Posts filed under 'fairy tales'

Slivers of Beauty and Optimism: On Artem Chapeye’s Love Letter to Ukraine

April 25, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Sarah Gear

Chapeye . . . focuses on the effect of these [linguistic] dynamics on the individual and the local rather than society at large.

The Ukraine by Artem Chapeye, translated from the Ukrainian, Russian, and Surzhyk by Zenia Tomkins, Seven Stories Press, 2024

‘This next part is my favorite part of traveling’, the narrator of the Artem Chapeye’s opening story ‘Pan Ivan and the Three Bears’ tells his friends as they are invited into a local man’s mountain home to shelter from the cold. Pan Ivan feeds them borsch and hot tea as he regales them with stories about bears—nearly all ending in death, but all endearing in their own way. Chapeye’s beautifully fairy tale-like opening invites us to explore his provocatively-articled short story collection The Ukraine, translated by Zenia Tomkins. Chapeye—a writer, photographer, and now soldier—wrote these stories between 2010 and 2018, blending fiction with autobiography. Snippets of rural and urban life shot through with perceptive encounters with a rich cast of characters, these stories form a love letter to Ukraine and its people. 

While some stories are told from other characters’ points of view, the narrator of the majority  appears to be Chapeye himself as he travels around Ukraine on a beaten-up motorbike, sometimes accompanied by his wife Oksana. While Ukraine is doubtless the main character, Chapeye himself emerges as the most sympathetic and immediate of storytellers. His ability to see the good in everyone, and his gentle questioning of the people he meets is one of the most endearing aspects of his book.  In ‘A Fancy Send-Off,’ Chapeye—who, in the present day, is a soldier fighting against Russia’s invasion—meets Baba Shura, whom he describes as ‘very Soviet’ because of her view that Russia and Ukraine should be ‘together forever’. Rather than argue with her, Chapeye allows her to voice her opinion, before permitting himself only the most agreeable of disagreements: ‘“They’ve supposedly separated already,” I reply, allowing myself to contradict her, which I only do very, very hesitantly.’ He leaves the subject there, instead describing the elderly lady with warmth: ‘Baba Shura never stops smiling, even when she’s talking about something sad, like that fancy send-off of hers. Periodically, she adjusts her scarf. She looks at me kindly. She’s waiting for the rain to pass. She’s worried that she’ll get drenched on her bicycle in the five kilometers she has to ride home.’

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What’s New in Translation: March 2023

March 13, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Ian Ross Singleton, and Rachel Landau

New translations from the Yiddish, Japanese, and Esperanto!

In this month’s round up of the latest releases, we’re thrilled to introduce three singular works from rulebreakers, free thinkers, and true originals. From Japan, an early novella from the nation’s renowned enfant terrible, Osamu Dazai, gives a telling look at the writer’s internal monologue. From the Nobel laureate Issac Bashevis Singer, a bilingual edition of the Yiddish author’s story—in multiple translations—opens up an inquest into the translator’s pivotal role. And from the Ukrainian émigré Vasili Eroshenko, a collection of the author’s fairy tales, translated from the Japanese and Esperanto, presents a well-rounded selection of the transnational author’s politically charged work. Read on to find out more!

gimpl

Simple Gimpl by Isaac Bashevis Singer, a definitive bilingual edition with translations from the Yiddish by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, and David Stromberg, and Illustrations by Liana Finck, Restless Books, 2023

Review by Rachel Landau, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

Whether you choose to know him as “Simple Gimpl” or “Gimpel the Fool,” the main character of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novella is a likable, rambling man who finds himself in an unfortunate situation. His wife, Elka, is frequently using their shared home for affairs with other men, and all of Gimpl’s attempts to come to terms with the situation are complicated by his deep love for her. Even when the pair are forbidden by the town rabbi from seeing each other, Gimpl works tirelessly to provide for the children and for Elka. He feels betrayed to learn, at the end of Elka’s life, that the children were not really his—and his reaction to this deception is a surprising one.

