Posts filed under 'fable'

European Literature Days 2023: Literature for a Better World

March 13, 2024  |  in Dispatches  |  by MARGENTO

From the famed literary festival in Krems an der Donau!

Since 2009, acclaimed writers, artists, readers, and friends of literature have gathered in a small Austrian town for four days to attend the European Literature Days festival. With each edition addressing a vital, timely theme of contemporary European writing, the packed program features some of the most brilliant minds across the continent. In the following dispatch, Editor-at-Large MARGENTO reports from this singular event.

The town of Krems an der Donau in Austria is a unique place in Europe, conducive to genuinely special literary and arts events such as the annual European Literature Days. Off the trodden path of regular tourist destinations, it is both compellingly picturesque as well as conveniently distant from the hustle and bustle of the capital, but nevertheless retaining the latter’s intransigence for excellence in higher education and the arts. 

The city’s tortuously narrow medieval streets wind between old churches and traditional pubs, and every now and then, they open upon wide panoramas of the Danube and the terraced vineyards surrounding it, resulting in a landscape both mysterious and inspirational. Ancient, blurred guild symbols and still-colorful frescos of winemaking deities and feasts are punctured by modern glass-and-concrete design and dernier-cri technology logos and landmarks. The stately Minorite Church in the heart of the old town is one such hub that combines rich cultural and architectural traditions with widely relevant contemporary interests and activities; the church is nowadays a generous cultural event and concert hall of excellent acoustics and high-tech video and audio equipment. It was the venue of most of European Literature Days’ 2023 events, while the former monastery’s annexes host a museum, art galleries, and multiple multi-purpose spaces—some of which also played an important role in the logistics of the festival.

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Announcing Our May Book Club Selection: Venom by Saneh Sangsuk

May 31, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla

For every moment of beauty, there is the shadow of cruelty hanging in the background.

A story about the dissolving borders between human and animal, life and death, love and cruelty, Venom by Saneh Sangsuk is a kind of philosophical fairy tale, with both danger and beauty always lurking at its edges. Told through shifting perspectives in poetic prose, this slim novel is densly packed with ideas and energy, providing a thrilling introduction to Sangsuk’s work for English-language readers.

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.

Venom by Saneh Sangsuk, translated from the Thai by Mui Poopoksakul, Peirene Press, 2023

The world is full of poetry; the world is full of cruelty—this is not a contradiction. As I read Saneh Sangsuk’s deceptively slim novel Venom, I was reminded of Laura Gilpin’s “Two-Headed Calf.” At barely nine lines, Gilpin’s poem also has depth that reaches far beyond its brevity. The first stanza begins with a warning (that the idyllic pastoral will soon be disrupted), while the final stanza establishes a heart-wrenching and melancholic portrait of a recently-born, two-headed calf revelling in the light of the moon, “the wind on the grass,” and the warmth of its mother. The beauty of Gilpin’s poem lies in the way it holds two worlds in its lines, but also in how it makes possible for a cruel tomorrow to never arrive. In a sense, by returning to this poem, we are returning to a moment in another world where a two-headed calf—this “freak of nature”—is frozen in an eternal evening of joy and love.

I found in Venom the same sensations, the same negotiation between poetic beauty and cruelty. The former comes quickly and easily, as the book opens with a little boy contemplating a mesmerizing sunset in the Thai countryside: “Over the horizon to the west, the clouds of summer, met from behind by sunlight, glowed strange and lustrous and beautiful.” Additionally, the first thing we learn about this boy is that he was granted the privilege of naming his family’s eight oxen, and he had been eager to fulfil this task with care and artistic flare. He calls the animals by names like “Field, Bank, Jungle and Mountain—Toong, Tah, Pah and Khao,” and “Ngeun and Tong, Silver and Gold,” or “Pet, Ploy, Ngeun and Tong.” These group of names speak to him with prosodic logic: some rhyme, and others provide a chance for alliteration. All in all, they belong to a group of words that “sounded like [they] could be poetry,” a phrase that Sangsuk repeats twice. This act of naming, the author suggests, is an act of writerly creation. While the world is not inherently poetic, some people are more prone to make poetry from its elements. READ MORE…

“Vulnerable” Languages: An Interview with Jim Dingley and Petra Reid

July 20, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Daljinder Johal

The journey of working on this text has led me to look at the whole field of literary translation much more widely than I ever had before.

