Reviews

The Human Life and the Greatest Work: On the Letters of Paula Modersohn-Becker and Rainer Maria Rilke

July 24, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Iona Tait

It is for this very reason—the painter’s desire to reconcile life and art—that Rilke’s memorialization of Modersohn-Becker is an act of distortion.

The Modersohn-Becker/Rilke Correspondence, ed. Rainer Stamm, translated from the German by Ulrich Baer, Columbia University Press, 2024

“And so you died like women long ago, died in the old warm house, old-fashionedly, the death of those in child-bed,” wrote Rainer Maria Rilke in the moving “Requiem for a Friend”. The piece, dedicated to the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker a year after her death in 1907 at the age of thirty-one, has since immortalized her in the stead of her own achievements as one of the most important figures of early expressionism, turning her—through Rilke’s vision—into a literary muse, with views that Modersohn-Becker herself rejected. The Modersohn-Becker/Rilke Correspondence, edited by Rainer Stamm and translated into English by Ulrich Baer, allows room for this poem in its final pages, but it also gives an equal voice to the two artists whose asymmetry in cultural history is tangible, and traces a friendship that was characterized by both companionship and disagreement, intimacy and coldness.

After their meeting in 1898 at an artists’ colony at Worpswede, the artists began their correspondence two years later. That German village would go on to figure centrally in the friends’ relationship, with Modersohn-Becker telling Rilke in 1900 that he is “the only piece of Worpswede for me in Berlin, and that means a lot”. It was there that the two artists gained respect for the other’s medium, an important facet of their relationship that is present in the Correspondence. Rilke recommends contemporary authors and sends poems in his letters; they discuss Paul Cézanne at length; and Rilke thinks of Paula when he is in Capri, as “[s]uch peculiar, unheard-of experiences of colour are possible here”, “things here that have never been properly seen and turned into art”. It was also at Worpswede that the two artists would meet their respective partners: Modersohn-Becker met fellow artist Otto Modersohn, getting engaged in secret at the colony, whilst in 1901 Rilke would marry Modersohn-Becker’s close friend, Clara Westhoff. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2024

July 15, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel and Samantha Siefert

New publications from Chile and Iran!

This month, we introduce two extraordinary novels erecting vivid, immersive narratives upon the intricate sociopolitical histories of their respective nations. From Chile, Carlos Labbé builds an intricate match of class warfare and collective action against the backdrop of professional soccer; and from Iran, Ghazi Rabihavi tells the tragic story of two queer lovers as they navigate the repressions and tumults of pre- and post-Revolution Iran.  

the murmuration

The Murmuration by Carlos Labbé, translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden, Open Letter, 2024

Review by Samantha Siefert, Marketing Manager

Carlos Labbé’s The Murmuration begins like a monologue from The Twilight Zone: a robust voice draws you aboard the night train from Temuco to Santiago, and a conspiracy of uncertainty and intrigue quickly follows. Cigarettes smolder, nail polish glistens, and a retired sports commentator’s hot cup of matico tea steams into the noir-film night. Suddenly, you find yourself hurtling through the darkness on Schrödinger’s train, where a director of the Chilean national soccer team may or may not be asleep in her first-class train car—or perhaps she is in the dining car, having a drink with the sports commentator. Furtive eyes dart about, noting every detail, but Labbé’s experimental style calls reality itself into question, letting linguistic artistry lead the way in an investigation of Chilean identity, representation, and collective memory. 

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On a Deafening and Prolonged End of the World: Reading Makenzy Orcel’s The Emperor

July 8, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Moumita Ghosh

The Emperor might come across as a novel of . . . personal torment, but it is concurrently an elegy of a failing nation.

The Emperor by Makenzy Orcel, translated from the French by Nathan H. Dize, Seagull Books, 2024

Set in contemporary Haiti, Makenzy Orcel’s The Emperor arrives to the Anglosphere at a time when the Caribbean nation is in the news for ongoing political, economic, and humanitarian crises. In Nathan H. Dize’s translation, the words of Makenzy’s protagonist almost seem to presage the current moment as he articulates: “In short, this country is a sea of shit. A tomb. . .  we live in a black hole. We’d all leave if we could, every single one of us.”

The protagonist does not have a name—or more specifically, he cannot seem to remember it. Presumably abandoned by his helpless family in a hurricane-ravaged countryside, he is only given an alphanumerical code as an identity, and grows up in a lakou ruled by a self-fashioned, pseudo-spiritual leader—the titular Emperor, who occupies the most beautiful house in all of the lakou. The protagonist sketches: “The other houses planted around the Emperor’s are not homes but narrow sheep pens, ajoupas, huts, used to corral an entire flock of absent souls, followers who are forced-fed truths and falsehoods by the mystical master. . .” Amongst them, the protagonist—who is later christened “P” by the only woman he will ever love—is the least sheeplike. Celebrated as a drummer in the local Vodou rituals but equally subjected to the lakou’s terrors, the narrative follows his life as he manages to flee its confines, reincarnating himself as a newspaper deliveryman in the capital, Port-au-Prince.

