Posts filed under 'bilingualism'

Spontaneity Through Ambiguity: An Interview with Chia-Lun Chang

March 4, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Anne Lai

[H]ere is where I can explore my limited English as a vehicle, within this ambiguity.

I met Chia-Lun Chang when we were both enrolled in the Poets House fellowship program in 2016, when I had only been writing for a few years and was hesitant to call myself a poet. We bonded over how new we were to writing poems. In this following conversation, we retraced her unconventional introduction to writing poetry and how English as a second language offered her a newfound identity to be playful and purely honest. Her book Prescribee (Nightboat Books, 2022) wields humor like a dagger, rife with cutting repartee that reveals how cruel, yet liberating life is for her in America. Her poems from the book have appeared in Granta, The Brooklyn Rail, and BOMB online.

Chia-Lun Chang (CC): In Taiwan, the genres are not as distinct as in America, but I noticed that many high-profile writers in Taiwan primarily write non-fiction prose, expressing their opinions. Readers think of it as culturally significant; it provides a getaway into the lives of another world, a world full of writers or cultured individuals. During our conversation, I’ve also realized that many novelists are telling one story. They have numerous novels, but it’s one same story from a core idea because it originates from their body. 

Anne Lai (AL): Do you feel like you’re also in pursuit of one idea when you’re writing?

CC: Because of my experiences, I tend to question my identity. But, aren’t we all, in some ways, asking ourselves, “Who am I?” In that very question, I’m afraid of finding the unknown. There are moments when I write in English, where I create a new persona that reflects this nation and the body that I inhabit within it. That is the direction I’m heading and it’s tied to my identity, this very new role that I’m cultivating.

AL: This reminds me of your experience in trying to get your green card, and eventually getting it.

CC: Yeah, both of those experiences—applying for a green card and learning the language that I speak most of the time. The green card process was brutal so I was constantly facing a blackhole answer: what’s necessary for me to stay? I’m terrified of my desire. I don’t believe I have the opportunity to create art in Taiwan, I’m not talented enough or I don’t have space to do what I’m doing here, and many may disagree. But I’m grateful that I can be playful and try different things in this new language and space.

AL: I’ve never asked you this, but have you written poetry in Mandarin? How did you start writing? 

CC: Never. Growing up, I was always interested in writing, but I saw myself more as a reader. There were times when I would write essays for school; the requirements of exams in Taiwan were like the SAT tests in the States, but they asked for more melancholic and metaphorical compositions. Those were my experiences in building my first language. I remember the question on my college exam was, “Who is your idol? Who do you look up to?” I actually wrote about the poet Su Shi. In my society, I felt that people had a moral obligation in writing; they had to be heroic—even in love, in pain, or struggling. Deep down, I have a cynical personality and worry about not being accepted by society. 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…

The Essential Integrity of Language: In Conversation with Anukrti Upadhyay

September 14, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Suhasini Patni

The two languages are two paths to approach our complex soul. . .

Anukrti Upadhyay, a Sushila-Devi-Award-winning author, is one of India’s few bilingual writers; working in both Hindi and English, she has always looked at writing as a form of translation. In Hindi, she has published a collection of short stories called Japani Sarai and a novel called Neena Aunty, both hailed as pathbreaking in Hindi literature. She is, however, best known for her books Bhaunri and Daura—perhaps the only English-language novels set in rural Rajasthan, telling stories of the desert and its folks.

I first met Anukrti in Udaipur at a writing workshop organized by the Rama Mehta Trust. Over a three-day workshop, we spoke about translation, writing, and she discussed the works of her favorite Hindi authors. I caught up with her later and we conducted this interview over email; in our conversation, she talks about being a bilingual writer, whether language affects form, and what transcreation means to her.  

Suhasini Patni (SP): What does being a bilingual writer in India mean to you?

