Reviews

Announcing Our June Book Club Selection: Alindarka’s Children by Alherd Bacharevič

June 30, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal

Alindarka’s Children is a striking example of a writer’s role as witness and archivist. . .

A contemporary fable for the linguistic and cultural conflicts of post-Soviet Belarus, wherein the Belarusian language is at risk of being overwhelmed by the dominant Russian, Alherd Bakharevich’s Alindarka’s Children is a poignant and disturbing look into the myriad consequences of language suppression. Translated into both English and Scots, this multilingual novel is a vital testament to both the necessities and moral ambiguities of preservation, and a fascinating investigation of the intricate networks between expression and communication, adulthood and childhood, the public and the private. 

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

Alindarka’s Children by Alherd Bacharevič, translated from the Belarusian by Petra Reid and Jim Dingley, New Directions, 2022

Alindarka’s Children is Alherd Bakharevich’s clever reworking of a classic parable, using a simple Hansel and Gretel-like premise to grapple with real-life tensions between language and power in Belarus. Despite being written from the perspective of children, the novel plumbs deeply into the subtle darknesses and psychologies of Belarusian society. The novel begins with Alicia and her brother Avi, interned in a forested camp where children are trained to forget their language through a malefic system. The two are rescued by their proud and defiant father, but eventually slip away on an adventure of their own. As they explore the woods, encountering a series of memorable characters—interpreted from the original fairy tale and its confectionary-packet house—we are led to explore a world of anxiety and obsession, within which the duo must fend for themselves to survive.

Set in Belarus, the novel’s original Belarusian and Russian is brilliantly translated into both Scots and English, with colloquial Belarusian rendered into the former, and the main body of the book written in the latter. The dominant state-approved language, of which the camp is desperately trying to instill, is ‘the Lingo’—one can presume that it stands for Russian. ‘The Leid,’ or the Belarusian language, is left to slowly slip from collective memory, with Father attempting to impede its eradication by secretly speaking it to Alicia—or really ‘Sia.’ As a result, she remains silent at school, having been taught at home that the Lingo, too, is a forbidden language. READ MORE…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

June 20, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Kent Kosack and Liam Sprod

This month's edition takes us to Germany and Hungary!

Looking for a summer read? Our editors are here to discuss some of what they’ve been reading lately, which range from German theology to QR code-studded Hungarian novellas. Read on to learn more!

László Krasznahorkai’s latest novella, Chasing Homer, is an experience. Translated from the Hungarian by John Batki and published by New Directions, the novella includes an original score by Miklós Szilveszter and images by Max Neumann. The music, accessed by QR codes at the start of each chapter, offers an anxious and propulsive accompaniment to Krasznahorkai’s virtuosic sentences: soundscape as panic attack. The plot follows a paranoid and unnamed narrator fleeing unknown killers—or, parable that it is, perhaps his, and our, mortality—in short bursts of manic interiority. The music, prose, and Neumann’s images, which have echoes of Edvard Munch’s moody lithographs, combine to pull the reader along as spectators to a timeless chase and maybe even as sympathetic fellow prey.

–Kent Kosack, Director of the Educational Arm READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2022

June 13, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eva Wissting, Shawn Hoo, and Suhasini Patni

New work from China, Tibet, and Slovenia!

In this month of highlights from the world of translated literature, we’re spotlighting three singular, wide-ranging, and immersive texts. From the Chinese, Shawn Hoo discusses the philosophical and journeying collection from celebrated poet Xi Chuan. From the Tibetan, Suhasini Patni reviews a dark, compassionate novel of womanhood and urbanity from Tsering Yangkyi. And from the Slovenian master Drago Jančar, Eva Wissting gives a look into his latest novel, on how personhood and identity survive the ravages of war.

