Posts filed under 'Deep Vellum'

What’s New in Translation: October 2024

October 14, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ben Goldman, Christopher Higgs, Jonathon Atkinson, and Matilda Nevin

Discover new work from Turkey, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Cameroon, Sweden, Chile, France, and Cuba!

In this month’s roundup of newly published translations, we introduce nine works from nine countries: Turkey, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Cameroon, Sweden, Chile, France, and Cuba. From a politically tuned memoir embedded with a familial conscience to a series of poems that consider diasporic experience through the lens of spectatorship—read on to find out more! 

WaitingfortheFear

Waiting for the Fear by Oğuz Atay, translated from the Turkish by Ralph Hubbell, New York Review Books, 2024

Review by Christopher Higgs

The oft quoted line from Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, “Hell is other people,” reverberates conceptually across Oğuz Atay’s Waiting For The Fear like a heavy skipping stone slumping across the surface of dark waters. Yet, in each of the collection’s eight stories, a confounding tension arises between the book’s Sartrean misanthropy and another seemingly competing desire: a strong craving to communicate, a yearning to connect. While Atay’s characters avoid human contact, holding deep disdain and even loathing for other people, they still thrum with a surreal pulse, a quivering mixture of rage and sadness in which their hatred comingles with a cry of the heart; they are desperate to embrace, to be accepted, to be acknowledged and valued, to be seen and heard by others. Six of the eight stories, for example, are epistolary, while the others rely on letters as plot devices. When the concept of written communication isn’t foregrounded, the narratives still hinge on concepts of storytelling, connecting, and sharing. READ MORE…

Among the Drift Ice: Larissa Kyzer on Modern Icelandic Literature in Translation

May 15, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

A lot of the best outlets for Icelandic literature in English translation are actually based in Iceland.

Larissa Kyzer translates from the Icelandic works in a wide range of genres, including novels, short stories, and poetry; microplays and film scripts; picture books, chapter books for young readers, and YA fantasies; essays and nonfiction; daily news, and more. Her recent projects include the Impostor Poets’ Manifesto; “A Radio Operator Goes Hunting,” a stand-alone excerpt from art curator-turned-author Steinunn G. Helgadóttir’s first, as-yet-available in English novel; “Bookworm in a Chrysalis,” an essay reflecting on immigration, language-learning, and a lifelong love of books by Natasha S.; and “On the Edge,” a special issue of new and timely writing from Iceland, which she curated for Words Without Borders in 2021. She’s also a writer herself, and has published book reviews (mostly focusing on contemporary Nordic and Icelandic literature), travel writing, personal essays, and articles (most while working as the staff journalist for The Reykjavík Grapevine). 

In this interview, I conversed with Larissa about the changing landscape of contemporary literature and literary translation in Iceland, her translation process, and her work to build a more inclusive literary world. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Before the First World War, translations of Icelandic writings were mostly into German, English, and Scandinavian languages. Eventually, the translations expanded to other languages such as Chinese, Georgian, Gaelic, Esperanto, Slovenian, Macedonian, Uzbek, and even French, Dutch, and Japanese. But this was the landscape of literary translation until the mid-70s through the early 90s, according to Cornell University Press’ Bibliography of Modern Icelandic Literature in Translation. What’s the scene of literary translation in Iceland these days like? 

Larissa Kyzer (LK): Thanks to Iceland’s fabulous landscapes and nature (not least its volcanic eruptions, which the country has had four of in the last four months), its perennial popularity as a tourist destination, and its status as a small, European island nation of many listacle-able quirks, there is always at least some demand for Icelandic literature in translation, although the scales still tilt towards crime fiction, as they do for most, if not all, of the Nordic countries. Per the Publishers Weekly Translation Database, which covers first-time English translations “distributed through conventional means” in the United States, there have been 93 Icelandic books translated into English since 2008, when the folks at Open Letter Books started collecting this data. 44 of them (that is, nearly half) are crime novels. Consider that in 2019 (the most recent year data was collected), 1,712 books were published in Iceland, whereas in 2008, at the height of the country’s boom years, we saw the publication of 2,125 books—in a single year. For a country with a population currently hovering around just under 400,000, that’s pretty impressive. But we’re only getting a fraction of this wealth in English.

