Posts filed under 'emotion'

When Meaning Fails Us: A Review of A Sun to be Sewn by Jean D’Amérique

February 2, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Sofija Popovska

Language is not only adjacent to violence in this novel, but comes to physically embody it . . .

A Sun to be Sewn by Jean D’Amérique, translated from the French by Thierry Kehou, Other Press, 2023

March of 2023 will bring A Sun to be Sewn, a novel by Haitian poet, playwright, and novelist Jean D’Amérique, translated from the French by Thierry Kehou, to bookshelves around the world. D’Amérique explores ravaged landscapes of the city and the heart, delves deep into wounds collective and individual, and parses fragments of hope shored against the ruin of a land ravaged by violence and destitution. Recounting the story of a young Haitian girl fleeing from a cruel prophecy and into the arms of her beloved, treading a path that weaves amidst the dangers of her Port-au-Prince slum, D’Amérique unfolds a panorama of pain and courage, death and desire, telling all in a wounded lyrical style that haunts the reader long after the novel’s end.

A Sun to be Sewn is narrated by a talented young girl, known to the reader as Cracked Head, living in a slum in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Her mother, Orange Blossom, is a prostitute struggling with alcohol addiction, “drowning,” as Cracked Head puts it, “to draw her halo from the abyss.” Her adoptive father, Papa, makes money from various criminal activities, working for a cruel and powerful man known as the Angel of Metal. Cracked Head is no stranger to crime herself, as it provides for survival which would otherwise be impossible. Even so, she lives off of “bread and sweetened water,” anchoring her hope in the image of her beloved: Silence, the daughter of her teacher.
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Different Ships on the Same Ocean: Jennifer Croft in conversation with High as the Waters Rise author Anja Kampmann and translator Anne Posten

January 13, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Jennifer Croft

. . . one needs to be very sensitive towards this structure, which is both a structure of memory and time as well as emotion.

In the fall of 2018, translator Anne Posten told me about a German book she had fallen in love with, about oil rig workers, male intimacy, the nature of memory, and the cost of freedom. I begged her to send me the pages she had translated that same night and was bowled over from the very first sentence. Two years later, I had the honor of publishing at Catapult Anja Kampmann’s debut novel, High as the Waters Rise, in Anne’s translation, which promptly became a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award in Translated Literature.

High as the Waters Rise is the story of Waclaw, a man who grew up in a German mining town and has been working on oil platforms across the world for twelve years. When Waclaw loses his closest companion in an accident on the rig, he must embark on a journey of grief and reckoning. 

Of course we all depend on the oil industry, even if the workers who run it are invisible to us. This novel makes that exploitation not only visible but intimate and personal. It is a politically urgent story, exploring the problems of a globalized capitalist society. But more than anything, it is the story of one man who stands at the margins of that society, asking what his life is worth.

Before we published it here, High as the Waters Rise had already been well received in Germany, where it won several awards and was nominated for the German Book Prize. But international literature in English translation, particularly by debut authors, must find passionate champions in order to succeed. We were thrilled when the novel found such a champion in author, critic, and translator Jennifer Croft, who alongside author Olga Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Flights. 

Below, Jennifer discusses with Anja and Anne the translation process, its challenges and intimate nature, and what it means to translate a person into another language. I hope that their conversation might inspire you to read High as the Waters Rise, which Jennifer Croft has said contains “prose with the brightness of poetry, in a splendidly lucid translation.”

—Kendall Storey, Editor & Foreign Rights Manager, Catapult

Jennifer Croft (JC): How did you two meet and come to this project? How did you decide to work together? Anne, maybe you could also speak a bit about how you generally choose your translation projects.

Anja Kampmann (AK): Anne and I met years ago when I was a fellow at the International Writing Program in Iowa. We’ve been in touch ever since, as she developed her professional career as a translator and I wrote a book of poetry and High as the Waters Rise. But I never expected her to do the translation for High as the Waters Rise, just because I respect her so much in her own work. I couldn’t believe it when Anne told me that she had fallen in love with the novel and wanted to translate it. Her translation sample was wonderful and she caught the spirit and rhythm of the book right away.