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Bloom and Other Poems by Xi Chuan, translated from the Chinese by Lucas Klein, New Directions, 2022

Review by Shawn Hoo, Assistant Editor

In the title and opening poem of Xi Chuan’s (西川) Bloom and Other Poems, a simple verb like “bloom” begins lyrically and unsuspectingly enough—

if you’re going to bloom then bloom to my rhythm
close your eyes for one second breathe for two be silent for three then bloom

—but in the course of its exuberant and exacting repetitions across six pages, the action soon blossoms into a sophisticated geometry. At times, the verb seems to indicate an instructive concern for those new to the world (“bloom a pear blossom in case the nape of your neck is cold”). Other times, we hear the speaker issuing something of an injunction or a dare: “bloom / unleash a deep underground spring with your rhizome.” In a poem structured around insistence (to borrow Gertrude Stein’s understanding of how repetition works), Lucas Klein—who also curated and translated Xi Chuan’s Notes on the Mosquito—constructs a resonant architecture, allowing the echoes to bounce off the pages’ acoustics, often to rhapsodic effect: “bloom barbaric blossoms bloom unbearable blossoms / bloom the deviant the unreasonable the illogical” and later: “bloom three thousand boundless universes / and string up and beat any beast that refuses to bloom.”

In English, though not in Mandarin, bloom sits uncomfortably close to blood; in this titular poem, this simple word—across both languages—operates with an undertone of violence, belying its vivacious exhortations until the end, ending up as a verb that has swelled beyond its initial premise. The poems that come after “Bloom” all seem to share this restless inflation of the poetic image and line, each taking the verse to its various geometric limits, upon where it strains to meet other worlds. READ MORE…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

June 6, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Andriana Hamas and Suhasini Patni

This month’s edition takes us to India and Mexico!

With Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand in frequent contributor Daisy Rockwell’s English translation taking the International Booker Prize recently, Indian literature is having its moment. Editor-at-Large Suhasini Patni’s contribution to this edition of A Thousand Lives could not be more timely then, spotlighting as it does another pioneering female Punjabi author. Sign up for our newsletter to get these recommendations delivered right to your inbox.

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Amrita Pritam, the first female poet to win the Sahitya Akademi Award, is one of the most prominent feminist figures in Indian literary history. Not only did she take a public stance against marriage, she also openly wrote about female sex and desire, and questioned gender-enforced roles. According to writer and translator Khushwant Singh, her poems about the plight of refugees made her “immortal.” Written in 1950, the book’s title, Pinjar, means ‘skeleton’ in Punjabi. In this radical novel, a Hindu girl, Puro, is abducted by a Muslim man, Rashid, as an act of revenge against her community. She’s given a new name, Hamida, and her life from before is erased. When she tries to go back to her parents, she is seen as tainted and turned away. Forced to return to Rashid and settle into a new life, she eventually has a child with him. During the fraught years of partition, women had to become skeletons, “with neither a face, nor mind, nor a will, nor identity.” Hamida is enraged at the condition of women like herself: “Some had been forced into marriage, some murdered, some stripped and paraded naked in the streets.” The book details unexpected brutality, acts of desperation, and highlights the struggles faced particularly by women in 1947. It was adapted into a successful Hindi-language film in 2002.

—Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large for India

 

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Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World (2015), and its unsettling opening paragraph, which would doubtlessly throw the reader into a vertigo-like state, is a captivating read bound to make you question (if you haven’t done so already) the significance of borders, their concrete reality, and multiple figurative dimensions. Makina, a switchboard operator, is sent on a mission to find her older brother, who, lured by the empty promises of a substantial inheritance, had chosen to undergo a dangerous water crossing in order to reach the neighboring country—an almost mythical land to which his fellowmen flee in search of the so-called “better life.” The Mexican author’s use of symbolism and his timely focus on the issues of migration, immigration and war reveal the fragility of one’s identity and the various traps that await the self. As for the language of the book, I would simply like to mention translator Lisa Dillman’s note, which informs us that the Spanish original “is nothing short of stunning, and translating it is both fulfilling and daunting.”

—Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large for Bulgaria 

*****

Read more on the Asymptote blog:

The Work of Feminism: On Elena Medel’s The Wonders

June 2, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

Alicia and María constantly think about the other women missing from their lives.

What makes us who we are, what shapes and defines us? Is it the country that we come from or the language we speak? Is it our sex or sexual orientation? The generation or political system into which we were born? Is it our job, the class we belong to, or the education that we are privileged with or denied? Is it our family, and, if so, as one character from Elena Medel’s The Wonders puts it, “What if genes determine your character, not just your eye colour or the shape of your mouth?” And in all this, how much is pre-ordained, what role is there for choice and free will?