Anukrti Upadhyay (AU): I have written poetry in Hindi for as long as I can remember—and if my mother is to be believed, even before that! Fiction, on the other hand, I began writing only a few years ago, and in English. The how and why of this occurrence, which had seemed organic to me at the time, I can now parse with hindsight; Hindi, the language of spontaneous expression, is the natural choice for poetry and English, the acquired medium, provides room for distance and synthesis which are essential for building stories. Of course, like everything else in life, this is not a complete explanation, nor one that is accurate on all points. After writing prose in English for a couple of years, I began writing fiction in Hindi as well, deriving a deep and unique satisfaction in the freedom and maneuverability I have in the language.

It is very important to me that I practice writing in both Hindi and English. I use “practice” here advisedly, for writing is a practice, just like law or medicine or running a triathlon. Writing fiction in two languages offers me the opportunity to observe and explore in different ways, each offering its own unique range and challenges, its muteness and volubility. These two languages, both mine in different ways, nurture and, I’d like to believe, enrich my writing.

SP: Does a story tell you what language it should be written in? Does language affect genre or form? Do you dream bilingually? 

AU: Aha, what an interesting bouquet of questions! Yes, a story tells me which language it wishes to emerge in. The first rumblings of a story, the first words—a sentence or a phrase—come to me like birds coming home. Whichever language those words are in, that’s the one I work with. I have noticed that the language does not seem to have any overt or discernible connection with the plot or setting or characters. Perhaps there are certain times when I think in one language and other times in another?

No, my language has not, till now, impacted genre or form. To me, the first and foremost condition for a story is that it should hold my interest, and language has never acted as a barrier in that; it has always been only a receptacle for the story.

And do I dream in two languages? Shouldn’t the question first be—do I dream?! Yes, and yes, and I wake up to jot down the vague or sharp images that remain with me in either language. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 25, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar, Mary Hillis, and Nestor Gomez

Translation competitions, new publications, and poetry readings from Japan, Guatemala, and El Salvador!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on a translation competition and an event to support Ukraine in Japan, the publication of a harrowing new memoir from Guatemala, and a celebration of women poets in El Salvador. Read on to find out more!

Mary Hillis, Educational Arm Assistant, reporting from Japan

Give Artists a Voice was held on March 15 at the Goethe-Institut in Tokyo and live-streamed on social media. Organized by EUNIC Japan and E.U. member cultural institutions and cultural departments in Japan, artists expressed their support of Ukraine through music, film, poetry, dance, and talks. Joining from Kharkiv, contemporary artist Olia Fedorova read text in Ukrainian documenting life during the war. Poet Marie Iljašenko read “Five poems from collection St. Outdoor” in Czech and Yoko Tawada read “Auszeit von Menschheit” (“Timeout from Humanity”) in German. Michal Hvorecký, author of the novel Troll (published in Slovak in 2017), delivered a message on disinformation and literary translation as a vehicle for deeper understanding.

Earlier in the month, at Bungaku Days Spring 2022, the award winners of the JLPP (Japanese Literature Publishing Project) sixth International Translation Competition were recognized: English grand prize winner Grant Lloyd and Spanish grand prize winner Eduardo López Herrero. Contestants translated two texts, “Namiuchigiwa made” by Maki Kashimada in the fiction category and “Ojigi” by Kuniko Mukōda in the criticism and essay category. The original texts and winning translations can be read on the JLPP website.

Designed to both recognize and provide support for emerging translators of contemporary Japanese literature, the event began with a prerecorded video showcasing comments from the judges and messages from the top three awardees in English and Spanish respectively. Former contest winners Polly Barton and Sam Bett joined this year’s winner, Grant Lloyd, for a symposium on the topic of becoming a translator, moderated by Yoshio Hitomi of Waseda University. They discussed Lloyd’s prize-winning translations and also analyzed the challenges of working with stories, novels, and essays from Japanese, while revisiting steps on their journeys to becoming literary translators. The publishing panel was moderated by Allison Markin Powell and included Anne Meadows (Granta Books), Yuka Igarashi (Graywolf Press), and Tynan Kogane (New Directions), who discussed their points of view on pitching, the acquisition process, and barriers to publishing literature in English translation. The seventh edition of the competition is now in progress and entries are being accepted in English and French.

