Reviews

A Trace of Justice: On At Rest in the Cherry Orchard by Azher Jirjees

June 17, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Bridget Peak

Azher Jirjees does not alleviate suffering nor balance injustice to write a palatable tale of redemption or closure.

At Rest in the Cherry Orchard by Azher Jirjees, translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright, Banipal Books, 2024.

In 2005, Journalist Azher Jirjees published Terrorism. . . Earthly Hell, an irreverent study of terrorist militias in Iraq, against the backdrop of an expectant country. That same year, elections were held, and a constitution drafted. Subsequently, Jirjees was the target of an assassination attempt and escaped Iraq, first to Syria, then to Morocco, before settling in Norway. What might have been remains unrealized, and violence, unrelenting, pervades Iraq for years. This mix of fear and promise, all too real, sets the tone of At Rest in the Cherry Orchard, the fictional autobiography of Saeed Jensen.

The original النوم في حقل الكرز was the sardonic writer’s debut novel, and had earned Jirjees a place on the International Prize for Arabic Fiction longlist in 2020. Now, Jirjees’ rendering of an Oslo postman haunted by apparitions of his dead father, abused until nearly unrecognizable, has been sensitively translated from the Arabic by journalist and translator Jonathan Wright.

In essence, this novel is a retelling, a measured unburdening of the sequence of events that lead the protagonist Saeed Jensen to return to Iraq after his exile to Norway. Our narrator is plagued by nightmares, sleeping and waking, of his faceless father, fourteen years after his forced departure from Iraq. His daily life is repetitive, monotonous to the utmost degree, the rhythm of his comings and goings etched into the snow that reconstitutes itself each night. He works as a postman, following the same route, delivering to the same houses, tracing the same motions each day in bitter cold. He lives alone, a solitary life punctuated by appearances of his father’s ghost. An email requesting his immediate presence in Iraq sparks our narrator’s return, as he remembers his life before and since leaving. READ MORE…

A Metaphysical Mistake: On Elias Canetti’s The Book Against Death

June 13, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Sebastián Sánchez

Death, to Cannetti, is not one part of what we might call a life-cycle, but rather a metaphysical mistake.

The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti, translated from the German by Peter Filkins, Fitzcarraldo/New Directions, 2024

The fact that the twentieth century saw the greatest number of conflict-related deaths in human history might be considered fundamental in explaining the over two-thousand pages Elias Canetti wrote in preparation for his book against death. However, reading the abridged version—published by Fitzcarraldo (UK) and New Directions (US)—one will find that Canetti would object strenuously to this causal explanation. This relation between factuality and literature, Canetti would say, concedes far too much to death in two ways. Firstly, it allows death quantity: by remarking on the sheer numbers, we suggest that the tragedy of death is quantifiable; that the more death there is, the greater the tragedy. Secondly, it allows death quality: by remarking on the specific kind of death—those caused by conflict—we suggest that its calamity is measured in part by the nature of the dying. To Canetti, a lone Don Quixote who ceaselessly struggled for life in a century of death, all death is singular and its tragedy is infinite. In order to better understand this, we must turn to one death: his mother’s.

June 15, 1942

Five years ago today my mother died. Since then my world has turned inside out. To me it is as if it happened just yesterday. Have I really lived five years, and she knows nothing of it? I want to undo each screw of her coffin’s lid with my lips and haul her out. . . I need to find every person whom she knew. I need to retrieve every word she ever said. I need to walk in her steps and smell the flowers she smelled, the great-grandchild of every blossom that she held up to her powerful nostrils. I need to piece back together the mirrors that once reflected her image. I want to know every syllable she could have possibly said in any language.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2024

June 10, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou and Mary Hillis

New publications from France and Japan!