The narrative in Simple Gimpl is slow-moving, reflective, and witty. It is an undeniable pleasure to read—and certainly not difficult to read multiple times in a row, as this edition of the book incites the reader to do. This “definitive bilingual edition,” released by Restless Books, includes back-to-back translations of the Yiddish work; first is Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Simple Gimpl,” which is followed immediately by Saul Bellow’s “Gimpel the Fool,” and this compendium of translations is decidedly about translation itself. Over the course of more than one hundred pages, one must realize that this is not a book about Gimpl, and not even about the differences between Saul Bellow’s Gimpel and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Gimpl. It is about the role of the translator; it is about the strange impossibility of rendering a story. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

January 20, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Areeb Ahmad

Literary news from Bulgaria, the Philippines, and India!

Join us this week with a new batch of literary dispatches covering newly released audiobooks by the unofficial “hero of the Philippines,” the passing of one of Bulgaria’s most notable political figures and literary critics, and an award-winning translator’s appearance in New Delhi. From a night of chilling literature in Sofia to a bookstagrammer’s compilation of all Indian books in translation from 2022, read on to learn more!

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria

Although usually uneventful, January has so far proved a surprise for everyone who has taken a keen interest in the Bulgarian cultural scene.

Earlier this month, the local community lost the literary critic Elka Konstantinova. Throughout her life, the scholar, who passed away at the age of ninety, managed to balance an innate passion for the written word with a desire to bring about broader societal change by being an active participant in the country’s political life. In a recent report, the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency described her as “one of the key figures in Bulgarian politics after the fall of communism in 1989.” Her research encompassed diverse topics from the relationship between the fantasy genre and the world of today to the general development of the short story during specific periods of the twentieth century.

In other news, by the time you are reading this dispatch, the French Cultural Institute in Sofia will have begun preparations for its first Reading Night (Nuit de la Lecture). The event, organized in collaboration with the National Book Centre, is set to start today, in the late afternoon, and will last well past midnight. This year, the theme is “Fear in Literature” with a focus on fairy tales, criminal investigations, fantasy, dystopian science fiction, chilling essays, and more. Younger readers and their parents will have the chance to participate in several literary workshops and specially designed games that aim to ignite the public’s enthusiasm for books and stories.

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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…

“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…

When the Cannons Are Firing: Q&A with Sergey Katran

June 8, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Caterina Domeneghini and Irene Kukota

It’s a constant struggle that I face as an artist: the futility of my efforts and, on the other hand, the wish to speak up, refusing to be silenced

Connections between meaning and visual representation can be puzzling, just like the multiple negotiations that occur between science and art, between natural phenomena and human attempts to grasp, control and even reinvent them through craft. Puzzles of this kind intrigue Sergey Katran. The art critic Vitaly Patsukov has defined the artist as the inventor of intricate “mechanisms” because of the complex ways in which he develops ideas integral to our modern civilization. A former graduate in chemistry and biology, Katran likes to experiment with Science Art and Bio Art in a variety of media, such as installation, sculpture, performance, and video. On the occasion of his most recent exhibition in the UK, currently on display in Wolfson College at the University of Oxford until October 2022, Caterina Domeneghini spoke with the artist and his interpreter, Irene Kukota, about the war in Ukraine, Katran’s country of origin. Their conversation also focused on his current situation, the stance of artists in times of war, and the ways in which his work has captured the growing tensions between two countries he has lived in and loved over the past twenty years.

Sergey, let’s start from where you are right now and what you are doing at this critical moment in our history.

I am currently in Moscow. For forty days I couldn’t do anything, the whole situation came as an overwhelming blow. What is happening to me is precisely what you have been describing, almost a split identity . . . I mean, that’s exactly how I feel, split. I’m in this slightly schizophrenic situation where my heart and all these worries that I experience are in Ukraine and at the same time I physically remain in Russia. And this situation continues, because for various reasons it has to remain like this.