A sidenote, because I think it’s interesting, and also worth highlighting: the figures for Icelandic literature in English translation are still way more heartening than you see for many so-called minority languages, including ones that have far more speakers. For example, there are about 5.4 million speakers of Finnish worldwide; according to the Translation Database, only 88 Finnish books have been published in English translation since 2008. Thirteen million people speak Greek; only 70 Greek books have been published in English in the same time period. Almost 40 million people speak Thai worldwide; only 3 English-language translations of Thai titles are listed in the database. Hindi has over 600 million speakers; only 14 Hindi-language books have been translated into English in the last 16 years. There’s a lot that can be inferred from these numbers—not least that there is obviously a significant Eurocentricity in English-language publishing—but the baseline point is that as English-language readers, we’re only ever getting access to a tiny sliver of the literature that exists in the world.

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A Pointed Atemporality: Mui Poopoksakul on Translating Saneh Sangsuk’s Venom

June 22, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Barbara Halla

He's very aware of the rhythm and musicality of this text . . . he said it should take something like an hour and thirty-seven minutes to read.

In our May Book Club selection, a young boy struggles with a snake in the fictional village of Praeknamdang, in a tense battle between beauty and cruelty. In poetic language that is nostalgic for the world it describes without romanticizing it, Saneh Sangsuk creates a complex and captivating world. In this fable-like story there are no simple morals, in keeping with Sangsuk’s resistance to efforts to depict a sanitized view of Thailand and to the idea that the purpose of literature is to create a path to social change. In this interview with translator Mui Poopoksakul, we discuss the role of nature in the text, translating meticulous prose, and the politics of literary criticism.

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.   

Barbara Halla (BH): How did you get into translation, especially given your law background?

Mui Poopoksakul (MP): I actually studied comparative literature as an undergrad, and then in my early twenties, like a lot of people who study the humanities, I felt a little bit like, “Oh, I need to get a ‘real job.’” I went to law school, and I worked at a law firm for about five years, and I liked that job just fine, but it just wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. 

So, I started thinking, What should I be doing? What do I want to do with myself? I had always wanted to do something in the literary field but didn’t quite have the courage, and I realized that not a lot of Thai literature been translated. I thought, If I can just get one book out, that would be really amazing. So, I went back to grad school. I did an MA in Cultural Translation at the American University of Paris, and The Sad Part Was was my thesis from that program. Because I had done it as my thesis, I felt like I was translating it for something. I wasn’t just producing a sample that might go nowhere.

The whole field was all new to me, so I didn’t know how anything worked. I didn’t even know how many pages a translation sample should be. But then I ended up not having to worry about that because I did the book as my thesis.

BH: You mentioned even just one book, but did you have any authors in mind? Was Saneh Sangsuk one of those authors in your ideal roster?

MP: I wouldn’t say I had a roster, but I did have one author in mind and that was Prabda Yoon, and that really helped me get started, because I wasn’t getting into the field thinking, “I want to translate.” My thought was, “I want to translate this book.” I think that helped me a lot, having a more concrete goal. 

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What’s New in Translation: June 2023

June 12, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon, Samantha Siefert, and Xiao Yue Shan

New work from Shumona Sinha, Dorothy Tse, and Berta Dávila!

In this month’s selection of the best in translated literature, our editors present a selection of texts that range from the intimate, to the surreal, to the furious. From Galicia, a mother writes a poetic rumination of abortion and post-partum depression. From Hong Kong, a love story unfolds between two unlikely characters as the city clamours in protest. From France, an interpreter gives a searing account of the immigration system and its many failures, in the aftermath of her own violent act.

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The Dear Ones by Berta Dávila, translated from the Galician by Jacob Rogers, 3Times Rebel Press, 2023

Review by Samantha Siefert, Marketing Manager

Five years after becoming a mother, a woman chooses to have an abortion. This uneasy duality forms the premise of Galician author Berta Dávila’s intimate, probing exploration of motherhood in her memoir, The Dear Ones, now available in an excellent English translation by Jacob Rogers. “It takes nine months for a child to form in the womb and be born, but no one knows how long it takes for a mother to do the same,” Dávila muses, never pretending to know or even seek a precise answer to the unstated question, instead dedicating this short but intense novel to articulating plainly the spaces between the themes of motherhood—the ones discussed openly, and the ones that are not.

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What’s New in Translation: November 2022

November 14, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Chinmay Rastogi, Laurel Taylor, and Samantha Siefert

New work from Danish, Chinese, and Russian!