Exciting destinations are in your future with these selections from some of the most delightful new publications in world literature. Futaro Yamada takes us back to nineteenth century Japan with a scintillating mystery of imperial intrigue and murderous plots; and Eric Hazan takes us along the streets and districts of a Paris as seen by one of its most vital figures: Honoré de Balzac. Read on to find out more, and bonne journée!

yamada

The Meiji Guillotine Murders by Futaro Yamada, translated from the Japanese by Bryan Karetnyk, Pushkin Vertigo, 2024

Review by Mary Hillis, Educational Arm Assistant

A driverless rickshaw, a bizarre sighting through binoculars, a corpse holding its own head—these are a just few of the perplexing scenarios that Chief Inspectors Toshiyoshi Kawaji and Keishirō Kazuki investigate in The Meiji Guillotine Murders by Futaro Yamada (pen name of Seiya Yamada).

The story begins in Japan after the Boshin War, in which the several domains fought against the Tokugawa Shogunate to restore imperial rule. During the Meiji period, strides to modernize the country continued, resulting in tumultuous changes to the economy, politics, and society. As officers of the Imperial Prosecuting Office, Kawaji and Kazuki are concerned with these developments, especially the role of justice within the new government. Both men are dedicated to their convictions, and early in the novel, Kazuki contends:

Corruption is, after all, the muddying of the distinction between the public and the private, between right and wrong. That’s why the public lost faith in the shogunate. Truly, it’s a good thing that it fell. And yet, the newly formed government is already showing signs of corruption. You ought to know this better than anyone. Otherwise, what was the point of our revolution? Or will there be another, and then another? Would it not be absurd to go on repeating it for all eternity? The government doesn’t exist merely to protect the people. Its aim must be the embodiment of justice.

One way Yamada renders this transformation and the accompanying influx of imported ideas and innovations is through the characters. Kawaji is based off of a real-life figure, the eponymous man who traveled as part of the Iwakura Mission to study systems in Western countries, and who is recognized as the founder of the modern police force in Japan. Kazuki, meanwhile, is a fictional character who returns to Japan from France to introduce the guillotine, and as the book’s title suggests, its chilling presence looms over the novel. There is a great deal of curiosity surrounding the new execution device, and when it is demonstrated at the prison, he addresses the doomed inmate:

“You are to be put to death, but in this enlightened age you shall be beheaded in the French fashion,” Kazuki boomed, as he clutched the hanging rope. “At least you shall have the honour of being the first in Japan to be subject to an experiment of this kind.”

In addition to Kawaji and Kazuki, another recurring character is Esmeralda Sanson, a French woman with an interesting family background. She is in the country working on translation projects; nevertheless, local residents are surprised to hear her speaking Japanese or singing ancient kagura songs. Often dressed as a shrine maiden, her features are captivating and give her an aura of mystique.

To Kawaji, her wide blue eyes seemed like a pair of mysterious jewels. Though he had seen them before, he could not help feeling mystified that such a beautiful creature could exist upon this earth.

After the introductory chapters, Kawaji and Kazuki investigate a confounding series of murders which juxtapose the old and the new: “A Strange Incident at the Tsukiji Hotel”; “From America with Love”; “The Hanged Man at the Eitai Bridge”; “Eyes and Legs”; and “The Corpse that Cradled its own Head.” Each begins with an excerpt from their reports filed with the Imperial Prosecuting Office, and finishes with a dramatic appearance by Esmeralda. These five baffling cases drive the narrative forward until they are ultimately connected and resolved in the final chapter. READ MORE…

“To listen to new, unknown sounds”: The Crónicas of Hebe Uhart in A Question of Belonging

June 5, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Michael Collins

Uhart's . . . conception of truth-telling clearly holds an imperative to bare the process of the telling itself.

A Question of Belonging by Hebe Uhart, translated from the Spanish by Anna Vilner, Archipelago Books, 2024

A Question of Belonging, the recently released collection of crónicas by the late, acclaimed Argentine writer Hebe Uhart, offers a unique alchemy of attentive reportage, sociological and psychological insight, and incisive wit. Drawing readers in with her ability to enjoy the unexpected without judgment, Uhart continually combines humor and erudition to recreate her encounters with camaraderie and guidance, and the care she extends to vulnerable strangers is all the more self-evident when contrasted with her willingness to eviscerate pernicious cultural narratives, particularly those that serve to harm and diminish. The translation by Anna Vilner captures the tonal nuances between these modes, as well as Uhart’s authentic political sympathies—most notably with marginalized and indigenous peoples, from whom she continually attempts to learn.

