Place: Sweden

What’s New in Translation: October 2024

Discover new work from Turkey, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Cameroon, Sweden, Chile, France, and Cuba!

In this month’s roundup of newly published translations, we introduce nine works from nine countries: Turkey, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Cameroon, Sweden, Chile, France, and Cuba. From a politically tuned memoir embedded with a familial conscience to a series of poems that consider diasporic experience through the lens of spectatorship—read on to find out more! 

WaitingfortheFear

Waiting for the Fear by Oğuz Atay, translated from the Turkish by Ralph Hubbell, New York Review Books, 2024

Review by Christopher Higgs

The oft quoted line from Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, “Hell is other people,” reverberates conceptually across Oğuz Atay’s Waiting For The Fear like a heavy skipping stone slumping across the surface of dark waters. Yet, in each of the collection’s eight stories, a confounding tension arises between the book’s Sartrean misanthropy and another seemingly competing desire: a strong craving to communicate, a yearning to connect. While Atay’s characters avoid human contact, holding deep disdain and even loathing for other people, they still thrum with a surreal pulse, a quivering mixture of rage and sadness in which their hatred comingles with a cry of the heart; they are desperate to embrace, to be accepted, to be acknowledged and valued, to be seen and heard by others. Six of the eight stories, for example, are epistolary, while the others rely on letters as plot devices. When the concept of written communication isn’t foregrounded, the narratives still hinge on concepts of storytelling, connecting, and sharing. READ MORE…

Risgröt or juk? On Han Kang’s We Do Not Part and Translating Between Small Languages

[Indirect translation] obscures the specific challenges that arise in Korean-Swedish translations, and thus the joy of these two languages meeting.

Behind the walls of the publishing industry, countless decisions are made to bring our favorite novels to our shelves. These decisions grow ever greater when it comes to translations, and particularly translations into languages other than English. In the following essay, Linnea Gradin explores the complex process of bringing Korean literature to Sweden, featuring commentary from Swedish translators and publishers in her analysis of monumental author Han Kang’s latest release in translation: 작별하지 않는다/Jag tar inte farväl/We Do Not Part. Discussing indirect translation, questions of form, and even the choices made in translating a single word, Gradin presents both the burdens and blessings of such a unique language pair.

Han Kang, one of South Korea’s biggest international authors, broke into the English-speaking literary fiction space with a bang in 2016 when she won the International Booker Prize for The Vegetarian (originally published in 2007), a darkly insightful look at Korean society told through the story of a woman who one day decides to stop eating meat in a quiet act of resistance that turns increasingly obsessive. That same year, Human Acts (originally published in 2014)—a novel that delves into painful parts of the country’s past—was also published in English, further cementing Kang as a leading voice of Korean literature worldwide.

Born in the city of Gwangju (where Human Acts is set), Kang is from a family of writers: her father is a teacher and award-winning novelist, and her two brothers are writers too. Kang herself has been widely praised and won many prestigious awards both domestically and internationally, and is known for her ‘poetic’ yet spare and quiet style among Korean readers. In her work, she often comes back to themes of remembrance and Korean history, approaching the subjects in a deeply empathetic though notably neutral way, never telling the readers what to feel or think. After winning the Booker Prize, her work—particularly the English translations of The Vegetarian and Human Acts by Deborah Smith—found itself at the center of discussions about the complexities of translation.

With her latest book, We Do Not Part, scheduled for English-language publication in January 2025 (almost a year after it was published in several European countries), I again find myself reflecting on translation and publication practices—and how different stories are mediated across different parts of the world.

READ MORE…

The Double-Edged Possibility of Hiding in Plain Sight: An Interview with Hanna Johansson

I think this kind of [queer] isolation can be generative for an author—it provides you with this ability to see while not being seen.

In Antiquity, Hanna Johansson unleashes a rapturous, sinuous tale of desire and its reckless vehicle. After falling for an older artist, a misguided journalist follows her and her teenage daughter onto a trip to the Greek islands in an almost-instinctive sense of codependence, and soon the gorgeous shores are turned into a stage of ruins, in which a self-deluding passion lays bear the tensions between the wanting and the wanted. Shifting between the incantatory posturing of someone captivated by the forbidden and the anxious distortions of unreciprocated intimacy, Johansson deftly grows an explosive triangulation in which closeness begets isolation, and isolation begets tragedy. In the following interview, Sofija Popovska speaks to Johansson about Antiquity’s queerness, ancient Greece as a specter, and how the novel considers power.