Medel’s debut novel,  translated from the Spanish by Lizzie Davis and Thomas Bunstead, does not presume to offer a single, clear-cut answer to these questions, but one thing is obvious right from the start through the Philip Larkin quotation she has chosen as an epigraph: “Clearly money has something to do with life.” Weaving together the stories of three generations of women from a single family over the course of half a century, from the ’50s to the death of Franco in 1975 to the 2018 Spanish Women’s Strike, the novel seems to suggest that gender clearly has something to do with it, too.

As the novel opens, Alicia (the third generation in the family), finding herself without “so much as a used tissue,” feels uncomfortable from the sense of material limbo. Even at the age of thirteen, she understands that “money tempers [mediocrity], helps to conceal it.” Although she defines her life through money, or the lack thereof, her experience has also been shaped by another great absence that is inextricably linked to financial ruin: that of her father, who feigned the life of a successful businessman while getting increasingly into debt and committed suicide after a bungled attempt at life insurance fraud. From thereon out, Alicia is denied the expensive school and new apartment she’d expected and must move back to the suburbs of Córdoba, eventually moving to Madrid and a mundane life of insecure work and an unsatisfying relationship of convenience punctuated by anonymous casual sex with men who she can approach cynically as “safe bets.”

READ MORE…

The Blurriness of Intimacy: On Caio Fernando Abreu’s Moldy Strawberries

June 1, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Georgina Fooks

Abreu has the ability to narrate big emotions while undercutting them with a self-consciousness that means these moments never feel trite.

Moldy Strawberries by Caio Fernando Abreu, translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato, Archipelago Books, 2022

Moldy strawberries: just past the point of ripeness, bursting with life until they exude decay. Sweet yet bitter, delicious yet spoilt, nourishing yet rotten. It is this dichotomy that sustains Caio Fernando Abreu’s Moldy Strawberries, tenderly translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato: a collection of short prose pieces and stories that brims with life even as its flesh bruises.

Abreu (1948-1996) came of age in a turbulent time in Brazilian political history. In 1968, the Department for Political and Social Order put him on the watch list they used to target their ideological opponents, and Abreu subsequently spent time in exile across Europe—in Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, England, and France. While his writing was heavily censored by the Brazilian authorities, he nonetheless became one of the country’s most beloved queer writers, winning the prestigious Jabuti Prize for Fiction three times for his luminous work.

Moldy Strawberries is considered by many to be his magnum opus. Published in 1982, its vivid depictions of queer communities amidst the perils of the military dictatorship, rising homophobia, and the looming AIDS crisis serve to affirm life even when the threat of death feels ever-present. In eighteen prose pieces, which range from dialogues and vignettes to fully developed stories, Abreu’s writing bears witness to humanity in all its fragile glory. His prose affirms the possibility of love, desire, and connection—or at least indulges that dream. READ MORE…

Announcing Our May Book Club Selection: Mister N by Najwa Barakat

May 30, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

A poetic and intricate labyrinth of a book that subtly explores trauma, mental illness, language, and the art of writing.

Dissipating the border between fiction and reality, Najwa Barakat’s Mister N is as much a traversal through the cartography of Beirut as it is one wandering the avenues of the mind. We are proud to present this the Lebanese author’s most recent release as our Book Club selection for the month of May, a singular and genre-defying look into where histories, memories, narratives, and psychologies coincide.

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

Mister N by Najwa Barakat, translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren, And Other Stories, 2022

Najwa Barakat’s Mister N, translated by Luke Leafgren, is a poetic and intricate labyrinth of a book that subtly explores trauma, mental illness, language, and the art of writing. Traveling through the streets and modern history of Beirut, Barakat’s psychological metafiction still manages to maintain a tone both light and entertaining, enthralling the reader in its twists and turns and propelling them through its pages.

