Place: Spain

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Juan Andrés García Román

December 15, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Nick Rattner

You’re the blonde girl who all morning long turns her desk like a sunflower.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, the awe and dread of winter are at once historical and timeless in these selections by Spanish poet, translator, and scholar Juan Andrés García Román. In “The Hour,” a looming sense of nostalgia-fuelled Weltschmerz—allegorized here as passing seasons—prompts our speaker to recognize the fleeting joy of life and youth, while also imploring the importance of “staying” in the face of melancholy. In “For the First Time, You Feel Sad (Belisarius Sends His Troops Up Into the Trees),” our speaker deploys allusions and anachronisms—everything from Byzantium military history to Roman mythology to contemporary French children’s literature—to illustrate the love and longing of a winter-born absence. The cerebral maximalism of García Román’s verse is done justice here by Nick Rattner’s adroit translation of the poet’s layered metaphors and embedded historical/literary references. A learned take on the season-change poem which warrants a careful, meditative read.

The Hour

for Antonio Mochón

Who, after tossing and turning a winter
night while snow
covered the peaks, honored the refrain,
the brave old songs,
and the postcards of mountains
displayed in mountain lodges,
who, I say, did not this way pass
through a cemetery and, feeling a quaver
in their legs, partly from
fatigue of another world,
and partly to shield against wind and lightning,
did not slip themselves into an empty niche
to wait out the storm, and from this feel
suddenly tired of the path, READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2020

December 14, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Allison Braden, MARGENTO, and Sarah Moore

The latest in literature from Spain, Romania, and France!

Our final selections in excellent translations for the year of 2020 are fittingly full of thought. Throughout these texts, one finds the endless potential roadmaps that chart out from the individual mind’s interrogation and contemplation of their surroundings, and one’s own place within them. From a wandering mind, everything is a pool for endless reflection; a Catalan collection draws from the sea, a Romanian notebook is filled with musings and defiances of authorship, and a French diary novel tells the lives of many through the life of one. 

salt water

Salt Water by Josep Pla, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush, Archipelago Books, 2020

Review by Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large for Argentina

On a recent virtual happy hour, my friend described a weekend camping trip on a secluded barrier island off the coast of Georgia, in the southern US. My envy verged on rage as I listened from my living room, which doesn’t get enough natural light. He said that after he and his wife kayaked over and set up their tent (annoying a resident heron in the process), they had done absolutely nothing—not even read. They sat on the shore and watched the sea. It’s easy to believe how that could have been enough.

Josep Pla would understand. In Salt Water, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush and released by Archipelago Books this month, Pla writes that “the mere presence of the sea is enough to sink into the deliquescent bliss of the contemplative life.” His curiosity courses through the book, a series of ten sketches that revolves around the coast of Pla’s native Catalonia: he describes shipwrecks, submarines, and harebrained sailing schemes. He relates stories from a salty, one-handed raconteur and imbues the rambling tales with strikingly lifelike texture. Though his plots unfold on or near the sea, human culture is ever present. Pla revels in detail, describing at length the joy of nearly black coffee on a marginally small boat: “That beverage makes an almost immediate impact: your mind projects itself onto the outside world, you are fascinated by everything around and a gleam comes to your eyes.” This book is a product of that fascinated, caffeinated gaze.

In the preface, Pla describes the stories as writings from his adolescence. In the translator’s note at the end of the book, however, Bush clarifies that they were written in the 1940s and hypothesizes that the preface was a canny attempt to evade censorship. He points out that Pla’s “articles containing veiled critiques of the dictatorship made him the most censored journalist in Spain.” Indeed, his biography offers helpful context for the conflicting claims that bookend the collection.

As a university student a century ago, Pla developed a clear, intelligible writing style and deployed it throughout his career as a journalist. He traveled widely across Europe as a foreign correspondent and served briefly as a member of Parliament for the Commonwealth of Catalonia, a short-lived assembly notable for its symbolic value. Over its eleven years in existence, the Commonwealth promoted Catalonia’s unity and identity, and evinced strong support for the Catalan language—Pla’s language. He became a chronicler of Spain’s tumultuous early twentieth-century history and spent multiple stints in exile. In the 1940s, he took to exploring his native coast and writing dispatches for Destino, a Burgos-based magazine at the forefront of the reemergence of Catalan-language culture. Throughout his peripatetic career, Pla never stopped writing: his complete works, compiled shortly before his death in 1981, stretch over thirty-eight volumes. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2020

October 19, 2020  |  in News  |  by Josefina Massot, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Our blog editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2020 issue!