Crónicas on trips ranging in destination from Río de Janeiro to the Peruvian jungle are supplemented by visits to various therapists, a “North American Professor,” and a hospital stay. Uhart’s integrated practices of reading—which include the interpretation of not only books, but people, relationships, and the self—intertwine in these textual sojourns, often revisiting the ego’s haunts, assumptions, and habits in correspondence with the journeys they narrate. Such practices deepen interactions with differing views, histories, and community structures, truly exemplifying an openness to challenge and newness. The results mirror the process itself: shifting, dynamic essays that act as flexible containers for both journey and reflection, while leaving ample space for the reader’s own impressions and discoveries.

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Announcing Our May Book Club Selection: Butterfly of Dinard by Eugenio Montale

May 30, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

These stories are a spatial message; they tell of living amongst, and in this way, they belong to everyone.

In the fifty short stories that make up Butterfly of Dinard, the great lyric poet Eugenio Montale turns to prose to inscribe the world that moves the psyche to its most extraordinary heights. As one of the most inviting additions to a remarkable oeuvre, the collection moves from mystery to comedy, from reminiscence to fantasy, taking the reader on excursions and immersions, introducing an Italy grasped in historical and personal material alike. The Montale admirer will find motifs that correspond with his most famed poems, and anyone new to the writer will find an assured, perceptive voice, dedicated to documenting the most curious and complex intersections of our social reality. Reissued now by New York Review Books in an updated translation from Oonagh Stransky and Marla Moffa, and with an illuminating introduction by Jonathan Galassi, we are delighted to introduce Butterfly of Dinard as our Book Club selection for the month.

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. 

Butterfly of Dinard by Eugenio Montale, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky and Marla Moffa, New York Review Books, 2024

After the walkman came into common use, a reporter in the Nouvel Observateur did a self-directed study on its effects, going around and asking its users if they considered themselves psychotic or schizophrenic. Clearly, the world of music had grown a new frontier. There would be communal listening, through the radio or some other form of public broadcasting, and solo listening; one could have a personal sonic timeline, running separately—though parallel—with the rest of the world’s sounds. Since then, we’ve only found new and improved ways to insulate ourselves from the social environment, so when a friend and I took a rental car around Los Angeles a month ago, I hadn’t heard the radio in probably a decade. When we turned it on, running through station after station, I catalogued the brief soundbites of the local airwaves—jockey banter, garbled trap, Christian rock, upbeat grupera. That frenetic soundscape accordioned over the brushed hills and highway traffic, and we synced to it, suddenly adopted into the city’s musical timestream as insiders. After a little while, we stopped at a light, and I looked to the car beside me. I couldn’t hear what the driver was listening to, but the taps of his fingers hit the exact same beats as those from our radio.

Music, and its innate potential for disrupting separation, was on my mind while reading Eugenio Monatle’s Butterfly of Dinard, a collection of prose pieces first published in the daily Corriere della Sera. The newspaper, similar to the radio, is a halfway-abandoned arena of public consciousness—a gathering place where people can experience the same thing at relatively the same time, and be joined, if not in opinion, then in engagement. But the days in which radically dissonant lives and perspectives could be unified via song or text are largely gone; though the cultural artifacts themselves are more proliferate than ever, we meet them on terms that are ever more individualised, ever more catered to the psychic patterns that we build, alone. Passing through Montale’s slice-of-life writings, some tell stories of the past, some follow the mania of dreams, but running through all of them is a sense that they are being told in the textual version of the town square—meant for all to hear, no matter if you are sat in the audience or just passing through. These stories are a spatial message; they tell of living amongst, and in this way, they belong to everyone. READ MORE…

In Remembrance of Time Wasted: A Slovak Memoir on the Impossibility of Escape

May 22, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel

Rozner illustrates how the state is able to reach into any of the nation’s corners, even as individuals sought freedom by opposing urban society.

