Posts filed under 'colonialism'

The Strange—and Strangely Familiar—World of 1800s Science Fiction Novella Les Xipéhuz

April 28, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Andrea Blatz

Rosny suggests that colonialism will eventually end because of a lack of communication.

In J.-H. Rosny’s 1888 novella Les Xipéhuz, strange beings invade humans’ territory and immediately begin to kill them. Communication becomes impossible; translation is useless because the Xipéhuz threaten humanity’s existence. In today’s essay, Andrea Blatz argues that, whilst science fiction purports to tell stories foreign to our own experience, this French book represents an all-too-familiar colonial situation—and crystalizes the relationship between language and imperialism.

J.-H. Rosny—the nom de plume of brothers Joseph Henri Honoré Boex and Séraphin Justin François Boex—wrote during the Third Republic, when France was expanding its empire in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. But the country had also recently lost the Alsace-Lorraine region to Germany after the Franco-Prussian War, and a loss so close to home was a brutal blow to national pride. Borders also shift in Les Xipéhuz, in which mysterious creatures invade the humans’ territory. The French empire claimed that its raison d’être was to bring its civilization to the rest of the world, and one way to do this was to spread its language. Consequently, the Alliance Française was established in 1883 to teach the French language and spread its culture and civilization, as well as to help create a new French identity.

In this context of imperial expansion, science fiction emerged. Belgian author J.-H. Rosny Aîné—the later pen name of elder brother Joseph—was one of the first authors to write science fiction in the French language, along with Jules Verne. In his works, Rosny pushes readers to imagine humans evolving to create a better world, free of colonialism, through science. The protagonist in Les Xipéhuz, Bakhoûn, represents the use of scientific knowledge for human advancement. Although seen as an outsider for his strange habits—for example, he farms instead of hunting and gathering—he is respected, and the nomadic Pjehou tribe turns to him when their methods against the invading Xipéhuz—who may or may not be from another planet—prove useless. Bakhoûn, who is thousands of years ahead of his time, represents modern rationality in comparison to the primitive beliefs of the other members of his tribe. His beliefs are based on logic rather than superstition:

Premièrement, il croyait que la vie sédentaire, la vie à place fixe, était préférable à la vie nomade, ménageait les forces de l’homme au profit de l’esprit. Secondement, il pensait que le Soleil, la Lune et les étoiles n’étaient pas des dieux, mais des masses lumineuses; Troisièmement, il disait que l’homme ne doit réellement croire qu’aux choses prouvées par l’expérience.

First, he espoused the idea that sedentary existence was preferable to nomadic life, allowing man to channel vital forces toward the development of the mind. Second, he thought that the Sun, the Moon and the Stars were not gods but luminous bodies. Third, he taught that man should only believe in things that can be proven by Measurement.

In other words, Bakhoûn bases his conclusions on evidence he has gathered, employing a quantitative methodology to learn about the Xipéhuz. During the weeks he spends observing them, he formulates and tests hypotheses regarding the invaders’ social, educational, and communication systems.

His findings mirror an anthropological study and the importance of science for the spread of the French empire. As the French did with their subjects, Bakhoûn used his newly acquired knowledge to gain a position of power over the Xipéhuz. Scientific advancement was said to measure how advanced a group of people were and thus was used as a tool in imperial expansion. Scientism, which promoted an objective view of the world, became the dominant ideology. To spread science, language also had to be spread. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2021

March 15, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alice Banks, Carol Khoury, Maddy Robinson, and Rachel Farmer

The best in world literature from Iceland, Palestine, Algeria, and Japan!

