Posts filed under 'crime'

What’s New in Translation: July 2022

July 11, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Charlie Ng, and Olivia Roslansky

Introducing new translations from the German, Gujarati, and Spanish!

In this month’s round-up of exciting new translations from around the world, our editors review an artful and intertextual graphic novel from Nicolas Mahler; a lyrical, genre-bending tale of creation and storytelling from Spanish writer Manuel Astur; and a compilation from Gujarati writer Dhumketu, a master of the short story. Read on to find out more!

sussex

Alice in Sussex by Nicolas Mahler, translated from the German by Alexander Booth, Seagull Books, 2022

Review by Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large for Hong Kong

Lewis Carroll’s Alice and Frankenstein’s monster make an unlikely combination, but in Alice in Sussex, Austrian comic artist and illustrator Nicolas Mahler brings the two together in his vivid reimagining of a classic tale. The title of the graphic novel makes references to both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and H. C. Artmann’s parody of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein—Frankenstein in Sussex, suggesting an intertextual playfulness that is further substantiated throughout the work. Mahler’s seven-year-old Alice—the same age as Carroll’s—experiences an adventure as equally nonsensical as the original’s, but her journey is even more rife with complexities, incorporating a wide range of literary and philosophical references. To sum it up, this adventure down the White Rabbit’s hole is a humorous, inventive set, in which Mahler can play with his own literary and philosophical influences.

Readers familiar with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland can certainly remember the beginning of the children’s classic, in which Alice complains that there are no pictures or conversations in her sister’s book. Mahler’s Alice encounters the same boredom when reading her sister’s copy of Frankenstein in Sussex, and thus initiates the White Rabbit’s invitation into his hole, promising to show her “a lavishly illustrated edition.” Drawn sitting by an infinity-shaped stream, the waters foreshadow Alice’s seemingly never-ending descent down the chimney into a huge house underneath the meadow, as well as the long, elaborated, and bizarre dream that follows. Although the promised book cannot be found on the Rabbit’s bookshelf, the graphic novel actualises it—illustrating Alice’s encounter with Frankenstein’s monster later in the story. It also tries to acknowledge her other desire—for conversations—by letting her meet and converse with other idiosyncratic characters. Both, however, turn out to be anything but desirable for young Alice.

In Lewis Carroll’s original, Alice ponders on her identity after experiencing a series of queer events: “Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” Likewise, Mahler’s Alice is confronted with the same crisis, visually represented by Alice falling into the huge, fuzzy cloud of smoke drifting from the pipe of the Caterpillar, who then asks her: “Who are you?” Alice is unable to answer the question, but she also doesn’t make any great effort; her desire to escape is stronger than any liking for strange conversations. A further existentialist twist is introduced when the White Rabbit can only find The Trouble with Being Born by Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran on his bookshelf, and the Caterpillar tells Alice an important thing about life: “Being alive means losing the ground beneath your feet!!!” Such aphorisms are commonly sprinkled throughout the graphic novel—reminiscent of The Trouble with Being Born; the pain of life is treated with levity and amusement, with Alice being tossed around on the Caterpillar’s body, and the Caterpillar’s writhing shifts with his many legs in the air. While Alice is dismayed at losing the ground beneath her feet, the Caterpillar is comfortable with it. Despite being infused with dark humor, Mahler’s style is never overly harsh on his characters; his drawings are delightful, exuding a sense of gentleness. READ MORE…

“I want my words and those of the law to meet on the page and touch”: On Alia Trabucco Zerán’s When Women Kill

March 10, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Suhasini Patni

In looking at disobedient women, the book dismisses “the lawyer’s red pen” and the “narrow confines” of law.

When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes, And Other Stories, 2022

Could such bloody murders really have been committed by women? Did they owe their homicidal violence to advances in feminism?

