Place: Syria

Summer 2023: Highlights from the Team

August 7, 2023  |  in News  |  by Catherine Xin Xin Yu, Heather Green, José García Escobar, Matilde Ribeiro, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Rachel Rankin

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)

READ MORE…

The 2023 PEN/Heim Grantees Talk Translation: Part III

June 5, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Margaret Litvin, Noor Habib, Priyamvada Ramkumar, and Zara Khadeeja Majoka

. . .to rely not on formulaic logic but the magical leaping flame that brings to life static words on a page, that defamiliarizes. . .

In this three-part series, Asymptote has asked the 2023 PEN/Heim grantees to talk about their work in progress; their responses, brimming with excitement, conviction, and connection, are a testament to how much translators put themselves into their labor. Through the varied approaches and languages, they share the important commonality of surety: that the work they’ve been entrusted with has an immense potential to illuminate our reality, enlarge our world, and enrich our experiences of literature.

For this final instalment, Margaret Litvin is moved by the living mind behind the words; Priyamvada Ramkumar renders a vivid polyphony of suffering and survival; and co-translators Noor Habib and Zara Khadeeja Majoka work together on poems that both gather and transcend meaning.

Margaret Litvin on Khalil Alrez:

At first it was the rhythm of his sentences: polished and wry, leisurely but not ornamented, like no Arabic prose style I had seen. Next it was the Russianisms: what were all these references to Chekhov, Turgenev, and Bondarchuk doing in contemporary Damascus, as if tailor-made for my research on the literary legacies of Arab-Soviet ties? Finally, it was the personality of Syrian novelist Khalil Alrez himself, glimpsed through every gleaming line. Who else could write such a lovable and quirky novel while escaping from bombed-out Damascus suburbs through Turkey and Greece, eventually completing it in a refugee shelter in Brussels? Who else, well aware of Russia’s role in the war, would set that novel in a fictional zoo run by a Russian former journalist named Victor Ivanitch, and furnish it with a wall newspaper, two wolves, three eagles, a hyena, an Afghan hound, and her friend the poodle Moustache? Khalil and I spoke over Zoom, and for a while I told myself I was just asking questions, not preparing to translate the book. But who was I kidding? The Russian Quarter had captivated me; I needed to share it.

Keeping the Syrian civil war in the background for most of the novel, The Russian Quarter reads nothing like a news dispatch. The action stays close to the unnamed narrator and his Russian-speaking girlfriend Nonna, who live in a rooftop room inside the zoo, next to rebel-held Ghouta. The book’s moral center is a giraffe. Time plays Proustian games, uncoiling spirals of memory. The virtuosic opening paragraph sets up the tension between the narrator’s mounting anxiety (his girlfriend is late in a war zone) and his cool descriptive eye:

On the roof of the zoo in the Russian Quarter, my 14-inch television, balanced on its table near the giraffe’s snout, was showing an archival soccer match between Spain and Uruguay. The rumble of nearby mortar fire had not stopped since early morning; my tea had gone cold waiting for the apple fritters baked by Denis Petrovitch, the clarinet teacher at the Higher Institute of Music, as I sprawled next to the giraffe watching tiny black-and-white goals filmed in Madrid fifty years ago. The artillery was shelling neighboring Ghouta from the orchards of the Russian Quarter. But my ears were trained on the long, still-empty staircase behind the couch on which I lay, expecting it to fill with the sound of Nonna’s elegant footsteps at any moment. She had gone to the cultural center in downtown Damascus to visit her dad. The full moon shone on me, and the screen’s silver light reflected brightly in the giraffe’s wide black eyes and flowed over her thick-fuzzed lips, which nearly touched the long-vanished players, the long-vanished spectators, and the long-vanished grass of the soccer pitch. READ MORE…

Fall 2022: Highlights from the Team

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

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

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

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

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

—Alex Tan, Senior Assistant Editor (Fiction)

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

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

—Janet Phillips, Assistant Managing Editor

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

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

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

—Megan Sungyoon, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2022

February 2, 2022  |  in News  |  by Barbara Halla, Bassam Sidiki, Caridad Svich, and Lee Yew Leong

Highlights from the Winter 2022 edition, presented by our section editors!