As the novel opens, our protagonist, the titular Mr. N, is writing a story about Lazarus, who has just been awoken from death. As the book progresses, however, we discover that the main narrative being written by Mr. N actually concerns his attempts to resurrect his authorial self by unpicking and then piecing together fragments of his memories, following a period of writer’s block that has lasted fifteen years. The novel regularly shifts in time, mood, and even self-referentially in its narrative point of view, but it quickly becomes clear that everything we are shown is through Mr. N’s very subjective lens. As his behaviour becomes more erratic, the reader must decide how much what he writes can be trusted and whether they should suspend their disbelief to the point where it would be possible for a character from one of his novels to appear in flesh and blood.

Much of the power and pleasure in Mister N is in its meditations on language and the act of writing, as well as the poetry within its pages. The novel is full of rich metaphor and simile, and Najwa Barakat’s study of cinema is evident in the detailed and evocative scenes she paints: the garden beneath his hotel window with its “three beautiful sisters clothed in green leaves”, which later, in the cover of pitch black night, becomes the stage for a macabre performance by his neighbours; the dirty and overcrowded streets of the refugee and migrant-filled districts where Mr. N “navigated high, dilapidated buildings, haphazardly placed, pushing against one another, tottering together, like man-made cumulus clouds locked in combat as they floated along with scents of decay from the slaughterhouses and the mountains of trash”. The potent combination of Mr. N’s poetic imagination and his illness allows the narration to glide seamlessly from the serious to the slight in the span of a sentence and then back again, reflecting a state of trauma in which the relative significance of things can be inverted, and a numbness to death and loss that can put the trivial on equal footing with the terrible. Midway through witnessing his neighbour’s suicide, for example, he becomes distracted by a mosquito and begins meditating on the best ways to get rid of it. On the one hand, such shifts and tangents contribute to the novel’s grim humour; on the other, as the novel progresses, and Mr. N grows less confident in his fiction of a comfortable hotel life and increasingly paranoid and delusional, they also reflect his inability to piece together a coherent narrative that might reveal the supposed truth of his life’s history. As he explains to one of his psychologists, “the malady lies in my fatal recalling of every detail and my brain’s refusal to take in the full picture. So here I am, not grasping realities except through successive glimpses of the horizon, momentary flashes that reveal disparate, disjointed things, before putting them back together again.”

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: May 2022

May 16, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor, Sabrina Parker Greene, and Samantha Siefert

New writings translated from Arabic, Croatian, and Italian!

In this month of new releases from literatures around the world, we present a poignant and transcendental collection of poems from Palestinian writer Maya Abun Al-Hayyat, a mesmerizing journey through Latin American from Croatian author Marko Pogačar, and a stunning psychological novel of detachment from Erica Mou, in her Anglophone debut. Read on to find out more!

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You Can Be the Last Leaf: Selected Poems by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah, Milkweed Editions, 2022

Review by Laurel Taylor, Assistant Managing Editor

To raise one’s pen is a political act. As I write these words, it’s been less than forty-eight hours since journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was fatally shot in Jenin. Having acted politically, having written politically, her death is now being used for political means. Words within and about war function as powerful political weapons, bandages, sirens, and songs, all in one. This is what Maya Abu Al-Hayyat shares with us through her incisive verse, as translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah.

Lovers Swap Language

the way enemies exchanges stabs:
he takes a word from her lexicon
and she takes one from his book.
That’s how poems are made
and also bigoted speeches

And when lovers and enemies sleep,
the ether carries a hot hum
the universe digests
unaffected.

Words weaponize, the world marches on, but Abu Al-Hayyat rests between breaths, demonstrating through a brilliant puzzle of verbal turns the ways in which trauma has distorted our time. This collection, You Can Be the Last Leaf, brings together verses from multiple times and tomes, holding them in conversation, exchanging the writer’s lexicons and books through the years, and digesting the whole in the face of an indifferent universe.