Alia Trabucco Zerán has been training herself to suspect—as if it were an art form. It is this honed ability for distrust, combined with her background in law, that brings her close to the four women at the center of When Women Kill. In her debut novel, The Remainder (shortlisted for the 2019 Booker International), Trabucco Zerán told the story of Iquela and Felipe, who undertake a road trip to help their family friend Paloma collect and bury her late mother’s body. The lives of the trio are bound with the loss and terror of Pinochet’s rise to power, and as the sky darkens to the color of ash, they too dream of corpses, sinking into hazy memories. The Remainder sealed its author as one of Chile’s most recognized and poignant debut novelists, and central to its story is the same uneasiness of forgetting that pervades When Women Kill; what is true, in a lawful sense, is curled and uncurled in this text, making it one of the more incisive intersectional feminist analyses of myth and murder.

Trabucco Zerán begins her book by explaining why she undertook this study, claiming that a woman who kills is “outside both the codified laws and the cultural laws that define and regulate femininity.” Scavenging through multiple archives, court documents, films, and plays, she reconstructs the history of Corina Rojas, Rosa Faúndez, Carolina Geel, and Teresa Alfaro—four high-profile Chilean murderers of the twentieth century. She is unconcerned with learning about the motivations behind the acts; instead, the book serves as an account to remember and discern the women who commit crimes, who have expressed their rage. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: January 2020

January 13, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eva Wissting, Leah Scott, and Samuel Kahler

A darkly comical Cuban fiction, the collected texts of an impassioned French thinker, and an Israeli story of radical empathy.

We’re starting up 2020 with what we do best: bringing you a selection of brilliant titles that have most recently landed in world literature. Our picks this month span the radical, the intimate, and the dark, with the stunning cross-section of twentieth-century Cuban society, a collection of essays by the notorious Jean Genet, and an Israeli tale of survival and struggle told in a great feat of imagination. Go ahead and take advantage of that new-year urgency to fulfill your resolution to read more, and start here.

black cathedral

The Black Cathedral by Marcial Gala, translated from the Spanish by Anna Kushner, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020

Review by Leah Scott, Social Media Manager

A dark mosaic of interwoven narratives, The Black Cathedral by Marcial Gala lures the reader straight into the complicated dramas of Cienfuegos, a small Cuban town riddled with poverty and conflict. The novel features a broad cast of idiosyncratic characters, whose histories we come to understand not only through their own unique voices, but by the tales told by others; Cienfuego’s harrowing history emerges through decades of local gossip, placing the reader right at the center of the town’s most turbid rumors and confessions—stories that ultimately culminate in a vicious and bitter end.  READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2019

August 12, 2019  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andreea Scridon, P. T. Smith, and Rachael Pennington

Noirs, voyeurs, and sensuality abound in this week's reviews of the newest in translated literature.

This week’s reviews of the newest and most compelling translated literature include the latest work by Poland’s preeminent writer, Olga Tokarczuk, a fascinating portrayal of manic self-interrogation and class by Stéphane Larue, and a darkly dionysian tale of the female gaze by the award-winning Nina Leger. Our editors burrow into the philosophy, language, and atmosphere of these three novels to give you some extra additions to your reading list.

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Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Riverhead Books, 2019

Review by Andreea Scridon, Assistant Editor

Janina Duszejko is the kind of woman that many would call “eccentric”: she’s in her mid-sixties, often bordering on paranoia, and she’s firmly convinced by astrology, absolute vegetarianism, and William Blake. In rural Poland, Janina—as she hates to be called—lives peacefully and in relative solitude as a guardian for the summer cabins surrounding her home. However, she quickly comes into conflict with the insensitive and barbarous hunters who reign over the area. The death of a neighbor escalates such tension, creating a series of mysterious murders that Janina will be privy to, and which will culminate in an unexpected twist.

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Translation Tuesday: “Surface Effects” by Francesc Serés

March 6, 2018  |  in Translations  |  by Lawrence Venuti

The ivy recovered. It spent two years fighting off that ochre evil until it returned to its formerly exultant state.

This week the eminent Lawrence Venuti brings us a curious story from Catalonia about a house consumed by ivy. The existence and appearance of this menacing plant dominates this rural community and the people who inhabit it.