Gathering new work from 43 countries, the Winter 2022 edition might be overwhelming at first. But don’t let that stop you from diving right in! Whether you consume the issue from cover to cover or click on whatever catches your fancy, we just hope you enjoy reading this eleventh anniversary edition as much as our section editors have loved putting it together! Here to tell you more about their lineups are Yew Leong, Barbara, Bassam, and Caridad. If, after reading the issue, you’re inspired to submit work, don’t forget that we welcome submissions all year round; if you are a Swedish-English translator, take note that we’re currently inviting submissions to a paid Swedish Literature Feature, slated for publication in Spring 2022. For guidelines on how to submit, go here.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction, Poetry, Special Features, and Interview Editor:

The statistics are undeniable: With one language dying every two weeks, ninety percent of all languages will go extinct within the next one hundred years. Even as we at Asymptote celebrate another milestone with our most diverse issue yet, loss—specifically that of entire worlds indexed by languages—is never quite far from our minds. In Dear You, translated brilliantly by Samantha Farmer, Croatian author Jasna Jasna Žmak takes us on a playful thought experiment inspired by Barthes: ”What if one word was removed each time a speaker of its language died as an act of remembrance?” Intended as an enjoinder to Eliot Weinberger’s essay published in these very pages one year ago, Yeshua G. B. Tolle’s submission to this issue’s Brave New World Literature Feature examines Aaron Zeitlin’s poetry, written in a language “half of whose speakers had been wiped off the face of the earth” when Nazis invaded his native Poland. “On what world do we gaze,” he asks poignantly, ”when the poet himself believes the world is over?” Whole worlds are rendered believably before our eyes in Matt Reeck’s skillful rendering of Rachid Djaïdani’s 1999 classic of banlieue literature that smashed Parisian tropes, and in Kim Su-on’s atmospheric science fiction brought to us by talented translators Spencer Lee-Lenfield and Lizzie Buehler. My two personal highlights from the Poetry section couldn’t be more diametrically apposite: the first (the Kazakh poet Anuar Duisenbinov) is as light (and alive with defiance) as the second (Spanish poet Pepe Espaliú) is weighted (with clear-eyed acceptance of inevitable death); both are powerful and moving. Rounding up the issue’s stellar lineup, Neske Beks and Charlotte Van den Broeck (in the Flemish Literature Feature I curated) as well as Jamaican-born artist Cosmo Whyte (in the Visual section, which Eva Heisler assembled) make important contributions to the conversation on our collective racial past.

From Barbara Halla, Criticism Editor:

In many reviews, the very act of translation can feel like an afterthought; usually reviewers will include a short line or paragraph to acknowledge the deftness of the translator’s skill, but that will be the extent of their engagement. I can understand why that happens: at times, without some familiarity with the original, it can feel impossible to speak in detail about the translator’s craft—which is why Tom Abi Samra’s review of Huda J. Fakhreddine and Jayson Iwen’s translation of Salim Barakat’s poetry is such a revelation. In his review, the translation features front and center, as Abi Samra investigates how Barakat’s attempt to defamiliarize Arabic is rendered into English, doing an almost phrase-by-phrase analysis of the translation. There are some texts, however, where the reviewer does not have a choice but to engage with the translator, because the very book they are reviewing questions the porous borders between author and translator. This is the case with Catherine Fisher’s fascinating review of Tomaž where Joshua Beckman appears not merely as a translator, but as a co-writer having had a direct hand in choosing how to present Tomaž Šalamun’s poetry into English. READ MORE…

A Translator’s Humility: An Interview with Leri Price

November 17, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

[C]onfronting biases you didn’t realise you had is a lifelong exercise, and it’s painful but necessary, especially in work like this.

Leri Price commands language, and—similar to the narrator in Syrian author Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay—does so with a prowess for invention. Furthering Price’s accomplishments as an award-winning translator of contemporary Arabic fiction, her translation of Planet of Clay was recently named as a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. The novel is a haunting exploration of the Syrian civil war, as seen through the eyes of fourteen-year-old girl named Rima. At a checkpoint one afternoon in Damascus, Rima’s mother is killed, leaving her and her older brother alone to survive. To escape from the surrounding horrors, she turns to reading, drawing, and daydreaming—creating her own magical universe à la her favorite book, The Little Prince. Though an unflinching account of war, Planet of Clay is, in many ways, a hopeful novel: a testament to the power of our own imaginations in the alleviation of suffering. In the following interview, Price graciously shares her thoughts on the importance of translator visibility, the nuances of translating from Arabic, and the books that have changed her life.

