Posts filed under 'catalan literature'

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 30, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa and Sofija Popovska

The latest in literary news from North Macedonia to the United States!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us from North Macedonia to New York with updates on literary festivals and fairs. From Jean-Pierre Siméon’s belief in the sustaining nature of poetry, to a celebration of the many languages spoken besides Spanish in Hispanic communities, read on to learn more!

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

The conclusion of the 2024 Struga Poetry Evenings (SPE) brought conversations about the meaning of poetry nowadays to the foreground of the Macedonian literary scene. The festival’s main award, the Golden Wreath—whose recipients over the years include W. H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, Pablo Neruda, and Ted Hughes—was awarded to French poet, writer, critic, and dramatist Jean-Pierre Siméon this year. In an illuminating conversation with the magazine Nezavisen (Independent), Siméon retraced the well-known, yet often forgotten, connection between poetry, longing, and change.

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Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: Mammoth by Eva Baltasar

August 29, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Hilary Ilkay

The spirit of the zoo has entered her bedroom: sex without pleasure, purely for the sake of regeneration, a blind but demanding impulse.

In the latest from lauded Catalan author Eva Baltasar, an animal desire is on the rise. Tired of the city, her studies, and the vacuity of contemporary life, the young protagonist of Mammoth seeks out a supposedly simpler provincial existence, and is willing to do anything to get there. Through both physical and psychological extremes, Baltasar’s heightened portrait is both shocking and absorbing, reflecting the chaos of an ego that vibrates with desire and spirals against expectation. The prose shivers with sensuality as this journey inward and outward carves its remarkable procession—the rampage of an unencumbered self, raging against the presumptions of civilised life.

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. 

Mammoth by Eva Baltasar, translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches, And Other Stories, 2024

Following on the heels of the 2023 Booker-shortlisted Boulder, Eva Baltasar’s latest novel, Mammoth, seizes the reader in a vice grip from the opening page and doesn’t relent even after its final words; the ending, in fact, delivers the sharpest blow of all. The narrative is a raw and visceral exploration of a young woman who shatters the routine of her daily life, learning to dwell among the shards of a new form of existence. Using a rich vocabulary of metaphors and similes, Baltasar creates a fictional space that is confrontational, explosive, and evocative, demonstrating her masterful ability to delve into the psyches of queer women who find themselves on the fringes, and Julia Sanches’s translation from the Catalan deftly captures the novel’s unique tone and voice.

Through its title, Baltasar thematically links Mammoth to her other two novels translated into English, Permafrost and Boulder: all three suggest weight, immovability. The unnamed protagonist in Mammoth is twenty-four years old and dissatisfied with her life, especially her research job at a university, which involves interviewing residents in nursing homes. “I hated my tool,” she reflects, “the specialist axe I used to cut up emotions and memories, the experience and suffering of those people.” This threat of dehumanization threads its way through the prose, hovering beneath the surface of every encounter. It’s telling that on the first page, the narrator reveals that her bedroom window faces a zoo, establishing a proximity to an animalistic wildness that has been broken and contained, on display for public consumption and enjoyment—a metaphor for her perception of her own existence. Returning to the zoo later, she thinks, “The animals didn’t live there, they rotted there—just like the visitors and no more nor less than the zookeepers.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

November 17, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou, Marina García Pardavila, and Miranda Mazariegos

News from Latin America, Greece, and Spain!

Join us this week with a new batch of literary dispatches covering a wide range of news from Latin America, Greece, and Spain; from censorship and literary awards to a slew of literary festivals, read on to learn more!

Miranda Mazariegos, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Latin America

In Colombia, Laura Ardila Arrieta’s book La Costa Nostra was pulled from publication days before going to print by Editorial Planeta, one of the most influential publishers in the Spanish-speaking world. Ardila Arrieta’s book investigates one of the most powerful families in Colombia and was pulled due to “three legal opinions that proved to us that the text contained significant risks that, as a company, we did not want to take on,” according to Planeta’s official statement. Ardila Arrieta was signed by Indent Literary Agency a few days later, and her book has instead been published by Rey Naranjo, an independent Colombian publisher who stated that the publishing of the book represents “the desire to contribute so that the future of our democratic system improves and that education and reading empowers us as a society.” 