The Emperor is written in a stream of consciousness style, and this design of P’s thoughts communicates the claustrophobic nature of his mental landscape, on which scurries a concoction of anger, anxiety, distrust, and a constant sense of imminent, lurking violence. Almost reminiscent of Kafka’s The Trial, the narrative is carried along an overarching tone of disconnection; in addition to his namelessness, the protagonist is also unaware of what he looks like. He ruminates on never having looked at his own reflection, and apprehends whether his appearance resembles the person he is inside. However, P is not the only one who remains nameless (and faceless); the host of characters he introduces—whether exploitative or comforting or everyday neutral—are never named. Fundamentally, this perhaps conveys the extent of withdrawal the protagonist embodies due to his past experiences, because such is how power shapes its subjects. P, whose only close companion is the “Other Within” (the voice inside his head), speculates: “How could I survive until now in this immeasurable solitude?” READ MORE…

Macabre Absurdities: The Meat Market by Mashiul Alam

July 1, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

Violence is the throughline of Mashiu Alam's fiction ... it remains viscerally bubbling, right under the surface.

The Meat Market by Mashiul Alam, translated from the Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya, Eka Westland, 2024

From its first story, The Meat Market amply indicates the weirdness that awaits readers. Written by Mashiul Alam, who was born and brought up in northern Bangladesh, this collection brings together short fiction originally written in Bengali, translated into English by Shabnam Nadiya, who continues to prove her skill. Described as “surrealist political horror,” the politics of The Meat Market is not an extraneous element limited to politicians and statecraft, but an omnipresent, embodied aspect of people’s lives; there is not a single sphere, no matter how small, devoid of it. Alam makes full use of affective disgust to drive this point home, letting the macabre and the absurd rise as the defining forces, thereby showcasing the hypocrisies of Bangladeshi society and the daily realities of the citizenry. These stories challenge social mores and underline existing fault lines, hidden behind the veneer of normalcy.

Perhaps the most chilling work in this collection is “Field Report from Roop Nagar,” which is written from the first-person perspective of an editor at a daily newspaper. As a regular work day passes, he slowly discovers that he is unable to get in touch with anyone who lives in Roop Nagar. He tries friends, colleagues, relatives—but the call either does not connect or just keeps on ringing, no one ever picking up. He asks people who live near the area to go and ascertain the situation, but they too become unreachable. Soon, the general public and the government also catch up to the fact that there is no way to connect to Roop Nagar. Only one piece of evidence is revealed: supposed field notes from one of the narrator’s eccentric colleagues, consisting of a video clip and some audio recordings. Together, they relate, in graphic detail, the horrific murder of a girl. READ MORE…

Announcing our June Book Club selection: Tongueless by Lau Yee-Wa

June 27, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

Tongueless . . . [mirrors] Hong Kong’s plurality and [elucidates] the darkening, authoritarian clarity of Hong Kong’s future.

Lau Yee-Wa’s Tongueless was published before the 2019 pro-democracy protests that saw two million people take to the streets in Hong Kong, but its prescient atmosphere of psychological horror and brilliantly embedded language politics anticipated the curtailing of Hong Kong’s linguistic and social liberties after 2020. Demonstrating Lau’s percipience and sensitivity, Tongueless is a timely and vital addition to the growing corpus of Hongkongese literature available in English. Jennifer Feeley’s masterful translation follows in her track record of translating titles from Hong Kong—most recently Xi Xi’s Mourning a Breast (New York Review Books, 2024), for which she was awarded a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts.

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. 

Tongueless by Lau Yee-Wa, translated from the Chinese by Jennifer Feeley, Feminist Press (US) and Serpent’s Tail (UK), 2024

Allegory depends on wordplay, and Tongueless starts with its title. The two ideographs in the original Chinese title, 《失語》, stand respectively for ‘loss’ and ‘language’. Together, they can both denote aphasia, a form of brain damage that hampers speech, as well as a Chinese expression that refers to a ‘slip of the tongue’. In Jennifer Feeley’s acerbic translation of this novel by Lau Yee-Wa 劉綺華—originally published in 2019 in what the copyright page calls ‘Complex Chinese’—《失語》becomes Tongueless. Lau’s psychological story of horror and loneliness in Hong Kong transfigures the metaphorical resonance of tonguelessness—losing one’s language, or mother-tongue—into a near-literal embodiment of mutilation and physical deprivation, a bloody allegory for the silencing and violence that Lau charts through the interpersonal and institutional politics of contemporary Hong Kong society.

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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.

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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…