Rose Bialer (RB): Last month, Planet of Clay was announced as a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature—just two years after your translation of Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work was a finalist for the same prize. How has your journey as a translator been up to this point? Have you noticed any changes or shifts in the literary translation field?

Leri Price (LP): It’s genuinely an honour to be counted among such amazing colleagues on the longlist and shortlist. Like most people in this industry, literary translation is not my only field of work, so it has been hard at times to maintain—especially when holding down full-time work in a completely different area. I’ve been so lucky that I have been able to translate authors like Khaled Khalifa and Samar Yazbek; a translator is a reader first of all, and having the chance to engage so deeply and intimately with a text is a privilege when it comes to writing like theirs.

My first translation was ten years ago, and I would say there has certainly been a shift in the field since then, in no small part thanks to translator/activists like Anton Hur and Deborah Smith. Among translators from Arabic, you have people like Sawad Hussain, Yasmine Seale, Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, and Lissie Jacquette (among many others) who all advocate for the incredible richness and variety of texts written in Arabic. Prizes like the National Book Award in the U.S. and the International Booker in the U.K. acknowledge that a translated work of literature requires recognition of the translator (without whom the work would not be accessible to English-speaking readers). There are more presses devoted to translation and more acceptance among others that translated literature is something that people are interested in reading. Maybe it’s part of the broader social movement to seek out and amplify voices that have been overlooked in the past—I certainly like to think so.

I also think that current conversations about the visibility of translators is long overdue— not (just) because translators deserve more credit for their craft, but because readers deserve to know how the text came to be in their hands. For instance, given how influential editors can be in the final version of a text, I actually think they should also be noted prominently. The final book is the result of so many people’s work, so much discussion and negotiation, and I wish that was recognised and celebrated more often. Jennifer Croft recently made excellent points about this issue.

RB: What was your relationship like with Samar Yazbek? Was there a collaborative element to the translation?

LP: I always consult with authors where possible; I think it’s vital to get author input, but personally speaking, I need to have a strong sense of how I see the text first. It’s much easier to go back and revisit things after a conversation with the author than having two or three versions of scenes or characters in your head while drafting the English version. (Of course, that can happen anyway, especially in a text like Planet of Clay!) I tend to consult authors after I have a draft in fairly good shape, and then again during the editing process, as many times as needed. So I don’t know that I would call it a collaboration as such, but I would never feel comfortable producing a translation without consulting the author as long as I have a chance of doing so. Samar and I had two or three long phone calls, as well as email exchanges, and they all took place in a sort of mishmash of Arabic, English and French, which was fun. READ MORE…

The 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature: Who We’re Betting On

November 15, 2021  |  in Essays, News  |  by Darren Huang and Xiao Yue Shan

Our blog editors take you through the shortlist!

The announcement for the National Book Award for Translated Literature is right around the corner; the 72nd ceremony is due to broadcast live on November 17. On the shortlist are five varied and individual titles: Elisa Shua Dusapin’s Winter in Sokcho, translated from the French by Aneesa Abba Higgins; Ge Fei’s Peach Blossom Paradise, translated from the Chinese by Canaan Morse; Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West; Nona Fernández’s The Twilight Zone, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer; and Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price. Whom will the judges smile upon? Read more for our take.

A friend, not too long ago, once told me that he feels guilty whenever he reads fiction. Just seems a bit indulgent, he said. Yes, I admitted in turn, when pleasure and beauty mix, it feels incredibly indulgent. It was early autumn, dawn was a glorious thing, and we were talking about the first novels we loved—ones I remember for their intelligent presences, their human authority, but most of all, for the distinct, almost secret, pleasure they brought. The indulgence of excellent fiction feels luxurious precisely because of this intimacy: a sense of understanding passed via that most hidden method, of mind to mind. It seems to me that when pleasure and beauty mix, we allow the precocious lies of fiction to move through us, and become truths.

The five titles that make up the finalists for this award are all, in their own respect, remarkable emblems of fiction’s capability to create truth through duplicity. They achieve this through vivid, personal recollections—as in Planet of Clay—or through intensive research—as in When We Cease to Understand the World—or perhaps in what Borges described as “magic, in which every lucid and determined detail is a prophecy”—something I suspect to be at work in The Twilight Zone. The worlds for which these works contribute their imagination are various, wonderful, horrible, and mercilessly true; it makes me think something else about this triangulation of pleasure, beauty, and truth—that it is in the conciliation of the latter two where the incomparable pleasure of fiction is found.