In this month’s of newly released translations, we are featuring works that traverse across landscapes of psychology, politics, perspectives, and coastal enclaves. From a travelogue that corporealizes a vision into reality, a fragmented ghost story that equally interrogates readership with writership, and a psychically dense political fiction that follows the twists of truths into fictions, these works are full of metamorphoses, imaginations, and materializations—all that possible within the realm of the text.

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A Line in the World, A Year on the North Sea Coast by Dorthe Nors, translated from the Danish by Caroline Waight, Graywolf Press, 2022

Review by Samantha Siefert, Marketing Manager

A line extends from Skagen, Denmark to Den Helder, Holland—a complex, jagged, six hundred mile stretch of coast. On a map, it is a fixed mark, something definite and present, representing a real place that exists today: the division between land and sea, a place of dunes and marshes, sweeping tides, surging storms, wind farms, gulls, and people. In A Line in the World, A Year on the North Sea Coast, celebrated Danish author Dorthe Nors asserts her dream for this line to be less static and more flexible, persistently animated, always moving, ever changing, evolving with its points marked in time just as much in time as they are in space. Her line reverberates heritage and memory, holidays, tragedy, Vikings, shipwrecks, disco ferries, and local gossip. In this first work of nonfiction, Nors brings Denmark’s western coast to life in fourteen essays, now available in a beautiful translation by Caroline Waight.

Each essay offers an exquisite, layered exploration of a different stretch of that wild North Sea coast, and the first one begins at the top. Nors is from west Jutland, but she has found herself living in Copenhagen, with a noisy neighbor next door and a hash dealer below, and she comforts herself there with sounds of the sea played through an app on her phone. She did not plan to write a book of essays (she was supposed to be working on a novel), but her publisher was insistent. They asked, and then they asked again.

I said, ‘I’ll have to think it over,’ and I did. Or I dreamt. In the dream, I was setting off across the landscape in my little Toyota. I saw myself escaping several years of pressure from the media by driving up and down the coast. Me, my notebook and my love of the wild and desolate. I wanted to do the opposite of what was expected of me. It’s a recurring pattern in my life. An instinct.

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Announcing Our September Book Club Title: No Windmills in Basra by Diaa Jubaili

September 29, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

[Jubaili] departs from reality and time to scratch at those seemingly eternal themes so often associated with fairy tales.

In this fantastic, sobering, and imagistic collection, Diaa Jubaili uses the folktale traditions of Iraq to reflect newly on war, country, and national history. Unlike traditional legends, where magic lives in the world as phenomenon and circumstance, the characters of these stories defy their grave realities with feats of imagination, in bold and moving demonstrations of how the mind can transcend matter. In humanizing the struggles of Iraq across its conflicts, Jubaili addresses the horrors of war with philosophical wit and metaphysical possibility.

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.

No Windmills in Basra by Diaa Jubaili, translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti, Deep Vellum, 2022

On the surface, fairy tales should theoretically be easy to translate (if there is a world in which translation is easy); they’re usually simplistically narrated, lexically limited, and short. But of course, texts that seem simple on the surface can often turn out to be immensely difficult, and in the case of fairy tales, perplexing questions arise almost immediately, because so much of what they impart depends on a reader’s pre-existing cultural knowledge. Can any of us remember a time when we didn’t know the story of Little Red Riding Hood?

The challenges of translation are made even more evident when the fairy tales are intended for adults, as is the case with Diaa Jubaili’s stories in No Windmills in Basra, translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti. In this collection of tales—some less than a page long, some ranging over several pages—Jubaili engages slantwise with the history of Iraq and Basra over the past seventy years. Rather than writing a collection of realist fiction, the author departs from reality and time to scratch at those seemingly eternal themes so often associated with fairy tales.

In the opening story of the collection, “Flying,” for example, a security guard named Mubarak thinks often of launching airborne as he guards the chickens at a poultry plant south of Basra.

. . . he flew twice—not on a plane, or by means of a hot air balloon or parachute, and not even on a giant demon’s wings or a magic carpet as happened so often in the tales from the Thousand and One Nights. Nor was he an admirer of the medieval scientist-inventor Ibn Firnas, who dreamed of flapping wings and soaring heights, since Mubarak knew that with that sort of thing, he would eventually end up a pile of broken bones on the side of the road.