READ MORE…

Residing in Language: On the Exhibit, “i write (in Vietnamese)”

November 29, 2021  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by Phuong Anh

For those working in two languages, Vietnamese was a language of intimacy, while English was the language that liberated them to explore ideas.

In the multimedia exhibit, “i write (in Vietnamese),” held in Hanoi during March of 2021, a group of poets and artists grappled with the fraught nature of writing in Vietnamese through a series of multifaceted installations crossing between poetry, photography, and other forms of visual art. In this essay, the Vietnamese writer Phuong Anh reflects on the exhibit through conversations with the artists and their works to discover their relationship to the Vietnamese language, their experiences of living in multiple languages, and the significance of translation for both the artists and herself. 

What does it mean to reside in a language?

What does it mean to write in a language?

These two questions dance around in my mind, as I pen down letters with diacritics, forming monosyllabic words, known to me as “Vietnamese.” Although every now and again, words from other places are inserted. They mingle together and ring in my ear like soft lullabies. Yet, when it comes to defining what language they are, what literature they are, no labels have yet to satisfy me.

residing in language

“The unsendables,” Hương Trà & Kai, photograph by Bông Nguyễn

Such a dilemma is encapsulated in the title of the exhibition i write (in Vietnamese) that ran in March of 2021, right after the lift of Hanoi’s third lockdown. It took residence at first in the Goethe Institute before migrating to the Bluebird’s Nest Cafe. It was composed of a multimedia showroom, displaying the multifaceted nature of writing “in Vietnamese.” A label so constrained by past and current cultural politics, yet so liberating—a mini tug of war, echoed by the brackets, which both confine and protect the language.

The exhibition brings the creator and viewer closer to the process of art-making. For example, in Hương Trà and Kai’s project nếu có viết ra thì đây cũng là những lá thư mình không bao giờ gửi được | unsendables, viewers were invited to come, sit down, and write. In that room, there was a table on which there were two stacks of paper: one labelled “here are the letters that depart” and the other, “here are the letters that stay.” Those who chose the first stack could have their letters sent; while the writing of those who chose the latter “will never be able to be sent” and would remain forever with the exhibition. This project also connects languages not just through the bridge of translation but also by placing them within the same space: English and Vietnamese on one double-sided paper (chiếu|  |uềihc reflect|  |tcelfer), on a single page (where is my heart?; Journals to), or on the same line (slow dance in a burning room; skin.da). READ MORE…

The Visceraless State: An Interview With Cristina Rivera Garza

October 8, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

[W]riting is a community-making practice . . . intimately, necessarily connected to the communities in which we live and which, ideally, we serve.

Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza is a foremost voice in contemporary Mexican literature. Known for her frequently dark subject matter and hybrid styles, her work focuses on marginalized people, challenging us to reconsider our preconceptions about boundaries and transgression. She has won major literary awards and is the only author to have twice won the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award (in 2011 and 2009). Her latest work to be translated into English, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, has just been published by Feminist Press and is a hybrid collection of journalism, crónicas, and essays, that explore systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the US-Mexico border. To coincide with its much-anticipated release, Asymptote’s Assistant Managing Editor Lindsay Semel spoke with Cristina Rivera Garza about the ideas behind this compelling work.   

“Let me just bring some tea, and I’ll be right back!” Cristina Rivera Garza dashed out of her Zoom screen briefly before settling back into her chair and adjusting her glasses with a warm smile, her air of familiarity challenging the oppressiveness of the geographical and technological distance to which we’ve lately become accustomed. In the following interview, we discuss Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, the striking latest collaboration between Garza and translator Sarah Booker. She reflects upon the demands that she makes of syntax, the enigmatic character of reality, the importance of solidarity and imagination, and how she and Booker coined the term “The Visceraless State.” Very much of the borderland between Mexico and the United States, her work meets the global, contemporary moment not despite its specificity, but because of it.