 I decided to resume my artistic work after a while, even though I might not be feeling entirely up to it. Many artists are leaving the country. I decided I am not going to leave for now. Instead, I am planning to make an artistic project at an independent art platform, dedicated to the current situation. Rather than fearing it, I want to still be able to express what I feel, though I cannot tell you much more for now.

You said that many Russian artists are leaving the country. Many artists, too, have withdrawn their participation from important international events, like the Venice Biennale. Does art still have reasons to exist in times like this?

You know, when the whole thing started, I was talking to some good artists, quite well known, and many of them were expressing different sentiments, emotions, thoughts. Some of them were saying, “What have we done wrong? How could we not prevent this from happening?” A couple of them were saying they didn’t want to be artists anymore.

It’s the usual thing, as clichéd as it may sound: art works with rather fine substances or fine energies, if you like this expression. It works with a certain germination of thought. Do you know the phrase “When the cannons are firing, the Muses are silent?” Art seems irrelevant in situations like this. Artists feel that their voices are not going to be heard, because there are other, more pressing issues of survival on people’s minds. Perhaps art should be using other media in times like these. It might need to be more performative, more poster-like, as it’s closer to action and speaks more directly about the current situation. READ MORE…

Fiction as Seduction: An Interview with Anne Serre

January 29, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Tristan Foster

A writer’s only responsibility is to seduce without cheating.

Anne Serre has been published steadily in her native France since the release of her debut novel, Les Gouvernantes, in 1992, but it wasn’t until October 2018, when New Directions published it as The Governesses, translated by Mark Hutchinson, that her writing was made available to an English-speaking audience. The Governesses was followed by The Fool in October 2019, a collection of three unlinked but thematically cohesive novellas. Serre’s two books tell enchanting and surprising stories, both delightful in style and shocking in their disregard for moral norms. At their heart is the subject of the fulfillment of desire—desires which range from living absolutely for the story to the taboo of incest; this jarring mix of charm and discomfort makes for a unique and surprising reading experience. Here, in a rare English-language interview, Serre speaks about her work in translation, her “infinite conversation” with longtime friend and translator, Mark Hutchison, and unravels some of the mystery surrounding her untranslated work.

—Tristan Foster

Tristan Foster (TF): In your essay published in Granta, entitled “How I Write My Books,” you state that you begin with a sentence, that this is the gate through which the rest of the story enters—this sentence and those which follow are the product of your reading and your thinking and living life. You write: “It requires on my part months of silence and solitude, a form of inner tranquillity, and close attention to what is taking shape inside me.” You frame this as something less serendipitous than it is magical, using the language of the occult—mystery, trickery, secret ceremonies—to describe it. How important is the magical for you, both in your writing and how you think of it? 

Anne Serre (AS): I don’t believe in magic, neither in life nor in writing! When I try to describe how I write, I’m describing a mental process in which memory and imagination meet like two rivers that suddenly flow together. It’s a bit of a mystery because, for me, this only ever happens in writing. You might compare it to a child at play. When a child pretends to be a character and invents a situation, he is both himself and the invented character.  

TF: It was also a delight for me to read, in that same piece, your view that the writing is a patchwork—of memories, your previous work, and the imagination, but one which “appears to be cut from the same cloth, and a cloth that is new and without a snag.” I say that because the story told in The Governesses seems to me to contain a perfect world of its own, one that is recognisable from fairy tales encountered as a child as well as, perhaps, Emma and Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair, an ecosystem in total balance, so much so it might pop if poked with a stick. The Governesses was your first book, originally published in 1992; why has building this kind of world been so important to you from the outset? 

AS: I used to say that I came to literature through “the door of enchantment” because it was the only door open to me. I tried to find other doors but I couldn’t. Sometimes I think that 99% of my early material was made up of my reading and my daydreams about my reading. I was full of fiction. Maybe a little too much to make do with just living. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Grandpa’s Little Glove” by Ilka Papp-Zakor

April 2, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Timea Balogh

So I waited there under the tree, and Grandpa was slowly absorbed by the fog, which drizzled and grew ever thicker.