Sofija Popovska (SP): Firstly, congratulations on your gorgeous debut novel! Before we dive into the text itself, could you tell me a little about how Antiquity came into existence?

Hanna Johansson (HJ): I started writing it seriously in 2018, and I had at that point been trying for a while to write a story about a trio of some sort. I find that kind of social structure to be very interesting and enticing—not the kind of love triangle where two people desire the same person, but a triangle where two people might belong to each other in this obvious, indisputable way, like a couple, or, as in Antiquity, a mother and her daughter, with a third person sort of looking in, desiring their bond more than anything else. I had also had a little bit of a personal crisis in 2016 and went to Ermoupoli for three months and realized pretty quickly that I would like to write something set in that city. It’s so beautiful and glamorous and strange at the same time. So, all of that had been brewing for a couple of years, and then, in the fall of 2018, I moved from Stockholm to a smaller city with my partner, who’s also a writer, while she was getting her MFA. I’m not sure I could have written it without those circumstances—the fact that she was incredibly supportive, and that we were living in a way that left me plenty of time to write. 

SP: Described in its promotional materials as a “queer Lolita story” and as reminiscent of Death in Venice, Call Me by Your Name, and The Lover, Antiquity is, from the outset, embedded in a specific literary tradition. Was this cultural situatedness a planned feature? Were you ‘in conversation’ with any of these works—or other texts—during the writing process, and, if so, what effect did you hope to achieve by recasting (and subverting?) their themes and elements in Antiquity?

HJ: Yes, the cultural situatedness was a planned feature, I would say. I was very preoccupied, while I was writing Antiquity, with these sorts of queer or gay tropes—the age gap love story, for instance, which is one, although maybe not very nuanced, way of describing the novels mentioned—but probably even more the story of the guest who overstays their welcome, like Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. I read The Line of Beauty in my late teens and it made a huge impression on me. Saltburn is another example of that trope, to mention something even more current. These are all stories of people who are obsessed with beauty, and who have a desire for luxury, but they also have this seemingly unquenchable thirst for belonging—and an equally intense conviction that they can’t belong anywhere unless they are deceptive and not themselves—and this very much informs the narrator of Antiquity.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Sweden and France!

This week, our editors take us to Sweden and France for updates on major literary initiatives and exciting literary festivals. From the fight against climate change to the fun of origami workshops, read on to find out more!

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

Last week, a climate initiative from the Swedish book industry—Bokbranschens klimatinitiativ—announced its new guidelines. The project started in 2021, with the goal of reducing the industry’s climate impact by 50% by 2030, and achieving net zero emissions by 2045. The initiative spans the entire supply chain from publishers to bookstores to streaming services, involving several of Sweden’s largest publishing companies and booksellers, as well as their industry associations.

Research from 2022 shows that most of the book industry’s emissions are caused by the production of physical books, along with their transportation; when it comes to streaming services, most of their emissions stem from the use of services, rather than during production. The guidelines presented last week include recommendations for renewable fuels such as green electricity for the transportation of books, but also optimized packing with minimal amount of air and recycled packaging material. The initiative also stated that it is essential for publishers to avoid overproducing physical books that never reach customers.

Apart from choosing sustainable paper for the printing of books, another important factor to consider is the weight of books: the lower the weight, the lower the carbon footprint. Even a small change of a few grams can make a difference, as it affects everything from raw materials to transportation, as well as the management of waste at the end of a book’s life cycle. READ MORE…

April 2024: Upcoming Opportunities in Translation

From education to grants, Spring brings new opportunities for writers and translators! We distill some of the very best below.

CONTESTS

IMAGINE 2200

Grist is excited to open submissions for the fourth year of their Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors Short Story Contest.

Imagine 2200 is an invitation to writers from all over the globe to imagine a future in which solutions to the climate crisis flourish and help bring about radical improvements to our world.

In 2,500 to 5,000 words, show us the world you dream of building.

Your story should be set sometime between the near future and roughly the year 2200.

There is no cost to enter. The winning writer will be awarded $3,000, with the second- and third-place winners receiving $2,000 and $1,000, respectively. An additional nine finalists will each receive $300. All winners and finalists will have their story published in an immersive collection on Grist’s website. Stories will be judged by authors Omar El Akkad and Annalee Newitz.

