Posts filed under 'bilingual books'

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

January 12, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, José García Escobar, and MARGENTO

Literary news from Central America, the Philippines, and the Romanian diaspora!

Join us this in this week of literary news from Central America, the Philippines, and the Romanian diaspora! From recent publications of women writers, to a collection of electronic-inspired poetry, to movements against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, read on to learn more.

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Central America 

In December, Nicaraguan novelist and poet Gioconda Belli announced that Libros VISOR had just published a 900-page book collecting all her poetry books. Titled Toda la poesía (1974-2020), it includes a prologue written by Spanish poet Raquel Lanseros. This publication came only weeks after Belli won this year’s Premio Reina Sofía de Poesía Iberoamericana, one of the most prestigious awards given to poets of the Spanish language. 

Earlier, in late November, Alfaguara put out a book entitled Desde el centro de América, Miradas alternativas, which includes short stories by twenty one Central American women. The collection includes the likes of Nicté Sierra, Marta Sandoval, and Ixsu’m Antonieta Gonzáles Choc, from Guatemala; María Eugenia Ramos and Jessica Isla, from Honduras; and Madeline Mendienta and Carmen Ortega, from Nicaragua. The book was put together by writer and researcher Gloria Hernández, who, in 2022, received Guatemala’s highest literary honor: the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature. 

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

November 24, 2023  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Miranda Mazariegos, and Sofija Popovska

The latest literary news from North Macedonia, Latin America, and the Philippines!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us to book fairs, awards ceremonies, and book launches. From celebrated poets and dearly departed essayists to up-and-coming novelists and prize-winning translators, read on to find out more!

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia

The recent publication of The Long Coming of the Fire, a collection of poems by Aco Šopov, translated from the Macedonian by Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer, was met with interest and celebration from Macedonian literary critics, journalists, and laymen alike. The book features a total of seventy-four poems, selected by Jasmina Šopova—daughter of the poet and established connoisseur of his work. A selection of Šopov’s poems in Kramer and Grau’s translation was featured in the Winter 2023 issue of Asymptote Journal.

Aco Šopov’s literary output is significant beyond its stylistic excellence and thematic range—it also marks the beginning of the modernist period in Macedonian culture. “His work,” writes N.M. for Nova Makedonija (New Macedonia), “is essential to a poetic movement that freed poetry from the grasp of both the folk oral tradition and the short-lived socialist-realist style, thus directing the [still] tenuous poetic tradition of authors writing in the newly minted Macedonian language towards the expansive spaces of modern European songmaking.” This swift evolution, propelled onwards by the “long strides” of Šopov’s visionary lyric, was the reason Macedonian literature managed to catch up with the still-relevant themes and styles of its European counterpart.

Now, 100 years after Šopov’s birth, the public at large can experience his unforgettable voice through The Long Coming of the Fire, a bilingual Macedonian-English edition published by Deep Vellum Press. In an unusual but successful move, the edition was translated via the synergy of three translators. In an interview organized by the Macedonian Academy of Sciences & Arts, Kramer explains that this translation resulted from the synergy of three unique approaches and skillsets: “Rawley [Grau], who translates poetry very well but doesn’t know Macedonian, me, who knows the Macedonian language very well but not how to translate poetry, and Jasmina, who weaved the threads together in a way that resulted in the creation of a team of translators.” Although, being a linguist, she would’ve “been more comfortable discussing Šopov’s use of nouns and verbs than his poetics”, Kramer notes that his images, recurrent within his poems, “subtly bind” the author’s inner workings to the outside world, creating poetry that is “simultaneously personal and universally human”. READ MORE…

Truths in Ambiguity: On Uljana Wolf’s kochanie, today i bought bread

October 12, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Anna Rumsby

Nissan’s expert translations, in turn, are contemporary in the sense that they are unapologetically “unfaithful”.

kochanie, today i bought bread by Uljana Wolf, translated from the German by Greg Nissan, World Poetry Books, 2023

In German, Uljana Wolf’s work inhabits the liminal spaces between the German and Polish languages, with all the fraught history that this double heritage involves. Now, in an English translation by Greg Nissan, this palimpsest of linguistic plurality has received another layer. Born in the German/Polish borderlands, Wolf has rapidly become a voice for a globalised, post-GDR generation, her life and work echoing the political and social upheaval of the twentieth century. In compact scenes of personal and shared experience, both dreamlike and jarring, she weaves together metaphoric word-sounds, juxtaposed imagery, and multilingualism. Nissan’s expert translations, in turn, are contemporary in the sense that they are unapologetically “unfaithful”. He has incorporated new imagery into the retold poems, such as the echoes of mink fur in “mornmink”, reiterating that his translated poems should not be seen as reproductions or ‘shadows’ of the original, but rather as a “jealous lover, eager to retort”.