During a routine mushroom-picking expedition in the forest, a wheelchair-bound child gets separated from her grandfather and is left to face the forces of nature on her own. In today’s Translation Tuesday, Ilka Papp-Zakor takes us on a fairy-tale adventure that comes to a surreal and haunting conclusion.

Grandpa’s beard was made of cotton, and his face of crinkled crepe paper. His hands shook, so he almost always spilled his tea, but his eyes were beautiful. I liked to watch him read his old books in the evenings, squinting by the light of the oil lamp—we didn’t have electricity in our shack—rocking back and forth in his rocking chair, the corners of his eyes smiling delicately from time to time, which is how I could tell where he was in his book. I knew all his books by heart. That’s how our evenings would pass. He’d rock in his chair, I’d stare at him, and sometimes, when I’d grow bored of staring, I’d roll around in my wheelchair. Grandpa didn’t like that, because the wheels made an ugly sound on the uneven plank floors. But he loved me anyway.

He said I’d be a beautiful girl if it weren’t for my distorted features, my underdeveloped legs and mangled hands, but I was happy there was something about me that he liked. I had long, curly, golden hair, a little reddish. Grandpa said the bridge of my nose was freckled, though I’d never seen it myself, because our shack didn’t have a mirror either, and I couldn’t lean so far out of my wheelchair over puddles to catch my reflection clearly. In any case, Grandpa said these features were my sex appeal, and that when I’d have kids, I should strive to pass onto them only these two features, because they wouldn’t get very far with the rest. At the time, it was difficult to imagine that I’d someday have a family, and kids of my own, because I didn’t know anyone else besides Grandpa.

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What’s New in Translation? April 2017

April 10, 2017  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Beau Lowenstern, MARGENTO, and Tiffany Tsao

We review three new books available in English, from Hebrew poetry to haunting fairy tales.

milk of dreams

The Milk of Dreams, by Leonora Carrington, tr. by the author, New York Review Books

Reviewed by Beau Lowenstein, Editor-at-Large for Australia

Leonora Carrington grew up listening to folktales told by her Irish nanny in Crookhey Hall. She spent most of her life in Mexico City and became renowned as a Surrealist painter, artist and novelist. Her children recount how they used to sit in a large room on whose walls their mother’s fantastical stories were brought to life. There were deranged creatures and wild forests, and mystical persons standing amid steep, clouded mountains. Carrington’s breath as a storyteller was as broad as her genius for painting and imagery, and the paring of the two resulted in a small notebook she called The Milk of Dreams (New York Review Books, 2017) – perhaps the only surviving relic of that enchanting time where, each day for her children, she opened the door to a realm of fantasy and wonder.

We are introduced to Headless John on the first page, which immediately sets the tone:

The boy had wings instead of ears.

He looked strange.

“Look at my ears,” he said.
The people were afraid.

Her stories, which are often not much more than a few lines in length, give a sense of whimsical creativity; the kind that is not just rare in literature but exceedingly so in children’s stories. Meet George, who enjoys eating walls and eventually grows his head into a house; Don Crecencio the butcher and his goat’s meat roses; and the monster Chavela Ortiz, who has six legs, a golden jewel, pearls, and a portrait of Don Angel Vidrio Gonzalez, the head of the Sanitary Department. There is a freedom in Carrington’s tales that is both outrageous and unpredictable, and yet underlying is the realness of raw experience. These are not watered-down shadows of a story like so much of fantasy writing seen today – they delve into genuine emotions, which are often dark and complex.

And yet Carrington imbeds a wicked humour in her stories, too. In “The Horrible Story of the Little Meats,” an old and ugly woman is nicknamed Lolita by her friends and captures three children, imprisoning them and cutting off their heads. They are saved by a Green Indian who, in his ignorance, reattaches their heads to their hands and feet and buttocks, though, “the children were happy in spite of having their heads stuck on such funny places.”

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