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

October 6, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Marina García Pardavila, Sofija Popovska, and Wambua Muindi

The latest in literary news from North Macedonia, Spain, and Kenya!

In this round of weekly updates from our Editors-at-Large, we hear about literary festivals, awards, and the latest translations from North Macedonia, Spain, and Kenya! From a festival themed “Air. Wind. Breathing.” to a recently completed translation of the Bible, read on to learn more!

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

The first weeks of autumn in North Macedonia brought exciting developments to the literary scene: the third installment of the Skopje Poetry Festival took place from September 24–28. The event spanned several venues, including the historic movie theater “Frosina”, the Skopje city library, and the bookshop-cafe “Bukva”. The festival opened with a performance entitled “Air. Wind. Breathing.”—a theme that was maintained throughout, as some of the readings were accompanied by musical improvisations with wind instruments. 

Represented at the Skopje Poetry Festival was a diverse range of cultures; Danish, Serbian, French-Syrian, Maltese, and Croatian poets gave readings alongside local authors. Aside from readings, there were screenings of several movies based on the poetry of Aco Šopov. One of the adapted poems was Horrordeath, which was featured in the Winter 2023 issue of Asymptote Journal in Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer’s translation. The screenings were followed by a musical concert, a creative writing workshop headed by Immanuel Mifsud (a Maltese author and recipient of the European Union Prize for Literature), a panel discussion on increasing the visibility of Macedonian literature abroad, and a yoga session in nature. Young Macedonian poets also had a chance to make their voices heard, during the “Springboard” event on September 24 dedicated to poets between the ages of 16 and 25.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 16, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Jiaoyang Li, Marina García Pardavila, and Sofija Popovska

The latest from North Macedonia, China, and Spain!

In this week of news in world literature, we hear from our Editors-at-Large on recent literary awards, revolutionary bookstores, and book fairs around the globe! From North Macedonia’s Novel of the Year to prizes for works across genres and languages in Spain, read on to learn more!

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

At the end of May, the 24th “Novel of the Year” award, given by the Slavko Janevski foundation, was presented to the author Vlada Urošević for his novel “Вистината но не многу веројатна историја за семејството Пустополски за куќата покрај Вардар и за четирите прстени” (The true, yet not very likely tale of the Pustopolski family, of the house by Vardar river, and the four rings). 

Urošević (b. October 17, 1934), who received the most prestigious Macedonian poetry award earlier this spring, is a writer, poet, and essayist. His oeuvre includes a wide array of literary genres—prose, poetry, essays, travelogs, literary and art criticism, and translations. His work as a full-time professor of comparative literature at the University of St Cyril and Methodius in Skopje is present not only in his lyrical oeuvre—his novel, too, blends different cultures together to create a thrilling, artful narrative.

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In Good Company: Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall on Translating The Left Parenthesis

September 22, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Rachel Farmer

[B]eing able to share genius in whatever way or form is the most beautiful thing there is.

Muriel Villaneuva’s The Left Parenthesis takes place by the sea, a fitting setting for a story that weaves in-between motherhood and mourning, loss and reinvention, the mind and the body. In the stunning autofictional tale of a recently widowed mother attempting to piece together her shifting roles in the world, Villaneuva merges the surreal and the intimately physical to chart the mystifying journey one takes back to get to oneself. In the following interview, Rachel Farmer talks to the co-translators of The Left Parenthesis, Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall, about the book’s feminism, Catalan specificity, and its “uncomplicated” representation of motherhood.

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 USD15 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.

Rachel Farmer (RF): First of all, before we dive into The Left Parenthesis, I’d be really interested to hear about your process as co-translators. In the brilliant conversation recently published in the Oxonian Review, the pair of you talked about working together on another co-translation of Montserrat Roig. Can you tell us just a little bit about this relationship?

Megan Berkobien (MB): Well, my dissertation is about co-translation, especially as a socialist and ecological phenomenon; it really came from the fact that basically all my translation experiences have been collaborative. I went to school at the University of Michigan for both my PhD and undergrad, and in the translation workshop there, everything was done together. So, it came naturally when I met María Cristina. The first thing we worked on as a team was a little anthology on women writers in Catalan—that’s when I realised we were really on the same page. We wrote the opening essay together, and it just really worked. We just feed off one another’s poetic creativities, I guess.