 —Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

Lindsay Semel (LS): You’ve stated in interviews, and it’s apparent in your work, that you intentionally test the limits between what language normally does and what it can do in order to discover new experiential possibilities between writer, text, and reader. I wonder if you could point to places in the text where you tested and stretched the limits of Spanish but were not able to do so the same way in English and vice versa. How do Spanish and English need to be challenged differently?

Cristina Rivera Garza (CRG): Every single project has to challenge language in specific ways. It always depends on the materials that I’m exploring, affecting, and letting myself be affected by, and there are specific ways that you can do that both in English and in Spanish. I tend to write longer sentences in Spanish and more fragmentarily in English, for example. When I am getting too long-winded in Spanish, I try to convey that thought with the directness and economy I associate with my relationship with English. At times, I try to use the semicolon in English, just because it is more common in Spanish and I want to see what happens to both sentence and sense. Constantly borrowing from English and borrowing from Spanish and taking traces and echoes from one language into the other, trying to honor and replicate the tension and friction that maintains them together where I live and how I think, has been almost a natural way of continuing to challenge both.

Sarah [Booker, translator of Grieving] is such a deft translator and we now know each other quite well. She’s been translating my work for a number of years and we have a very open, fluid conversation as she goes into the translation process: less a process of moving language from one context to a another, and more a search for similar effects based on the affective capacities of host and receiving languages. I work closely with syntax, especially if I’m exploring issues such as violence and suffering. Pause, breathlessness, all those aspects of a body going through tremendous pressure or pain inflicted—in terms of keeping both form and content responding to the same challenges, it is important that syntax and semantics are somehow reflecting and embodying that experience. That’s when writing occurs.

I think of translation as a creative process too. I see Sarah as my co-author and her work as a way through which I receive my book back anew. I think she’s a poet at heart. I don’t know if she knows that, but all those experiments with language, that’s something she’s very deft at. READ MORE…

Honoring the Art of Translation: Carolina Orloff

September 29, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Carolina Orloff

There is so much of us in the language we inherit, the language we’re nursed in. Our mother tongue defines us, whether we like it or not.

As National Translation Month draws to a close, so does our four-part special feature on the subject—a series of first-hand, original essays by key players in the translation process: an author, a platform, a translator, a publisher. And since translating also means shifting coordinates, we made sure to hit four different corners of the world. Over the course of the past few days, we’ve brought you a Romanian poet, a Chinese online literary hub, and a Turkish translator, all at the very top of their game. Today, we wrap it up by traveling from Buenos Aires to Edinburgh with Carolina Orloff, co-founder and publishing director of the award-winning Charco Press (we figured the trip was worth postponing our usual “Translation Tuesday” column, back next week).

In this thoughtful, moving piece, Carolina masterfully intertwines personal experience with theory. She dives into the challenges of living between languages (she’s a longtime Argentinian expat in the UK), explaining how that has influenced her own views of translation and, more broadly, Charco’s publishing philosophy. From missing dulce de leche to musing about Benjamin, she covers almost as much ground here as she’s done throughout her life as a bona fide globetrotter.

Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrious memory. Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough—he wanted to compose the Quixote.

‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,’ Jorge Luis Borges

When I think about translation, I’m seized by a host of thoughts and emotions—some varying, some constant. It goes beyond the years I’ve spent studying and writing theory, or the fact that I’ve been living between languages (‘entre lenguas,’ to quote the extraordinary Sylvia Molloy) for more than half my life now: there is something within my matrix, my emotional framework, that is made of languages, of gestures from different cultures, different geographies. As is the case with many compatriots, I’m a second-generation Argentinian (most of the country’s indigenous population was wiped out by a nefarious ‘whitening’ campaign during the late 1800s); like many in my generation, I have also emigrated from that southern land. All my grandparents were foreigners, and I use this word with the utmost care and precision. My parents fed off that simultaneously strange and normalised state of living in Buenos Aires while immersed in the echoes of Russian, English, Yiddish, Polish, and Andalusian Spanish. They soaked up these acquired traditions and dressed them up in new meaning—a meaning that they could call their own and that could be freer, albeit loaded with so many other foreign codes. In sum, they were constantly translating.