In his brilliant introduction, Joudah describes Abu Al-Hayyat’s place both as an individual soul but also as someone writing to the collective trauma of the Palestinian people. “The multifarious Palestinian voice lives on in Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s words, ordinary as grief and daily as laughter.” In the vein of the kitchen table, many of her poems do indeed touch on the quotidian, the life of motherhood and of aging, of love and family. “Mothers Arrange Their Aches at Night,” for example, opens “Joint pain, high sugar, / rheumatic ailments, / a boy who missed school because of a cold”. Quickly, however, the shade of the larger region—of that political conflict—ghosts over the next lines. “mothers feel sadness for mysterious reasons, / like sadness over other mothers / who stand in public streets / holding photos of their sons’ / well-groomed faces / with sideburns and mustaches, / waiting for the camera to capture them / and their chapped hands.” Like Abu Akleh’s reporting, Abu Al-Hayyat’s verse is a camera, and what it captures, what it turns toward, is not only the violence but also the aftermath, the void left by time cut short.

In “Mahmoud,” for example, Abu Al-Hayyat imagines a different future for herself and her lover, who was killed by a bullet from Israeli forces on the first day of the second intifada, as Joudah tells us in his introduction. The poem opens in the hypothetical. “Mahmoud could have been our son. / I’d have objected to the name / and, for family reasons, you’d have insisted on it.” Midway through the poem though, other temporal modes wriggle in. “You’d have forgiven him, / you’re kind like that. He’d only smoked in secret. / But the first rock he’d have thrown / at soldiers at the checkpoint, / to raise his heroic stock in Mana’s eyes, / would have declared war in our house / biting followed by flying slippers.” Mahmoud is forgiven in another timeline, but the lover is kind even now. Mahmoud smoked, but he only hypothetically threw the rock. The poem ends with a slap, the same slap which never landed on Mahmoud’s cheek. READ MORE…

Unexpired Bodies: On Malika Moustadraf’s Blood Feast

May 4, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Alex Tan

Vignettes, as building blocks of Moustadraf’s narrative, are wielded to strip away at illusions of respectability.

Blood Feast: The Complete Short Stories of Malika Moustadraf, translated from the Arabic by Alice Guthrie, The Feminist Press, 2022

More than a decade after the original publication of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley infamously called the book her “hideous progeny.” A whole critical tradition was born in the shadow of that phrase, obsessively sewn together by the umbilical connections between writing, motherhood and the monstrosity of autobiography; no one could forget that the complications of Shelley’s birth had literally sent her own mother—the pioneering English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft—to an untimely death.

Like giving birth, writing exacts an extraordinary sacrifice in order to grant the gift of life to another. It’s difficult to imagine a more tragic illustration than the story of Moroccan cult feminist icon, Malika Moustadraf. Debilitated by chronic kidney illness but dogged and uncompromising in her devotion to her craft, Moustadraf skipped rounds of essential medication to fund her first publication. This literary progeny consumed her—heart, soul, and kidney; still she insisted, “writing is a kind of sedative for the pain I live with.”

Every word she set down on the page sustained as much as it killed her, as Alice Guthrie tells us in her tender and comprehensive translator’s note, appended to her crisp rendering of Blood Feast: The Complete Short Stories of Malika Moustadraf (issued in the UK by Saqi Books under the title Something Strange, Like Hunger). Beyond its ambitious sweep of contextual detail, Guthrie’s essay represents a loving tribute to Moustadraf’s tempestuous and painfully ephemeral existence in the karians of Casablanca—a monument to all the work she could have written if not for the overlapping violences of the systems that failed her, one after the other.

Karian, a term unique to Casablanca, is cleverly left untranslated by Guthrie and glossed as impoverished neighbourhoods—with “unregulated improvised residential structures,” “often inhabited by recent migrants to the city from rural areas.” Fringed by a context of Sufi marabouts and witchcraft, these spaces are rife with djinn and black magic curses inflicting impotence, lovesickness, and malady on the integrity of bodies. Throughout Blood Feast, Guthrie’s familiarity with the rituals, superstitions, and slang of the region are not simply evident in the cadences of her translation, but further substantiated by the specific Arabic and Darija expressions she opts not to translate. READ MORE…

Announcing Our April Book Club Selection: Gentlemen Callers by Corinne Hoex

April 28, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

Hoex’s playful romp through the transformative powers of female sensuality . . . toes the line of taste and teases the reader.