The house came with a garden—like all the others in the promotion. It was large, three floors, and had a slate roof. Not till Cinta and Pere bought the thing did it change. Ivy began to envelop the ochre façade. They had planted it after falling out with the neighborhood. The houses were painted in a bright earth tone, an ochre that possessed a concrete reference. The only distinguishing feature was the uneven discoloration that the sun caused to the paint. At community meetings, Cinta and Pere would dig in their heels against their next door neighbors on either side and, finally, against everybody else. They (she, and he too, although not as much) wanted the ivy.

And so they planted it and installed an American mailbox, which wasn’t permitted either. That broke the perpetual peace that reigned over urbanization in the countryside. They contracted a gardening firm to fertilize the grounds and plant ivy all around the house. The ivy liked the place: it grew like a shot. From my house, just beyond the development, the ivy on the east wall seemed quite like a hand or paw clinging to it. Time passed quickly for the neighboring houses, and the hand continued to grow nonstop till its entwining tentacles reached the nearby façades.

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What’s New In Translation: February 2018

February 5, 2018  |  in New in Translation, News, Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla, Jessie Stoolman, and Lara Norgaard

The books from Albania and Latin and Central America hitting shelves this month.

For many of us, this month will be either the coldest or the hottest of the year; luckily, the books we’re focusing on this February are resilient and long-lasting—featuring new titles from Albania all the way to Latin and Central America. 

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Blood Barrios by Alberto Arce, translated from the Spanish by John Washington and Daniela Ugaz, Zed Books

Reviewed by Jessie Stoolman, Editor-at-Large for Tunisia

Blood Barrios, Alberto Arce’s account of his diverse experiences as the only foreign journalist inside Honduras between 2012 and 2014, gives a platform to voices inside this small Central American country that are seldom heard. From deep within the Mosquitia jungle, where Arce investigated possible American involvement in massacring innocent civilians, to an overcrowded prison farm where over 350 people died in a fire, he makes “[t]he privileges of a foreigner” in Honduras “his obligations,” asking questions that others cannot.

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In Conversation: Daniella Gitlin on translating Rodolfo Walsh’s Operation Massacre

January 15, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by Lara Norgaard

"Walsh is relevant for American readers now, even if they don’t necessarily understand the nitty-gritty of the political situation of his time."

One challenge of translation is finding a text that appeals to an audience separated geographically and culturally from the author. Finding a nonfiction text with that kind of currency is all the more difficult. The translator of nonfiction is faced with a text tied to local events and often steeped in a historical, social, and political context. Why should the average international reader care about nonfiction in translation? Today, Asymptote sits down with Daniella Gitlin, the translator of the famous 1957 Argentinian reported novel, Rodolfo Walsh’s Operación Masacre (Operation Massacre), previously excerpted in our Summer 2013 issue, to discuss her encounters with a masterpiece of nonfiction and outline the urgent relevance of a text six decades old. 

Lara Norgaard (LN): Tell me a bit about how you came to translate Operation Massacre.

Daniella Gitlin (DG): I spent the year after college in Buenos Aires working for a nonprofit, Poder Ciudadano, with a Princeton in Latin America Fellowship. I was back in Argentina for a visit and told my friends there that I was applying for the nonfiction writing program at Columbia. Before I left, my friend Dante gave me a copy of Operación Masacre with a dedication in it. He wrote, “Dani my dear, a little ‘Argentinian nonfiction’ will do you good. I hope you like it.” I took the book back with me. I had heard of Walsh, but I didn’t really know anything about him.

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Tracing Szilárd Borbély’s Poetry in The Dispossessed

January 10, 2018  |  in Essays, Reviews  |  by Diána Vonnák

To lay bare the inarticulate self as it is thrown into the violent mould of the world—and to uphold the captured encounter without commentary.