This month, our selection of excellent new publications are representative of literature’s capacity for translating worldly phenomenon into language, converting the lived into the understood. From Iceland, a passionate and intimate call to response on the tragedies of environmental destruction; from Palestine, a monumental work of love and resistance from “the Virginia Woolf of Palestine,” Sahar Kalifeh; from Algeria, a sensual novel that treads the tenuous territory of colonialism’s aftereffects; and from Japan, the English-language debut of Akutagawa-winner Kikuko Tsumura, who with graceful humour and intrigue tackles the toxic concept of labour in the thrive of capitalism.  

on time and water

On Time and Water by Andri Snær Magnason, translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith, Open Letter, 2021

Review by Rachel Farmer, Chief Executive Assistant

When Greta Thunberg addressed the UN Climate Summit in September 2019, she choked back tears as she uttered the now infamous words: “How dare you?” Reactions to this display of emotion were mixed to say the least. Some showed discomfort, others concern for her wellbeing; some dismissed her outburst as manipulative, others ridiculed her. Her face and words were even immortalised in meme format. In displaying her anguish and rage so plainly, Thunberg violated the unspoken rule that seems to underpin much of the communication and discussion around climate change, wherein impassivity, stoicism, and detachment reign supreme.

In On Time and Water—part memoir, part interview, part impassioned treatise on the future of our planet—Andri Snær Magnason follows the young Swedish activist’s example, casting aside convention and delving into the emotional side of the climate crisis. In doing so, he embarks on a deeply humane and vulnerable exploration of what manmade climate change truly means for the planet—and for us. In this compelling hybrid of a book, translated sensitively by Lytton Smith, he explains how, a few years ago, he was called upon to defend a region in his country’s highlands from being destroyed in the name of energy production. Despite his deep admiration for the spiritual fervour with which Helgi Valtýsson, another Icelandic writer, wrote about the region in 1945, Magnason found himself unable to infuse the same passion into his defence. Bringing emotions into the discussion would have risked his arguments being dismissed as hysterical, doommongering, or hopelessly idealistic.

I’d found myself overwhelmed by melancholy at the unruly devastation that washed out this peerless region, yet I chose words that seemed moderate and inviting to readers. I used the prevailing language of liberalism, innovation, utilitarianism, and marketing. I discussed the area’s importance for Iceland’s image, its potential tourist income, the area’s research value, how the highlands were a magnet for foreign currency as a filming location for movies or commercials. [. . .] We live in times when money is the measure of reality. I couldn’t argue nature’s right to exist, its essential value, by saying that we might find God’s all-encompassing expanse there. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: February 2021

February 22, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Darren Huang, and Thuy Dinh

Please join us in celebrating three new translations this month from Russia, Mozambique, and Spain!

Amongst the great gifts that translation brings us is an awareness to the alternation and variegations of perspective, informed by ever-shifting factors of fact, selfhood, relationships, and hearsay alike. In this month’s roundup of excellence in world literature, our selection of texts brings expansive voices to light in exquisite explorations in what it means to remember, comprehend, and believe: a luminous text on family history from Maria Stepanova, the reimaginings of folktales by Mia Couto, and a deft fiction on self-deceptions by Sònia Hernández. 

in memory of memory

In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale, New Directions, 2021

 Review by Darren Huang, Editor-at-Large for Taiwan

In W.G. Sebald’s final novel Austerlitz, the protagonist Jacques Austerlitz—an art historian who arrived in Britain as an infant refugee from Czechoslovakia in the Kindertransport—searches for the fate of his parents, who were displaced and lost amidst the Holocaust and the Second World War. The novel is a poetic and digressive excavation of family history through the innovative hybrid of photography, travelogue, history, art criticism, and fiction, as well as a meditation on the horrors of the twentieth century, the unreliability of memory and memorialization, and the weight of the past on the present. This unique, peripatetic narrative method of ruminating over the past, which Sebald described as “documentary fiction,” is adapted by the highly acclaimed Russian novelist, poet, and essayist Maria Stepanova in her autofictional, essayistic memoir, In Memory of Memory, elegantly translated by Sasha Dugdale for New Directions. Like Sebald, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in her multi-genre novel Dictee, Stepanova adopts an oblique, multifaceted approach towards her central project of assembling a family history dating from the late nineteenth century. She lodges memoir like a puzzle box within cultural commentary, historical documents from her ancestors, philosophical discourse, and literary criticism; the result is a densely textured memoir-in-fragments that is alive to the limitations of its project—the lack of historical evidence, the inaccuracies in memory, the fraught relationship between the storyteller and her subjects, and the inevitable incompleteness of the family narrative.