In the world of letters, sex is too often strangled with extremes. Whether entrenched in symbolism, proliferate with diverse politics, or avoided altogether, this pervasive element of human experience is too often deprived of its more irreverent, mirthful, and pleasurable evocations. In our Book Club selection for April, award-winning Belgian writer Corinne Hoex presents a series of sexual dreams and fantasies in Gentlemen Callers, a collection that astounds, subverts, and engages with physical pleasure in joy, levity, and dreaminess. Unabashedly funny and fiercely sensual, Hoex’s journey through the erotic is a breathless delight.  

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

Gentlemen Callers by Corinne Hoex, translated from the French by Caitlin O’Neil, Dalkey Archive Press, 2022

Literature has—particularly in the last century or so—become a Serious Business. I’m not speaking here of economics or occupations, but rather the affect of seriousness. Very often, the more tragical, gritty, and dark a tale is, the more lauded its reception becomes. For whatever reason, we have decided that comedy is not as worthy of critical attention or canonization, in spite of the fact that, in my estimation at least, comedy is infinitely harder to pull off. Humor is culturally specific, temporally tied, and situationally contextual, and all of these facets are amplified in the context of translation, where puns and plays become tangled in tongues. This is what makes Gentlemen Callers, by Corinne Hoex, translated from the French by Caitlin O’Neil, a truly astonishing outlier. While French literature enjoys a fairly prolific publication rate in English, the kinds of literature chosen for publication are often cerebral, philosophical, and introspective. Hoex’s series of vignettes, too, are interiorized, in that they are dreamworlds, but they are also fleshy, sensuous, and gilded with a teasing tone firmly rooted (pun intended) in sexual exploration and fulfillment.

Gentlemen Callers is somewhere between a novel and a short story collection; a first-person narrator delivers each brief tale, and her power to call men (and other more fantastical lovers) into her dreams perennially returns, but nearly every chapter is self-contained, and the narrator shapeshifts as she sees fit, all the better to become the tool with which her lovers might exercise their expertise. Each vignette is titled after an occupation, some of which happily gesture to the realm of tried and true pornographic tropes (like The Mailman or The Schoolteacher) while others are more oblique: The Butcher, The Furrier, The Beekeeper. Following each chapter title comes an epigraph, all taken from some of Europe’s most famous canonical authors: Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Émile Zola. As one might expect, all the referenced authors are men, and all the epigraphs gesture to the occupation under examination, albeit some more obliquely than others. The narratorial play here is not only to reference the heights of physical joy one can achieve with a skilled workman, but also to reference the heights of intellectual joy one can achieve when toying with the phantom canon, with the master’s ghost.

Take, for example, the epigraph from “The Young Priest 2,” one of only three vignette continuations in the book. It’s from Thomas à Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ, perhaps one of the most widely read Christian works after the Bible itself. The quote: “How pleasant and sweet to behold brethren fervent and devout, well-mannered and disciplined!” This earnest, chaste sentiment takes on a new and sensually playful valence when paired with the priest’s vignettes, in which a handsome man of the cloth visits the narrator in her dreams and delivers an intercession upon which, “the Holy Spirit enters me. God clasps me in His arms, possesses me with His mouth, radiates His light by waking the wild urges of his servant’s potent sap.” No doubt Kemis himself, who in his teachings stressed silence, solitude, resisting temptation, and purging fleshly pleasures, would be outraged at the implication that actions “fervent and devout” might be found in the narrator’s oblique allusion to fellatio, “kneel[ing] on [her] white cloud, back arched, face upturned, lips parted, surrendering [her] flesh to the Redeemer.” READ MORE…

Strange and Stranger: On Leylâ Erbil’s A Strange Woman

April 14, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Carol Khoury

[Erbil] transcribes the coming-of-age of the protagonist—but also in many ways of the country.

A Strange Woman by Leylâ Erbil, translated from the Turkish by Nermin Menemencioğlu and Amy Marie Spangler, Deep Vellum, 2022

Before jumping to conclusions and judgments stemming from the title of Leylâ Erbil’s debut novel, I consulted Deep Vellum’s take on the book—hoping, or perhaps wishing, that the original Turkish title would give more to go on. Tuhaf Bir Kadın, of which the English title is a direct translation, caused quite a stir in Turkey upon its publi­cation in 1971. Since then, over half a decade has passed—a considerably long time for such a seminal and vital text to appear for the first time in English, by way of Amy Spangler and Nermin Menemencioğlu’s sinuous translation. This is also the first novel by a Turkish woman to ever be nominated for the Nobel, furthering the case for the Anglophone to take notice of this singular author, Leylâ Erbil—or as Amy Marie Spangler calls her, Leylâ Hanım.

