Posts filed under 'comparative literature'

A Guest of its Originality: An Interview with Ghazouane Arslane

September 19, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Alex Tan

What matters here is that translation implies both bifurcation and multiplication. Bilingualism splits in two opposite directions, but enriches.

A highlight of the current Summer 2022 issue, Abdelfattah Kilito’s “Borges and the Blind” stages an erudite inquiry into the classical Arabic underpinnings of Jorge Luis Borges’s famous “Averroës’s  Search,” traversing the proximities and distances that triangulate between writers, readers, and texts across disparate literary traditions. As a reflection on the innumerable angles from which one might approach—with varying degrees of blindness and insight—the mirror of the text, Kilito’s essay is nothing if not a testament to the fundamental questions of translation that mediate each of our relationships to language and culture. Ghazouane Arslane’s English translation interposes yet another layer in this mise en abyme, deftly capturing the labyrinthine turns of Kilito’s thought. I had the honor of corresponding with Ghazouane over email; our conversation ranged over vast swathes of terrain, from the difficulties of rendering the polysemy of Arabic literature, the ethics and politics of the “original copy,” the hospitality involved in any act of translation, to more specific (but no less essential) lingerings over the evocative scene of prayer in Borges’s story alongside Kilito’s singular talent for discerning “the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the strange.”

Alex Tan (AT): So much of Kilito’s piece revolves around the specific positionality of the reader. I thought we could start there, with how you exist in language. You speak, in a recent essay, of how English eludes the contested politics of language connected to Algeria’s postcolonial anxieties. While a Ph.D. student in Britain, you grasped English as “a way out of everything inherited.” In contrast, Arabic became something you had to “[translate] yourself back into,” a language that you inhabited as “both host and guest.” How do your differing relationships to these two languages inflect the way you approach translation and, more specifically, your decision to translate this essay of Kilito’s?

Ghazouane Arslane (GA): English, I must say, has furnished me with a space of expression and self-articulation that is deeply personal and, at the same time, inevitably political. If it somehow escapes the complex politics of language in postcolonial Algeria, it is nevertheless lurking in the background. I am referring here to the rivalry between English and French as imperial languages in the last two or three centuries, a rivalry that saw English triumph for reasons everyone is familiar with. But for me, English meant going beyond the linguistic world of Algeria—a window to another world, beyond Algeria, but also a window through which I can look back into the world that Algeria has always represented for me, into myself, and, above all, into the languages that formed me.

It was thanks to Kilito, in part, that I became even more conscious and fascinated by language, by languages, by what they do to you. To speak more than one language is to turn in multiple and often opposite directions, enabling one to be a translator in the manner of Musa ibn Sayyar al-Uswari—an interpreter of the Qur’an that al-Jahiz describes as “one of the wonders of the world,” being eloquent in both Arabic and Persian. Al-Uswari, al-Jahiz tells us, “would sit with Arabs to his right and Persians to his left. He would recite a verse from the Book of God, explain it in Arabic to the Arabs, then turn toward the Persians and explain it to them in Persian.” All of this I learnt in Kilito’s Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language, my first encounter with his work. What matters here is that translation implies both bifurcation and multiplication. Bilingualism splits in two opposite directions, but enriches. To be both host and guest is better than being either—in the sense that it is more demanding, more exhausting, thus more rewarding (the pleasure, like the pain, is doubled). To wander and get lost in the labyrinth of languages—I can’t say labyrinth without thinking of Borges!—is to find oneself in the real world, whose frontiers you can only cross via translation. In this sense, therefore, I was led to translation as necessity, not choice. After reading Kilito’s essay, I told myself it must be translated. And, of course, from Arabic into English—the same crossing I had already made. Needless to say, there are considerations of visibility and readability, but the main drive is the quality of the essay—which means its translatability in Walter Benjamin’s sense. Perhaps even the multiple directions it takes you to. Kilito’s essay is a journey through Borges, Averroës, Kafka, al-Ma’arri, and others, into blindness and insight. Distances collapse. Time is insignificant. Here, indeed, is world literature. That, I must say, is what drove me to translate the essay. READ MORE…

An Existential Gangster Novel: On Un-su Kim’s The Plotters

October 10, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Darren Huang

Kim’s novel joins recent [work] that offer[s] critiques of South Korean capitalist society and class—most notably Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite.

Prize-winning South Korean writer Un-su Kim was first introduced to English readers in 2019 via The Plotters, a hitman thriller that follows protagonist Reseng, a man raised by his mentor, Old Raccoon, to be an assassin. Comparisons have been made to numerous other gangster works, such as films by Quentin Tarantino and the John Wick series, yet Kim’s take on the genre is compelling and unique. After the death of a close fellow assassin, Reseng begins to question his place in this lucrative yet nihilistic industry, as the novel takes a more existential turn. In this review—the first of four in a series spotlighting Korean fiction in partnership with Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea)—Asymptote editor-at-large Darren Huang explores The Plotters as a political critique of Korean capitalism and considers whether it succeeds in subverting the gangster genre.