Anne Posten (AP): In a way, High as the Waters Rise has been a long time in the making. Anja and I met in 2010. I had just moved to New York to start grad school at Queens College and still felt a bit like a country mouse in the big city. A mutual friend knew Anja wanted to come to New York after her time at the International Writers’ Program in Iowa and asked me if I wouldn’t mind hosting her. I said yes. Luckily, Anja and I became fast friends, and we still cherish memories from that time when we were both discovering the city and getting to know each other. We’ve kept in touch ever since, and over the course of these ten years, I fell in love with and started translating Anja’s poetry and visited her several times in Germany. In that time she published her first poetry collection and I my first book-length translations, and then Anja’s debut novel Wie hoch die Wasser steigen came out, to great success in Germany. I was thrilled for her, and entranced by the text. It was amazing to be so familiar with Anja’s poetry and then see, like magic, that same voice and style turned into a novel. I did a sample translation and wrote a long report on the novel, which I sent out to almost all of the editors I know, plus some I didn’t. There was a lot of initial interest and then, much to my surprise and dismay, radio silence. I was feeling pretty frustrated when I ran into Kendall unexpectedly on a trip to New York in November 2018 and heard that she’d started working for Catapult. When we met for drinks, Kendall asked if there was anything I might want to pitch her. I told her about the book and she was immediately intrigued. I sent her my sample and report, and the rest is history. I can still hardly believe it all worked out so perfectly—getting to work on a book I care so much about, written by a friend, and edited by someone I respect, like, and trust so much as Kendall.

AK: Yes, it felt like a perfect match. Also, it was great to have a friend by my side for the American translation, after almost five years I spent writing the book. READ MORE…

Beauty and Violence: Sophie Hughes on Translating Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season

May 13, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Andrew Adair

I belong to the school of whatever produces a text that doesn't sound like it has been squeezed through a mangle to get to where it is.

A few months back, I read Fernanda Melchor’s Temporada de huracanes in its original Spanish in only two short sittings. The Mexican author’s breathless prose almost demands this; putting the book down feels like walking away from a friend who is ripping you, between gasps, through one of the most harrowing stories you’ve ever heard. Among the myriad feelings I had on finishing the book was a combination of pity and excitement for the poor but lucky soul that would translate it. Perhaps you’ve already heard the list of Melchor’s stylistic choices: endlessly winding sentences, paragraphs that last chapters, and a slew of slang that even some Mexicans might need to ask their filthiest-mouthed friend to translate from Spanish into Spanish. Happily, in the end, it was Sophie Hughes, Fitzcarraldo Editions, and New Directions who brought this torrential narrative downpour to English readers, giving it the carefully considered translation it deserves.

The following interview with Hughes is as much about the practical element and the psychological toll of translating such a dense work (both in technique and in content) as it is about the field of translation and the modern relationship between the Spanish and English languages. For this reason, my questions are a bit scattered, but fortunately, Hughes’s answers are not!

—Andrew Adair

Andrew Adair (AA): Were you met with claims of “untranslatability” when people heard you were translating this work? Did you have this doubt yourself?

Sophie Hughes (SH): Not untranslatability in so many words. There is a tweet floating around somewhere—written in Spanish and sent to Fernanda and me—that I think sums up the general response to the book’s translation:

“How do you translate Hurricane Season? Incredible job by the translator if she managed to even remotely reproduce the feeling of reading the original, especially when she isn’t jarocha [from Veracruz] or Mexican and doesn’t understand half of it.”

Hurricane Season has been something of a literary sensation in Mexico and Latin America, striking cords and hitting nerves with many readers, so it makes sense that some of them should respond emotionally to its translation, even feel protective over it. It’s a difficult book, but I knew what I was getting myself into, and actually, the way the prose is structured, without paragraph breaks and with very long, circumambulatory sentences, made the translation quite a compulsive activity, even when the content was grueling or the slang particularly thick. It is meticulously written in the original, which usually makes a text supremely translatable.

AA: On the subject of doubt, do you ever question whether you’re the right person for the job? Not as a question of skill but rather, sensibility?