A Strange Woman was originally translated by Nermin Menemencioğlu in the early 1970s; herself a scholar and an acclaimed translator of Turkish poetry, Menemencioğlu worked impassionedly to introduce A Strange Woman to a wider audience. However, despite receiving encouraging responses, no publisher was willing to commit. When Amy Marie Spangler stepped in almost half a century later, her contributions to the original translation further advanced the efforts towards publication—although Spangler admits in her preface that “world literature would have been all the richer” if it were published in its original form.

Further complicating the timeline is the fact that over the years, Erbil—in her signature defiance of convention—had “updated” the novel as further editions were released. Spangler worked on incorporating the new passages, only to discover that Erbil had also made additional edits and changes throughout the text. Naturally, these different versions had to be cohered, and one thing led to the other; Spangler found that “the English had been stylistically “smoothed out” in many ways.” The more she put one version against another, the more interventions she made. With both Erbil and Menemencioğlu no longer alive, Spangler and the publisher had to face and continually interrogate the ever-torturing question of how much authority the translator “could justifiably exercise.” She explains:

I decided to attach my name to the translation because the revisions were so substantial that I did not think it right to attri­bute it only to Menemencioğlu. I did not completely retrans­late the book, but neither was the translation Menemencioğlu’s alone. My name, the publisher and I agreed, should be added so that I might bear the brunt of any criticism. I wish only that Erbil and Menemencioğlu were still with us so that we might have collaborated on the text together in real time. […] It seems to me fitting that this translation process was, like its author, rather unconventional.‎

READ MORE…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

April 13, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Andriana Hamas and Thuy Dinh

A selection of staff reads from Asymptote’s Fortnightly Airmail!

Recently, our staff has been revisiting modernizations of canonical works. Our editors recommend their latest favorite reads from Vietnam and Japan, including a collection of poems meditating on the Vietnam War and a Japanese essay on aesthetics. Sign up for our newsletter to get these recommendations delivered right to your inbox.

Vietnamese book

In May of 1966, Thích Nhất Hạnh, 39 years old and not yet famous, arrived in Nyack, New York, at the invitation of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR)—an American peace organization—to lecture on the escalating Vietnam crisis. He then traveled to Washington, D.C., and throughout the continental U.S., to present a Buddhist-led peace proposal that called for a cease-fire with the North Vietnamese government, followed by humanitarian assistance from the U.S. toward a peaceful reconstruction of Vietnam. Thích Nhất Hạnh’s 1966 peace tour included readings of his folk poetry, which he also translated into English, to portray the raw feelings of Vietnamese who “[could not] speak for themselves; [did not] know or care much about words like communism or democracy but [wanted] above all for the war to end….”  The poems were subsequently published in a chapbook entitled Thơ Việt Nam (Vietnamese Poetry), by Unicorn Press, Santa Barbara, California. Three of them, “Condemnation”, “Our Green Garden”, and “Peace”, also appeared in the June 9, 1966 issue of the New York Review of Books. Visceral and intimate, Thích Nhất Hạnh’s poems define the Vietnam War as a civil war. Beyond the Cold War context, all warring nations are seen as misguided brothers. Thích Nhất Hạnh’s peace sojourn was denounced by his brethren on both sides of the Vietnam conflict and turned what he thought was a three-month journey into a 40-year exile. He was eventually allowed to return to Vietnam and passed away on January 22, 2022, a month before Russia invaded Ukraine.

–Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: April 2022

April 11, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Arabella Bosworth and Georgina Fooks

Discover new titles from Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad and Korean novelist Kyung-sook Shin, out this month!

