Posts filed under 'avant-garde writing'

As Close to 600 BC As We Are to Tomorrow: A Conversation with Saudamini Deo

May 8, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Tristan Foster

The role of the translator is to madden a language, drive it insane, do unimaginable things with it.

Writer and translator Saudamini Deo is expanding the English-speaking world’s understanding of Hindi literature, working to translate forgotten works by avant-garde literary outsiders into English for the first time. Several years after she began this series of translations with a collection of short stories by Bhuwaneshwar, the second book in the project, Traces of Boots on Tongue by Rajkamal Chaudhary, is being published by Seagull Books as part of their India List series. 

I first spoke to Deo about her translation project in 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The writers she was interested in were almost totally unknown outside of India, and I was curious to know what it meant to have them recovered, translated, and presented to an English readership navigating life in the twenty-first century. We exchanged questions and answers while both of our countries were in strict lockdowns—her in India, me in Australia. In the fog of fear and uncertainty that had overcome us, I wondered if Deo’s project was a way of coping with the immediate reality of living through something lifted straight from a history book—would it last beyond those early days of COVID-19 or was it a mere distraction?  

Three years later, the project has not only outlasted lockdowns, it has expanded and matured, taking on the shape that Deo had envisioned from the beginning: where Bhuwaneshwar’s stories are dreamy and deeply pessimistic, Chaudhary’s stories face the concrete absurdity and hardships of the everyday head on—their subjects span time and culture. As Deo states in her introduction: “Written more than 70 years ago, the stories sometimes read like they were written just this morning.”

Chaudhary wrote at a time when India was still a young nation, yet its promises of a future filled with hope and opportunity were slipping further and further beyond the horizon; as Deo puts it, it was a “world where there is no longer either god or morality, not even the desire for it.” Maybe, regardless of time and place, we always feel as though the riches we were promised never actually eventuate.

I asked Deo about the act of translation, the direction her translation project will take from here, Chaudhary the writer, and the parallels between his time and the present moment.

Tristan Foster (TF): Your English translation of Traces of Boots on Tongue by Rajkamal Chaudhary is due to be published by Seagull Books. What, in your view, makes Chaudhary significant to a modern English readership?

Saudamini Deo (SD): I think, in the last few decades, there has been some interest in Indian writing and Indian writers in the anglophone world. However, this interest or exposure is, to a large extent, limited to diaspora writers and writing. It’s about time that India is no longer seen or understood as a mere background to its diaspora. It’s not just a reference point or historical source, it’s a living and evolving country where people live fully human and complex lives, and is just as interesting or incomprehensible as anywhere else in the world. Rajkamal Chaudhary takes his readers through this maddening incomprehensibility of the modern Indian existence in the 1950s and 1960s. And India is not just about India much the same way as Europe is not just about Europe. It’s part of the entire world, it’s part of the reason why our present reality looks and feels the way it does. Chaudhary’s work would be significant to anyone interested in arriving at a fuller understanding of the human existence in these mad modern times. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 15, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Matilde Ribeiro and MK Harb

Festivals and prizes from India and Lebanon!

This week, our editors from around the world highlight literary festivals, events, and publishing trends in India, along with accolades for previous contributors to Asymptote from Lebanon. Read on to find out more!

Matilde Ribeiro, Copy Editor, reporting from India

Geetanjali Shree’s novel Tomb of Sand was shortlisted on April 7 for the International Booker Prize. This is the first novel written in Hindi to have come this close to winning the prestigious award. The novel was translated to English by Daisy Rockwell, who emphasized the polyphonic nature of the text, which uses loanwords from other Indian languages like Punjabi, Hindustani, Urdu, and Sanskrit.

This linguistic choice, which mimics the way in which speakers of many dialects of Hindi borrow words from other languages, is especially important in light of persistent attempts to “purify” and standardize the Hindi language by removing all non-Sanskrit words. Moreover, in a literary field that is still dominated by twentieth-century authors like Premchand and Yashpal, Shree’s achievement could encourage more contemporary authors writing in Hindi.

However, there remains in general a fundamental disconnect between Indian literary awards and festivals and the choices of the Indian reading public, especially in non-English languages. This was one of the problems addressed during the online discussion “Karimeen for the Soul,” a panel on Malayalam literature hosted by the Bangalore International Centre on March 28, featuring Sahitya Akademi award-winning author Paul Zacharia, publisher Karthika VK, translator Nisha Susan, and journalist Nidheesh M K. Karthika noted that a major problem with regard to “mainstream” publishing and awards is their reliance on the novel as the main form of storytelling, rather than the short story, based on relative sales figures for the two forms. In the meantime, regional newspapers and magazines continue to publish experimental, pathbreaking local-language short stories, a medium that, Zacharia noted, “comes alive when innovation is dead.”

READ MORE…

The “Untranslatable” Osvaldo Lamborghini’s English-Language Debut

March 8, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Paul Holzman

Lamborghini is all wild and free in his work, and Sequiera corrals it, grounds it.

