Posts filed under 'feminism'

Poetry and Resistance in Iran

Words that are spoken are forgotten, and treatises lie unopened on the shelf, while lines of poetry live forever.

Since 2022, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement has made historic advances in fighting for the rights of Iranian girls and women. With protests that have ripped all across the world, the demonstrations have continued Iran’s long tradition of fusing literature with politics, showing that where people and ideas go, poetry soon follows. Here, Cy Strom, co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, Woman, Life, Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution (open for submissions!)discusses the texts, songs, and slogans that make up the fabric of contemporary revolution.

The Iranian revolution that began in September 2022 responded to no political manifesto. Instead, it flared up to an unforgettable line of people’s poetry: “Zan, Zandeghi, Azadi!” This is how “Woman, Life, Freedom” sounds in Persian.

In Kurdish, the language in which this slogan was first spoken, its words are “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî.” That is what Mahsa Jina Amini—the Iranian-Kurdish woman whose brutal death catalyzed the protests—would have heard. Protestors in Iran continue to pay respect to the slogan’s origins when they chant both the Kurdish and Persian words, even when Kurdish is not their mother tongue. In both languages, the words of this slogan are balanced and graceful, the rhythms assertive. It is people’s poetry.

The slogan was first circulated among the women militia fighters in Rojava, the western Kurdish lands by the Syrian-Turkish border, and spread through the writings of Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Activists and protestors in the streets have now taken these three words as the name for this first ever feminist revolution, and a statement of the best in hopes and ideals for all people everywhere.

Within days of its outbreak, Iran’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” revolution also found its anthem. Amidst Persian-language reworkings of the World War II partisan song “Bella Ciao” (which kept its wildly incongruous Italian refrain) and the 1970s Chilean insurgent march “El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido,” a string of found poetry began to sound out in Iran, artfully arranged and set to music by singer-songwriter Shervin Hajipour. The people in the streets quickly taught themselves to sing this winding melody, which begins as a murmur but gathers force until a last intake of breath pushes out the words: “Azadi! Azadi!” Freedom. Hajipour assembled the lyrics to this song, which he called “Baraye” (“For” or “For the Sake Of”), from people’s tweets. Some of these were political slogans, some were complaints, some were sweet dreams: “For a dance in the alley. . . For the dreams of the dumpster kids. . . For the jailed beautiful minds. . . For the tranquilizers and insomnia.” The song is said to have gained forty million views in forty-eight hours, and it earned Hajipour six days in prison with the threat of more to come. In February 2023, “Baraye” also earned the first ever Grammy awarded for the best song for social change. READ MORE…

Deanna Cachoian-Schanz on the Mania of Translation

I felt the dance between author and translator: each disentangling the other as she tried to understand her(self).

Deanna Cachoian-Schanz was awarded one of the prestigious PEN Translates grants earlier this year for her work on Shushan Avagyan’s Girq-anvernakira rich, experimental novel that speaks to repressions, literary legacy, and the expansive collisions between disparate writings, voices, times, and lives. Soon to be released as A Book, Untitled through Tilted Axis, Avagyan’s work is emblematic of literature as an act of congregation and communality in giving voice to the silenced, and in this following interview, Cachoian-Schanz speaks on how translation furthers that textual power.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Shushan Avagyan is also a translator; did this affect the way you worked with the text, and were there conversations between you two about how this translation should be approached?

Deanna Cachoian-Schanz (DCS): Of course! As I intimated in the Translator’s Afterword, my translation style tends to keep as close to the text as possible, prioritizing the words on the page and not what I imagine as the “author’s intent.” As Barthes famously declared in 1967, “the author is dead!” However, when working with contemporary literature, the elephant in the room is that the author is still speaking! How can we not, as responsible translators, take the authors’ voices into consideration, especially when they are fluent in the target language?