There is no magic in this story—at least not the kind we associate with fairy tales—but that does not stop Mubarak from experiencing a journey from the everyday to the cosmic. In his first experience with flight, As an infantry soldier whose company is targeted by bombing, he is tossed into the air after a detonation, being sent briefly into a world where a man airborne is not shorthand for a fighter pilot honing in for the kill, but instead a miracle that allows for deferred violence and peace accords. Of course, Mubarak’s flight comes at the expense of his company, all of whom die in the explosion. Fairy tales are fantastic things, but they’re also dangerous things, and miracles usually have exacting prices. In fact, in this story, American munitions are the only means by which Mubarak can again take flight. The djinns and magicians of the Thousand and One Nights have been replaced by the darker realities of modern warfare. READ MORE…

Announcing Our June Book Club Selection: FEM by Magda Cârneci

June 30, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

Cârneci's protagonist is a modern Scheherazade—or is she?

The persuasive potentials of storytelling don’t always hold the life-or-death thrill that they did for the mythical Scheherazade, who spun her narratives to stay alive, but as the profundities of Magda Cârneci’s FEM prove, there is always an enchantment in speaking one’s own experiences to another. Exalted with Cârneci’s celebrated poetics and visceral in its discernment of gendered bodies, our Book Club selection for June is a novel that speaks to our evolving understandings of physicality, sexuality, and selfhood as refracted in societal prisms of sex, femininity, and myth.

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 Q&As with the author or the translator of each title!

FEM by Magda Cârneci, translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter, Deep Vellum, 2021

In the very first lines of FEM, the protagonist—a fictionalized version of author Magda Cârneci—compares herself to the mythical heroine Scheherazade, then immediately troubles the comparison: “A little, everyday Scheherazade in an ordinary neigh­borhood, in a provincial city; your personal Scheherazade, even if you won’t cut my head off in the morning, when I fail to keep you awake all night with extraordinary stories.”

How, then, is she like Scheherazade? She will indeed attempt to enchant her listener, a lover, with a string of stories—but are all women who tell stories like Scheherazade? It is not a simple affinity between the two women that gives meaning to the comparison, but, more fruitfully, the symmetry’s imprecision. Like the north ends of two magnets, the two storytellers’ refusal to meet tantalizes, inviting the reader into the no-man’s land, in which they may question—or even participate in this exchange of identities. Cârneci’s own active approach to living in a body, in fact, is exactly what she begs her listener/reader to adopt, and her appeal is so breathtaking, it’s a wonder anyone could refuse:

We are seeds sown into the brown-black loam of a terrestrial existence, and we must germinate and rise slowly from our fragile burgeoning, our green sprouting, through lay­ers of clay and stone, through bacteria, worms, and insects that wish to devour us, we must pierce through sheets of underground water and enemy root systems, our germi­nations are deviated by contrary forces, deceived by grav­itations and visions, by temptations and traps, but pulled upward by an atavistic, core instinct, along a fragile thread of light, pulled by an inverted, celestial gravity, we are tractable, attracted toward growth at any price . . .

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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. 

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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…

Announcing our February Book Club Selection: “Muslim”: A Novel by Zahia Rahmani

February 28, 2019  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Erik Noonan

She speaks out even though her efforts to liberate herself have only shrunk the bounds of her freedom.

Zahia Rahmani’s “Muslim”: A Novel (translated into English by Matt Reeck and published by Deep Vellum) is a combination of fiction and essay, written with a “stark and uncompromising beauty.” When the novel was first excerpted in Asymptote back in 2015, Matt Reeck highlighted the way in which “The novel’s experimental form stages the gaps between places, and between accepted norms, where a person cast adrift must live.”

Now, Asymptote Book Club subscribers will have a chance to discover this “contemporary classic” in full. You can join our discussion on the Asymptote Book Club Facebook group, or sign up to receive next month’s title via our website.

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“Muslim”: A Novel by Zahia Rahmani, translated from the French by Matt Reeck, Deep Vellum, 2019

Reviewed by Erik Noonan, Assistant Editor

The protagonist of Zahia Rahmani’s “Muslim”: A Novel has lived a life contained within the constraints of a pair of quotation marks. The exercise of her voice in the printed word—French in the original, English in a new translation by Matt Reeck—represents an effort to outtalk the multitude that would mischaracterize her and confine her to a type. She speaks out even though her efforts to liberate herself have only shrunk the bounds of her freedom.