The deadline for submissions is June 24th, 2024, 11:59 PT. Learn more and submit your story here.

 GRANTS & FUNDING

PEN TRANSLATES

English PEN’s biannual PEN Translates grant is now open for applications! This grant, which is open to UK publishers, was launched in 2012 as an incentive to publishers to pick up books in languages other than English. Since its conception, the grant has funded over 350 works of literature translated from over 90 different languages.

The grant funds up to 75% of translation costs for selected projects. Works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, prose, and plays, translated from any language into English, will be considered.

Starting this year, English PEN is also offering a second award in partnership with South Asian Literature in Translation. PEN Translates x SALT is open to publishers anywhere in the world that are looking to publish works of South Asian literature. Submissions must have been originally published in any of the official or unofficial languages of South Asia by an author that is a citizen or resident of a South Asian country, or who is of South Asian heritage.

Applications for both grants are due on the 31st of May. Apply here.

READ MORE…

Where the Change Comes From: Saskia Vogel on Translating Balsam Karam

Here are the losses. Just listen this time. That directness is so wonderful.

In The Singularity, Swedish author Balsam Karam instills a startling and deeply profound gravity within the devastating fractures of life—mothers who lose children, migrants who lose countries, and the emotional maelstroms stirring at the precipice of disappearance. With an extraordinary style that exemplifies how poetics can search and unveil the most secret aspects of grief and longing, Karam’s fluid, genre-blurring prose is at once dreamlike and harrowingly vivid, with the remarkable sensitivity of translator Saskia Vogel carrying this richness through to the English translation. We were proud to select this novel as our January Book Club selection, and in this following interview, Vogel speaks to us about how Karam’s writing works to destabilize and shift majority presumptions, as well as how literature can echo, verify, and perhaps change the way we live.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Rachel Stanyon (RS): How did you come to Balsam Karam’s work?

Saskia Vogel (SV): I first encountered Balsam’s work through Sara Abdollahi, one of my favorite literary critics in Sweden—she’s full of integrity, and really cares about literature and its transformative potential. She had done a podcast with Balsam, and their conversation really struck me, especially Balsam’s extraordinary representation of solidarity. This is exemplified in her first novel, Event Horizon, which, as I understand, is connected to The Singularity like a kind of diptych; they’re of the same world, and written with the same sorts of strategies—for example, a lot of the details of place, location, and identity are unstated. I find this aesthetic really compelling.

Balsam assumes that she’s writing into Sweden and a majority white culture, and she doesn’t want to give people an easy out where they can say, “I’ve been to Beirut. It’s not exactly like that.” She instead strips away detail and, in The Singularity, focuses on loss and the effects of war on individuals, as well as on migration and racism.

Another extraordinary feature of her prose is that the white gaze is decentered, which works to shift how the presumed audience reads and perceives some of the most pressing and potent human experiences of our time. She moves us away from the particularities of politics, and tries to make us understand what it feels like to be in a certain position. In that way, she really encourages and facilitates a deep growth and compassion—if you’re open to it, I guess. READ MORE…

Announcing Our January Book Club Selection: The Singularity by Balsam Karam

Karam stretches the limits of conventional narrative writing. . . the result is a work of true formal experimentation without . . . artifice.

With inimitable lyricism and an impeccable sense of balance, Balsam Karam’s The Singularity addresses some of the most complex elements of contemporary social reality. Yet, even as the thrilling narrative is intricately braided with the brutal realities of loss, displacement, motherhood, and migration, the novel’s innovative structure and bold, surprising style elevates it beyond story, revealing an author who is as precise with language as she is with illustrating our mental and physical landscapes. In starting off a new year of Asymptote Book Club, we are proud to announce this work of art as our first selection of 2024.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.  

The Singularity by Balsam Karam, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel, Feminist Press/Fitzcarraldo, 2024

Meanwhile elsewhere—two women perched on the precipice in a tangential encounter, spun together by forces outside their control, as if in the singularity of a black hole. One woman is about to jump off the edge, bereft after the loss of her teenage daughter; the other will frame this moment as the beginning of the end for the child in her womb. No need for spoiler alerts here: what might feature as the climax in a more conventional narrative is laid bare in The Singularity’s prologue. That it nevertheless remains absorbing to its very end is a testament to the depth of feeling and dexterity with which the Swedish-Kurdish novelist Balsam Karam orchestrates the rest of this novel about grief, loss, migration, and motherhood.