I recall a conversation I had with a fellow student once, when I was at the University of York. His porteño accent was much stronger than mine. I was twenty years old and had been living in English for three. When I asked him when he’d last been to Argentina, he said nonchalantly that he had actually never ‘crossed the pond.’ His mother was from Buenos Aires and yes, he had been born there, but when he was just one or two years old, they had left for Sweden in search of political asylum. They had never returned. It was an epiphanic moment for me. And now that I am a mother, an Argentinian mother living in Scotland with a daughter born in Edinburgh, I can’t help but re-signify it. There is so much of us in the language we inherit, the language we’re nursed in. Our mother tongue defines us, whether we like it or not, and I feel that there is no satisfactory way of translating that identity; it can only be transmitted. READ MORE…

Dancing on a Digital Pond: the International Poetry Familia

September 3, 2020  |  in Dispatches  |  by Edwin Alanís-García

Latinidad contains multitudes . . . an array of intersecting races, gender identities, languages, religions, and nations.

The age of social distancing has left even the introverted among us seeking community. For poets in particular, whose work continues to seek establishment and verity through the inherited traditions of oration and public gatherings, being deprived of the physical realms in which one can share and revel in poetry together has been especially lonesome. As we adapt, rally, and shift into virtual spaces, however, one encounters equal joy and substance in the connections fostered beyond the locality, as notions of community expand beyond physical closeness. One momentous event that took full advantage of this moment in time was LatinX: International Poetry Familia, which connected a brilliantly variant array of Latinx poets from the U.S. and the U.K. in a celebratory reading. With bodies of work that newly tread and interrogate the disparate facets of identity, these contemporary poets embody a politics of pride and revelation, lessons learned during the journey one takes to arrive at oneself. Asymptote’s own assistant editor, Edwin Alanís-García, reports from the event.

Lest locked up poetry aficionados forget, there was once a time when people gathered in public spaces to hear poets read or recite their work. For the uninitiated, such events help poets stay connected with their community and fellow writers, while helping grow a (hopefully book-buying) fanbase. At the risk of waxing poetic (no pun intended), these readings are the heart of an ancient vocation—a tradition going back to the epic poets, who sang about transnational sagas, and later the wandering troubadours, who brought their musical repertoires to the countryside. Even now, poets tour their countries like rockstars, sometimes to the same acclaim. Or so they did, until the pandemic hit.

For those ensconced in major literary hubs such as London or New York City, the shift to virtual readings was—and perhaps still is—a pale simulation of the real thing, a necessary adaptation meant to keep newly published books marketable. In the rest of the connected world, however, this shift has opened new doors for rural and otherwise isolated audiences. And within certain literary circles, it has created entirely new forums for artistic exchange.

One such event took place this past June. The transatlantic reading “LatinX: International Poetry Familia” was meant to celebrate the diverse roster of Latinx poets in the United States and the United Kingdom. Featured voices from the U.S. included Francisco Aragón, José Olivarez, Jasminne Mendez, Antonio López, Janel Pineda, Malcolm Friend, and co-hosts Carlos Andrés Gómez and Diannely Antigua. Among their U.K. counterparts were Leo Boix, Maia Elsner, Patrizia Longhitano, Kat Lockton, Marina Sanchez, and Juana Adcock. The nearly two-hour event was organized and co-hosted by scholar, artist, and activist Nathalie Teitler, co-founder (with Leo Boix) of Invisible Presence, a U.K. initiative dedicated to promoting the work of British Latinx writers; Teitler is also credited with founding the country’s first mentoring and translation programs for exiled writers.