Beauty is not reliably something one can stand to look at for long, but it always leaves something searing. Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay—the most lyrical and poetic of the five selections—is gorgeously written, and its translation by Leri Price is a definitive work of art, but it feels sick to talk about the pleasures in reading this story of Rima, a young, mute girl in Syria, as she loses one solid fact of her life after another amidst the atrocities and miseries of war. Instead, Yazbek’s prose is a holding thrall, channelling the child’s voice which springs between stark lucidity and dappled abstraction. Elegantly hanging in the balance between the wounded reality and the salve of her reveries, Rima draws an excruciating impression of the pain she experiences and witnesses, intensifying the horror with an unsparing visuality: “I am afraid of the meanings of things when they turn into words, as it is hard for me to understand bare words without turning them into pictures.” The coarse red of blood, the acrid taste of poison gas, the dusty pallor of a face in death—the words of Planet of Clay are both pictures of unflinching witness, and figures of breathtaking reverie. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2021

November 8, 2021  |  in In This Together, New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Fairuza Hanun, Georgina Fooks, Shawn Hoo, and Suhasini Patni

New titles this month from the Philippines, Indonesia, Syria, and Slovakia!

This month, our selection of translated titles traverse the battlefield and the surfaces of paintings, lonely post-Communist apartment blocs and conservative spaces housing queer, radical instances of love. In language described by our editors and reviewers as potent, provocative, capacious, and full of longing, these four titles present an excellent pathway into the writers who are bringing the immediacies of experience into powerful socio-cultural commentary on our reality: Martin Hacla, Norman Erikson Pasaribu, Ramy Al-Asheq, and Monika Kompaníková. 

angels

There Are Angels Walking the Fields by Marlon Hacla, translated from the Filipino by Kristine Ong Muslim, Broken Sleep Books, 2021

Review by Shawn Hoo, Assistant Editor

Words happened. Cow became
Cow. The word milk gushed in every throat.

From this seemingly deflationary announcement that opens one of Marlon Hacla’s poems—“Words happened.”—an entire landscape is animated and given breath at the very juncture of utterance. Not only do ears of corn and a crown of birds begin to stir, so too does the speaker, finding himself transported by the magical properties of language: “I uttered the word joy / And I was once again playing a game / As a child with my friends.” Read as the collection’s ars poetica, we might say that in Hacla’s debut poetry collection, words do not simply refer to things. They move things, and each marks an occasion in the world; they sing the world into movement.

There Are Angels Walking the Fields—first published in 2010 under the Ubod New Authors Series by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts in the Philippines—opens with a lilting “Invocation,” its unbroken anaphora incanting the world of inanimate things (“In the name of the rock. In the name of the lily blossom”), of unarticulated desires (“In the name of burned / Letters from a concubine”) and of those who have been cast into the margins (“In the name of wives / Abandoned by their husbands. In the name of gay fathers”). Who could believe more in language’s ability to intervene in the world than the one who uses them in supplication? In opening the collection with this list, Hacla immediately throws his lot with the downtrodden and the forgotten—those who may not have the ability to speak—and soothes them with the divine balm of words. In her translator’s note, past contributor Kristine Ong Muslim justifies her sharpening of the poem’s decisiveness in order to heighten the quality of invocation. Thus, a line more literally translated as “In the name of hands / Not touched” becomes “In the name of hands / Never held.” Might we also consider the translator as one who practices the art of invocation—except rather than calling out in prayer, the translator calls inward, to be possessed by both languages? Where, in order for words to perform the magic of the original—for cow to become cow—something first has to happen to them? In Muslim’s translation, Hacla’s lines are screwed tight; each enjambment turns brutally, and every line sweats with a potent lyricism, as how this opening poem rollicks to an epiphany by the end:

[. . .] In the name of faces hidden.
By a black veil. In the names of ears
That had not known the sound of a violin. In the name of a flower
That bloomed in the morning and wilted by nightfall.
In your name, you who would someday die and fade away.