The soldierly heroes of literary and cinematic works in the gangster genre are often absorbed and then trapped within rigid political and cultural structures defined by their underworlds. In the 2019 Martin Scorsese film, The Irishman, Frank Sheeran, the hitman protagonist, played by a typically reticent and unsmiling Robert De Niro with his curled lower lip, is initially an outsider but assimilates into the Bufalino crime family by adopting the mobster ethos—cold-bloodedness, discreteness, and above all, unswerving loyalty to his superiors. He never seriously questions the instructions of his boss, even when they involve the killing of a longtime friend and mentor. In Mario Puzo’s crime novel, The Godfather, the tragic hero Michael Corleone at first renounces his family business of organized crime and detaches himself by escaping New York to settle in Italy. A number of incidents (including a car bomb explosion that inadvertently kills his wife and an assassination attempt on his father) compel him to return to New York, where he succeeds his father as head of the family organization. He expands his father’s dynastic empire and rises through ruthlessness and cunning to become the most powerful don in the country. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Selections from A Woman Awaiting (The pandemic from a garret) by Agnieszka Taborska

September 15, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood

When the world goes back to 'normal,' how quickly will we regain middle age?

Writer, translator, and scholar Agnieszka Taborska reflects upon the literary and historical precedents of the global lockdown in these excerpts from A Woman Awaiting (The pandemic from a garret), our selection for this week’s Translation Tuesday. In coping with the trauma and uncertainty of the current pandemic, Taborska offers a bookish yet personal perspective, one informed by an expansive breadth of literary knowledge as well as familial accounts of another historical tragedy: the Nazi occupation of Poland. Paradoxically, the speaker’s isolation takes us on a necessarily cosmopolitan journey through books, recontextualizing the pandemic through the lenses of Gabriel García Márquez, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Bram Stoker, and Spalding Gray, among others. With candid, irreverent wit, Taborska chronicles her daily thoughts about the absurdities, losses, and shared anxieties of our current global crisis.

What was a day, measured for instance from the moment you sat down to your midday meal to the return of that same moment twenty-four hours later?

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain [1]

Friday, April 3

With every passing day our activities take on more of the characteristics of ritual. In the morning we top up the humidifiers on our radiators, rolling up the blinds to let the plants soak up the sun from the first minute, and wiping down with a wet cloth the leaves that haven’t had time to gather dust since we last cleaned them. For the umpteenth time we move the flowerpots around to make their residents feel as comfortable as possible. The tiles, the bathroom, the bathtub, and sink have been scrubbed raw.  We recall with relief that there are still windows to be cleaned. We have shifted the furniture around, surprising ourselves with the audacity of our experimental solutions. Our new routine makes us laugh at the previous one. We strive to create hothouse conditions in our limited space. When all this is over, will we deliberately let our flat go to seed? Will we stick to a daily agenda or—on the contrary—will we turn day into night, drop in on our friends unannounced, wake up our neighbours by playing loud music at dawn, will we ditch every schedule?

The habit of checking the weather forecast is now a thing of the past. The degree of air pollution has also become irrelevant. A million dollars to anyone who, asked out of the blue, can name today’s date and day of the week without having to stop and think. On the other hand, we are getting expert at telling the hour. We have our hand on the pulse. We are aware of the days getting longer. We are familiar with the path of the rays of the sun as they move across the floor. We could tell the shadows out in the street where and how far to fall.

Our window looks out onto a small grocery store. We have noticed a pattern: young people go in wearing gloves and face masks, the old behave as if nothing was happening. Our activist neighbour picks up litter from the pavement as usual. A sight that takes me back to the past.

The dogs waiting outside the shop are surprised that their two-legged friends have suddenly been spending so much time with them. Two Labradors who came with a gentleman on a bike kill time by simulating copulation, as always. They mount each other and make rubbing motions, too brief for ‘anything’ to really happen. The infection has not impaired their erotic fantasies. READ MORE…

Translating Zahia Rahmani: An Interview with Matt Reeck

March 14, 2019  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Erik Noonan

I would say translating allows the translator to find new parts of him/herself, instead of leaving parts behind.

“I’m always surprised by how docile American intellectuals are when they enter the public space,” says Matt Reeck, the translator of Zahia Rahmani’s strikingly bold “Muslim”: A Novel. In the course of a wide-ranging interview with Asymptote Assistant Editor Erik Noonan, Reeck aims to challenge that dominant paradigm of always being “on our best behaviour.”

In our most in-depth Book Club interview to date, Reeck sifts through the “layers of imperial cultural history in Algeria”, makes an eloquent plea for the widening of the capital/cultural space currently allotted to translation, and suggests that “the translation of texts that are already domesticated work[s] against translation in a broader sense.”