The translators of Alindarka’s Children, our May Book Club selection, had good reason to think of the text as an enormous challenge. Alherd Bacharevič’s subversive take on Hansel and Gretel is written in a musical tangle of two languages: Russian and Belarusian, addressing the conflict of Belarus’ languages in a powerful tale of intimidation, suppression, and  postcolonial linguistics. Now released in a brilliant medley of English and Scots, the Anglophone edition adds new dynamism to the politics and cultures at work, immersing the reader in the complexities of what language tells and what it holds back. In the following transcription of a live interview, translators Jim Dingley and Petra Reid discuss their process, the pitfalls of classifying a language as “vulnerable”, and the creative potentials of dissonance.

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. 

Daljinder Johal (DJ): What were your first impressions of Alindarka’s Children? And what did you consider when making your respective decisions to work on its translation? 

Jim Dingley (JD): Alindarka’s Children was published in 2014, I first read it in 2015, and my immediate reaction was: how on earth could anybody even begin to translate this? Then, when I was in Edinburgh with Petra, another Belarusian author began talking about this book with great enthusiasm. It suddenly occurred to me then that there is much being said about Scots being a language—distinct from English—and therefore a source of real national identity. With Scotland’s movement towards independence, it seemed to me that we could try to do something by contrasting English with Scots. I found working with Petra very rewarding as well, because she had an innate feeling for what we were trying to do, putting Scots up against “standard” English.

I think this adds a whole new dimension to the book, which is what any translator does when the process is not purely technical. You’re trying to get the sense of something. When you’re translating a book written in two languages, you can only get to the dynamic between them by introducing some realia from a country where another two languages are spoken. That’s why, in Alindarka’s Children, you feel as though you’re both in Scotland and Belarus at times.

Actually, I hope people experience some confusion with this book. It sounds very strange to say, but I think a lot of language is about dissimulation, confusion, leaving the reader to work it out at every stage.

Petra Reid (PR): Jim and I had very different experiences, because he speaks and writes Belarusian, while I have no knowledge of that language. So when I was reading the novel, I was reading Jim’s translation—that was the first time I’d heard of the novel or the author. In a way, I was reading it through Jim’s filter, and in that, it gained the context of a relationship between the English and the Belarusian.

I also came to it as a third party, as a Scot who doesn’t speak Scots—I was frank with everybody from the beginning, I warned them! I’ve got a strong accent, but I don’t speak Scots. The translation, and my work on it, is a personal explanation of my attitude towards Scots.

DJ: Could you expand on how that exploration went and what you got from it?

PR: What I like to do when I’m reading a translation is to try and imagine how the original sounds in my head, so even if you don’t have the exact vocabulary, you can approach the rhythm of it, and different nuances become available.

That’s what I found interesting about Jim’s translation; I was beginning to feel the Belarusian nuances through Jim. It was a two-way mirror, because Jim and I have our own dynamics in terms of how we speak English, and Jim has his own dynamic in terms of how he speaks Belarusian. It was a multidisciplinary, 3-D process, holding all these nuances in your head and trying to find a way to express that on the page. READ MORE…

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!

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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…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from “Brothers” by David Clerson

November 22, 2016  |  in Translations  |  by Katia Grubisic

In his dream, he was walking on the ocean as one might walk across a desert, an ocean covered in bodies, a dry sea, not fit for life.

David Clerson’s Brothers is an original, phantasmagoric piece of fiction that is steeped in myth and fable. In a world of “gruesome, gargantuan creatures, two-headed fish, turtles with shells as big as islands, whales with mouths so large they could consume entire cities,” two brothers set out to find their dog of a father. The elder brother is missing an arm, while his younger brother has been fashioned by his mother from that arm. Excess and adventure abound as fresh, original writing draws us in to “surreal, hostile worlds.” We meet the leech-boys, a wooden puppet the brothers drag from the sea to become a member of the family, six pig-children, and more, all conveyed in a tone that lies somewhere between delirium and a disturbing dream.

The sailboat was small and light, made of wood, and it glided on the ocean, attended by graceful seagulls and a few cormorants. This craft was much easier to handle than the brothers’ rowboat. This time, the older brother headed straight out to the open sea, pushed by fair, warm summer winds.

He had secured Puppet’s head to the bow, leaving his figurehead clad in the grey pelt. Often, the wind would fill the pelt, moving the body and limbs. It seemed to dance at the bow, and it made the older brother smile, a fleeting happiness.