SH: I regularly suffer from crises of confidence. In this case, though, I did and still do feel I had the right sensibility for the job: I finished reading Temporada de huracanes with a head full of beautiful images, not just violent ones. I could not shake, for example, the passage describing a group of young men being admired by a lustful onlooker as they worked the sugar cane fields; an image that seems to slip the bonds of the nightmarish reality of the book’s world (pages 18-19 of the New Directions edition). I also found acute moments of catharsis dotted throughout the book, which add light and shade to its otherwise stubbornly miserable action—something like Mrs. Ramsey’s “matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.” Fernanda’s characters moved as much as they shocked me—I felt tenderly towards her monsters. Maybe subliminally I understood these as signs that I had the right sensibility for the job, so at that point I said to my husband: I’ll translate a sample and be honest with myself about whether I have the skill to pull this off. And I could hear Temporada de huracanes in that sample. I knew I could do it. One day I hope someone retranslates it so that I can read it afresh. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Don’t Cry” by Mohamed M. Farrag

October 15, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Essam M. Al-Jassim

“Men don’t cry, whatever happens.” And then he wiped my tears.

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the work of Mohamed M. Farrag. The prose is short, succinct, and hits like a hammer—much like the vision of masculinity embodied in the story. Enigmatic messages, the codes that construct subjects along certain lines, flow freely between a boy and his grandfather. These messages transport generational models of masculine repression as they are passed down; in just a few lines, Farrag aptly demonstrates the ways in which the social codes that dictate behavior are transferred. However, the end of the story leaves us with a question: can the script of behavior be broken by reflection and release? Or is this too a planned movement, derived from what came before? Regardless, the emotions captured here are delivered with an uncanny availability: the rhythms that the translator pulls from the original present an ordinary scene that makes one feel as if the answer to some pressing, universal question is close at hand. But the true answer is only a choice: to show or to hide.

He sat beside his dying grandfather; a man known for his cruel heart. He’d never seen him cry. ‎Gently, the grandfather caught his grandson’s hand. “Do you know, son, what my father ‎told me when he saw me crying on the day of my mother’s death?”‎

“No.” The young boy shrugged.

He said, “Men don’t cry, whatever happens.” And then he wiped my tears. “When my wife died your ‎mother was still young. Her death stung me, but I didn’t cry in front of her. I didn’t want her to fall apart. I ‎kept my tears inside.” READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2019

April 22, 2019  |  in News  |  by Jonathan Egid, Nina Perrotta, and Xiao Yue Shan

Join our blog editors as they explore everything the Spring 2019 issue has to offer!

The Spring 2019 issue of Asymptote, “Cosmic Connections,” features work from 27 countries and 17 different languages. If you’re not sure where to begin, our blog editors have you covered with recommendations for some of their favorite pieces, including an essay about an adventure in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, a story that jumps from medieval Jewish theology to the relationship between an Argentine father and son, and poems that offer us a glimpse into intimate moments in the city of Shanghai.

Asymptote’s newest issue is one of the journal’s best to date, meaning that it was nearly impossible to choose just one piece to highlight. In the interviews section, I found Dubravka Ugrešić’s comments on literary activism and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s discussion of the role of Marxism in his work particularly illuminating, while, in the special feature, Nancy Kline’s essay stood out for its focus on the often-overlooked role of the writer’s (and the translator’s) accent and spoken voice in the translation process. But I’d like to devote my highlight to an essay by a somewhat lesser-known writer, one who might otherwise get lost among the many big names that appear in this issue.

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Choose Silence or Dream: Alejandra Pizarnik’s The Galloping Hour in Review

August 13, 2018  |  in Reviews  |  by Rachael Pennington

Looking for your next woman in translation to read? Look no further!

The Galloping Hour: French Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik, Translated from the French by Patricio Ferrari and Forrest Gander, New Directions, 2018

Have you ever been thrown into the deep end of a pool or overcome by a rogue wave, unable to get your bearings and reach the surface for air?

Unpublished during the poet’s lifetime, Alejandra’s Pizarnik’s The Galloping Hour: French Poems (New Directions), translated from the French by Patricio Ferrari (who has also translated the collection into Spanish) and Forrest Gander, tips the reader headfirst into an engulfing, bottomless sea of emotions.

Born in Argentina to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Alejandra grew up ridden with complexes: as a young girl she suffered from acne and was overweight; her European accent in her mother tongue of Spanish made her feel like an outsider wherever she went, and she was plagued by jealousy of her older sister. Although she never openly identified as gay and had difficulty expressing her Jewish identity and her sexuality, she was known to have several female love interests.

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