The text is deliberately structured into three distinct portions: the first two sections alternate between cultural criticism, personal anecdotes, and historical documents. Certain “chapters,” wryly entitled “Not a Chapter,” are entirely composed of letters from her forbears, including her maternal great-grandparents, Sarra Ginzburg and Mikhail Fridman, her maternal grandparents, Lyolya and Lyonya, and her paternal grandparents, Nikolai Stepanov and Dora Stepanova, among others. The letters, chronologically arranged from 1942 to 1985, offer intimate glimpses into the personal lives of Stepanova’s family, and serve additionally as pieces of cultural history. They are redolent of a particular place and time, evoking what Stepanova calls “a feeling for the age.” Each epistolary “chapter” is accompanied by minimal context or commentary and separated from each other by essayistic inquiries into memory—ranging from such subjects as the photograph, Charlotte Salomon and her epic novel Life? Or Theatre?, Sebald and his writings on history, and the memory boxes of Joseph Cornell. In the first two sections of the text, this digressive arrangement interrupts the family narrative so that it only appears in decontextualized fragments. The effect of this bifurcated structure is that the family narrative remains mostly unexplored until the end of the second section and the third section, which consist of more conventional biographical accounts of family members. Stepanova’s delay in directly grappling with both her personal and family history reflects her anxieties about writing on the past. For example, she cites Marianne Hirsch’s concern that inserting archival photographic images might de- or re-contextualize them and distort their original realities. Therefore, the sections of cultural criticism represent the author’s hesitant, fitful attempts at approaching the past, which she finally accesses in the final third of the novel. In these critical chapters, Stepanova admits to “picking through different approaches to the past, as one might pick through dried peas, in search of one that might work.” READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2021

February 8, 2021  |  in News  |  by Bassam Sidiki, Caridad Svich, Eva Heisler, Garrett Phelps, Lee Yew Leong, and Sam Carter

Our section editors present their favorite works from our Winter 2021 issue!

Our Winter 2021 issue marks a decade of diving into the languages of the world (our archive now boasts 113 of them!) in all their incredible singularity and variegation. Spanning thirty-one countries, this milestone edition feels like a fitting way to honor a decade of hard work behind the scenes. After hearing from our blog editors last week, let’s pass the mic to the very editors who had a hand in putting together the issue itself.

“Is it a Comedy? Is it a Tragedy?” Thomas Bernhard asks in our debut issue from January 2011. Ten years later, Brazilian author Adelice Souza’s fever-dream of a story (in Padma Viswanathan’s pitch-perfect translation) provides a direct enjoinder: “The play wasn’t a comedy, nor was it a tragedy . . . It was a drama very specifically for those two women.” Just as in Bernhard’s story, the point is not the play at all—we hardly know what the play is about, other than the fact that its two actresses play a lonely woman and her dog, and that tragedy ensues when one demands to switch roles with the other. In contrast to Bernhard, who focuses squarely on the theatre-goer, Souza makes it all about the two actresses whose eight years of traveling with the play to multiple cities have “put them through every type of relationship.” It’s not a story one imagines being plotted out; rather, the work feels like it has been ejected, like toothpaste from a tube, sentence by exhilarating sentence. In the “Brave New World Literature” Special Feature, we also come full circle but in a different way via the return of frequent contributor Jeremy Tiang, who debuted as a translator in our first issue. Combining pop-cultural references with theory, “The World Is Not Enough” is full of quotable gems, but nowhere is Tiang more on-point than when he muses, “Perhaps if the dominant anglophone culture actually acknowledged itself to be part of the world, rather than treating ‘world literature’ as a spice rack to save itself from total blandness, more than three percent of books published in the United States would be in translation?” Finally, anyone who is curious about the workings of a magazine of world literature other than our own will find plenty of food for thought in John Freeman’s riveting piece on how he remade Granta into a global publication.