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What’s New in Translation: August 2018

August 9, 2018  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ilker Hepkaner, Jacob Silkstone, Lara Norgaard, and Nestor Gomez

Find respite from the heat with these new reads.

From Icelandic landscapes to art history, August brings with it an exciting new selection of books. Whether you’re looking for a book to pass the hot summer days, or are in the market for inspired poetry, the Asymptote team has something for you in this new edition of What’s New in Translation. And if that’s not enough, head over to the Asymptote Book Club for fresh reads, delivered to your doorstep every month!

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Öræfi: The Wastelands by Ófeigur Sigurðsson, translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith, Deep Vellum, 2018

Reviewed by Jacob Silkstone, Assistant Managing Editor

One of the many epic stories retold in Ófeigur Sigurðsson’s Öræfi: The Wastelands (“that punctuation mark… both pushes words (and worlds) away from one another and means they’re roped together,” according to translator Lytton Smith) is the story of Öræfi itself. Formerly known as Hérað, the Province, a place in which “butter drips from every blade of grass,” it was devastated by the most destructive volcanic eruption in Iceland’s recorded history:

The chronicles record that one morning in 1362 Knappafjells glacier exploded and spewed over the Lómagnúpur sands and carried everything off into the sea, thirty fathoms deep… The Province was destroyed, all its people and creatures annihilated; no sheep or cattle survived, no creatures left alive anywhere… the corpses of people and animals washed up on beaches far and wide… the bodies were cooked and tender and the flesh so loose on the bones it fell apart.

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In Review: Banthology, edited by Sarah Cleave

March 14, 2018  |  in Reviews  |  by Cassie Lawrence

Good stories help us to make sense of the world.

In January 2017, independent British publisher Comma Press announced that in 2018 they would only be publishing authors from ‘banned nations’. This was a response to President Trump’s directive to block entry to citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries for ninety days. Whilst continuing to generate hate and divide people, Trump’s announcement did give rise to some positive news. Organisations around the world stood up to fight for the rights of the citizens of these countries. In a show of solidarity, Asymptote’s Spring 2017 issue featured writing from authors in many of the countries affected. And now, a new title from Comma Press, Banthology: Stories from Unwanted Nations, has just been published in this spirit.

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What’s New in Translation? October 2016

October 13, 2016  |  in New in Translation, News, Reviews  |  by Madeline Jones, Saba Ahmed, and Theophilus Kwek

Asymptote reviews some of the best new books translated from the Arabic, Korean, and Spanish.

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The Ninety-Ninth Floor, by Fawaz Elhassan, tr. Michelle Hartman. Interlink Publishing.

Review: Saba Ahmed, Social Media Manager, UK

Shortlisted last year for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, The Ninety-Ninth Floor is Jana Fawaz Elhassan’s third book: an ambitious, multi-voiced novel, spanning the topographies of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1980s Beirut, and New York in the New Millennium. It is also the first of Elhassan’s works to be translated, by Michelle Hartman, from the Arabic into English.

The plot centers around Maj’d, a successful video-game designer whose life among the dizzying skyscrapers of Manhattan, and the subterranean depths of its subway system, bears a haunting resemblance to the cramped, vertical heights of the refugee camps he has fled where “garbage piled up in alleyways”. Palestine, reflects Maj’d, is “a land that inhabits me that I have never stepped foot on”. It occupies his deepest memories, the walls of the camp where the displaced mark the distance from imagined homelands, and is framed—in the present-day narrative—as a map in Maj’d’s apartment in New York. It is an imagined space where Maj’d’s father obstinately believes his dead wife and Maj’d’s mother is waiting for them with their unborn child.

The spatial dimensions of the novel mirror this hyper-reality. The text is littered with a cast of characters who are attempting to navigate life in the wake of war and political trauma. Consequently, the plot is distended by a lack of closure, permeated with repetitive strains of absence and loss. Maj’d’s relationship with Hilda, a dancer who is also trying to build her life anew, away from her Orthodox Christian family in Lebanon, becomes a battle-space for negotiating distances and originary points from which to examine notions of identity, belonging, and worth. Is the love they share true and authentic, or is there a more complex conflation of the female body and nationhood at play here?