María Cristina Hall (MCH): For us, having the interaction of editing together was a way to build trust, to understand that our voices were similar enough to co-translate. Our process involved dividing the book up, each doing fifteen pages, then looking at each other’s version and editing it as if it were our own piece—so there’s never that feeling of holding back. It seems very natural to edit, sometimes heavily and sometimes not. If ever a word comes up where we think, “how should we translate that?”, we have a back-and-forth, and it goes smoothly from there. It’s very enriching, and I think something Megan touched on in her dissertation was the importance of working in a community and having company. Translation is usually very solitary work, so it’s very different to have this practice.

MB: In a lot of ways, the fact that translators are artists insinuates at the worst part about being an artist: that you have to work by yourself, and that you have this “grand genius” inside you. I just don’t think genius is never located in one person, and being able to share genius in whatever way or form is the most beautiful thing there is.

RF: Was there anything in particular about The Left Parenthesis that needed a different approach?

MCH: Well, it was our first project together, and then we did Goodbye Ramona by Montserrat Roig. In that book, the voices are so distinct that we divided it by character, so I worked on the one from the 1900s and Meg did the one from the 1960s—and the one from the 30s, we shared between the two of us. Because Meg is more active in the Socialist party, she could be the character who was politically involved, while I took on the conservative one since I live in Mexico and I have more of a background in Catholicism. But The Left Parenthesis is just one character talking about herself.

MB: We did have to attend to making sure it was all one unified voice, and as such it made a lovely first project because it’s almost as if our voices were weaving together. If we take a cue from the book to describe this, it’s kind of like waves were flowing over us, and each new wave made us come together a little bit more. READ MORE…

Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: The Left Parenthesis by Muriel Villanueva

August 31, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Rachel Farmer

As the novella progresses, there is a blurring between author and protagonist, between the author’s writing and the writing within the writing.

In Muriel Villanueva’s poetic, undulating The Left Parenthesis, a young mother works towards repair and reinvention, threading together the disparate reflections of selfhood. Under the guise of notes on reprieve, Villaneuva delves into surreal ascriptions of consciousness, of a psychological journey that braids together experience and fantasy. In beautiful, spare language, The Left Parenthesis is an open punctuation, seeking outwards to define that which is in constant flux—life.

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 USD15 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.

The Left Parenthesis by Muriel Villanueva, translated from the Catalan by María Cristina Hall and Megan Berkobien, Open Letter, 2022

I knew you weren’t well, but I pretended it wasn’t true, because the whole thing made me sick, too. If you died, so did I. If we were a pair, what would that make me afterward?

What do you do when you define yourself by your relationship to another person, and that person ceases to exist? How do you go about allowing the self that you have become to crumble away, making room for a new self to grow? Muriel Villanueva’s The Left Parenthesis—a slim, surreal novella tracking a woman’s trip with her young baby to a small beach town—examines precisely such questions in sparing, direct prose.

The narrative follows the inner life of a woman seeking to understand herself. Throughout the novella, the protagonist, also named Muriel, unpacks and dissects her three selves: the self that is a mother to her daughter Mar, her wife-self (she tells us at the start that she is a widow), and the self that acts as a mother to her own husband. She grapples with the fact that she was never sure which of her selves would emerge when she opened her mouth, a response to her husband’s oscillation between his child-self (the one she felt compelled to mother) and his burgeoning man-self. This three-week excursion, a brief parenthetical phrase within the novel that is her life, is something she undertakes to hopefully catalyse a transformation within her, a process of purging and healing.

Threaded through this book is the eponymous theme of an opening parenthesis, an explanatory and exploratory phase of existence that is separate—parallel—to the day-to-day. “At the beginning of my stay here I thought the cove with the shape of a waning moon. Now I think it’s only a parenthesis. It opens over here and I don’t know where it closes.” The cove to which the protagonist retreats is curved like a parenthesis, simultaneously opening out and welcoming in. This symbolic shape is mirrored in the curve of her arm as she breastfeeds her infant daughter, nurturing her baby as she herself is being nurtured by this trip, this secluded spot to which she has retreated. READ MORE…

Unhurried Melancholy: Martha Tennent and Maruxa Relaño on Translating Mercè Rodoreda

March 19, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Alyea Canada

In my opinion, it’s the perfect novel for a digital detox . . . or a quarantine.