—Lee Yew Leong, Fiction Editor and ”Brave New World Literature“ Special Feature Editor

Max Rojas is a constant enthusiasm of mine and so I was thrilled to showcase a pretty sizable excerpt from Zane Koss and Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz’s translation—the very first in English—in all its shining, breathless glory. Even though it’s a mere sliver of a doorstop-sized poem, it’s an excellent sample of Rojas’ talent and an overdue introduction for the Anglosphere. The language of Bodies is both baroque and ephemeral, rugged and philosophical, and its tone swings between that of a theologico-political treatise and a declaration of war. It’s some of this last century’s densest and most sophisticated Spanish-language verse, and some of the most woefully unknown.

—Garrett Phelps, Poetry Editor READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2020

November 16, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel, Marina Dora Martino, and Samuel Miller

Our favorite selections for the month, featuring David Diop, Yi Lei, and Pergentino José!

There’s plenty to get excited about in the latest offerings from around the world, bound to satisfy the desires of any reader—from the emotionally visceral, to the patiently curious, to the surreal and the hallucinatory. In scoping for the finest translations, we bring you reviews of anti-colonialist fiction by a Prix Goncourt des Lycéens winner, a new collection from a leading figure of contemporary Chinese poetics, and the first ever literary translation from the Sierra Zapotec into English by a thrilling new voice. 

at night

At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop, translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020

Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

David Diop’s brutal sophomore novel, At Night All Blood Is Black, translated elegantly by Anna Moschovakis, is a relentless indictment of the colonial power structure. Through the utter dissolution of the protagonist, Alfa Ndiaye, the novel demonstrates its ripples and rhizomes throughout society—from the individual to the geopolitical to the environmental—rotting away what does not serve it. Though heavy and dark from beginning to end, this is a highly specific, deftly illustrated, poetically rendered critique that justifies the emotional slog.

Alfa is a chocolat soldier, a Senegalese man who has voluntarily travelled to fight on the side of France in the first World War. During the ensuing battles, Mademba, his childhood friend and “more-than-brother” is disemboweled before his eyes by an enemy soldier. We meet Alfa shortly after he has watched Mademba die slowly, refusing his pleas for mercy. In these scenes of articulate gore and moral anguish, Moschovakis reveals her poetic side in the restraint and somber vivacity with which she renders Diop’s descriptions. Alfa then finds himself in the throes of both deep regret and liberation from the moral conventions which had prevented him from acting in Mademba’s best interest. “No voice rises in my head to forbid me: my ancestors’ voices and my parents’ voices all extinguished themselves the minute I conceived of doing what, finally, I did.” The horror of both bearing witness to and being complicit in the suffering of a loved one silences the voices of morality in his head and marks his entrance into a world of alternate, competing guiding forces: his own tortured impulses and the abstract interests of the narcissistic state. He begins performing solo operations late at night in no-man’s land, disemboweling enemy soldiers and keeping one hand and a weapon from each kill.

A progression that functions on multiple planes expands the novel upwards and outwards from where it remains firmly rooted—in viscera spilled. As time advances and settings shift, Alfa’s psychological state, the narrative mode, the realms of reality, the overarching value system, and the gender coding of these spaces evolve in conjunction. Generally speaking, the trajectory is from the concrete to the abstract, the sober to the unhinged, the current to the eternal, the “real” to the mythological, the individual to the collective, and the masculine to the feminine. Alfa remains our guide, however unreliable, through this uncertain terrain, until his psychological coherence evaporates entirely, leaving the reader stewed in his reflections and testimonies. READ MORE…

Of Loneliness and Disillusion: Abdellah Taïa’s A Country for Dying

September 10, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada

While each narrative voice is unique, they all share a sense of loss. [The novel] draws its strength from its haunting air of solitude.