In the final instances of the English-language text, Shushan and I were in close and caring contact to make the final touches, together. When I first started to translate the book back in 2010, it was a way for me to work on my Armenian—to carefully improve my vocabulary and language skills through a text I was invested in knowing deeply. However, because Book is in part a translator’s diary, sometimes I felt as if the author was already telling me how to translate her work, or even trolling me, her future translator. It’s hard to not take certain lines to heart when you’re that deep into the text; when you’re translating, you really get into that mindset, as if the author is speaking directly to you, for you. Perhaps translation is in part some kind of mania. . . READ MORE…

Between Seeing and Listening: Dias Novita Wuri on Birth Canal

For me, it was important to talk about everyone's story and experience with the term “motherhood”.

 In Birth Canal, Dias Novita Wuri masterfully braids disparate storylines of women across various countries and time periods to track the shifting contexts of sexuality, femininity, family, and gender roles. What results is an alternative face of history, from the violence of wartime and colonialism to the contemporary dynamics of sex work and objectification. As our September Book Club selection, this subversive and unflinching text defies generalisation and presumption to consider the many ways a body can be used—and freed. In this interview, Novita Wuri speaks on how the women in her life inspired the novel, sexuality and politics in Indonesia, and the mental anguish that surrounded the writing and reading of this powerful text.

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. 

Thuy Dinh (TD): Could you explain the meaning behind the title Birth Canal?

Dias Novita Wuri (DNW): Birth Canal actually doesn’t have as much significance in English as it does in Indonesian—which you wrote about very well in your review. The term in Indonesian is jalan lahir; jalan means a road, or a way—something one has to go through, and lahir here means birth. You can see it doesn’t really translate very well to English, and my editor and I decided to go with “birth canal”. I wanted a short, impactful title because my first book’s title, Makramé, was very simple. Of course, the birth canal is part of the reproductive system, and I wanted to use a bodily word to symbolise the feminine struggle related to procreation. It’s hard not to talk about birth because it’s a woman’s “duty” to give birth, and I think this term nicely represents the stories of all the women in my story.

TD: Your book doesn’t seem to think there is a necessary connection between fertility and motherhood—as some characters in the book can’t have children but yearn to be mothers. Can you expound on this theme?

DNW: I wanted to talk about a lot of the women that I know in my life, some of which can’t have children, or struggle to have children but want to have children, and others who don’t want children at all. For me, it was important to talk about everyone’s story and experience with the term “motherhood”. I also knew people who got pregnant as teenagers outside of marriage, and that’s why I opened the book by talking about abortion, because abortion is illegal here in Indonesia. It’s very frowned upon—which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

Actually, when I open up to the women that I talk to in Indonesia—my friends and acquaintances—sometimes they would tell me that they have had abortions. It’s a shame that it’s illegal and not talked about, because it’s something that women need. It’s a basic healthcare right. To have such shame and stigma surrounding abortion can only be detrimental to women’s lives in Indonesia. Some of them might be mothers already, but they can’t handle another child or can’t afford another child. Yet, they can’t have an abortion. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

Dispatches from Romania, Sweden, and North Macedonia!

In this week’s dispatches, our editors report on the continual remembrance of iconic poets, interdisciplinary festivals, and writing that draws attention to the climate crisis. Read on to find out more!

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia

Sixty years after the tragic passing of Danica Ručigaj, iconic poet and pioneer of écriture féminine in North Macedonia, an anniversary edition containing the entirety of her oeuvre was published this month. The collection, entitled Srebreni nokjni igri i zarobenici na vetrot (Silver Nighttime Games and Prisoners of the Wind) was prepared by two prominent publicists and journalists working at Radio Skopje, Sveto Stamenov and Iskra Cholovikj, who have dedicated over two decades to researching Ručigaj’s reception and sustaining the vivacity of her legacy.