Given this jarring beginning and its atypical (or absent) narrative arc, it is perhaps no wonder that as the rest of this novel unwinds, we are met with multiple displacements in time and perspective, echoing the geographical dislocation of the two central figures—both of whom are refugees—and the all-encompassing, omnipresent nature of the trauma they experience.

Before throwing herself off a tourist-thronged cliff in a bullet-ridden city, the first woman has been searching for The Missing One­: her seventeen-year-old daughter, who never came home from her cleaning job on the corniche a few months earlier. After fleeing from their home, receiving scant help from the relief organization that occasionally visits with a “hello and how are you all then here you go and we’ll be back soon, even if it’s not true,” and finding little sanctuary living in a tumble-down alleyway at the fringes of this unnamed city, the mother seems to experience the disappearance of her daughter as the final loss that makes her lose herself. “What mother doesn’t take her own life after a child disappears?” the first woman asks the universe, or “when a child dies?” the second woman asks her doctor. READ MORE…

Narrator as Narcissus: A Review of Hanna Johansson’s Antiquity

The textual body of the novel is a monument to the clash between the natural flow of life and its narrativized counterpart.

 Antiquity by Hanna Johansson, translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson, Catapult, 2024

“Where were they?” asks the nameless protagonist of Antiquity, Hanna Johansson’s gorgeous, lacerating debut novel, translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson. She is interrogating the lack of cemeteries in Ermoupoli, a luxurious Greek city where she spends her summer with Helena, a chic and volatile artist with whom the narrator is infatuated, and Helena’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Olga. In a city where “the dead should be more numerous than the living”, there seems to be no trace of “such monuments, not even a site for simple graves, no memorial grove in the little park in front of Saint Nicholas Church where the cats slept in the shade of the pine trees.” “Where are they?” she asks of both cemeteries and the dead, not realizing that it is she who haunts the suggestively-named Persefonis—“the short street where Helena’s house was wedged between an alley and a ruin”. Ever on the margins of life, of human relationships, the spectral narrator might touch other things and people, but she never leaves a trace. Throughout the novel, the wounded lament of this reluctant nomad begins to haunt us, too. And this is not only because she is undone by the very skill that enables her to tell a story—narrating—but because Johansson’s creation, in Josefsson’s translation, reminds us of our own tendency to narrativize life, to write ourselves out of the intimate joy of immediate experience by stepping back and fiddling with the details, fashioning an ideal self.

Antiquity feels destined to be a classic, as multifaceted, revealing, and transformative as works by Dostoyevsky, Mann, and Nabokov. Its power comes from its vulnerable, gorgeous prose, replete with lush images, and also from its structural sophistication—a complete convergence of shape and themes. The textual body of the novel is a monument to the clash between the natural flow of life and its narrativized counterpart, felt through the temporal textures of the story, its narratological conflict. In narratological terms, the novel’s fabula—its narrated structure—opens at the end of its syuzhet—its chronological timeline: the narrator, Helena, and Olga are leaving Ermoupoli, heading towards an inevitable separation. As they depart in a ferry, the narrator says: “I could hear my own voice narrating: the sun was so strong you always had to squint a little. I felt reality take its leave of me. I wasn’t there.” From the very start, it is clear that the novel’s tension will emerge from the ebb and flow between the lived truth and the narrator’s censorial customization of real experiences as a constructing of the self. This becomes especially palpable in the chafing of the chronological flow of events against the narrator’s private perception of time. Her narration moves backward and forward in time, then further backward still, only to reemerge somewhere after the middle and then proceed all the way to the end—that is, the beginning. The unpredictability of the temporal jumps precludes anticipation but heightens the sense of foreboding with which the beginning’s manifestly melancholy departure taints all subsequent pages; as in a Greek tragedy, the reader can sense the protagonist hurtling towards a bitter end. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2024

Taking a closer look at Asymptote’s milestone issue!

Not sure where to start with our tremendous fiftieth issue? Our blog editors talk their favourites.

In its overarching theme of “Coexistence,” Asymptote’s monumental 50th issue draws together the quiet, the forgotten, and the unseen, allowing us to inhabit worlds that are not our own. From the bright unease of Elena Garro’s “The Week of Colors” (tr. Christine Legros), to the serene, dynamic stanzas of Eva Ribich’s Along the Border (tr. Julian Anderson), to the dedicated love in Almayrah A. Tiburon’s “Keyboard and Breastfeed” (tr. Bernard Capinpin), Asymptote’s Winter 2024 Issue examines the relationships we have with each other, with the world, and with ourselves.