A Country for Dying by Abdellah Taïa, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan, Seven Stories, 2020

A Country for Dying is more about atmosphere than plot. It is a brief, taut work that digs deep into the margins of society to demonstrate the many ways in which colonialism pollutes our notions of love and self. Over the course of three parts and six chapters, Abdellah Taïa introduces us to the inner lives of four immigrants in Paris, as they contend with their present realities, the pasts they are trying to flee, and the dreams they still hope to indulge.

Their stories read like monologues, and talk toward each other more than they ever intersect. In this they mimic the characters, who are largely confined to their individual apartments; even the city that holds them all is, in a way, isolating—a refuge that can never quite be home (as a Moroccan living in Paris, Taïa himself writes from a place of exile). Thus, while each narrative voice is unique, they all share a sense of loss. A Country for Dying draws its strength from its haunting air of solitude.

If there’s anything like a connective tissue between the stories, it is Zahira: a forty-year-old Moroccan sex worker who has moved to Paris to escape the trauma of her father’s suicide when she was a girl. She struggles with the guilt of having “abandoned” him when he fell ill and was confined to the second floor of their house. “I didn’t think my father was going to die,” she reflects, “[b]ut I accepted, just like everyone else, that I wouldn’t see him again . . . The weight of his heavy footsteps echoes in my ear.” Grief-stricken, Zahira struggles to rewrite his story and heal her pain. Much of the chapter devoted to it is written in the second person as she addresses her father directly, updating him on his family’s lives after his death; in practice, however, it feels like she is addressing the reader, telling us her story on her own terms, to great emotional effect.

There is a direct through line between Zahira’s trauma and her instinct to take care of Mojtaba, a gay Iranian exile, when she finds him collapsed on the street. Looking after him over Ramadan helps her cope with her father’s death: “He was also tender, sweet, melancholic. That was obvious immediately. Something in him was similar to me, familiar.” For a moment, the quiet intimacy that forms between them brings them the peace they so badly deserve. Their bond never ceases to feel fragile, though, and it is clear that it will not last. 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…

WIT Month: An Interview with Aneesa Abbas Higgins

August 26, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Moore

Fear makes fools of us all—I believe passionately in the power of literature and books to help break down the barriers that divide us.

According to the Index Translationum, a database published by UNESCO, texts written originally in French are the second most frequently translated, with over two hundred thousand titles published since 1979. Though the numbers exhibit a disappointing hierarchy, the fact that French occupies such a large presence is unsurprising; after all, as today’s interviewee, Aneesa Abbas Higgins, informs us: “French is a world language.” Spoken in diasporic populations around the world, the French of today is a linguistic carrier of resistance and individualism just as it once was a language of oppression.

Aneesa Abbas Higgins has translated numerous works from the French, including Seven Stones by Vénus Khoury-Ghata (Jacaranda, 2017) and Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin (Daunt Books, 2020). In her efforts to represent a variety of original French voices, her contributions to English-language readers have been invaluable. Now, in our second feature for Women in Translation Month, blog editor Sarah Moore speaks to Higgins about her most recent translation, All Men Want to Know by Nina Bouraoui (Penguin, 2020), how French female authors are represented in translations, and the challenges of translating today.

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Sarah Moore (SM): You translate from the French into English—could you talk about your relationship with French and how you learned it?

Aneesa Abbas Higgins (AAH): I started it at school at the age of eleven—I’ve always loved languages, and I added German, Latin, and Russian over the next few years. I’ve also dabbled in Italian and Spanish and made a real effort to learn Urdu; I even tried Japanese at one point. But French was the one that really stayed with me, and I’ve spent a good part of my life going back and forth between London and various parts of France. I did my MA in French and taught French at an American school in London for more than thirty years, so I’ve spent most of my adult life immersed in French language and literature in one way or another. Learning another language is a lifelong project, and I think of myself as still learning. As a translator, one learns more and more about one’s source and target languages all the time.