There are certainly echoes of recent political fiction from the Middle East in The Ninety-Ninth Floor, such as of the spare, Kafkaesque political allegory The Silence and the Roar by Syrian writer Nihad Sirees. Yet, Elhassan is less interested in form, and more invested in dissecting the emotional vicissitudes of love. There is a certain sagginess to the novel which gestures to the so-called ninety-nine floors or levels of the book. When Hilda returns to Lebanon, to the home she has left behind, she thinks back to the home she has created with Maj’d. “Perhaps,” she considers, “I also came back to occupy this memory, to tell it that we can arrive at some kind of settlement: to expand into all places and be done with our enmity toward our roots”. It is hard not to read these words without a degree of skepticism, to wonder whether this resolution papers over the allegorical implications of difference and attachment. But perhaps it is more fitting to hear these closing lines echo like the one-note sonic beeps of an Atari or PlayStation video game, like the kind designed by Maj’d. In this simulated fantasy, Elhassan suggests, love is creative and imaginative work in a world where our collective national consciousness consigns us to love and live in very specific ways.

 

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A Greater Music, by Bae Suah, tr. Deborah Smith. Open Letter Books.

Review: Theophilus Kwek, Chief Executive Assistant, UK/Singapore

It is perhaps inevitable that Deborah Smith’s new translation of Bae Suah’s novel A Greater Music—forthcoming this October from Open Letter Books—will be compared to her recent prizewinning translations of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Human Acts, both of which are suffused with Han’s unique voice and vision. But Bae is a compelling, inventive, and significant author in her own right, and Smith’s ability to match these qualities with a stylish and highly readable translation leaves no doubt about her contribution to the growing canon of Korean literature available in English.

A Greater Music, which records the experiences of a young Korean narrator’s relocation to Berlin through her relationships with Joachim, her boyfriend, and M, her first German language teacher, draws at least in part from its author’s own journey. Bae Suah, a former civil servant with a degree in Chemistry who made her literary debut in 1988, lived in Germany for 11 months in 2001, learning the language there. Though she has since moved back to Seoul, she has also previously translated various works by Sebald and Kafka into Korean.

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In Conversation: George Henson, Translator

May 4, 2015  |  in Interviews  |  by Rosie Clarke

Rosie Clarke chats with George Henson, translator of Sergio Pitol's "The Art of Flight"

George Henson is a senior lecturer at UT Dallas, where he specializes in literary translation, translation theory, Spanish language, 20th century Latin American poetry and narrative, and queer literature. His translations of short stories by Mexican author Elena Poniatowska have appeared in Nimrod, Translation Review, The Literary Review, and Puerto del Sol. His translation of Carlos Pintado’s short story “Joy Eslava” was published by Zafra Lit, and his translations of poems by Francisco Morán have appeared in Sojourn and The Havana Reader.

His translation of Sergio Pitol’s The Art of Flight, the first of Pitol’s “Trilogy of Memory,” was published last month by Deep Vellum. Recipient of the Cervantes Prize in 2005, Pitol is considered by many to be Mexico’s greatest living author, but this is his first appearance in English translation. I spoke with George via email about why this could be, and discussed his translation practice and the challenges of working with a multigeneric work like Pitol’s. READ MORE…

On the Dearth of South Asian Translations in the U.S. (Part III)

August 25, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Mahmud Rahman

We can't just blame the publishers when there's a glaring lack of institutional support.

 

Read all posts in Mahmud Rahman’s investigation here.

It would be exciting if an academic publisher steps forward with a contemporary South Asian literature list. Until that day comes, what might be more realistic are initiatives from small publishers. In recent years, besides old stalwarts like NYRB, New Directions, and Dalkey Archive, we’ve seen the emergence of translation-focused publishers like Archipelago, Open Letter, and now, Deep Vellum.

I had a few exchanges with Will Evans, founder of Deep Vellum. As a new kid on the block based in Dallas, Texas, Evans is effervescent about Deep Vellum’s mission. Starting out with a list of five impressive titles translated from French, Russian, Spanish, and Icelandic, their initial plan is to publish ten books a year. In a recent interview with this blog, Evans confidently declared, “Deep Vellum is going to publish translations of literature from every language.”

My conversation with him about South Asian translations revealed that visibility is a problem. Larger publishers may have resources to scout out interesting titles (though one doesn’t see this go beyond certain languages and regions). But smaller publishers rely on information channels that are already in place. READ MORE…