Dark and unflinching, Maria Grazia Calandrone’s Your Little Matter delves into the ambiguous history of the author’s mother Lucia, her parents’ joint suicide in Rome, and all that was left behind. Central to the piece are physical mementos—two old photographs of Lucia, a list of items left in a suitcase, clippings from a newspaper—from which Calandrone pieces together the story of her parents’ lives, revealing aspects of a woman her daughter barely knew. Alongside the photos come memories passed down and memories created, as Calandrone pieces together the life of a young woman who was nearly forgotten. 

Translated by Antonella Lettieri, Your Little Matter is a work of empathy—of putting on a parent’s shoes, of imagining the pain and the love of the life that led to yours. The lives of our parents are distant, disconnected from our own. Even for those who knew their parents, the question of who they were before we existed can be haunting. What did you lose when you had me? What did you gain? It can be a self-centered venture, as relationships with parents often are, and Your Little Matter simultaneously veers away from and embraces this selfishness. Who were you? Why did you have to leave? I want to remember you; I want you to be remembered. Calandrone’s condemnation of the society that killed her parents; the somber moments spent amidst photographs, imagining; the love she holds for someone who can only be known retroactively—these elements draw you into Lucia’s life, her story, unforgettable. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest in literary news from India, Sweden, Spain, and Denmark.

This week, our editors bring news of commendations, intercultural exchanges, and champions of free speech that highlight the need for bold voices and acts of solidarity. 

Zohra Salih, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

Winter is here—not just in the air outside, but within our hearts. One finds it hard to write about literature and culture with genuine excitement in times like these, when Gaza, already deeply wounded, is bleeding again with little hope in sight. It feels anachronistic to mention the many literary festivals and prizes that are scheduled for this winter, as if one is inhabiting two distinct worlds: one with cause for celebration, another for mourning. At the very least, it seems right to acknowledge this disparity, and to consider the very real responsibility of all literary enthusiasts in bridging this divide, in keeping our eyes and ears open, and in being willing to allow for other truths and realities to be translated as part of our own.

On that note, the JCB Prize for Literature has announced its longlist for 2023, featuring four works in translation. Simsim by Geet Chaturvedi, translated by Anita Gopalan, and I Named My Sister Silence by Manoj Rupda, translated by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar (who was himself longlisted for the prize previously), are both written originally in Hindi; The Nemesis, Manoranjan Byapari’s latest work, is translated from Bengali by V Ramaswamy, and it is also worth noting that this is the third time that the fiery writer has been featured on the longlist.

Perumal Murugan’s Fire Bird is also on the longlist, and was translated from the original Tamil into English by Janani Kannan. A professor of Tamil literature, Murugan’s works have garnered critical acclaim through translations, including Madhorubhagan (One Part Woman), his best-known work, which won the prestigious ILF Samanvay Bhasha Samman in 2015, and caused massive uproar amidst conservatives because of its bold and feminist themes—leading to the author briefly declaring that he was ‘dead’ and retired from writing until the Madras high court judgment unequivocally upheld his artistic freedom. Murugan’s profound and incisive explorations of caste and its entanglement in every rubric of Indian society have also rightly led to his book, Pyre, being longlisted for the International Booker Prize this year, as well as his receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award at the seventh edition of the Ooty Literary Festival, which wrapped up this October. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

News from Egypt, Bulgaria, and Sweden!

In this week’s round-up of literary news, our editors report on losses, scandals, shortlists, and banned books. While Egypt mourns the loss of one its most gifted storytellers, the Katara Prize’s shortlist announcement has also given the nation’s writers something to  be proud of. Meanwhile, Bulgarian PEN and Swedish PEN are respectively dealing with separate issues surrounding the dissemination of sensitive literature. Read on to find out more!

Ibrahim Sayed Fawzy Elsayed, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Egypt

The 9th edition of the Katara Prize for Arabic Novels has unveiled an eclectic shortlist, featuring nine captivating titles hailing from Egypt, Lebanon, Kuwait, Oman, Syria, and Palestine. Egypt topped the shortlist with three outstanding titles: The Secret Society of Citizens by the best-selling novelist Ashraf El-Ashmawi (Al-Dar Al-Masriah Al-Lubnaniah, 2022), You Shine, You Light Up by Rasha Adly (Dar El-Shorouk, 2022), and The Signs of a Lover by Mohamed Mowafi (Dar El-Ain Publishing, 2022). These Egyptian novels employ a unique lens on history to dissect pressing socio-political issues within Egyptian society.