The reading was in celebration of two recent anthologies of Latinx poetry: The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT, published by Chicago-based Haymarket Press, and Un Nuevo Sol: British LatinX Writers, published by London-based flipped eye publishing (sic). Each participant was invited to preface their reading with a one-minute excerpt from a Latinx song of their choice. Dancing (albeit socially distant and through a Zoom screen) was encouraged; as Teitler said in her opening remarks, it was the readers’ way of affirming that, “yes, sí, we’re still alive.” Her words can be interpreted as a statement about our collective resilience in the face of the pandemic, but also a poignant endorsement of poetry as a tool of resistance across Latinx communities—a testament to Latinx survival in the face of colonial and anti-Black violence. The entire event, in fact, was an extended moment of resistance. READ MORE…

Words Containing Multitudes: Theodor Kallifatides on Writing The Siege of Troy

October 16, 2019  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Josefina Massot

A basic human need is also to remember and be remembered. That is why we put one stone on top of another, we paint, we sing, we write.

In September, we were honored to present Theodor Kallifatides’s The Siege of Troy as our monthly Book Club feature. This poignant, multilayered novel intertwines a modern coming-of-age wartime story with a psychologically profound retelling of the classic Iliad. In the following interview, Assistant Managing Editor Josefina Massot speaks with the author on overcoming writer’s block, writing about Greece in a foreign land and tongue, and humanizing ancient heroes.

Josefina Massot (JM): You had an unexpected bout of writer’s block at age seventy-seven, back in 2015, after almost fifty years of uninterrupted literary output. The Siege of Troy was, I believe, the first novel you wrote once you overcame it. Did your writing process change at all as a result? What was it like, rediscovering your narrative voice in novel form?

Theodor Kallifatides (TK): Yes, it affected me and my writing greatly. I felt free from all expectations, from all demands from the publisher, the public, and myself, and my writing got wings it never had before. I did not care about anything except doing justice to my deepest feelings and ideas. I got back both my eyes. Before it, I always had—as most writers do, I dare say—an eye on what people would think about my work. Suddenly, I simply did not care. I was free. READ MORE…

Ambiguity and Bilingual Art: Pavel Arseniev’s Reported Speech in Review

February 27, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Paul Worley

Through art like Arseniev’s poetry, we gain a toehold, however momentary, from which we are better able to grasp the present and prepare a future.

Reported-Speech-Cover-Spread-Final-768x520

Reported Speech by Pavel Arseniev, Cicada Press, 2018

Reviewed by Paul Worley, Editor-at-Large

I tell my students that literature does things, but I prefer to do so in even less polished terms. From a more abstract perspective, I see current attacks on the humanities (especially literature) in the United States and elsewhere as being so vicious precisely because of the fact that literature does do things. It changes how we, as humans, relate to and understand others, as well as ourselves.

That said, there are moments when I profoundly doubt this. For example, I was recently discussing the fabricated crisis at the US-Mexico border and Trump’s wall with someone I had just met. During our discussion, this person informed me that Stephanie Elizondo Griest’s nonfiction All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the US Borderlands, a work that gives a nuanced, highly sensitive portrait of the US-Mexico border, actually serves to justify that border’s further militarization. It was like being told by someone with a very serious face that Shelley’s “Ozymandius” is a laudatory poem on the subject of indelible human achievement or that Swift’s A Modest Proposal provided a brilliant roadmap for the betterment of the Irish economy. And yet, even when my doubts about literature and its power dominate my thoughts, events like the murder of Iraqi novelist Alaa Mashzoub snap me back to reality. Literature matters, so much so that in other parts of the world literature can get you killed, even as I safely type this up in my home in the United States. Perhaps this will soon be the case here, too.

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Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from The Lobster by Monique Proulx

January 22, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Frances Pope

The world froze for a fraction of a second; the cashier hurriedly sponged the counter as she leant towards Marceau: “What would you like, Monsieur”

Tensions in the family bubble and boil over in this excerpt from The Lobster by the award-winning Monique Proulx, translated by Frances Pope. What happens when Marceau brings home a lobster he can’t afford? Read on to find out.

“Are you mad? What d’you expect me to do with those? How d’you even eat them?”