SM: How did you come to be a translator?

AAH: Translating was something I’d always thought about. I’ve been fascinated by it all my life and have vivid childhood memories of my father, an Urdu speaker who was working on translating Shakespeare at the time, talking about the endless challenges of conveying such rich, figurative language. I’ve been a reader all my life, and have also always loved to write. So when I decided to retire early from teaching, it seemed like a natural progression. I took some courses in translation and creative writing, sought advice from the wonderfully generous and supportive translation community, and set about researching, translating samples, and pitching books I wanted to translate to publishers. I was lucky enough to find a publisher and obtain a PEN grant for one of those books, and I went on from there.

SM: Which books did you initially want to translate when you began your career?

AAH: Looking back, I was definitely looking mostly at female authors, but I was primarily interested in works that originated beyond the confines of mainstream metropolitan France. French is a world language, just as English is. There are many, many authors who write in French and whose relationship with the language is complex. French, the language of the colonial oppressors, becomes the vehicle for voicing anti-colonial sentiment and raising black consciousness worldwide, in the same way as English has been used by writers from the Indian subcontinent and diaspora. I wanted to help bring more of those voices, the inheritors of the original mantle of the Négritude of Senghor and Césaire, into English. And for me, it’s personal. I’ve always been drawn to writers and books that express what it means, and what it feels like, to be both an insider and an outsider in the society one lives in. READ MORE…

Land / Water: A Chronicle of Vietnamese as a Diasporic Condition

May 27, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Maya Nguyen

There can be no firm diasporic life. Only affirmation of the un-firm: the resolution of irresolution between one home and another.

The journey that a language takes to arrive at us is often unimaginably intricate, with all the marks of history, people, and land upon it. In the following essay, gorgeous with lyricism and intimate with the facts and ideas of past and present, Maya Nguen takes us through the emotional and physical cartography of Vietnam and its language, and how such structures reverberate against the ever-mutable definitions of identity, personhood, and home.

In the beginning is a creation myth.
Âu Cơ meets Lạc Long Quân where mountain meets sea.
They form a bond and Âu Cơ bears an egg sac with a hundred children.
At the core of their bond with one another is another bond of one with the mountain and the other with the sea. So it came to be that fifty children followed Âu Cơ for the mountain whence she came and fifty followed Lạc Long Quân for the sea whence he came. And as Âu Cơ calls for land and Lạc Long Quân calls for water their children come to call a country
land  water
đất   nước ¹
 where land begins at the edge of the water that starts at the end of the land: is a shore that holds the country in the crossing between one word and another: between 越南 & Indochine Française & Việt Nam & Vietnam
the Vietnamese language emerges at the border
thoroughly other & utterly ones own
& defined by a border endures
Diasporic
& Pure

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In prehistory: Austroasiatic tribes living in the Red River Delta (today’s Northern Vietnam) speak a Proto-Viet language belonging to the Mon-Khmer language family.

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Beginning in 111 BC: Colonization by the Chinese empire for eleven centuries to follow. Classical Chinese is imposed as the written language of the government elite, forming the basis of politics, science, and literature. Proto-Viet continues to be spoken, and its speech, to be influenced by Classical Chinese.

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Beginning in the tenth century: Independence from the Chinese won by King Ngô Quyền at the shores of Bạch Đằng River. After a millennium of foreign occupation without a formal writing system of its own, independent Vietnam continues as before: with Classical Chinese at its helm.

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Beginning in the thirteenth century: A vernacular written script called Chữ Nôm (lit. “southern characters”) is developed on the basis of Classical Chinese to record Vietnamese folk music and poetry. Considered as the pillar of Vietnamese literature, Truyện Kiều (Tale of Kieu) by Nguyễn Du is written in Chữ Nôm. For this script, Chinese characters are naturalized to fit the Vietnamese spoken language, which itself includes Chinese words naturalized into Vietnamese. “Southern characters” in Chữ Nôm: 𡨸喃. “Southern characters” in Classical Chinese: 字南. 𡨸喃 is taught in reference to 字南. 𡨸喃 exists alongside 字南: forming a pillar: a porous border. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Buddha” by Jules Boissière

March 24, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by A. Z. Foreman

The Buddha gave our wolfish men a smile.