Additionally, there’s one more literary treasure on the horizon: recently, the prominent Egyptian publisher Dar El-Sharouq has posthumously released a final novel—one last Bedouin tale—by Hamdy Abu Golayyel (1967-2023), an author of Bedouin descent, celebrated for chronicling the lives of Egypt’s marginalized and working class. The novel is entitled My Mother’s Rooster; in his last interview on ArabLit, Abu Golayyel had said, “I’m currently working on a novel titled ديك أمي / My Mother’s Rooster. I first titled it as غيط أمي / My Mother’s Field. My mother used to raise chickens, and she had a rooster that was very dear to her. So I changed the title to My Mother’s Rooster.”

Abu Golayyel has left an indelible mark on Arabic literature. His literary journey began with the publication of a short-story collection, Swarms of Bees (1997), followed by Items Folded with Great Care (2000). His debut novel, Thieves in Retirement (tr. Marilyn Booth), hit shelves in 2002, while his second, Dog with No Tail (tr. Robin Moger, 2008), won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal. Notably, his 2018 novel, The Men Who Swallowed the Sun (tr. Humphrey Davies), earned him the prestigious 2022 Banipal Prize. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: H-A-N-N-A by Hanna Riisager

Blissfully mute, / infatuated babbling / from a marble mouth.

An entrancing poem on babyhood commands our devotion this Translation Tuesday–a fitting muse for poet and critic Hanna Riisager, whose first collection wields overtly feminine symbols to subvert gender norms. In H-A-N-N-A, precisely translated from the Swedish by Kristina Andersson Bicher, a small subject wields a gravitational pull, overwhelming us in equal parts bewilderment and wonderment.

You are a plank you
are a bridge you are a bronze
railing. You are a
landing you are a
nook. You are a ramp
for baby carriages.
Head down feet up
Child’s position.
Perpendicular dominance
trimmed in lead. An
H in the heart.
Think: the scope
of this walk!

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest in world literature from Sweden, Guatemala, and Ireland!

This week, Asymptote‘s Editors-at-Large take us around the global literary scene, featuring book fairs and the highlights of Women in Translation Month! From the multimedia cultural event Bokmässan by Night in Sweden to the Taiwan/Ireland Poetry Translation Competition, read on to learn more!

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

A month from today, it will be time for Scandinavia’s largest literary event, the Göteborg Book Fair—an event spanning four days with around eight hundred exhibitors and the same amount of seminar speakers. Started in 1985, it now attracts eighty-five thousand writers, publishers, librarians, teachers, and book lovers every year. This year’s themes are Jewish Culture, The City, and Audio. The club concept Bokmässan by Night was introduced last year, which combines bar hopping with various cultural experiences. The fair has now announced that Bokmässan by Night will return on September 29 with four stages, five bars, multiple DJs, and stage performances. The evening includes Swedish writers and dramatists Jonas Hassen Khemiri—known to Asymptote readers through pieces like I Call My Brothers and Only in New York—and Agneta Pleijel, whose novel A Fortune Foretold was published in Marlaine Delargy’s English translation by Other Press in 2017. Bokmässan by Night will also offer live literary criticism with critics Mikaela Blomqvist, Jesper Högström and Valerie Kyeyune Backström, as well as live podcasts, including Flora Wiström’s Röda rummet—a literary podcast which borrows its name from the Swedish Modernist writer and playwright August Strindberg’s 1879 debut novel The Red Room. While Bokmässan by Night is an in-person experience, many other events during the fair are available online through Book Fair Play

READ MORE…

Summer 2023: Highlights from the Team

Still looking for entry points into our brand-new Summer issue? Members of our multi-continental team offer you several!