Asymptote’s momentous fortieth issue features brand new work from thirty-two countries, a Dutch Literature Special Feature curated by 2020 International Booker Prize co-winner Michele Hutchison, and a literary roster spanning classics like Tagore, heavy hitters like Harwicz, and rising stars like Fabias. Dizzy yet? We’re here to help.

In the Chinese language, we never use the abstract noun of beauty. Instead, beauty is always a quality, a trait something possesses. There is, for example, no real way to express the notion that “beauty is all around us”; instead, one would say, “everything here is beautiful.” I find something wondrous in this distinct nature of what beauty is. It is a wandering state, a constantly mutating definition, a metamorphosing form that adapts to whatever subject it is applied to—never fixed, never permanent. Something is beautiful not for its appeal to the pure nature of beauty, but for its unique addition to the myriad of beauty’s appearances.

I was once again reminded of this definition while reading through the Fall 2020 issue, in which the writings from thirty-two countries have compiled and allowed the contours of literary beauty to vacillate and transmit. The various Englishes that evolve via translation do not subscribe necessarily to the English that certain texts are born to, instead bringing the colours and geometries of their own language, imparting a distinct and knowing pleasure. In Stella N’Djoku’s poems, the brief lines are vehicles for a cyclical musicality, emphasized by the rhyming Italian but also vivid in the tender translation of Julia Pelosi-Thorpe, sensitive in their lineation. The verses are potent with grief, but positions it within the great immeasurability of the world—creating a familiar dwelling for grace amidst pain, and the poem as our path towards that space.

As if yesterday today tomorrow
were not places
and were here now
in centuries.

In the two poems of Kashimiri poet Nādim, one is also reminded of the singular iterations of his the poet’s original language. As translator Sonam Kachru informs us in his translator’s note, “[Nādim] is thinking of [Kashmir’s] history—a history revealed, in part, through the history of its poetry.” There is then, an impression that we are not privy to when reading in translation, yet the poem still transmits the meditative, majestic quality of scanning the poetic horizons for something that reverberates from the past into the present, and back again. The stoic power of lines like:

I will not sing—
I will sing today no song of Nishat or Shalimar, no annealed song of waters
engraving terraced gardens, no bower songs of bedded flowers;
No soft songs flush or sweetly fresh, not green dew songs
nor songs gentle and growing—

READ MORE…

In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

May 30, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Lawrence Schimel

We spend days between four walls, but nobody said anything about nights.

Bringing you translated literature from around the world during troubling times, this week’s In This Together presents a selection of Spanish writer Jordi Doce’s journals. Translator Lawrence Schimel introduces this work and its significance below:

These entries come from Spanish poet, translator, and critic Jordi Doce’s careful attention to and recording of the minutiae of life under quarantine, his looking inward (while at the same time observing the world around him) just as Madrid began that explosive & expansive flourishing that is Springtime.

Originally published on his blog, forty entries (the literal “forty days” of the Italian “quarantena” that ships suspected of carrying disease were required to be isolated before passengers and crew were allowed to disembark) spanning eight weeks—Sunday, March 15th through Monday, May 11—are about to be published in book form under the title La vida en suspenso (Life on Hold), by Fórcola, in June 2020.

Jordi has been a steady if intermittent diarist since the Spring of 1997, as he notes in La puerta del año. Enero-febrero 2004 (The Year’s Gate: January-February 2004), the first of his diaries to be published in book form. He continues to write his diaries, first and foremost “out of a need to order my thoughts, to soothe them, but also with a will of lightness, almost weightlessness, as if wanting to remove the thorns of reality.” Sometimes (as in the case of these entries) he also shares them online or in book format, when the observations can stand on their own or make a sort of thematic sense or unity.