Erik Noonan (EN): Discussing the role of the translator in your statement for the National Endowment for the Arts, you say that “In a globalized world, while we know more about many parts of the world that we didn’t have access to previously, often what we know seems to get cemented quickly into easy stereotypes. Then, in a way, we don’t know much more at all; we just know what we think we know.” Dealing with the potential of certain texts to expand our knowledge of the world, you also say, in a piece in The Los Angeles Review: “While university presses help by publishing some of these [truly exotic] works, they don’t take on others: the manuscript must match a list, and this list consolidates established emphases of teaching and research.” Your work includes research and teaching in the Comparative Literature Department at UCLA, I believe, as well as translation. How is your teaching related to your research and your translating, and has that relationship changed in any way over time?

Matt Reeck (MR): I’m interested in many things, and they don’t all necessarily fit anyone’s idea of a single pursuit, a single trajectory, a single work. But they do for me. They are unified by being the things I’m interested in! It would be nice to be able to teach things that match my translating interests and my research interests, but to date I’ve been able to do that only here and there. Fingers crossed this will change soon.

READ MORE…

Winter 2015: We Almost Didn’t Make It

September 17, 2018  |  in 30issues30days  |  by Victoria Livingstone

Asymptote was giving—and continues to give—voice to languages and regions across the globe without ever lowering the curatorial bar.

If you’re just joining us, we invite you to revisit our first 16 issues via our #30issues30days showcase here. In honor of our milestone 30th edition, we’ll shortly be launching a contest giveaway with a top prize of $200, so watch this space!

2015 was a milestone year for Asymptote: We won a London Book Fair award and partnered with The Guardian. But only Asymptote staff back then know we almost didn’t make it past January. On 15 December 2014, despairing of the lack of progress in fundraising, I wrote the following (lightly edited) email: 

“Hello team, I’ve been reassessing the situation. It seems I underestimated the support for the magazine and it doesn’t look as if we’re going to hit our campaign target by December 19. Therefore, we’ll be extending the deadline to January 29, 2015. Our January issue will be pushed back to January 30, the very date of our debut in 2011, four years ago, so that we’ll have come full circle. If we don’t hit the target on January 29, we will announce in the editorial that the Jan 2015 issue will be our very last. Social media and blog activities (including the podcast, very sadly) shall cease with effect from 1 Feb. The magazine will fold. Planning for all activities after January should be halted with immediate effect. Please respect this. Section editors, please do not communicate any more acceptances, and please be prepared to rescind your acceptances for anything after the January issue on the event of our closure, if it does come to that. As promised, we will break for the holidays. (I’ll hold the fort on social media during this time.) In January, we will prioritize work on the January edition as well as the two January events. As for those who are willing to help, we will keep publicizing the IndieGoGo campaign and sending out appeals. We’ll see if the magazine can be saved. (During a recent discussion with the senior editors, the question did arise about whether to shield all of you from the hard reality in front of us. But I don’t think it’s good to keep mum, for morale’s sake; also, I would not be so cruel as to ask you to continue working on projects that may not see the light of publication, or events that have to be cancelled. The reality is that I am simply out of funds, and also depleted in other ways. If we don’t hit the IndieGoGo target, I would prefer to end on a high note and move on.)”

Here to introduce our Winter 2015 issue, released one day after 287 supporters brought us past the finish line of $25,000, please welcome Assistant Editor Victoria Livingstone. 

“I am always trying to push the market very hard,” David Damrosch told Asymptote contributing editor Dylan Suher in an interview included in the Winter 2015 issue. The Harvard professor of comparative literature explained that he strives to bring so-called minor literatures into the canon of world literature by translating, anthologizing, and teaching works from underrepresented regions and languages.

Asymptote has been similarly pushing against the market since Lee Yew Leong founded the journal in 2011. When the Winter 2015 issue was published, I was finishing my doctoral work, which focused on connections between political contexts and translated literature. As I was immersed in the work of critics such as Damrosch, I was also reading Asymptote, and I recognized then that that the journal was doing something different. Rather than reproducing the inequalities of what Pascale Casanova calls “the world republic of letters,” Asymptote was giving—and continues to give—voice to languages and regions across the globe without ever lowering the curatorial bar.  READ MORE…

The Joys and Dangers of Translating Asian Dictionaries: Part II.

March 24, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Eric Gurevitch

"An encyclopedia already performs one dangerous act of translation: it translates the language of things into that of man."

When last we left off (read part I here!), I was discussing an imagined translation of an ordering system devised by a (fictitious) king of Siam in the mind of the (very real) W. Somerset Maugham. This time, I will jump to a different author.

Jorge Luis Borges, like Maugham, takes us once again to a land East of Eden, more precisely, somewhere East of Suez (where the best is like the worst, where there aren’t no Ten Commandments). In his essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” Borges introduces us to “a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled ‘Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge’” that was discussed by one “doctor Franz Kuhn.” Borges writes:

In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.

READ MORE…