Posts filed under 'fascism'

Principle of Decision: Translation from Italian

How does one evaluate the works of a writer who paradoxically championed women’s rights and supported an ultra-patriarchal regime?

Principle of Decision takes a close look at the manifold, careful decisions made by translators in their interpretations. Each participating translator is given the same excerpt of a text to render into English, revealing the various incarnations that can stem from even a single word. In this edition, Catherine Xinxin Yu presents a piece from the Italian writer Ada Negri.

When I was casually browsing at a book fair in 2023, my eyes were caught by two descriptors on the back of a tiny claret booklet featuring Ada Negri’s works: ‘feminist literature ante litteram’ and ‘twice nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature’. I had to find out who this Ada Negri was.

Ada Negri (1870-1945), born in the northern Italian city of Lodi, grew up in a working-class milieu and began earning a living as a schoolteacher from the age of seventeen. She published her first poem La nenia materna (Mother’s Lullaby) in 1888, her first poetry collection Fatalità (Fatality) in 1892, and continued to garner literary acclaim through the 1910s. Her gaze was directed outwards, encompassing the struggles of the Italian working class of which she was a part, but also turned inwards, voicing her intense emotional turmoil as a woman, a lover, and a mother. At the same time, she actively participated in socialist projects like the Lega Femminile di Milano and co-founded the Asilo Mariuccia in 1902 for at-risk women and minors.

In 1917, Negri published her immensely successful short story collection, Le solitarie (Solitary Women), from which the excerpt below is drawn. Eighteen grayscale character studies provide ‘humble glimpses into the lives of women who fight alone: alone despite family, alone despite love, alone due to faults of their own, of men, or of destiny’, as the author wrote in the book’s preface (translated from the Italian). This collection was groundbreaking in its focus on the tribulations of lower-class women and unflinchingly tackles taboo subjects from female sexuality and abortion, to marital unhappiness and the lack of care for the elderly.

So far, so good, right? But Negri was also a controversial figure who achieved her status partly due to her staunch support of Mussolini’s fascist regime. In the 1890s, she befriended socialists active in Milan, such as Filippo Turati, the Russian-born feminist Anna Kuliscioff, Nobel peace prize winner Teodoro Moneta—and Benito Mussolini, who identified as a socialist at the time. But by the outbreak of WWI, as Mussolini’s break with socialism gave way to his avowed fascism, Negri definitively sided with Mussolini’s bellicose patriotism and distanced herself from the antimilitarist democratic socialism of Turati and Kuliscioff. She would go on to win the Premio Mussolini in 1930, become the first and only woman to be admitted into the Accademia d’Italia in 1940 (a short-lived hall of fame for intellectuals in fascist Italy, if you will), and follow government directives in her long-standing collaborations with major newspapers until her death in 1945. READ MORE…

The Story as Experience: Oonagh Stransky and Marla Moffa on Eugenio Montale’s Butterfly of Dinard

[A]s ephemeral, beautiful, and delicate as these stories are, they are firmly grounded in history. . .

In Butterfly of Dinard, the great poet Eugenio Montale leads the reader up to numinous looking points along the towers of everyday experience, pointing us towards an innate sublimity and magic—how individual vision and experience can strike pedestrian sceneries with an extraordinary intensity of meaning. Originally published as columns in the Corriere della Sera, fifty of these stories have been translated with extraordinary care and finesse by Marla Moffa and Oonagh Stransky, and in this interview, they speak to us about the affinity between Montale’s prose and poetry, the revelations of translation, and how such stories travel from the page into personal realities, deepening and celebrating the spaces, people, and objects that—if looked at closely—“reveal a great truth.”

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. 

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): I wanted to start with asking you both about the crossings between Montale’s poems and his prose works. What do both of you consider Butterfly of Dinard to be saying to us on its own? Is there an independent author to be found, or should we read his prose as dialogic with his poetry?

Marla Moffa (MM): I would say that there are various symbols in the poems that we can also find in the stories. Considering that he wrote Butterfly of Dinard when he was in his fifties—after the two main volumes of poetry, Cuttlefish Bones and The Occasions, and concurrently with The Storm and Other Things—it’s as if he’s regrouping in these stories everything that we find in the poems as well.