Seven Days to the Funeral by Ján Rozner, translated from the Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood, Karolinum Press, 2024

In 1968, troops of the Warsaw Pact—led by the Soviet Union—invaded Czechoslovakia to crush an ideological rebellion against Communist orthodoxy, bringing the daring freedom movement to to its inevitably violent end. The world would come to define that era as the Prague Spring, yet as well as the subsequent arrests, heavy censorship, and exile for many intellectuals affected not only Prague, but also Bratislava and the whole of Slovakia—the eastern part of what was then one country.

In the foreign imagination, Slovakia largely remains in the shadow of Czech narratives—something Prague-centric fiction and non-fiction have long perpetuated. The recent translation into English of Seven Days to the Funeral (Sedem dní do pohrebu), by Slovak author Ján Rozner, fills this major gap in the perception of post-1968 Slovakian and Bratislavian intellectual life. In a four hundred-page long autofiction, meticulously and elegantly translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood, Rozner provides a rare testimony against the blind spots of collective history and memory—including those, as it turns out, of Slovak readers.

What is particularly striking is how the shape and the style of Seven Days to the Funeral espouse the despair and dread of what was experienced in Czechoslovakia as “normalization”—party-speak terminology used to describe the post-1968 period of obsessive governmental control, enacted to ensure that any dissent against Moscow would never again be possible in Central Europe. This translated into the elimination of any possible contest or alternative culture, be it intellectual or religious opposition, or simply works of music, literature, or art. However, as the dissident movement (with Václav Havel and the rebellious manifesto of Charter 77) proved, the liberating aspirations of underground gatherings, samizdat literature, and civil uprisings would eventually triumph three decades later, in the Velvet Revolution. READ MORE…

Glimpses of Kashmir: On For Now, It Is Night by Hari Krishna Kaul

May 16, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

[For Now, It Is Night] is a collection that represents Kaul as a chronicler of his times, mapping memory and history.

For Now, It Is Night by Hari Krishna Kaul, translated from the Kashmiri by Kalpana Raina, Tanveer Ajsi, Gowhar Fazili, and Gowhar Yaqoob, Archipelago Books, 2024

Hari Krishna Kaul (1934-2009) was a Kashmiri writer dedicated to inscribing the quotidian lives of people in the valley, releasing their stories in both fiction and dramatic works throughout his life. Some of these pieces have now been collected in For Now, It Is Night, which features seventeen stories picked from the four collections spanning Kaul’s career—two written and published before the watershed year of 1989, while the writer still lived in Kashmir; and two published after he and his family had migrated—just like many other Hindu families—in the Kashmiri Pandit exodus, which occurred upon the onset of militancy and rise in communal tensions after India’s Independence in 1947. As Kalpana Raina, Kaul’s niece and one of four translators in this volume, writes:

There are no grand themes in Kaul’s work, but an exploration and an acceptance of human limitations. He used his personal experiences to explore universal themes of isolation, individual and collective alienation, and the shifting circumstances of a community that went on to experience a significant loss of homeland, culture, and ultimately language.

One would assume that Kaul would become prejudiced after his exile, but that could not be farther from the truth. As Gowhar Fazili, another translator, states: “Unlike a partisan trend in contemporary Kashmiri writing—particularly in English—that victimises a community, demonising the other while valorising the self, Kaul subverts the binaries of good and evil, friend and enemy, self and other.” As exemplified in this selection, Kaul does not create reductive caricatures in the guise of characters, whether Muslim or Hindu. Moreover, neither the exodus, nor the events surrounding it, make up the sole focus of his narratives; he is not interested in the incidents themselves so much as the rootlessness and unbelonging they engendered. Tanveer Ajsi elaborates: “Not assuming the inclusive character of Kashmiri society, he excavated the strengths that bound it together, while also exposing the fault lines that lurked behind its cultural veneer.” As such, Kaul’s work can also be seen as a questioning of Kashmiriyat, the much-romanticised idea of communal harmony and religious syncretism in the Kashmir valley, which—despite its gradual erosion—still sees people swearing by its steadfastness.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: May 2024

May 13, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Danielle Pieratti and Sarah Gear

New titles from Italy and Colombia!