Renowned Catalan author Mercè Rodoreda’s tender and meditative novel, Garden by the Sea, was our February Book Club selection. An essential name in postwar Catalan literature (and past Asymptote contributor), Rodoreda’s immersive yet subtle language is beloved for its captivating lyricism and simple, poignant depictions of everyday life. In these chaotic days, when many of us are looking to literature for comfort, the patient world of Garden by the Sea offers a quiet reprieve. In the following interview, assistant editor Alyea Canada speaks to the translators, Martha Tennent and Maruxa Relaño, a mother-daughter duo with a unique process and an unceasing admiration for Rodoreda’s singular style.

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 USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Alyea Canada (AC): This is the second book by Mercè Rodoreda that you two have translated together. What drew you both to Rodoreda’s work in general and Garden by the Sea specifically?

Martha Tennent (MT): This is indeed the second Rodoreda novel we have translated together, since in 2015, Open Letter published our translation of her novel War, So Much War. I have always been an admirer of Rodoreda’s work, and for many years my apartment in Barcelona was just a couple of blocks from where she was born and grew up, in the Sant Gervasi neighborhood that figures in many of her short stories and in Garden by the Sea.

I started publishing translations of a few of her short stories, and that led, in 2009, to my translating her Death in Spring for Open Letter. At that time, I would say almost no one in the United States had heard of Mercè Rodoreda. Death in Spring is such a brutal, haunting book, but at the same time it is lyrical and painfully beautiful. Neither I nor Open Letter expected the book and the author to gain the following they have. It’s been amazing. Then I received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to translate her stories, also with Open Letter. And then came the two commissions to translate jointly her War, So Much War, and now Garden by the Sea. No one has done more to promote the work of this exceptional writer than Open Letter.

Maruxa Relaño (MR): The chance to translate Rodoreda was a treat to say the least. Garden by the Sea is my favorite of her novels. I like the unhurried melancholy that imbues the writing; you can open the book wherever you choose and find yourself in a Mediterranean villa in the middle of one “long hot summer,” with its occupants wandering about aimlessly, sunning themselves and squabbling on the veranda, a life of perpetual waiting, where as you mention, nothing seems to happen and much goes unsaid. We were especially drawn to Garden by the Sea for the vision of behind-the-scenes domesticity provided by the quiet, observant gardener, and the slowly developing unease and intrigue as the protagonists move gently toward catastrophe. In my opinion, it’s the perfect novel for a digital detox . . . or a quarantine. READ MORE…

Announcing our February Book Club Selection: Garden by the Sea by Mercè Rodoreda

February 27, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada

Both the translators and the author seem to know that the power of Garden by the Sea lies in the spaces between the words.

Deemed one of the most formative and influential writers of contemporary Catalan literature, Mercè Rodoreda’s prolific body of work details the profundity of “essential things . . . with a certain lack of measure.” For the month of February, Asymptote Book Club presents her most recent work to be translated into English, the contemplative and timeless Garden by the Sea. Rife with sensuous detail and quiet notes of transition, this novel is the poignant result of a patient life, of time marked equally by conversation and silence. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers in the US, the UK, and the EU. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Garden by the Sea by Mercè Rodoreda, translated from the Catalan by Martha Tennent and Maruxa Relaño, Open Letter Books, 2020

Being someone who is unfamiliar with Mercè Rodoreda’s work, I read the description of Garden by the Sea and was expecting Gatsby-esque schadenfreude. I was wrong. Garden by the Sea is something quieter, more tender, and mournful. It has a sense of longing for a time when summers at your seaside villa could really be carefree romps and endless parties without the tragedy and trauma inherent in postwar society.