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…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from The Book of Travels by Ḥannā Diyāb

May 4, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Elias Muhanna

Translated into English for the first time, meet the young Syrian responsible for some of the most beloved stories from the Thousand and One Nights

Introducing Anglophone readers to the young Syrian responsible for some of the most beloved stories from the Thousand and One Nights, The Book of Travels is Ḥannā Diyāb’s remarkable first-person account of his travels as a young man from his hometown of Aleppo to the court of Versailles and back again and we are thrilled to partner with Library of Arabic Literature and NYU Press to present an excerpt of its debut in English today. Diyāb, a Maronite Christian, served as a guide and interpreter for the French naturalist and antiquarian Paul Lucas. Between 1706 and 1716, Diyāb and Lucas traveled through Syria, Cyprus, Egypt, Tripolitania, Tunis, Italy, and France. In Paris, Ḥannā Diyāb met Antoine Galland, who added to his wildly popular translation of the Thousand and One Nights several tales related by Diyāb, including “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” When Lucas failed to make good on his promise of a position for Diyāb at Louis XIV’s Royal Library, Diyāb returned to Aleppo. In his old age, he wrote this engaging account of his youthful adventures, from capture by pirates in the Mediterranean to quack medicine and near-death experiences. In the following excerpt, Diyāb recounts what happened when he arrived at the court of Versailles and met King Louis XIV for the first time.

As we approached the king’s palace, I could see that there was a vast open space before it, surrounded by an iron fence as tall as a man with his arm outstretched, and topped with points as sharp as spears. At the center was a gate that opened onto the space, flanked by tall soldiers carrying battle-axes and spears, and snarling like panthers. They allowed no one to pass except those they recognized to be known at court. When we approached the gate, the soldiers tried to turn us away, but my master gave them a password and they let us through.

We entered the square and walked across it to the gates of the king’s palace. There were soldiers there just like the ones we’d seen earlier, along with a seated chamberlain wearing an ornate uniform. He was a handsome man of dignified bearing, attended by a group of servants. When my master stepped forward and introduced himself, the man welcomed him in most cordially. We climbed a grand set of stone stairs, then headed to the pavilion of the minister known as Pontchartrain, who was minister for the Orient. We received permission to enter, and presented ourselves before His Excellency the minister, accompanied by the chamberlain.

My master bowed ceremoniously and announced that he’d returned safely to Paris from his voyage. He presented the minister with an inventory of the seven trunks’ worth of goods he had purchased for His Majesty the king during his travels. The minister read the inventory and repeated his greetings, congratulating my master on returning home safely despite all the frightful things he’d surely encountered during his voyage. I stood at some distance from the two men, holding the cage with the animals inside. The minister spotted me.

“Who’s that, and what’s he carrying?” he asked my master.

“This young man served as my dragoman during the voyage,” he replied. READ MORE…

The Queer Lives of Arabic Literature

October 7, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by MK Harb

[T]he question of translating the “Arabic queer” . . . looms large . . . [H]owever, the canon does not lack for contemporary contenders.

The role that fiction plays in both relating and shaping our reality is pivotal, and this power that lies in representation is oftentimes an essential source of strength for individuals who persist under oppression and negation. For writers of queer texts in the contemporary Arab world, the complex paradigm of politics, history, storytelling, and interiority has culminated in an explosive multiplicity of voices and experiences, coming together in revolutionary expression. In this essay, MK Harb, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Lebanon, focuses in on three novels which engage their queer characters and environments in surprising and enlightening narratives, denying easy categorization to tell the poetry of the personal.

Oftentimes, when discussing the subject of queerness in contemporary Arabic literature, the idea of time travel arises in tandem. I say this only half sarcastically: it is not strange for a piece of criticism on a twenty-first-century Arabic novel to have an introduction valorizing the homoerotic poetry of Abu Nuwas, an Arabo-Persian poet from the ninth century. To put this in literary perspective, imagine an article on Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous beginning with an introduction discussing a queer text from the European Middle Ages. This bemusing conundrum is a product of orientalist academic training, often popularized by the faculties of Middle Eastern Studies departments across Western universities: a standard that singles out race in using the past to justify the present, imagining an uninterrupted continuum of the “Arab” experience irrelevant of space and time.