Because language is like night-time. Moist,
an indecipherable series of grunts. Pure dread, and
inchoate visceral shrieking. It is inhuman.

from “On the wings of freedom“

The Dispossessed, Szilárd Borbély’s first novel (translated by Ottilie Mulzet), was published in Hungary in 2013, just a year before he took his own life. Its reception was exalted, the scope of its success overwhelming and somewhat unexpected. Until then, Borbély had been primarily known as a poet, whose voice stood starkly apart from the literary mainstream’s travesties, veneration of subjectivity, and l’art pour l’art games with language. Instead, Borbély reached back to Baroque liturgical forms, motives of Hasidic folklore, and he crafted a depersonalised voice so as to hone in on the roots of the self: the stuttering of fear, grief, hope. In other words, he fused the interpersonal and the formalised with barely articulate and verbal intimacy. The relationship between language and the body was at the heart of this fusion: he wrote about the physicality of speech, the sequence of aging that connects birth and death, about the immediacy of sensory life and the brutality of this immediacy.

This poetic voice was not simply an aesthetic choice for him. Rather, it stemmed from a realisation that the world is fundamentally different from “the language we live by” and that much of it “cannot even be expressed as questions, or formulated as problems.”[1] For him, the world existed in a rawness that defied legal and moral constructs, be they about human rights or divine redemption. It defied the very rules of language. Crime—raw and immediate—is only arbitrarily linked to punishment, and only when it is too late. Law alone could never prevent the killer from entering the room. Imre Kertész—the Holocaust survivor novelist who won Hungary’s only Nobel in literature—saw no reason not to expect that you can be shot anytime, anywhere. Similarly, Borbély was acutely aware of how thin the coat of law was and how in vain it existed in the face of brutality, especially after the house-break that led to his mother’s homicide.

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Translator’s Diary: Vincent Kling

March 29, 2017  |  in Essays, Translator's Diary  |  by Vincent Kling

this dehumanization excises the heart of the crime story, its exploration of community, of which language is the most unmistakable evidence.

This month Vincent Kling gives us his take on what Die Strudlhofstiege isn’t—detective fiction—and its main protagonist, language.

“a collection of scenes, dialogues, and portraits,
humorous or affecting, intermixed with much wit,
and with much learning, original or borrowed.”

—Walter Scott on Laurence Sterne

“to the highest excess rambling, excursive, and
intermingled with the greatest absurdities.”

—Scott on Rabelais

What Strudlhofstiege Isn’t. It doesn’t take long for a motivated reader of Strudl­hofstiege to develop cognitive dissonance. Does any other novel so totally thwart the “Apparent Narrative Rationale”—George Saunders’s name for “what the writer and reader have tacitly agreed the book is ‘about’” (The Braindead Megaphone)? Behind the three-pillared façade erected by realist-minded readers and upheld by Doderer’s impish misdirection—the intricate plot, the memorable characters, the vivid settings—stands a novel shaped from vastly different models and traditions.

Strudlhofstiege is brilliantly plotted; all that’s missing is a plot. The novel undercuts rising action by “building up” to a horrible accident that was announced in the very first sentence. Other elements are patchworks of trite set pieces and inane crime-story devices requisitioned with such overt irony as to throw the very foundations of narrative into question—an unsuspected twin, an inept plan to smuggle cigarettes, an elopement foiled by an irate father. Doderer himself wrote, “A work of narrative art is all the more successful the less one can get an idea of it through a plot summary.” As early as 1928, Ronald A. Knox had drawn up a tongue-in-cheek “Decalogue” of “thou-shalt-nots” for detective fiction; number 10 forbade twins or doubles, but Doderer treats us to both.

The characters are striking, but as dexterously elaborated variations on ancient types or stock figures, not as individuals like those found in Dostoyevsky or James, Proust or Mann. Herr Stangeler is the classic peevish old man, the senex iratus, for instance: Scheichsbeutel the cunning servant, the servus callidus; Editha Pastré the strumpet ormeretrix; Eulenfeld the blustering soldier, miles gloriosus; and Thea Rokitzer the innocent young girl, the puella delicata morphed into the Viennese “süßes Mädl.” These unforgettable characters function as vehicles, not ends in themselves, just as Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus in Ulysses are symbolic recreations of Odysseus and Telemachus as well as brilliantly plausible modern Dubliners.