There had been a barrel of fresh water in the boat when he set sail, along with a few dry biscuits and some smoked herring. The older brother ate parsimoniously, nearly fasting, and he almost never slept, his eyes wide open over dark circles carved out by a scalpel.

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“The Fable of God’s Servant, the Unemployed Mr. Fistulka,” by Lidia Amejko

October 10, 2016  |  in Translations  |  by Beatrice Smigasiewicz

When Fistulka had a job, no one on our housing block contemplated the meaning of life.

The unemployed Mr. Fistulka came by our housing bloc, and leaning against the buzzer he pressed all the call buttons at once.

And all at once all went to the buzzer

And all at once all answered

And at once all in different voices, each in their own intonation, melody and pitch, in their own way bellowed loudly into the buzzer:

“Helllllooo?”

“Who is it?”

“Hello?”

“Who’s there?”

“You little fucker, what do you want in the middle of the night?”

As the symphony of voices echoed though the housing block, Fistulka asked in a hushed voice:

“Why am I here?”

I mean to say Fistulka asked about the meaning of his life. Night after night, sounding that same sentence in our heads.

Even Mr. Bolczyk, who survived all the occupations and somehow got a good night’s rest each night, would now only lay in bed staring at the ceiling, then get up nervously and lighting a cigarette, he would bounce around the apartment like a moth beating its wings against a glass lampshade.

And Lalek, the sheet metal worker stopped going to work. He closed down his car repair shop and now sits on the bench under the Osieka Epiphany, fixing his gaze on the periwinkle blue ceiling.

Fistulka infected our housing block with his question. Each of us walked around pale like vampires, tripping from a lack of sleep on the holes in the sidewalk; unemployed because it’s understood that before a person can really start living they have to answer that fundamental, “why?”

Only two places got busier, the church and the supermarket, Jericho. A few even started hanging themselves.

And it’s all because of unemployment: when Fistulka had a job, no one on our housing block contemplated the meaning of life.

In an emergency meeting, our housing block community convened. All heads agreed and a decree was reached to occupy Fistulka with “something.”

But I have to confess that nothing came of it. A strong fraction rose up against the decree. The owner of the supermarket claimed that what differentiates a man from an animal is that a man can search for his own meaning. The priest agreed in collusion like never before, and the one from the Galaxy funeral home chimed in, too.

So Fistulka continued walking around the housing blocks, tormenting people with his stupid question. He probably would have continued for a long time and I don’t know what would have happened to our housing block if the rabbit didn’t finish him off with his ears.

It was like this: Mr. Krasik the hunter that lived on the 20th floor—right next to Ms. Janina, Mr. Obrabek’s and the blunt smoker’s servant— killed a rabbit and hung it out in the freezing cold to get him ready for Christmas eve. The rabbit hung head down, stiff as an icicle, and just as Fistulka walked up under Krasik’s house about to pronounce his, “Why am I here,” the rabbit slipped out from between the rope and speared his ears like two blades into Fistulka’s head.

Then the question became irrelevant because Fistulka was no more.

That’s how the matter resolved happily and on its own. The priest said in a sermon that it was the housing block that we all carry inside us that killed Fistulka along with his question and he declared Fistulka a saint who died a martyr’s death in the hands of the rabbit, a symbol of our housing block’s wickedness (or something like this). And now we live peacefully, without questioning anything.

Only sometimes, when the buzzer rings in the middle of the night do we jump to our feet and wonder about the meaning of life.

Translated from the Polish by Beatrice Smigasiewicz

Lidia Amejko is a playwright and a short story writer. Her publications include When the Mind is Asleep–the Answering Machine Turns On, The Passion in the Bottle, and Stories Out Loud, among others.  She has been nominated multiple times for the prestigious literary NIKE award and translated into German, French and Bulgarian. She often adapts her stories for stage and radio production, and it’s this practice that seems to inform her use of language. Her fabulist style has been compared to Olga Tokarczuk’s. This story is taken from her second book, The Lives of Housing Block Saints, (2008), which was a winner of the Polish Book Editors Prize.  

Beatrice Smigasiewicz is a Fulbright scholar living in Warsaw and an editor-at-large for Asymptote. Her work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Art Papers, Words Without Borders, and BODY, an international online literary journal, among others. She holds an MFA from the Nonfiction Writing program at the University of Iowa, where she also studied literary translation. 

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