In this month’s roundup of translations, we review the works of two iconic feminist writers, Forough Farrokhzad and Kyung-sook Shin, who trace, narrativize, and engage with gender and politics in its most vivid and various forms. In dialogue with the greater schemes of sexuality, passions, and poetics, these women writers work within and trespass the boundaries of their language to paint bold new portraits of the world, as a place lived in the mind.

season

Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season by Forough Farrokhzad, translated from the Persian by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., New Directions, 2022

Review by Georgina Fooks, Director of Outreach

A poet of (com)passion: such is just one of the myriad ways to encapsulate the unique encounter with Forough Farrokhzad and her poetry. One of 20th-century Iran’s most celebrated and outspoken poets, she was controversial for the ways in which she lived and loved—openly, in transgression of patriarchal societal norms—and as a result, her work was banned for more than a decade after the Islamic Revolution. Yet, her legacy has lived on in illicit fragments and poems shared between readers, and now she is one of Iran’s best-loved women poets, widely read and translated. Through the work of Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., this latest translation seeks to offer lovers of poetry a comprehensive critical edition of Farrokhzad’s work.

Born in 1934, the poet’s turbulent life was tragically cut short by a car accident in February 1967, leaving us with a nonetheless prolific oeuvre spanning a wide range of creative endeavours. A poet, filmmaker, actress, painter, and more, her work across various formats bears witness to the vibrancy of human life in the face of suffering, and to the wonders and pleasures of living despite overwhelming pressures and pushbacks.

Farrokhzad is undoubtedly a poet of romance. Drawing on a long tradition of Persian love poetry (Rumi was one of her great inspirations, according to Sholeh Wolpé), Farrokhzad’s work remains unique in its fervent declarations of physical and emotional intimacy, opening up possibilities for women poets in the Persian language. The opening poem of the collection, ‘Captive’, points to the vastness of desire:

I want you, and I know that never
will I hold you as my heart desires
You are that clear bright sky
I am a captive bird in the corner of this cage

READ MORE…

Confronting Caste and Gender Hierarchy: On Gogu Shyamala’s Father May Be An Elephant and Mother A Small Basket, But…

April 7, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Suhasini Patni

Her work brings forth the daily, dignified lives of her people.

Father May Be An Elephant and Mother A Small Basket, But… by Gogu Shyamala, translated from the Telugu by Diia Rajan, Sashi Kumar, A. Suneetha, N. Manohar Reddy, R. Srivatsan, Gita Ramaswamy, Uma Bhrugubanda, P. Pavana, and Duggirala Vasanta, Tilted Axis Press, 2022.

To read Gogu Shyamala’s Father May Be an Elephant, a landmark collection of twelve Dalit feminist stories translated from Telugu, is to uncover the gaping absence of women in Dalit literature. Rarely are stories exploring the intersections between feminism and Dalit experience translated into English. First published by Navayana, an anti-caste indie press based in New Delhi, the seminal stories are now distributed through another radical small press, Tilted Axis.

In the title story, children play in balmy, wet weather, shrieking with happiness as the clouds part to reveal a rainbow. A young girl waits for Mother, who has been “weeding the paddy fields all day.” Born in a house where musty dampness is etched into the soot-covered walls, she is used to seeing her family slog for hours. While a thunderous rain pours outside, the family members soothe one another, consoling and rubbing each other’s overworked backs. Father has lived away in the city for almost a year to earn back the money he was wrongly accused of stealing by the patel, a person belonging to a non-subaltern caste. On the rainy day he comes back, a tender joy spreads among the “orphaned birds.”

In his absence, the family survived on thick gruel, but to celebrate his return, Mother buys a kilogram of meat with chili and salt to make curry. The children relish the meal, roasting the meat over woodfire, content with full bellies. But when Father asks his wife for money to buy toddy, he is informed it was all spent to prepare the feast. Angered by her response, Father “beat her like she was cattle,” not stopping despite the wailing of the kids. “We were scared that he might beat us too if we went near him,” worries the panic-stricken protagonist, helplessly watching this violence along with her siblings. Father is ultimately berated by his own mother, who reminds him that it was his wife who took care of everyone while he was away. The title is a popular idiom—despite the elephant-like prowess of the father, the woman is the reason a family survives.

READ MORE…