In a fecund month of new translations, our editors select two phenomenal titles: a collection of the later poems by the acclaimed Eugenio Montale, and an intimate epistolary fiction leading readers to a seldom-seen region of Colombia. 

Late Montale – New York Review Books

Late Montale by Eugenio Montale, translated from the Italian by George Bradley, New York Review Books, 2024

Review by Danielle Pieratti, Poetry Editor

“The world exists,” declared Eugenio Montale in the poem “Wind and Flags” from his first book, Cuttlefish Bones, published in 1925 (translated by Jonathan Galassi). Given the frank, existential agnosticism that governs the poet’s later work, it feels a little like whiplash to return to this otherwise characteristically subtle poem after reading Late Montale. Translated from the Italian by George Bradley, this collection comprises Montale’s published and unpublished poems from the second half of his life, offering glimpses of the poet first in the period of his Nobel win and later, as an increasingly reflective and skeptical widower. Yet ultimately, Montale seems to arrive where he began. “Unarguably / something must exist,” he writes in an unpublished poem at the end of his life,

But with [regard to] this,
science, philosophy, theology (red or black)
have all misfired.

If this isn’t faith,
O men of the altar or the microscope,
then go f. yourselves.

Given that these works range from the 1960s to his death in 1981, the fact that Montale circles back to this revelation bears noting. While his underlying ironies and symbolism persist, there’s a definitive “shift from formality to intimacy and self-revelation,” Bradley writes in his introduction, which “parallels the course of twentieth century poetry as a whole”. In poems taken from Satura, first published eight years after the 1963 death of his wife Drusilla Tanzi, Montale retains his characteristic imagery and density, but his focus has drifted from the tangible nature symbolism of his earlier works to more abstract questions of grief befitting an older poet experiencing loss. Many of the poems speak to memory and to individuals from Montale’s past, including several from two long sequences addressed to Tanzi. Others allude frequently to Montale’s former life as an opera singer. Indeed, the tension between then and now pervades Late Montale, and the poet’s apparent scorn for the passing of time lends a hint of tragedy to poems increasingly pensive and raw. “We were two lives too young to be old but too old to feel we were young,” he writes to Tanzi in “Lake Sorapis, 40 Years Ago”, which ends:

That’s when we learned what aging is.
Nothing to do with time, it’s something that tells us,
that makes us tell ourselves: “Here we are,
it’s a miracle and won’t come again.” By comparison
youth is the most contemptible of illusions.

READ MORE…

Room of Mirrors: On Ángel Bonomini’s The Novices of Lerna

May 9, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Jordan Spector

It is a testament to this collection’s dizzying, wandering nature that the reader is left to consider: what if this story is true?

The Novices of Lerna by Ángel Bonomini, translated from the Spanish by Jordan Landsman, Transit Books, 2024

Ángel Bonomini is one of those extraordinary literary figures who—despite having been lauded for his singular, masterful inventions—has somehow fallen into oblivion. In addition to being a cultural critic and prolific translator, the poems and stories published throughout Argentina in his lifetime represented a vital contribution to the nation’s phenomenon of fantastic narrative. While he remained largely unknown to international readers in his lifetime, such work earned him multiple distinguished accomplishments in his home country—including two Premio Konex awards and personal accolades from Jorge Luis Borges. In 1994, at the age of sixty-four, Bonomini passed away, and sadly, his writing seemed to disappear with him.