From the Indonesian Feature in the Summer edition, I was intrigued by the poems of Nirwan Dewanto, in vivid translations by John H. McGlynn, including “The Way to the Museum,” which begins with “All eyeballs dipped in the vinegar of the bourgeoisie will become pickled eyeballs” and continues, in long lines, to contemplate class, blindness, and revolution. It resonated against the pathos and absurdity in excerpts from Ulrike Draesner’s Schwitters, translated by Sharon Howe, and Tatiana Niculescu’s play Brancusi v. United States, fresh portraits of European Modernist artists Kurt Schwitters and Constantin Brâncuși, respectively. In each case, as the exile of the artist comes to the fore, the language of their place of origin is woven into the text, along with glimmers of humor. I particularly appreciated the note from Niculescu’s translator Amanda L. Andrei, which describes the process of working, as a heritage speaker, with her father Codin Andrei: “The emotional challenge [of translating this work] lies in my own hang-ups of being a non-native speaker due to political and historical forces beyond my control. When we co-translate, my father and I converse about Romanian culture from a perspective free of Western stereotypes of communism, vampires, and oppression, and we are delighted.” Finally, I was swept up in the atmospheric excerpt from Habib Tengour’s Women of the Odyssey (tr. Teresa Villa-Ignacio) while listening to Tengour’s mellifluous reading of the subtle text in French, describing those who console themselves by “sticking ear in seashell” or the “Unfinished / Wave bringing you to the threshold.”

—Heather Green, Visual Editor

I adore the rush of the speaker’s voice in Enrico Remmert’s The War of the Murazzi (tr. Antonella Lettieri), and its syntactical verbality, meandering but never losing control, digressing into tightness, into an accumulation of narrative stress. I love as well the narrator’s contextualisations of the backdrop of Turin and its historico-social problems with violence, particularly in a refugee context: Turin feels masterfully integrated into the plotline, like a combattant in the Murazzi war itself, and the vivacity of its violence continues running, naturalistic, organic, as the “river never stops running.”

The textuality of Mateo Díaz Choza’s Precipitations (tr. Lowry Pressly) is staggering: the dual columns that inform multiple methods of reading the poem, as well as the materiality of the poem, almost transforming it into an object itself. The way the words waterfall down the screen mimic the “drop,” a kind of fall from heaven, in a mode that lends itself to the digital form undoubtedly better than it would a magazine or a standard-format book, in the “depths of the page” that ultimately do not supercede the infinite scroll of the screen. When the poem’s substance and words meet and meld into each other, the poem’s two columns also merge into one, into the “weather,” “snow-mute” but “beautiful” in the void of its meaning. Choza creates an aesthetics of decay, of death, of abandonment, but of regeneration as well. The drop recurs again and again; the speaker will continue to recognise his lover, again and again.

I love the adventure of Amyr Klink’s One Hundred Days Between Sky and Sea (tr. Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren), the sense of movement through space and time that underpins the narrator’s paradoxical stillness, immobility. It is remininescent of Jules Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires, venturing beneath the sea or into the heart of volcanoes, on a journey pushing against the boundaries of human capacity. Klink melds the joy and exuberance of a child discovering the world with a practical, didactical style of writing that underpins the veracity of his voyage. I find this piece particularly apt for Asymptote as a vessel in the sea of understanding, a buoy of translation in the archipelago of languages.

I appreciate Asymptote‘s continued dedication to featuring Ukrainian writing in each issue, particularly Ukrainian writing about the Russian invasion. In my view, this is one of the most essential tasks of literature in translation: to continually draw attention to the diversity of global experiences; to remind us that our lives are not insular, that we are not islands. To that end, I found Anton Filatov’s Finding Myself at War (tr. Patricia Dubrava) both heart-wrenching and vital. As his “eyes bleed” before the cruelty of false news stories, so do readers’ eyes before the horrors of Ukrainian soldiers’ war experiences. They are given voice not in those news stories, but in literature. Sharing their stories—and I love the detail of the abandoned cat, ironically (or not?) named Death, as well as the final section on cinema—is an act of taken care.

I find Nicole Wong’s discussion of translation theory in The Terroir of a Single Work: Redefining Scope in Approaches to Translation incredibly pertinent and eloquent, and I particularly enjoy the ‘close reading’ section where she dissects her own translation of Proust. It’s a priviledge to experience the clarity and sharpness of such a mind through this piece. Her style is reminescent of Kundera’s narrator in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: playful, heavy on metaphor without falling into abstraction, clear, enlightening (and bearably so!). Since reading this piece, I’ve found myself returning to it as I internalise and integrate her analysis into my own understanding of translation.

 —Michelle Chan Schmidt, Assistant Editor (Fiction)

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