For example, as Jonathan Galassi points out in the introduction, Montale speaks about the eels in the story “The Best Is Yet to Come,” and just at the mention of the word eel on the menu for the protagonist, the narrator has this flashback, because the eels represented something special in his youth. There’s also the poem “L’anguilla / The Eel” in Montale’s poetry, which is one of his most important poems. It’s interesting to be able to read the two pieces in parallel, but at the same time, I feel like the stories are independent. If you don’t know his poetry, and you just read Butterfly of Dinard, you can still enter into Montale’s world. He even says himself that if one wants to know his story, that this is the book to read, because it is quite autobiographical.

Oonagh Stransky (OS): I agree with what Marla said, and the only thing I would add is that one of the things that appeals to me most about these stories is really the element of humour—the self-deprecating humour and irony. As in his poetry, there are moments of existential crisis, of gaps and sudden shocks, but there is also a delight in life, and a delightfulness that he attributes to so many different things. The nostalgia towards his past is one aspect of it, but I also like how he talks about himself—how he describes this figure, who may represent himself, as bumbling and Chaplin-esque, as Galassi calls it. It opens up new windows onto Montale the man, and who this very mysterious and obscure Nobel-winning poet was. Here we see him as a man in slippers, with a turban on his head, holding a rug up to scare away a bat—all those things are elements that allow the reader to feel more familiar with him. READ MORE…

The Simultaneous Precision of Each Person’s Storytelling and the Unknowability of the Truth: On Ismail Kadare’s A Dictator Calls

Kadare suggests that memory itself can build discourse, poetic and otherwise, with those who are no longer living.

A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare, translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson, Counterpoint Press, 2023 

In A Dictator Calls, Ismail Kadare creates an interwoven narrative of historic suspense, gently challenging the line between personal storytelling and an encyclopedic index of information. John Hodgson’s eloquent translation from Albanian is densely packed with perspectives, anecdotes, and curiosity surrounding a significant moment in Soviet literary history. How a legendary conversation transpired and what impact it had on all involved is the question that Kadare seeks to answer in A Dictator Calls; he approaches the question from all angles, and in the process investigates his own complex relationships to historical and literary legacies, afterlives, and the very act of storytelling.

Kadare’s novel is grounded in a story from 1934: Osip Mandelstam, a legendary Russophone poet, had been arrested after writing a poem critical of Joseph Stalin, a text known in English as “The Stalin Epigram” or “The Kremlin Mountaineer.” According to the general narrative, Stalin himself decided to call Boris Pasternak, a contemporary of Mandelstam’s, to ask whether or not Mandelstam was a great poet. Stories diverge, and contemporaries of both poets, from Viktor Shkhlovsky to Isaiah Berlin to Anna Akhmatova, claim different conclusions to that conversation. 

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Compass and Rifle: On Roque Dalton’s Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle

No one escapes Dalton’s inquisitive pen . . .

Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle by Roque Dalton, translated from the Spanish by Jack Hirschman, Seven Stories Press, 2023

On Thursday, July 6, 2023, the inaugural day of Guatemala’s International Book Fair (FILGUA), the government of El Salvador requested organizers to exclude Salvadoran author Michelle Recinos’ Sustancia de hígado (F&G Editores) from the fair. The next day, online news outlet elfaro revealed that El Salvador’s ambassador in Guatemala had said, “It would’ve been an unpleasant thing for the government of El Salvador if this book had been a part of the fair.” Details are scarce, but presumably, this action was related to Michelle’s story Barberos en huelga, winner of the 2022 Mario Monteforte Toledo Prize, which openly criticizes sitting president Nayib Bukele’s war on gangs. 

Hearing this, I can only imagine what Roque Dalton would have written about Bukele. 

Roque Dalton’s Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases (Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle) dates back to 1975, and remains as timely as ever. In a time when most Central American countries are under authoritarian regimes and have experienced backslides of democracy, the life and work of Roque Dalton is at once a beacon of hope, an inspiration, and a warning sign. Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases is a book filled with courageous testimony, the poet’s typical dry humor, and bone-chilling depictions of state violence. Here, Dalton is hyperaware of the pain and plight of his compatriots, but in addition to his typical grittiness and social critique, we also find tenderness, softness, beauty, and frailty; Dalton’s acute perception is both a rifle and a compass, manifesting in words of both rebuke and encouragement. 

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What’s New in Translation: July 2023

New work from Natalia Ginzburg and Djuna!