This week’s Translation Tuesday presents a chilling and challenging poem by Jules Boissière, translated from the Occitan. At turns uncomfortable to read yet undeniably skilful in its imagery and structure, the poem’s deft enjambment and linguistic precision belies the speaker’s cultural ignorance (e.g., the suggestion that the Buddha is revered as a god) and his complicity in colonial terror. It’s admittedly difficult to make sense of the colonizer’s mindset, which at once mourns a seemingly indifferent universe while confirming the wolfish volition of his compatriot soldiers.

Also noteworthy is the poet’s insistence on writing in Occitan rather than French. Writes translator A.Z. Foreman: “It is only in Occitan that Boissière allows himself to be honest about life as a colonial soldier. This poem gives a soldiers’-eye view of terrorized civilians running for their lives from a home in flames, followed by a macabre meditation. We are more accustomed to poetry that describes the effect of brutality on those who suffer from it. This poem, though, conveys the effect on a man who inflicts it. The coarsening of the mind, brought on by acceptance of the horrific.”  

The Buddha

Our soldiers won, then torched a domicile.
The owner with his sons ran half a mile
Under gunfire. On the ancestors’ altar
Not guarding the old creeds or their old shelter,
The Buddha gave our wolfish men a smile. READ MORE…

Narrative Repatriation: Inari Sámi Folklore: Stories from Aanaar in Review

April 1, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Paul M. Worley

Frandy’s edition openly rebels against the moment when these stories were first recorded.

Inari Sámi Folklore: Stories from Aanaar by August V. Koskimies and Toivo I. Itkonen, revised by Lea Laitinen, and edited and translated by Tim Frandy, University of Wisconsin Press, 2019

Whatever the cosmopolitan politics of many people living in cities like London, New York, or Paris, the majority of museums in such places continue to struggle with the colonizing narratives forwarded not only by the layout of the physical space of the museum—a prime example being the room dedicated solely to Egypt, separate from the rest of the African continent—but also by the fact that many objects within these collections were stolen, looted, or otherwise removed from the communities that produced them.

Should these objects be returned or, in an argument that many see as dripping with colonial paternalism, are they indeed “safer” under the protection of Western institutions? One only need think of the ongoing controversy surrounding the so-called “Elgin” Marbles and their possible repatriation, or any number of recent developments concerning Native American peoples in the United States requesting the return of sacred objects, to understand how such objects touch on themes like intellectual and cultural sovereignty in the twenty-first century. The “Elgin” Marbles may have inspired Keats’s meditation on truth and beauty, but how would these same marbles appear, at a distance, to a poet writing from Greece during the Romantic period or in the age of Brexit? How would the nature of the marbles’ famed “truth” and “beauty” appear to someone who understood them as a piece of cultural heritage that had been looted for the express benefit of a cosmopolitan other? What would the return, or so-called repatriation, of such objects mean not only for those who have been robbed of such items, but for the descendants of those who stole them in the first place?

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An Interview with Jordan Stump

January 14, 2019  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Alyea Canada

The words on the page told me everything I needed to know.

Our final Asymptote Book Club selection for 2018 was The Barefoot Woman, Scholastique Mukasonga’s “haunted and haunting love letter” to her mother. In this latest edition of our Book Club interview series, translator Jordan Stump tells Asymptote’s Alyea Canada why he leapt at the chance to translate both The Barefoot Woman and Scholastique Mukasonga’s earlier memoir, Cockroaches, and why “this is a really good time for translation.”

Already broken a few New Year’s resolutions? How about making one you’ll really enjoy? Like reading the world with Asymptote Book Club, now open to E.U. residents! It’s still not too late to pledge to read adventurously in 2019: Sign up for the Asymptote Book Club by Jan 16 and receive your first book in January!