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Crime on the Island: Interviewing Cheryl Tan of “Singapore Noir”

August 6, 2014  |  in Interviews  |  by Nicole Idar

An interview with Cheryl Tan, editor of the first Singaporean crime fiction anthology published in the United States

Singapore has one of the world’s lowest homicide rates, but much like its partner in (low) crime, Iceland, it’s fertile ground for noir stories. Launched this month, ten years after the release of Brooklyn Noir, is Brooklyn-based Akashic Books’ newest title in its bestselling series of Noir anthologies, Singapore Noir, edited by the Singaporean writer Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, a former staff writer at the Wall Street Journal and author of A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family.

Nicole Idar: Singapore is the fourth Asian city to boast an Akashic Books Noir anthology, after Delhi, Manila, and Mumbai (Seoul is forthcoming). Can you tell us how Singapore Noir came about?

Cheryl Tan: I’d long admired New York publisher Akashic Books’ award-winning Noir series—a series of anthologies, and there are dozens by now, each one set in a country or a city. Brooklyn Noir was a personal favorite but you also have everything from Baltimore Noir to Paris Noir. Some really big names have edited these collections of dark stories set in these locales—Joyce Carol Oates edited New Jersey Noir, for example, and Dennis Lehane edited Boston Noir.

In November 2011, I was at the Miami Book Fair, speaking about A Tiger in the Kitchen, my first book. At the authors’ party, mystery writer extraordinaire S.J. Rozan introduced me to Johnny Temple, Akashic’s publisher. I told Johnny how much I loved his noir series but asked why there hadn’t been a Singapore Noir. He said it was because he didn’t know any Singaporean writers. And S.J. said, “Well now you do.”  

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In Review: Marek Hłasko’s Killing the Second Dog

April 28, 2014  |  in Reviews  |  by Yardenne Greenspan

First published in Polish in 1965, Tomasz Mirkowicz's translation of a crime novel set in Tel Aviv is a delight.

Killing the Dog by Marek Hłasko, translated from the Polish by Tomasz Mirkowicz, New Vessel Press, 2014

Marek Hłasko’s novel, Killing the Second Dog, is set in Tel Aviv, but it isn’t any Tel Aviv that I know. Not only the years that separate my Israel (I was born there in 1982) from the novel’s newly independent Israel of the early 1950s account for this lack of familiarity. Nor is it the fact that Killing the Second Dog is, essentially, a crime novel. Hłasko’s Tel Aviv is an identity-less city, where a multitude of languages is spoken and a variety of currencies is exchanged. Still overcoming British rule and catering to the many post-war tourists financing its new path, this Israel offers itself up for grabs, trying, in spite of the suffocating heat and the shoddy infrastructure, to constitute as small an interruption as possible.

The central feeling of estrangement, however, the gnawing discomfort I felt as I read this book, came from the fact that my Tel Aviv, and especially the beach, where the bulk of the novel is set, is nothing if not laid-back. Traffic jams, bad parking, sweltering heat—they all fade into the feeling of a constant vacation, of beers on rickety wooden tables and sooty flip-flop-clad feet.

Hłasko, on the other hand, presents readers with a Tel Aviv that is constructed from bricks of anxiety. In a town cursed by the dry desert wind, Hłasko’s protagonists, Jacob and Robert, are surrounded by lowlifes, criminals and lost souls. Their Israel is one of jail time, seedy hotels, dirty deals and sweaty beds. Jacob is constantly looking for something of his own, but everything he ever has—the dog, his room, a towel—must be shared with another.

The plot is simple. Two Eastern European nobodies are romance con artists. Robert, a former theatre director who believes plays were meant to be performed in real life rather than on stage, writes lines for Jacob, the good-looking one, and with the help of a charming dog (which must be replaced with each iteration of their scheme), they trick rich American tourists into falling in love with Jacob and paying his fictitious debts off so that he may join them in the United States. The money is pocketed, the relationship falls through, on to the next victim.