As always, Laura’s first words were recriminations. It has to be said that the creatures were no less threatening for being quite dead; amongst the tangle of legs, claws, and feelers which now filled the sink, you could make out here and there the glimmer of a small, black, malevolent eye—more alive than the others, you’d swear—peeking at you with belligerent hate. Marceau had stopped twice on his way home, hearing the wind flap against the big plastic bag, worriedly checking to make sure that the contents weren’t still wriggling, and that his hand wasn’t about to be sliced clean off by a claw.

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Trishanku―Language as Purgatory

June 28, 2017  |  in Essays  |  by Aurvi Sharma

“My adulthood is covered with the bubble-wrap of English.”

So here’s a story―Trishanku was a mythological king, the ancestor of the Hindu god Ram. When Trishanku grew old, the gods invited his soul to heaven, but he wanted to rise to paradise in his earthly body. “Impossible,” the gods shuddered. Trishanku went to the sage Vishwamitra for help. Vishwamitra conducted a great yagya for Trishanku, and with the power of his ritual, started levitating Trishanku―body and all―towards heaven. But when the gods barred the gates, Vishwamitra built an entirely new universe between heaven and earth where Trishanku dangles, upside down, for eternity.

As a bilingual writer, I often feel like Trishanku. Having grown up in a postcolonial country with the shadow of a foreign language colouring every aspect of my existence, a duplicity cleaves my life. I inhabit two languages―English and Hindi―but I’m never fully comfortable in either. It’s telling perhaps that Trishanku is also the name of a constellation that in English is known as Crux. This confusion of languages I reside in, this no woman’s land of living between tongues defines me.

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In Conversation with Iranian-American poet and translator Kaveh Akbar

May 24, 2017  |  in Translator's Profile  |  by Claire Jacobson

"How do you change everything about a poem and still preserve the essence of the thing?"

Kaveh Akbar is a recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives and teaches in Florida. His newest collection, Calling A Wolf A Wolf, is forthcoming from Alice James Books this fall. Earlier this year, Mr. Akbar was featured on PBS after tweeting poems from banned countries in response to President Trump’s infamous travel ban, and translated Negar Emrani’s poetry for Asymptote’s feature on banned countries in the Spring Issue. Claire Jacobson spoke to Mr. Akbar about the experience. 

Claire Jacobson (CJ): What are some of the limitations you found in translating between Farsi and English, in general or specific to poetry?

Kaveh Akbar (KA): I can speak to my own limitations as a translator—I don’t actually speak Farsi, not really, and so I rely on Negar’s patient explication of her own poems. She provides me with the trot, and then allows me to ask question after question after question about connotations and specific meanings and idioms. It’s a time-consuming process, but it’s necessary to ensure a kind of fidelity.

CJ: How does working with the author change the way you approach the process (as opposed to, say, translating someone who is no longer living)?

KA: Being able to work directly with Negar, who speaks English well enough to talk me through her poems and answer my questions, has been such a treasure. She signs off on the final drafts (and often rejects many earlier ones), which affords me a kind of confidence in the fidelity of the final translations. Besides that, she’s an absolutely original poetic mind, and being able to spend time talking with her and exploring the cosmology of her verse has taught me so much about poems in general.

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Dilemmas of a Bilingual Delhi-ite

June 12, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Mohini Gupta

"I am now coming to terms with the fact that I call myself a literature student from India, without ever having read a novel in my own language."

“Umm. I’ve studied in English… but my mother tongue is Hindi, of course,” I said confidently to my Nigerian housemate, who had asked about my “first language” while I was struggling with my newly acquired culinary skills during breakfast.

In a heterogeneous environment, students collect crumbs of the languages around them, believing they are true connoisseurs of culture. I should have anticipated her next question: “So how do you say ‘Good Morning’ in your language?”

Shubh Prabhat. I had stored it somewhere in my preconscious memory. It’s one of those things that you know you know, but you can’t remember at the urgent moment. That’s forgivable when it’s an uncommon word. But this was “good morning”—probably one of the first phrases one learns while learning a new language. And this wasn’t a new language: it was supposed to be my “mother tongue.” READ MORE…