I began translating these entries into English while Jordi was still writing them—a curious twist which perhaps helped him at a dark moment. As he noted, “the tone has grown darker and even bitter with the days. I guess it was inevitable, but I resist. I don’t want to turn these notes into an account of aggravations and laments.”

He wrote: “If these notes brought a bit of serenity to friends, a bit of patience and good humor, I’d be satisfied.” Hopefully, his satisfaction is even greater as these notes and observations are now available to an even broader audience, in English translation.

Confinement Notebook

by Jordi Doce

Confinement Notebook 8
Tuesday, March 24, 2020

The midday sun (a clean sun, like one between storms) warms the large cauldron of the patio. One can see clothes hung out to dry at the rears of buildings and people (few) working on their balconies. Others simply emerge to get some air or smoke a cigarette. The light falls directly on the window and dazzles me. I’ve had to lower the blind. In the street it’s cool, but here I note how the studio heats up in just a few minutes. I feel the urge to greet the sun, like in Frank O’Hara’s poem, but I don’t yet have the necessary level of intimacy. I prefer to celebrate it with words. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: May 2020

May 11, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Arabella Bosworth, Edwin Alanís-García, Marina Dora Martino, and Samuel Miller

New work from Hye-Young Pyun, Keiichiro Hirano, Andrés Neuman, and Jazmina Barrera!

The best that literature has to offer us is not resolution, but that Barthian sentiment of recognition—the nakedly exact internal sentiment rescued from wordlessness and placed in a social reality. In this month’s selections of translated works, the authors confront a myriad of trials and ideas—despair, rage, guilt, purpose, obsolescence—with stories that attest equally to the universality of human feelings and the precise specificities of localities. Read reviews of four spectacular texts from Japan, Korea, Spain, and Mexico now:

law of lines

The Law of Lines by Hye-Young Pyun, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell, Arcade Publishing, 2020

Review by Marina Dora Martino, Assistant Editor

How does the world change us? Is it life and its unpredictable events that bend us; or is it something more fundamental, something that has always been hatching inside ourselves, ready to ripen at the right occasion? These questions act as the fundamental hinges of The Law of Lines, a novel written by South Korean author Hye-Young Pyun and translated by Sora Kim-Russell. Although ambitious and abstract, these existential questions acquire here a concrete form—they are investigated—not by philosophical or religious means—through the stories of two young women, Se-oh and Ki-jeong. Set in the vast South Korean suburban world, The Law of Lines travels through injustice, poverty, and grief, and exposes the thin threads that run between people who didn’t even know they were connected.

Ki-jeong is a teacher. She doesn’t like teaching—actually, she hates it. To get through her day, Ki-jeong transforms her life into a performance, and herself into a mere act of herself. Only in this way she manages, with varying degrees of success, to hide her frustration, her disengagement, and her lack of empathy for the people around her. Se-oh is a young woman who lives as a semi-recluse at her father’s house. She doesn’t go out because she fears the world, that churning machine that ruins and distorts everything. Ki-jeong and Se-oh don’t have dreams of a better life, or not exactly. They are dormant and static. But their stillness is not only a desire for tranquillity—it’s a method for concealment.

Soon, the world presents them with irreversible and unpredictable events, and their apparently quiet lives break irrevocably. In the middle of a stressful day at school, Ki-jeong receives a mysterious phone call that throws her on a desperate search for the truth. Her half-sister, the one Ki-jeong and her mother had never managed to really love, becomes her only thought and anchor to reality. Se-oh is almost home after one of her rare trips to the stores when she is startled by the view of her house enveloped by fire. She sees the paramedics carrying away a man on a barrel, and from then on, her life turns into a quest—to track down and plan the destruction of the man she blames for everything that went wrong. READ MORE…

In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

May 2, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Andreea Scridon

And meanwhile, / time is the drool of the snail / that drags.

For this week’s instalment of our In This Together column, we present a poem by Spanish writer Miguel Ángel Pozo Montaño. The poem was originally published as part of the Inversos poetry project, which was created to make this period of lockdown more bearable and to enable us to be more united than ever, despite the distance. The poems, written during lockdown by different poets worldwide, will be compiled in an anthology after lockdown ends. Translator Andreea Iulia Scridon says of this poem, “Snails”: “I was attracted to the unusual visual element of the snail, which sets the poem apart from many others that I’ve read on social media outlets, which all tend to be quite literal.” 