But the script Robert had come up with is so inventively ridiculous that it creates a circus of sorts on the beachfront: Jacob is to play an angry, miserable and belligerent man in order to win the love of kindly women. In a fit of rage, realizing that he would never be able to join his beloved in America and wanting to hurt her and himself, making him appear cruel and heartless in her eyes, he must shoot the dog, his only possession, and then attempt suicide by swallowing sleeping pills. This is no fraud—the dog is now dead, and on at least one occasion Jacob alludes to, the forged suicide attempt had almost culminated in very real death.

And the most ludicrous part is, by Jacob’s own testimony, the two don’t ever do much with the money they swindle out of the women. Most of it pays for the dog’s food, and the rest is spent on cheap movies and cigarettes. While Jacob laments not having been born rich, while he is plagued with guilt for his lowly way of life and refuses to talk about one of his victims, who, after being admitted to a mental health institution, had killed herself over his betrayal, he never attempts to change his situation. He mentions previous occupations, all leading him in some way or another to serve time in prison. He enjoys conning his own partner, and has no interest whatsoever in finding real love. He is an aspiring actor who hates acting and an aspiring writer who won’t write. He dreams of a room of his own to disappear into with his books. But he, and all the other characters in Killing the Second Dog, know only how to dream, incapable of making their dreams come true. Whenever he stumbles upon a chance for real emotion and true bravery, he makes sure to squash it as best he can. In the book’s touching final scene, Jacob makes a weak attempt to take over the role of director of his own life, but it’s just another meaningless scene in the fiction of his life. In many ways, he is the second dog that must be sacrificed for the show to go on.

Unkempt, unwashed, unpleasant and unethical, Jacob and Robert appear not as the Big Bad Wolves of Tel Aviv. Instead, they read like two empty shells conjuring up the remains of their strength, whatever was left of them after communism and World War II had its way with them back in the home country. We learn little of their personal histories, but enough to know they have been traumatized in ways that, left untreated, lead men to nothing but more violence, more hate. In their pathetic aggressiveness, they manage to overcome readers’ distaste for them and become almost sympathetic.

This feat is greatly thanks to Hłasko’s talent of blending the old with the new in practically imperceptible ways. Bringing up small anecdotes from his characters’ past (“I didn’t learn anything in school. I misbehaved so badly they used to make me stand in a corner with my face to the wall. That was my punishment. You have to admit that under those circumstances I didn’t stand a chance of learning anything. Even the gym teacher would throw me out the door,” “My real father was a good and gentle man who died when I was six”), he accentuates just how empty their present is—their future, most likely, nonexistent. His cool, staccato style is held back for moments when one of the characters lets slip a sentimental run-on statement, puncturing a reader’s seemingly already-made-up mind.

Tomasz Mirkowicz has created a translation simultaneously exotic and familiar, resulting in a sense of pleasant disorientation. Without explaining too much about the time and place, avoiding the temptation toward footnotes, he serves English readers the colloquial style of dialogue and narrative in an easy, palatable and familiar way, only to then surprise them with a punch of that delightful strangeness, which is often the most pleasurable part of reading translated work. This is a novel that will haunt me, like a dog.

***

Yardenne Greenspan, Asymptote editor-at-large for Israel, has an MFA in Fiction and Translation from Columbia University. In 2011 she received the American Literary Translators’ Association Fellowship. Her translation of Some Day, by Shemi Zarhin, was chosen for World Literature Today’s 2013 list of notable translations. Yardenne’s translations include work by Rana Werbin, Gon Ben Ari, Nahum Werbin, Vered Schnabel, Kobi Ovadia, Yirmi Pinkus, Ron Dahan, Alex Epstein and Yaakov Shabtai. Her fiction, essays and translations have been published in Hot Metal Bridge, Two Lines, Words Without Borders, Necessary Fiction, Agave, World Literature Today, Shelf Unbound and Asymptote, among other publications. She is currently working on her first novel.