This obsession with the queer past of the Middle Eastern archive rarely comes from an investigation into the transgressive capabilities of past writings; rather, a strong exoticism governs this curiosity, and it often falls into the trappings of fetishizing the body and the experience of male love. Now, the subject of queerness in contemporary Arabic literature is itself fraught; many countries across the Middle East and North Africa engage in heavy censorship of books, particularly ones with characters that defy the hegemony of national and patriarchal orders. The other dilemma is that of language—in the past years, many queer Arabic characters came to us through writings in English or French. Whether it is Saleem Haddad’s Guapa or Abdellah Taïa’s An Arab Melancholia, the question of translating the “Arabic queer” and its various experiences looms large. Regardless of such constraints, however, the canon does not lack for contemporary contenders, which shed some much-needed light on the developments in queer livelihoods and philosophies. In this article, we will go on an elaborately queer journey through the works of Samar Yazbek in Cinnamon, Hoda Barakat in The Stone of Laughter, and Muhammad Abdel Nabi in In the Spider’s Room. What binds the protagonists of these novels together is not simply their queerness, but also their strong interiority and internal monologues, through which they shatter and construct social orders. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Another Biography of the Lunar Phases” by Amarji

June 9, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Sean McDonagh

from my creaking nocturnal crib / i saw the white and luminous beak of the kite / lacerate the pink skin of dawn

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, Syrian poet Amarji chronicles the cycle of the moon with visceral surreality in “Another Biography of the Lunar Phases.” Through the imagery of growth and decay, our speaker takes us through nine phases, each new phase unleashing a barrage of dreamlike (or perhaps nightmarish) scenes. We begin with the “nourishment” of a milk that stains the world, and we return to this bodily metaphor as it tarnishes the speaker’s very being. There are shades of Celan’s sublime and terrifying beauty; here the ‘black milk’ is persistent, its repetition adding a dizzying mantra-like meditation on death and the consumability of the body.

1. New Moon

black milk drizzles on the windows. it trickles on the northern forest. first on the sharp needles of the cedar and those blunt on the fir, and then on the other lesser kinds. black milk trickles on all of the families and all of the species. [nothing vanishes in front of the vanished white eye of the exposed black milk] as you see, as you don’t, the black milk makes everything tremble. one drop makes a blue roller tremble. one drop makes a cotoneaster tremble. one drop makes a squirrel tremble. one drop makes a blue rock thrush tremble. one drop makes a blue tit tremble. one drop makes an ash leaf tremble. one drop makes a maple leaf tremble. one drop makes a checker leaf tremble. one drop makes a thread of lichen tremble.
a black, black, black milk.
on the barbary nut iris: black milk. on the prostrate cherry tree: black milk. on the peony
flowers: black milk.
black milk that spreads and coagulates on everything.
black milk that coagulates on the bones of a dead lynx. black milk that coagulates on the skin
of a dying roebuck.
black milk on the corners of my mouth, on my Adam’s apple, and on my chest.
black milk that spills on all of the world, on all of my body:
as i, with my mouth, i pull towards the window and i suck
the black nipple of the night. READ MORE…

An Impeccable English: Notes on the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature

November 18, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Erik Noonan

The unstated significance of the way the books are written in English is the meaning of the Translated Literature Award.

As both writers and readers anticipate the results of the National Book Awards this upcoming Wednesday, we at Asymptote, to no surprise, are keeping a particular eye out for the outcome of the Translated Literature category. In this following essay, Assistant Editor Erik Noonan gives us a probing and interrogative look at the five books on the shortlist, looking beyond content to pursue answers regarding the linguistic journeys that these works have taken, in order to be chosen.

With the reinstatement of the Translated Literature category, the National Book Foundation is clearly attempting to correct the gender and culture biases of years past. From the beginning of the category in 1967 until 1983, when it was discontinued, every winning author was European with only four exceptions: Yasunari Kawabata in 1971, the anonymous author of The Confessions of Lady Nijo in 1974, the anonymous Chinese author(s) of Master Tung’s Wester Chamber Romance in 1977, and Ichiyō Higuchi with the Japanese authors of the Ten Thousand Leaves anthology in 1982. Lady Nijō and Higuchi were the only two women, albeit long deceased, to be awarded during the prize’s first iteration. Among the translators, Karen Brazell and Helen R. Lane won in 1974, Clara Winston won with Richard Winston in 1978, and Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link won in 1980. The rest were male. In 2018, the category was reinstated and the entry criteria revised, so that both the author and the translator had to be alive at the beginning of the awards cycle to qualify. Last year, the first of its new phase, author Yōko Tawada and translator Margaret Mitsutani took the award for The Emissary. This year, you can expect this corrective trend to continue (for example, every book on the longlist was written in a different language). READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

November 8, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Daniel Persia, Ruba Abughaida, and Sarah Moore

Our editors have you covered with the latest news in world literature!