Snails 

by Miguel Ángel Pozo

Now all of us are snails.
All of us now are snails
with slow applause all of us
slow applause
in terraces that
seek relief, air or light.

Because
nothing is permanent
you tell me, nothing. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Short Tales” by Pere Calders

April 28, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Tiago Miller

Between going to heaven and staying at home, he preferred the latter.

This week’s Translation Tuesday presents a series of absurdist snapshots from one of the modern masters of Catalan literature. In this collection of contes breus (Catalan ‘short stories,’ often only a few sentences in length), Pere Calders embraces fragmentary quips as a mode of subversive storytelling. At times aphoristic, we’re taken through a series of disjointed narratives that shift between a satirical third-person to a self-referential first-person. We can follow this surrealism and satire as a kind of montage, connecting pieces of ironic wisdom to a kind of irreverent philosophical theme. Alternatively we can read the tales as a collage, allowing the shift in point-of-view to reorient ourselves to a new (and again, ironic) life lesson. Like a master class in non-sequiturs, Miller’s translation invites us to laugh and scratch our heads at the hapless soul who speaks here in mordant proverbs.

Biographical Note

My name is Pere plus two surnames. I was born the day before yesterday and it is already the day after tomorrow. Now, I only think about how I will spend the weekend.

Balance

Just as he was about to take hold of the pail, his leg gave way and he plunged into the well. As he fell, he experienced that well-known phenomenon of seeing one’s life flash before one’s eyes. And he found it so predictable, monotonous, and commonplace (to remain strictly between us, of course) that he let his lungs fill with water and drowned with exemplary resignation.

Obstinacy

Between going to heaven and staying at home, he preferred the latter, despite the powerful propaganda against it and the fact that his house was full of leaks and a whole host of privations. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

April 17, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Daljinder Johal, Eva Wissting, Poupeh Missaghi, and Sarah Moore

Bringing you the latest in literary news from Sweden, Iran, the UK, and Spain!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Sweden, Iran, and the UK. In Sweden, a new translation of Albert Camus’s The Plague is on its way, and the annual children’s book award ALMA has announced Baek Heena as its winner; in Iran, sales of The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree have surged after its nomination for The International Man Booker Prize, and readers have welcomed a Persian translation of Italian writer Paolo Giordano’s new non-fiction work about contagion; in the UK, authors and publishers are proving resourceful after the cancellation of key literary festivals; finally, people around the world have been mourning the death of best-selling Chilean author Luis Sepúlveda, who sadly passed away this week in Spain.  

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

Easter in Sweden is usually a time when people have a few days off and either go skiing or open up the country cottage after the winter. This year, however, like in a lot of other places around the world, people have had to alter their plans as traveling was discouraged, even within the country. Unlike most of its neighboring countries, Sweden still allows bookstores as well as most other stores to remain open. Nevertheless, changed habits in a time of social and economic uncertainty has led to a decrease in sales of physical books by 35%. Although sales of e-books have increased by over 10%, bookstores have started plans to lay off employees and renegotiate rent costs, in order to manage a possible prolonged decline in book sales.

One book that nonetheless sells like never before in Sweden at this time, is French Algerian author Albert Camus’s The Plague from 1947. Swedish readers have the book today in a translation by Elsa Thulin from 1948, but a new translation is on the way, by Jan Stolpe, and will be available in stores by the end of April. READ MORE…

Unhurried Melancholy: Martha Tennent and Maruxa Relaño on Translating Mercè Rodoreda

March 19, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Alyea Canada

In my opinion, it’s the perfect novel for a digital detox . . . or a quarantine.

Renowned Catalan author Mercè Rodoreda’s tender and meditative novel, Garden by the Sea, was our February Book Club selection. An essential name in postwar Catalan literature (and past Asymptote contributor), Rodoreda’s immersive yet subtle language is beloved for its captivating lyricism and simple, poignant depictions of everyday life. In these chaotic days, when many of us are looking to literature for comfort, the patient world of Garden by the Sea offers a quiet reprieve. In the following interview, assistant editor Alyea Canada speaks to the translators, Martha Tennent and Maruxa Relaño, a mother-daughter duo with a unique process and an unceasing admiration for Rodoreda’s singular style.