Now, in The Novices of Lerna, Jordan Landsman has captured the author’s wistful and pensive voice in a stirring collection of sixteen previously untranslated stories, spreading the magic to a new generation of readers. With candles melted “as if light had been slit from their veins,” theories “woven like black thread in the dead of night,” and people “like books with transparent pages where the lines don’t match up,” Bonomini glides vividly and lyrically into worlds where time warps, people live and die and live again, doppelgängers are plentiful, sentences disappear into amorphous paragraphs, and Buenos Aires isn’t quite the same urban sprawl that one might see in Argentina. While the pieces in this collection have no crossover in plot or character, some subterranean power connects them, with favored symbols and images appearing and reappearing—figs, trees, fires, death, and the landscape of the city.  READ MORE…

Announcing our April Book Club Selection: Anomaly by Andrej Nikolaidis

April 29, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Sofija Popovska

Nikolaidis’ very literal rendition of the Book of Revelation is unflinching, darkly humorous, and relentless in its pursuit. . .

In Andrej Nikolaidis’ Anomaly, no one is safe. Not only is the world ending, but everything is being unearthed up along with it—every confidence, every disgrace, every deception. With his signature blend of rapturous imagery and indomitable intellect, Nikolaidis forces humanity to face its horrors while still allowing us some potential for redemption, a characteristically penetrating move for an author who is also an outspoken activist against war and corruption. Just last month, Nikolaidis faced intimidation and public harassment for his bold political work in Montenegro, underlining the necessity and urgency of his dissent. We are proud to announce this exemplary title as our Book Club title for the month. It’s a hell of a ride, literally.

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. 

Anomaly by Andrej Nikolaidis, translated from the Montenegrin by Will Firth, Peirene Press, 2024

I am an Apocalyptist. I believe that Good will win out in the end, and when it does, the world as we know it will be abolished—it will no longer exist. So, once that world is gone, Good will prevail. If the concept of the Apocalypse isn’t the ultimate irony, I don’t know what is.

—Andrej Nikolaidis

Andrej Nikolaidis’ Anomaly, published in Will Firth’s translation, begins with a verdict: “The human race owes its history, as well as its future, to the fact that we’ve always been able to turn our backsides to the graves of those we maltreated, and then seek absolution.” Though this has been the case for millennia, the novel insists that human censorship will not be able to preserve its euphemized retellings for much longer. After a freak incident involving “a machine that would give each of us . . . all of the possible scenarios and outcomes of our lives”, past and present begin to merge: a mammoth falls and crushes a man brooding on a quay in Chile; a cruise ship collides with three women contemplating shop windows on Ferhadija Street; a man haunted by an incestuous affair is killed by a cannonball fired in 1805 by Napoleon’s fleet, while praying in the Kotor Cathedral. The truth of never-ending human cruelty—“one drop” of which is “enough to destroy the world”—finally refuses the revisionism afforded to us by the present, and becomes unignorable by physically unfolding everywhere, all at once. Nikolaidis’ very literal rendition of the Book of Revelation is unflinching, darkly humorous, and relentless in its pursuit of the uncomfortable details we tend to suppress.

In 1992, Nikolaidis and his parents fled to Montenegro from his native Sarajevo to escape the mounting ethnic strife that would soon erupt into the Bosnian War; the author, then, is no stranger to the tumultuous experiences at the core of Anomaly. Decidedly anti-war and anti-nationalist, Nikolaidis is also fearless in voicing his views. When his 2006 novel, Sin, was awarded the 2011 European Union Prize of Literature, the announcement detailed how his public defense of “victims of police torture. . . resulted in his receiving many threats, including a death threat during a live radio appearance”. His insistence on “freedom of speech [as] the basis of freedom” is obvious in his literary and journalistic work—and the way he implements this freedom is equally noteworthy. READ MORE…

Slivers of Beauty and Optimism: On Artem Chapeye’s Love Letter to Ukraine

April 25, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Sarah Gear

Chapeye . . . focuses on the effect of these [linguistic] dynamics on the individual and the local rather than society at large.