Taking place outside 1920s Barcelona over six summers and one winter and narrated by an unnamed gardener, Garden by the Sea is the story of a rich couple, Senyoret Francesc and Senyoreta Rosamaria, and their friends whose idyllic summers are rocked by the construction of a grander villa next door. (Surely you can see how it’s difficult to avoid The Great Gatsby coming to mind.) What unfolds is a collection of personal tragedy, lots of gossip, some light one-upmanship, swimming, and, of course, something of a love triangle. There are also brief appearances by a mischievous monkey and a lion cub, and a great many lush descriptions of plants and flowers. “Look at the linden trees. See the leaves, how they tremble and listen to us. You laugh now, but one day if you find yourself walking in the garden at night, beneath the trees, you will see how the garden talks to you, the things it says . . .” The book opens with the gardener saying, “I’ve always enjoyed knowing what happens to people. It’s not because I’m garrulous, but because I like people, and I was fond of the owners of this house.” However fond he was of the owners, it is clear that he is that much fonder of his garden. He takes such care in his expertise that when he looks at the neighboring villa’s garden and its bearded irises, he says he’s “really distressed.” The only times we see the gardener critical of the Senyorets and their friends are when their revelry comes at the cost of his flowers, or if his expertise is questioned by people who clearly know less. READ MORE…

Poesia Brossa: Joan Brossa at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art

January 31, 2018  |  in Dispatches, Profile  |  by Rachael Pennington

Through the end of February, a retrospective exhibit on the life and work of the influential Catalan poet.

On May 25, 1970, Joan Brossa (Barcelona, 1919–1998) spoke out at the first Festival of Catalan Poetry at the Price Theatre, Barcelona, in solidarity with the political prisoners under Franco’s dictatorship. Just a few months ago, in November 2017, the Catalan president controversially announced that in the context of the referendum for independence held in Catalonia, Spain once again had political prisoners. Captured on film by Pere Portabella in a clandestine documentary, fragments of the poems recited by Joan Brossa and other renowned names in Catalan literature are now being shown at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA). For an artist, political activist and Catalan nationalist, this intriguing exhibition that offers a new reading of Brossa’s complete works could not be more timely.

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An Inventory of Resistance: Notes on Catalan Language Politics in Literature

January 17, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Manel Mula Ferrer

Perhaps part of the uniqueness of Catalan comes from this awareness of its influence on and disconnection from Castilian and European traditions.

Part I: The Nineteenth Century

At first, I was hesitant to write an article on the uses of the Catalan language in literature throughout recent history. After the referendum for Catalan independence held this past October 1, which was deemed illegal by the Spanish government, and the subsequent episodes of violence that occurred in the region, the topic has come to be a sensitive matter for any national. However, where there is a language, there is a literature, and the history of Catalan is one of stubborn resistance. It is my contention that the history of a language is somehow lived out in those who speak it, insofar as a sentiment of ambiguity still informs contemporary critical debates on the usefulness and adaptability of Catalan literature. “Is Catalan literature diverse enough? Can it cultivate all genres? Is it economically viable?” are questions that have resonated among critics and the public alike. Catalan literature inherits a sense of shame from its own fruition, and it is this feeling that I want to explore with this genealogy of usages.

This is not a history of Catalan literature and the texts featured here have not been selected according to an aesthetic canon. This is an archive of perceptions of Catalan language and literature as experienced throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the literary resurgence known as La Renaixença in Catalan literary history (parallel to which political Catalan nationalism as we know it unfolds) to the relatively normalized literary field in existence today. While certainly not the only appropriate approach, in what follows I present a succession of events from the nineteenth century that Catalan historiography has employed to explain the evolution of the uses of the language.

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Translation Tuesday: An excerpt of “Miss Keaton and Other Beasts” by Teresa Colom

May 31, 2016  |  in Translations  |  by Mara Faye Lethem

"Death had been tempted by the idea of being a mother for centuries."

Death can arrive at any moment and for one anonymous woman it came when she’d been gestating a fetus for six months. Her shrouded body ended up tossed into a mass grave in a random cemetery. As a compassionate priest devoted a few words to her out of the goodness of his heart, the gravedigger covered her body with dirt. No one claimed or identified the cadaver, and the few folks who noticed her obvious pregnancy assumed that the baby had died along with its mother.

However that wasn’t the case. The fetus continued to nourish itself on her inert body and, just as blackness was about to envelop its incipient existence, the only power able to change its inevitable fate intervened. Death. Death itself, whose job was to carry off designated souls without a second thought, fixed her eye on that small creature.  READ MORE…