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Alyea Canada (AC): This is the second book by Mercè Rodoreda that you two have translated together. What drew you both to Rodoreda’s work in general and Garden by the Sea specifically?

Martha Tennent (MT): This is indeed the second Rodoreda novel we have translated together, since in 2015, Open Letter published our translation of her novel War, So Much War. I have always been an admirer of Rodoreda’s work, and for many years my apartment in Barcelona was just a couple of blocks from where she was born and grew up, in the Sant Gervasi neighborhood that figures in many of her short stories and in Garden by the Sea.

I started publishing translations of a few of her short stories, and that led, in 2009, to my translating her Death in Spring for Open Letter. At that time, I would say almost no one in the United States had heard of Mercè Rodoreda. Death in Spring is such a brutal, haunting book, but at the same time it is lyrical and painfully beautiful. Neither I nor Open Letter expected the book and the author to gain the following they have. It’s been amazing. Then I received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to translate her stories, also with Open Letter. And then came the two commissions to translate jointly her War, So Much War, and now Garden by the Sea. No one has done more to promote the work of this exceptional writer than Open Letter.

Maruxa Relaño (MR): The chance to translate Rodoreda was a treat to say the least. Garden by the Sea is my favorite of her novels. I like the unhurried melancholy that imbues the writing; you can open the book wherever you choose and find yourself in a Mediterranean villa in the middle of one “long hot summer,” with its occupants wandering about aimlessly, sunning themselves and squabbling on the veranda, a life of perpetual waiting, where as you mention, nothing seems to happen and much goes unsaid. We were especially drawn to Garden by the Sea for the vision of behind-the-scenes domesticity provided by the quiet, observant gardener, and the slowly developing unease and intrigue as the protagonists move gently toward catastrophe. In my opinion, it’s the perfect novel for a digital detox . . . or a quarantine. READ MORE…

Bringing the World Into the Classroom: The Winter 2020 Educator’s Guide

March 4, 2020  |  in Asymptote for Educators  |  by Barbara Thimm

One focus of these lesson plans is that students engage in deep thinking and writing, another is to connect reading with their own experience.

Often, our love for literature is catalyzed by a journey taken within a classroom. No matter where and how we teach literature, it is always an opportunity for our students to engage with their world in a new way. The Asymptote Educator’s Guide is a resource we’ve developed to facilitate more of these expeditions, bringing important, diverse works from our issues into the classroom by way of a curated and detailed guide for teachers. In the following essay, Barbara Thimm, Assistant Director of Asymptote’s Educational Arm, discusses the immense potentials and applications of the Winter 2020 Educator’s Guide.

Jerome Bruner, the famous cognitive psychologist and one of the most important contributors to the theory of education, likened reading to a journey into new terrains without the help of a map: “As our readers read, as they begin to construct a virtual text of their own, it is as if they are embarking on a journey without maps.“ Yet that emerging virtual text is shaped by our previous reading experiences, “based on older journeys already taken . . .” Eventually, that journey becomes a thing of its own, a generator of new maps and thus an extension of the reader’s world, an addition to her repository of maps.

World literatures are particularly apt in expanding their readers’ collections of maps, that is, to enrich their reading of the world, not only literally in the sense that they raise awareness of writing and thinking in parts of the world more likely to be “known” via externalized news reports, if at all. Through their defined difference, world literatures confront us with names, places, and narrative patterns that are farther removed from the “older journeys already taken,” and thus extend the routes we can travel in the future. It follows that world literature can be made uniquely productive in encouraging our students to expand their horizons by adding to the variety and reach of their reading maps.

Asymptote’s mission, “to unlock the literary treasures of the world,” thus becomes a rich resource for a variety of classrooms in the English language arts, not least because the vast majority of the pieces published here are contemporaneous—that is, they reflect the thinking, storytelling, and creativity of artists writing in our present moment. Often, these texts are not part of a canon, nor can they be found in print outside their countries of origin. What they have in common is that someone who speaks both English and the language of the original artist found them worthy of her or his attention and effort, and brought them forward so that we may connect their ideas, experiences, and visions of the world to ours. Bringing these voices to the attention of our students is an ever more urgent endeavor in a time where nationalist interests and perspectives crowd out more unifying visions.  READ MORE…

The 2020 Booker International Longlist

March 2, 2020  |  in Essays, News  |  by Barbara Halla

This year the specter of violence, visceral brutality, and even hauntings loom large.