Alyea Canada (AC): How did you come to translate The Barefoot Woman? What drew you to Scholastique Mukasonga’s work in general and to this book in particular?

Jordan Stump (JS): It was Jill Schoolman who introduced me to Mukasonga’s work, not long after Notre-Dame du Nil was published. I was immediately taken by it, so when the chance to translate Cockroaches and The Barefoot Woman came along, I leapt at it immediately. I translate books that say something in a way that strikes me as so perfect I want to try to say it myself—like learning to play a piece of music you particularly love instead of simply listening to it.  Reading is like listening; translating is like playing. There are always many reasons why a given book has that effect on me, but in this case I loved the sharpness of Mukasonga’s eye, the graceful construction of her chapters, the way a story wrapped up in unimaginable loss is told with a little smile, and the way in which that smile sometimes abruptly disappears.

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Announcing our December Book Club Selection: The Barefoot Woman by Scholastique Mukasonga

December 27, 2018  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada

In telling her mother’s story, Mukasonga returns agency to Stefania and the other women of her village.

The Asymptote Book Club enters its second year with a first African title: Scholastique Mukasonga’s The Barefoot Woman, translated by Jordan Stump and published by Archipelago, is a moving tribute to the author’s mother, one of the victims of the Rwandan Genocide.

After visits to Turkey and Croatia in the previous two months, we again find ourselves confronting “the dark and bloody face of history” through the mirror of prose. Mukasonga’s homage to her mother, though, “radiates . . . with warmth and affection,” in the words of our reviewer. “This slim memoir,” says Alyea Canada, “is a haunted and haunting love letter.”

Head to our online discussion page to add your voice to the discussion on The Barefoot Woman. All the information you need to subscribe for future Book Club selections is available on our Asymptote Book Club site, together with a full overview of our first twelve months.

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In Conversation: Len Rix on Translating Hungarian

April 30, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by Diána Vonnák

"Translation is itself an artistic enterprise, an act of co-creation, relying on empathy, intuition and imaginative insight."

Len Rix is best known for translating Antal Szerb’s works into English: Journey by Moonlight has been a long-time favourite, reissued many times. In recent years, Len translated Magda Szabó’s The Door and Katalin Street, both poignant novels about memory, integrity and the way history intrudes into the private realm. In February this year, he was awarded the PEN America Translation Award for Katalin Street. Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large Diána Vonnák asked him about his remarkable journey to the Hungarian language, his thoughts on Szerb and Szabó, and the translator’s craft.

Diána Vonnák (DV): Not that many people take it upon themselves to translate from Hungarian without family roots or some other connection. One of them is Ottilie Mulzet, who says Hungarian is “like a rubber band. It can expand and expand, until you think, well, this rubber band is going to break at any moment now, or it can shrink into just a few sparse words, where all the most important parts are left out and you just have to know.” What was it about the language that made you choose it? Do you agree with Mulzet and her emphasis on elasticity?

Len Rix (LR): It was initially the sheer sound that drew me to it, so strange and beautiful, with its soft and alluring vowels and diphthongs that simply do not exist in English, and its musical spoken rhythms. Then it became the elaborate and rigorously logical grammar, with its agglutinative case endings and “reversed” word order that drew me on. And all those wonderful new words!

This “elasticity” is partly to do with the age and historic isolation of the language, which have both acted to keep the case-endings and other suffixes intact. Old English and Anglo-Saxon were similarly agglutinative until the Nordic invaders arrived. They shared the same (Germanic) root words but had evolved different endings, which were soon set aside. Cut off from its Finno-Ugric cousins, Hungarian missed out on that. The one language to which it was exposed down the centuries, Latin, would have done nothing to diminish its tendency to ramify endlessly. Cicero’s “periodic” sentences can equal the best of Krasznahorkai. There is one in his Pro Milone, as I recall, that runs to fifty-seven lines of close print without a full stop.

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