This week, our editors report on the commemoration of Amjad Nasser, one of Jordan’s most celebrated writers, as well as Syrian poet Adonis’ discussion with his translator Khaled Mattawa at London’s Southbank Centre. From Brazil, the International Literary Festival of the Peripheries (FLUP) and the Mulherio das Letras have taken place, with both festivals seeking to give voice to underrepresented writers and speakers. In France, the winners of two of the most prestigious literary awards were announced at the beginning of the week. Read on to find out more!

Ruba Abughaida, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

This week, word-lovers celebrate the life and work of Jordanian poet, novelist, essayist, and travel memoirist Amjad Nasser (1955-2019), who launched his writing career as a journalist and activist for Palestinian rights. His debut poetry collection, Praise for Another Café, was published in 1979 when he was just twenty-four years old. A Map of Signs and Scents, a collection of sixty poems spanning from 1979-2014 and published by Northwestern University Press, features new English translations of his work by Fady Joudah and Khaled Mattawa.

In 2014, his poem A Song and Three Questions, was praised by Saison Poetry Library as “one of the fifty greatest love poems of the last fifty years.” Translator Jonathan Wright said of Nasser’s lyrical novel Land of No Rain: “I’m not sure what to call Land of No Rain. The publishers call it a novel. I call it a meditation.” 

The UK’s Southbank Literature Festival saw Syrian poet Adonis in conversation with Khaled Mattawa, Libyan poet and Adonis’ regular translator. They discussed poetry, translation, the blurred cultural lines between geographical points of East and West, and read their poems to a packed audience.  READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2019

October 28, 2019  |  in News  |  by Ah-reum Han, Caridad Svich, Ellen Jones, Henry Ace Knight, Lee Yew Leong, Varun Nayar, and Victoria Livingstone

Our Section Editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2019 issue!

Eleven days after its launch, Asymptote’s Fall 2019 issue continues to capture the zeitgeist. Many of its pieces, drawn from a record thirty-six countries, simmer with polyvocal discontent at the modern world, taking aim squarely at its seamy underbelly: the ravages of environmental degradation, colonial resource extraction, and media sensationalism of violence, in particular. If you’re still looking for a way in, perhaps our Section Editors can be of some assistance. Their highlights from the edition follow:

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction, Poetry, and Microfiction Special Feature Editor:

Via frequent contributors Julia and Peter Sherwood, an excerpt from Czech writer and dramaturg Radka Denemarková’s latest Magnesia Litera Prize-winning novel, Hours of Lead, brings us into the bowels of a Chinese prison, bearing witness to a dissident girl’s defiance of state repression and censorship. Inspired by Václav Havel, the protagonist’s struggle is entirely private and self-motivated, untethered from any broader democratic collective or underground movement. Her guards are driven mad by her equanimity and individuality in the face of savage interrogation: “Even her diffident politeness is regarded as provocative. As is her decency. Restraint. Self-control. Humility. . . The guards find her very existence provocative.” Renounced by her parents and rendered persona non grata, “a one-person ghetto,” by the state, her isolation is both liberating and the ultimate gesture of self-sacrifice.

Meanwhile, poet Fabián Severo—the only Uruguayan writing in Portunhol, the language of the Uruguayan frontier with Brazil—revels in an act of presence just as radical and defiant of the mainstream, resisting the state’s attempted erasure of his language. Laura Cesarco Eglin and Jesse Lee Kercheval’s translation sings: “This language of mine sticks out its tongue at the dictionary/ dances a cumbia on top of the maps / and from the school tunic and bow tie / makes a kite / that flies / loose and free through the sky.” Don’t overlook the luminous poems of prolific French and Martinican Creole writer Monchoachi, whom Derek Walcott has credited for “completely renewing our vision of the Creole language.” “The Caribbean could be considered a workshop for the modern world,” he conveys in Eric Fishman’s English translation, “with its deportations, its exterminations, and also its ‘wildly multiple’ side, its ‘ubiquity of voices and sounds.’” READ MORE…