Two Stories by Osvaldo Lamborghini, translated from the Spanish by Jessica Sequeira, Sublunary Editions, 2021

The subject of Osvaldo Lamborghini’s impact on Argentine Literature summons a polarity of responses. The late Leopoldo Marechal, commenting on Lamborghini’s seminal El Fiord, said: “It’s perfect. A sphere. Shame it’s a sphere of shit.” On the contrary, César Aira, Lamborghini’s mentor/curator of sorts, extrapolates his singularity—claiming his work to be unparalleled. Academics of the greatest rigor and other heavyweights of the contemporary Latin American literati—such as Tamara Kamenszain and Roberto Bolaño—have unfettered their comments on the writing of Lamborghini as well: the former finding the need to unabatedly analyze, theorize, and deconstruct the dialectic around Lamborghini’s work, and the latter encouraging the reader to enter with caution. With so much contention surrounding his oeuvre, taking on the task of translating any of Lamborghini’s work is a mighty—even ominous—task. It therefore comes to no surprise that a print translation into the English has taken a relatively long time to reach our hands, but it has arrived: Two Stories by Osvaldo Lamborghini, by the intrepid hand of translator Jessica Sequeira.

The written word, for Lamborghini, permeates the conscious with a concise and potent mechanism, boggling the minds of readers with an intelligently savage use of syntax, punctuation, and orthography. I first encountered his antics in El Fiord, his first publication. After quickly scrapping my thesaurus and dictionary, I stumbled between aversion and infatuation, rummaging through a labyrinth of blogs and academic databases for explanations and makeshift guides to the text. After a few years of indulging in the somewhat toxic relationship of attempting to translate El Fiord into English, my notes revealed that a great many elements of his writing transcend conventional translation approaches and decisions, culminating in ever more possibilities for the text. Thus, translation is an important tool for engaging the multifarious nature of Lamborghini’s work, and Two Stories demonstrates that the act of translation proves to be a helpful light while shadowboxing what some call the “untranslatable” Osvaldo Lamborghini.

It is not only Lamborghini’s quirky punctuation and witty syntax that deems his work untranslatable; the challenge lies within his deep plunge into Argentine history, politics, literature, popular culture, and identity at large. Two Stories is no exception. Each story is meticulously laced with gaucho and contemporary slang—not to mention the author’s own neologisms. Jessica Sequiera is to be commended, then, for a translation that does not break or loosen the tensions Lamborghini creates with the aforementioned layers embedded in his work, setting the state for the Anglophone community to consider how Lamborghini has set himself apart, breaking from the established literary scene. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2020

December 14, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Allison Braden, MARGENTO, and Sarah Moore

The latest in literature from Spain, Romania, and France!

Our final selections in excellent translations for the year of 2020 are fittingly full of thought. Throughout these texts, one finds the endless potential roadmaps that chart out from the individual mind’s interrogation and contemplation of their surroundings, and one’s own place within them. From a wandering mind, everything is a pool for endless reflection; a Catalan collection draws from the sea, a Romanian notebook is filled with musings and defiances of authorship, and a French diary novel tells the lives of many through the life of one. 

salt water

Salt Water by Josep Pla, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush, Archipelago Books, 2020

Review by Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large for Argentina

On a recent virtual happy hour, my friend described a weekend camping trip on a secluded barrier island off the coast of Georgia, in the southern US. My envy verged on rage as I listened from my living room, which doesn’t get enough natural light. He said that after he and his wife kayaked over and set up their tent (annoying a resident heron in the process), they had done absolutely nothing—not even read. They sat on the shore and watched the sea. It’s easy to believe how that could have been enough.

Josep Pla would understand. In Salt Water, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush and released by Archipelago Books this month, Pla writes that “the mere presence of the sea is enough to sink into the deliquescent bliss of the contemplative life.” His curiosity courses through the book, a series of ten sketches that revolves around the coast of Pla’s native Catalonia: he describes shipwrecks, submarines, and harebrained sailing schemes. He relates stories from a salty, one-handed raconteur and imbues the rambling tales with strikingly lifelike texture. Though his plots unfold on or near the sea, human culture is ever present. Pla revels in detail, describing at length the joy of nearly black coffee on a marginally small boat: “That beverage makes an almost immediate impact: your mind projects itself onto the outside world, you are fascinated by everything around and a gleam comes to your eyes.” This book is a product of that fascinated, caffeinated gaze.

In the preface, Pla describes the stories as writings from his adolescence. In the translator’s note at the end of the book, however, Bush clarifies that they were written in the 1940s and hypothesizes that the preface was a canny attempt to evade censorship. He points out that Pla’s “articles containing veiled critiques of the dictatorship made him the most censored journalist in Spain.” Indeed, his biography offers helpful context for the conflicting claims that bookend the collection.

As a university student a century ago, Pla developed a clear, intelligible writing style and deployed it throughout his career as a journalist. He traveled widely across Europe as a foreign correspondent and served briefly as a member of Parliament for the Commonwealth of Catalonia, a short-lived assembly notable for its symbolic value. Over its eleven years in existence, the Commonwealth promoted Catalonia’s unity and identity, and evinced strong support for the Catalan language—Pla’s language. He became a chronicler of Spain’s tumultuous early twentieth-century history and spent multiple stints in exile. In the 1940s, he took to exploring his native coast and writing dispatches for Destino, a Burgos-based magazine at the forefront of the reemergence of Catalan-language culture. Throughout his peripatetic career, Pla never stopped writing: his complete works, compiled shortly before his death in 1981, stretch over thirty-eight volumes. READ MORE…