The Ukraine by Artem Chapeye, translated from the Ukrainian, Russian, and Surzhyk by Zenia Tomkins, Seven Stories Press, 2024

‘This next part is my favorite part of traveling’, the narrator of the Artem Chapeye’s opening story ‘Pan Ivan and the Three Bears’ tells his friends as they are invited into a local man’s mountain home to shelter from the cold. Pan Ivan feeds them borsch and hot tea as he regales them with stories about bears—nearly all ending in death, but all endearing in their own way. Chapeye’s beautifully fairy tale-like opening invites us to explore his provocatively-articled short story collection The Ukraine, translated by Zenia Tomkins. Chapeye—a writer, photographer, and now soldier—wrote these stories between 2010 and 2018, blending fiction with autobiography. Snippets of rural and urban life shot through with perceptive encounters with a rich cast of characters, these stories form a love letter to Ukraine and its people. 

While some stories are told from other characters’ points of view, the narrator of the majority  appears to be Chapeye himself as he travels around Ukraine on a beaten-up motorbike, sometimes accompanied by his wife Oksana. While Ukraine is doubtless the main character, Chapeye himself emerges as the most sympathetic and immediate of storytellers. His ability to see the good in everyone, and his gentle questioning of the people he meets is one of the most endearing aspects of his book.  In ‘A Fancy Send-Off,’ Chapeye—who, in the present day, is a soldier fighting against Russia’s invasion—meets Baba Shura, whom he describes as ‘very Soviet’ because of her view that Russia and Ukraine should be ‘together forever’. Rather than argue with her, Chapeye allows her to voice her opinion, before permitting himself only the most agreeable of disagreements: ‘“They’ve supposedly separated already,” I reply, allowing myself to contradict her, which I only do very, very hesitantly.’ He leaves the subject there, instead describing the elderly lady with warmth: ‘Baba Shura never stops smiling, even when she’s talking about something sad, like that fancy send-off of hers. Periodically, she adjusts her scarf. She looks at me kindly. She’s waiting for the rain to pass. She’s worried that she’ll get drenched on her bicycle in the five kilometers she has to ride home.’

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: April 2024

April 15, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Georgina Fooks, Nestor Gomez, and Willem Marx

New titles from Kazakhstan, South Korea, and The Netherlands!

This month, our editors introduce three incredible new works that delve into family, solitude, and fractured legacy. From the lyrical explorations of family by Surinamese author Astrid Roemer, the delightful oddities of Yun Ko-Eun’s sincere and humorous short stories, and the vivid, compassionate vignettes of Kazkah author Baqytgul Sarmekova, these newly published translations invite reflection, tenderness, and joy.

off

Off-White by Astrid Roemer, translated from the Dutch by Lucy Scott and David McKay, Two Lines Press, 2024

Review by Nestor Gomez, Editor-at-Large

In Off-White, Astrid Roemer weaves a grand, multigenerational narrative around the matriarchical figure of Grandma Bee and her family in Suriname, a South American country on the Caribbean coast. The year is 1966, and each member of the Vanta family is going about their lives in different directions, threatening the bond that is necessary to continue Grandma Bee’s vision of the family’s legacy.

While one part of this narrative is deeply embedded in identity, exploring how structures of race, class, and gender have been encoded within the family, another part is inextricably tied to loss and getting lost, as various characters all reckon with their history (cultural, personal, and traumatic) in different ways. Translators Lucy Scott and David McKay demonstrate remarkable skill and artistry in conveying the story with ease and clarity, relaying the subtle tensions in both the spoken and the unspoken. Through their work, Roemer’s prose enlivens with emotive and physical details (especially that of meals), deeply coloring the multiplicity that threatens the family’s unity while highlighting their diversity of experiences.