Wolf’s verse is extremely dense and laden with historical and cultural references, making both the foreword by Valzhyna Mort and the afterword by Greg Nissan crucial pieces of the puzzle in beginning to decode Wolf’s poetry. This being said, such ambiguous verse is also a joy for the reader or reviewer; there are as many interpretations as there are eyes to read. The poetry benefits from its bilingual presentation, with the German on the left and the English on the right as equal partners that reflect one another without simply replicating the other. This allows readers to appreciate the form and page-feel of both languages, even if they are not bilingual.

Something that struck me initially in Wolf’s German was the formatting: a reader of German would expect the nouns to be capitalised, but here they are not. This only adds to the possibilities of their ambiguity, as words which could be both nouns and adjectives, or nouns and verbs, are no longer distinct from each other; the line einen gehorsam verzeichnen could mean, as Nissan has translated it, “to register an obedience”, but equally could have been translated as “to register (somebody/something) obediently”. The German prose is made ever denser by this use of the language, as the nouns no longer jump out on the page. While reading the German poems, I realised with a start that this is what reading English may have felt like to my German-speaking students, learning to read a language in which the nouns blend in with everything else. READ MORE…

Bilingual Books: A Personal History

June 8, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Ian Ross Singleton

The process of doubling, of language regenerating itself, overlaps the process of translation and the weaving of two versions together. . .

Though not yet standard practice, bilingual editions of translated works are becoming increasingly welcomed by readers, both as a method of language engagement and an embodiment of a text’s various appearances and lives. In this following essay, Ian Ross Singleton discusses the power of reading and learning from a bilingual text, as well as the many dialogues that can transpire from this meeting of reader, writer, translator, and the worlds they each bring along.

I have bilingual books to thank for access to much of my knowledge of each and every language I utter—specifically Russian and, most recently, Ukrainian. I began to learn Russian about seventeen years ago. I was delighted to be able to access the originals, alongside helpful translations, in books such as Russian Stories / Русские рассказы, edited by Gleb Struve, which introduced me to the work of writers such as Evgeny Zamyatin and Fyodor Sologub, among others. Penguin also published a bilingual anthology of Russian poetry that became the basis of my education in this language, from which I memorized poems by Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Aleksandr Blok.

There are bilingual books by individual poets as well; Pushkin Threefold, translated by Walter Arndt (Dutton Books), gives the original Russian texts of Pushkin alongside literal English translations and verse translations. The book shows how translators must scrutinize, interpret, and create texts that are nonetheless complemented by ready comparisons with the original. Nativity Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a collection of the exile Joseph Brodsky, includes work written during the end-of-the-year holidays or discussing the story of Christ’s birth, and provides both a way of reading Brodsky’s original Russian poetry as well as elegies by poets who admired his writing, such as Derek Walcott, Anthony Hecht, and Seamus Heaney. Even the American poet Carol V. Davis wrote It’s Time to Talk About… / Пора говорить о…, a bilingual book of poems written in Russian and English, published in Russia by Simposium in 1997.

A bilingual book lends itself to a dialogue between two languages, the kind of negotiation that take place in a bi- or multilingual mind. It also creates a space for the kind of lingering that a bi- or multilingual person does with their words—the space a translator navigates in their relationship with both the original and their own renderings. It signifies companionship: of the author and the reader, of the author and the translator, and, if the reader is a language learner, of a teacher and a student. A bilingual book also does much to demonstrate the intimacy between the translator and their source texts—a relationship that involves a close scrutiny of language and meaning—and thus it also fosters the relationship between the two texts. READ MORE…