Every year, the prestigious Booker International Prize is always announced to a crowd of critics, writers, and readers around the world with much aplomb, resulting in great celebration, some dissatisfaction, and occasional puzzlement. Here at Asymptote, we’re presenting a take by our in-house Booker-specialist Barbara Halla, who tackles the longlist with the expert curiosity and knowledge of a reader with voracious taste, in place of the usual blurbs and bylines, and additionally questioning what the Booker International means. If you too are perusing the longlist in hunt for your next read, let this be your (atypical) guide.

I tend to dread reading the Booker wrap-ups that sprout immediately after the longlist has been announced. The thing is, most critics and bloggers have not read the majority of the list, which means that the articles are at best summaries of pre-existing blurbs or reviews. Plus, this is my third year covering the Booker International, and I was equally apprehensive about finding a new way to spin the following main acts that now compose the usual post-Booker script: 1) the list is very Eurocentric (which says more about the state of the publishing world than the judges’ tastes); 2) someone, usually The Guardian, will mention that the longlist is dominated by female writers, although the split is around seven to six, which reminds me of that untraceable paper arguing that when a particular setting achieves nominal equality, that is often seen as supremacy; and 3) indie presses are killing it, which they absolutely are because since 2016, they have deservedly taken over the Booker, from longlist to winner.

I don’t mean to trivialize the concerns listed above, especially in regards to the list’s Eurocentrism. Truth is, we talk a lot about the unbearable whiteness of the publishing world, but in writings that discuss the Booker, at least, we rarely dig deeper than issues of linguistic homogeneity and the dominance of literatures from certain regions. For instance: yes, three of the four winners of the International have been women, including all four translators, but how many of them have been translators of color? To my understanding, that number is exactly zero. How many translators of color have even been longlisted? The Booker does not publish the list of titles submitted for consideration, but if it did, I am sure we would notice the same predominance of white voices and white translators. I know it is easier said than done, considering how hard it is to sell translated fiction to the public in the first place, but if we actually want to tilt the axis away from the western literary canon, the most important thing we can do is support and highlight the work of translators of color who most likely have a deeper understanding of the literatures that so far continue to elude not just prizes, but the market in its entirety. READ MORE…

Announcing our February Book Club Selection: Garden by the Sea by Mercè Rodoreda

February 27, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada

Both the translators and the author seem to know that the power of Garden by the Sea lies in the spaces between the words.

Deemed one of the most formative and influential writers of contemporary Catalan literature, Mercè Rodoreda’s prolific body of work details the profundity of “essential things . . . with a certain lack of measure.” For the month of February, Asymptote Book Club presents her most recent work to be translated into English, the contemplative and timeless Garden by the Sea. Rife with sensuous detail and quiet notes of transition, this novel is the poignant result of a patient life, of time marked equally by conversation and silence. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers in the US, the UK, and the EU. 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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Garden by the Sea by Mercè Rodoreda, translated from the Catalan by Martha Tennent and Maruxa Relaño, Open Letter Books, 2020

Being someone who is unfamiliar with Mercè Rodoreda’s work, I read the description of Garden by the Sea and was expecting Gatsby-esque schadenfreude. I was wrong. Garden by the Sea is something quieter, more tender, and mournful. It has a sense of longing for a time when summers at your seaside villa could really be carefree romps and endless parties without the tragedy and trauma inherent in postwar society.