Even before beginning the novel, we are immediately confronted with the issue of color in the title: Off-White. The Dutch term, “Gebroken Wit,” is also included in the book’s very first page, and Roemer describes it as having multiple translated meanings, such as “broken white” or “refracted white.” In a conversation with Two Lines Press, Roemer states: “essentially, [gebroken wit] refers to refracted sunlight—a rainbow, for instance—showing a wide range of colors. . . [It] also means that sunlight always finds a way through time and always keeps gathering together.” This imagery of sunlight resonates strongly throughout the novel in the many harrowed struggles of the Vanta family: Heli’s burgeoning relationship with an older married man who teaches at her school, Louise’s ongoing incestuous relationship with her brother, and Laura’s diminishing mental health from the sexual harassment she experienced as a child at the hands of Grandma Bee’s brother, Lèon.  READ MORE…

“I’ve hidden in the details whatever remains”: On Tomasz Różycki’s To the Letter

April 8, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Michael Collins

Throughout this collection. . . one must continually meet Różycki’s challenge to read across the gaps between poems.

To the Letter by Tomasz Różycki, translated from the Polish by Mira Rosenthal, Archipelago Books, 2024

“It’s my word, my letters against your minutes,” writes Tomasz Różycki in To the Letter, the most recent English-language volume from the distinguished Polish poet. The line concludes the poem “Shadow,” in which the speaker—himself already “gone, no longer”—addresses an equally enigmatic audience: “From the shadows / perhaps you’re watching me pass through the gate.” Such confrontations between experiential time and textual consciousness, individual mortality and the ghosts of cultural consciousness, reverberate throughout this collection. The speaking voice of these poems is always aware of itself as text—a part of history inhabiting a living reader.

The book’s macrocosm integrates Jungian insights about how the shadows of history intermingle with the personal and cultural shadows of the living. In literature, these exchanges are facilitated through the act of reading, and To the Letter presents various perspectives on—and within—this process, incorporating allegorical considerations of the reader-writer, as well as direct addresses to the mutable beloved facing the pages. In collaborative, interdependent structures (numerical sequencing, narrative fragments, various configurations of speaker and addressee, and dream-like recurrences of theme, image, and setting), Różycki displays the dynamics between unconscious and conscious, self and other, individual and culture, all captured in a fine translation by Mira Rosenthal. Her English iterations fully relay the poems’ accessibility, music, and humor—as well as the ways they integrate into surprising valences with creativity, love, and interbeing. Within them, one identifies an existentially grounded, metaphysically nimble soul, intrinsically defying the authoritarian project that empowers itself by convincing people that they are drastically oversimplified, reified versions of themselves.

The central character in the collection is Lieutenant Anielewicz, who often appears in cameos. His unexpected arrivals, usually in a capacity of investigation or covert sabotage, befit the historical Mordechai Anielewicz, a leader of the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto. In using this character to stage ongoing psychological engagement with creativity, trauma, and finality, Różycki finds both literal and metaphorical affinities between the commander’s resistance against the Nazi genocide, and the poet’s evocations of the soul’s potentially destructive aspects. READ MORE…

Yet So Alive: A Collection of Groundbreaking Latin American Horror Stories

April 1, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Sharon Beriro

The horror in all of these stories slithers in stealth . . .  it quietly intoxicates, revealing its true colors in a hypnotizing fashion.

Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories, Two Lines Press, 2024

For some time now, Latin American literature has engrossed readers with magical realism, fantasy, surrealism, and most recently, horror. These aren’t necessarily the stories of the region’s most considered authors—Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Horacio Quiroga, Amparo Dávila, and other giants among them—but rather the work of bold, fearless, and independent writers who, in the last decade, have honored and twisted these genres in unprecedented ways. Their work represents a new generation of talents, who are redefining their region’s legacy in gothic literature.

Many call it horror. Others, like Carmen Alemany Bay, a literary scholar at the University of Alicante, call it “narrativa de lo inusual”—narrative of the unusual, or the strange, defining a subgenre “in which the reader is ultimately the one who decides what is possible and what is not.” Whatever one wants to call it, the certainty remains that these voices are as powerful as they are unflinching, grounded by a sincerity and authenticity faithful to their geographies; that is to say, these stories are as “unusual” as they are Latin American, which is in part what makes Through the Night Like a Snake all the more visceral.

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