This month, we’re excited to introduce two works that explore social intricacies from two respective angles: the familial and the technological. From the Italian, lauded modernist Natalian Ginzburg’s most recent English-language work plumbs into the combustive conflicts within a family unit to reveal the complex moralism within our most intimate relationships. From the Korean, science fiction author Djuna conjures a thrilling tale of how corporate politics and advancement colonises upon human identity. Read on to find out more!

ginzburg

The Road to the City by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff, New Directions, 2023

Review by Catherine Xinxin Yu, Assistant Director of Outreach

Seventeen-year-old Delia is a frivolous beauty with neither talent nor sense. Her hobby is to get dolled up in her blue dress, take the dusty road to the city, and stroll around, admiring its affluence. Seeking to escape from the drabness of her townish family, she thought a bright future had beamed on her when a rich doctor’s son began pursuing her, but little did she know that it was an abyss, instead, that beckoned.

The Road to the City is Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg’s earliest published work, written in 1941 and published in 1942. At the time, she had been sent into internal exile to a village in Abruzzo for her husband’s anti-Fascist activities. Missing her home city of Turin while developing close ties to the locals in Abruzzo, she blended the places and people from memory and real life to craft this nuanced novella, with a snappy style that “[her] mother might like”.

Ginzburg has an incredible talent for depicting explosive clashes within families, integrating insight and humour into her narrative. English readers might already be familiar with her voice through Family Lexicon, her autobiographical novel published in 1963, and in The Road to the City, we see her burgeoning style with same pithy descriptions and wry comedy, surgically precise choice of scenes and voices, refrains of familial sayings as inside jokes and memory triggers, and nuanced character sketches that highlight their contradictions and moral ambiguity. But unlike Ginzburg’s own family, which is soldered with love and a common cause against fascism, The Road to the City traces how a family splinters into pieces from collective shame and spite.

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Political Mythmaking: On Barricade by Utpal Dutt

...in his attempt at creating a political myth, Dutt does not lose sight of his characters’ humanity.

Barricade by Utpal Dutt, translated from the Bengali by Ananda Lal, Seagull Books, 2022

The Indian playwright Utpal Dutt wrote that myth is one of the most crucial forms of political storytelling because of its ability to transcend time and space, becoming relevant over and over again in new contexts. In Towards A Revolutionary Theatre, which is simultaneously a memoir of staging radical plays amidst the tense politics of his native Indian state of West Bengal in the 1960s and 1970s, and a manifesto about the necessity of leftist theatre, he cites William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as an example of a literary work that has “freed itself of the trappings of its own age and has become a gigantic myth,” continually reinventing itself for new political circumstances. This is seen in productions set in Benito Mussolini’s Italy, which form a critique of the tyranny, demagoguery, and mob rule that make such regimes possible. 

Dutt’s play Barricade, which has been translated from the Bengali original by Indian theatre critic Ananda Lal and published by Seagull Books, is an attempt at such mythmaking. Set in the period just before the Nazi Party’s rise to power in Germany, the text is ostensibly about the party’s attempts to scapegoat their Communist rivals for the murder of an elderly political leader, but Dutt suggests throughout that the actual subject is the turbulent political situation then prevailing in West Bengal; the play was written in 1972, when the Congress-ruled government in Bengal was actively suppressing all forms of direct dissent. 

However, as Lal said in a recent interview, “The fact that he set Barricade in 1933, when the Nazis rose to power in Germany, didn’t make his viewers think that it was remote from their lives. On the contrary, they connected with it viscerally, sympathised and cheered at the right moments.” This speaks to Barricade’s power as political myth, one which is increasingly relevant in the contemporary Indian context exactly fifty years after it was written, especially for its narration of how various democratic institutions such as elections, the judiciary, and the media are slowly co-opted and corrupted by the ruling party. 

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What’s New in Translation: May 2019

Your guide to this month’s newest literature in translation.

This month brings us a set of novels in translation from some of the giants of international literature: László Krasznahorkai, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Ananda Devi. These reviews by Asymptote team members will give you a taste of an exiled baron’s return to his home town, a meditation on fascism and gender relations, and the decline of an older woman living in a London divided by race and class. 

baron

Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet, New Directions, 2019

Review by Jacob Silkstone, Assistant Managing Editor

“With this novel,” László Krasznahorkai told Adam Thirwell in their conversation for the Paris Review, “I can prove that I really wrote just one book in my life . . . When you read it, you’ll understand. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming must be the last.”