Taking place outside 1920s Barcelona over six summers and one winter and narrated by an unnamed gardener, Garden by the Sea is the story of a rich couple, Senyoret Francesc and Senyoreta Rosamaria, and their friends whose idyllic summers are rocked by the construction of a grander villa next door. (Surely you can see how it’s difficult to avoid The Great Gatsby coming to mind.) What unfolds is a collection of personal tragedy, lots of gossip, some light one-upmanship, swimming, and, of course, something of a love triangle. There are also brief appearances by a mischievous monkey and a lion cub, and a great many lush descriptions of plants and flowers. “Look at the linden trees. See the leaves, how they tremble and listen to us. You laugh now, but one day if you find yourself walking in the garden at night, beneath the trees, you will see how the garden talks to you, the things it says . . .” The book opens with the gardener saying, “I’ve always enjoyed knowing what happens to people. It’s not because I’m garrulous, but because I like people, and I was fond of the owners of this house.” However fond he was of the owners, it is clear that he is that much fonder of his garden. He takes such care in his expertise that when he looks at the neighboring villa’s garden and its bearded irises, he says he’s “really distressed.” The only times we see the gardener critical of the Senyorets and their friends are when their revelry comes at the cost of his flowers, or if his expertise is questioned by people who clearly know less. READ MORE…

Other Worlds: Engaging Rajko Grlić (Part II)

February 6, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Ellen Elias-Bursac

At the airport, Honorio confesses to his wife that he has neither the strength nor the enthusiasm for new revolutions.

This week, the Asymptote blog is excited to share a special two-part engagement with Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić. Yesterday in Part I, we featured an interview between Grlić and Ellen Elias-Bursać, who, in addition to being an Asymptote contributing editor, is also the editor of the first English translation of Grlić’s memoirs. Today, in Part II, we bring you an exclusive excerpt from that memoir, from a section called “Festival Selector.”

Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić organizes the material of his memoir, Long Story Short, like a lexicon of filmmaking terminology. Under each heading and definition, he includes a story from his life: his filmmaking; his struggles against nationalism in Croatia during the war of the 1990s; and his years of teaching at NYU, UCLA, and Ohio University. Grlić was known as one of the leading Yugoslav filmmakers in 1980s Croatia, celebrated for such box-office successes as You Love Only Once (1981); In the Jaws of Life (1984), which was based on a Dubravka Ugrešić novel; and That Summer of White Roses (1989). He left Croatia in the 1990s during its war for independence and has since gone on to make several more notable films, including The Border Post (2006) and The Constitution (2016). He collected stories during his many years of making movies and moving through the world, aware that he’d never have the opportunity to make every story he had to tell into a film, but refusing to lose them to oblivion.

Grlić’s memoir was translated by Vesna Radovanović and edited by Asymptote contributing editor Ellen Elias-Bursać. Elias-Bursać spoke recently to Grlić about the life that led to Long Story Short, an interview that was published yesterday as Part I of this series. In the excerpt that follows, “Festival Selector,” Grlić tells of his decades-long friendship with Honorio Rancaño, the selector for movies shown at Mostra, a film festival that was held for many years in Valencia, Spain.

Festival Selector: the person who chooses the films, conceptualizes and shapes the festival creatively.

Cannes, 1981

In the hall of Palais des Festivals in Cannes, someone taps me on the shoulder and, before I have a chance to turn, starts talking about my movie You Love Only Once, in a jumble of Czech, Russian, and Spanish.

“Honorio Rancaño, selector for the Valencia Film Festival,” the man finally introduces himself, unshaven and chewing on a long, wet cigar. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

January 31, 2020  |  in Dispatches  |  by Daniel Persia and Leah Scott

The latest in literary news from Brazil and Spain!

This week, our reporters bring you news of new publications, prizes, and book fairs in Brazil and the release of new novels in Spain examining the Franco regime. Read on to find out more!

Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brazil

Things are heating up in Brazil, as summer carries on in full force and the Sambadrome gears up for its first parade of the decade. Brazil is more than just Carnaval, though, as Eliane Brum reminds us in The Collector of Leftover Souls (Graywolf Press), translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty and longlisted for the National Book Award. A prolific journalist and documentary filmmaker, Brum calls out the reader in the first few pages of the book: “Whenever I visit an English-speaking country, I notice Brazil doesn’t exist for most of you. Or exists only in the stereotype of Carnival and soccer. Favelas, butts, and violence.” Brum invites the reader on a journey into indigenous villages, through environmental destruction (and reconstruction), and into the heart and soul of politics in Brazil. The translation resonates in the midst of growing tensions over fires in the Amazon, met by what Brum characterizes as an unfit and “destructive” response by the Bolsonaro administration.

READ MORE…