Ottilie Mulzet’s English translation of Báró Wenckheim hazatér has, understandably, been one of this year’s most keenly-anticipated books. It opens with a “Warning,” a labyrinthine eight-page sentence ending with a sigh of weariness that merits quoting at some length:

I don’t like at all what we are about to bring together here now, I confess, because I’m the one who is supervising everything here, I am the one—not creating anything—but who is simply present before every sound, because I am the one who, by the truth of God, is simply waiting for all of this to be over.

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In Conversation: Ghayath Almadhoun

My poems are full of death, but that’s because they are also full of life.

Describing Ghayath Almadhoun’s poetry in Adrenalin is anything but easy. The blurbs on the book call the collection ‘crucial political poetry’, ‘urgent and necessary’, ‘passionate and acerbic’, and ‘our wake-up call’, although we find out that Almadhoun’s own views on his poetry are slightly different. Written in the wake of the Syrian war, the refugee crisis, and a personal loss of his homeland, the poems in Adrenaline are formally experimentally and emotionally explosive. In a voice that is, in equal measure, full of wonder and irreverence for the turn the world has taken, Adrenalin dwells on war, empathy, displacement, suffering, love, and hatred unapologetically. Translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham, and released by Action Books last November, this is the poet’s first selection of poems to be published in English.

The collection starts with the poem ‘Massacre’ (which can be read at our Guardian Translation Tuesday showcase), with the unforgettable lines: “Massacre is a dead metaphor that is eating my friends, eating them without salt. They were poets and have become Reporters With Borders; they were already tired and now they’re even more tired.”

Born in Damascus, the Palestinian poet Almadhoun has been living in Stockholm since 2008. The following interview was conducted over email and has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Sohini Basak (SB): As a point of departure, could you tell us which writers you have been reading these days? And are you working on something new?

Ghayath Almadhoun (GB): I am now re-reading Tarafah ibn al-Abd. He was so young when he died, in the sixth century (around twenty-six years old). He is a great poet and could be described as pre-postmodern as he was ahead of his times. I’m also reading Closely Watched Trains by Bohumil Hrabal.

About my work, I have begun a new project—my fifth poetry book. I find myself in front of the question that I faced when I started writing more than twenty years ago: will I survive this time? Will I be able to write something new? And, like always, I punch the world in the face and continue writing.

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In Review: Banthology, edited by Sarah Cleave

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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Translator Profile: Jennifer Scappettone

The notion of a unitary, homogenous, and monolingual “America” is as much an alternative fact as Spicer’s attendance numbers at the inauguration.

Former Asymptote blog editor Allegra Rosenbaum interviews translator and scholar Jennifer Scappettone, whose profile appeared in our Winter 2016 issue. Her translation of Italian poet Milli Graffi was featured on the Asymptote blog last week and her translation of F. T. Marinetti’s futurist poetry appeared in our Spring 2016 issue. 

Who are you? What do you translate? (This is just a preliminary question! To be taken with an existential grain of salt.)

I am a poet and scholar of American and Italian nationalities who grew up in New York, across the street from a highly toxic landfill redolent of the family’s ancestral zone outside of Naples (laced with illegal poisonous dumps). I translate Fascists and anti-Fascists; Italian feminists and a single notorious misogynist; inheritors of Futurism and the historical avant-garde; and contemporary poets who are attempting to grapple with the millennial burden of the “Italian” language by channeling or annulling voices from Saint Francis through autonomia.

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Borges, the Quixote, and Two Street Markets

The author of "The Antiquarian" tackles Borges, contextual understanding… and the singular joys of book shopping

The first time I read “Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote,” I was seventeen and in my freshman year in college in Lima. As anyone who reads Borges for the first time, I was dazzled by the story of a fictional French writer who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, wants to write once again, without plagiarizing or recovering it from memory, Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The most memorable passage of the story comes when the narrator, a friend of Menard’s, and very likely a French fascist, analyzes one paragraph from the novel in two different ways. First, assuming that Cervantes is the author, he concludes that the paragraph is rhetorical and verbose, when written by a seventeenth-century Spaniard. Later, assuming the author is Pierre Menard, a contemporary right-wing surrealist poet, he finds that the same words are fantastically counterintuitive and herald a new form of understanding the world. Since the narrator is a fascist, one suspects that his interpretation is an overinterpretation, the grotesque imposition of ideas that were not there in the original text.

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