Ručigaj (1934–1963), sometimes referred to as the Sylvia Plath of North Macedonia for the unabashed vulnerability of her writing, studied ancient Greek, Latin, and Southern Slavic literature, and also worked for the Cultural Ministry of North Macedonia. She passed away at the age of twenty-nine in the 1963 Skopje earthquake—a devastating event that resulted in numerous casualties and left the entire city in ruins. Two poems famously discovered in the ruins of Ručigaj’s home—“Circles” and “Untitled”—will be featured in the anthology, along with essays about her work by prominent scholars and a complete bibliography of publications containing Ručigaj’s writing.

Ručigaj’s poetry, informed by her academic background and nonconformist, taboo-defying artistic attitude, occupies a prominent position in Macedonian literary history. Her refusal to comply with patriarchal norms continues to retain its relevance, as anti-equality sentiments are rising amidst the public. In one of her best-known poems, “No, Do Not Speak to Me” (“Ne, Ne Zboruvaj Mi”), a feminine voice laments the death of a bird who lived “within eyes that have now dried up”, simultaneously noting that its death might be a relief to some: “Come hither, do not fear / Those eyes no longer shine / And so, come hither.” As the poem progresses, we begin to realize that the owner of the eyes is the feminine speaker herself; without the bird—their inner songsmith—they no longer pose a threat to the Other that the poem is directed to. This poem remains an accurate image of gender relations in Macedonian society, where equality is still considered a threat to the “sanctity of the family”. READ MORE…

When Woe Means No: Translating Women’s Survival as Resistance 

Carson grants her Trojan women agency, even if it seems that hostile men and unfeeling gods control their lives.

In our new column, Retellings, Asymptote presents essays on the translations of myths, those enduring stories that continue to transform and reincarnate. Here, Hilary Ilkay considers the contemporary rendition of an ancient tragedy by Euripedes, as told by poet Anne Carson and artist Rosanno Bruno in the acclaimed The Trojan Women: A Comic.

Thanks to cinematic blockbusters like Troy and Emily Wilson’s bestselling translation of Homer’s Odyssey, the story of the Trojan War has established itself within the cultural mainstream. However, its continual revival is not just a contemporary phenomenon; as early as 5th century BCE, the mythical war had already taken on legendary status, and was ripe for adaptation and retelling.

Arguably the most tragic of the ancient Greek tragedians, Euripides’s plays are infamous for their bleak explorations of human hubris and divine cruelty. In his lifetime, as Athens was embroiled in the Peloponnesian War, a violent 27-year conflict with rival city-state Sparta, Euripides drew on the Trojan War specifically to reflect on the uncertainty of his time, making a connection between Athenian imperialism and the Greeks’ pretense of invading Troy for the sake of a single woman. Taking its cue from the ending of the Iliad, which features funeral laments from three women characters, Euripides’s play The Trojan Women casts a spotlight on the fates of the wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters of the male heroes—who typically occupied center stage in narratives of war. As a focused treatment of women’s suffering rarely seen in ancient Greek tragedy, the play is a brutal exploration of the commodification of women’s lives and bodies, as well as the ambivalence of “surviving” a tragedy when those remaining have lost all sense of meaning, stability, and security.

Given Euripides’ interest in the experience of women and the retelling of myths, it’s no surprise that his legacy continues through the work of poet and translator Anne Carson, who has received much acclaim for her rewritings of Greek classics. Carson constantly stretches the boundaries of translation in her work, dramatizing how every translation is necessarily its own “version” of the source material and not necessarily a “faithful” replica. In 2006, she published her loose translations of Euripides’s lesser known tragedies under the title Grief Lessons; in 2019, she adapted his infamously bizarre play, Helen, into Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, which interweaves the stories of Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest from Kenya, Canada, and Oman!

In this week of literary news, our editors on the ground are bringing stories of triumph, mourning, and commemoration. In Kenya and Ghana, readers mourn the loss of pioneering feminist author Ama Ata Aidoo; in Canada, a Quebec initiative supports readers in finding more books by Indigenous writers; and in Oman, a lauded author brings home the prestigious International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Read on to find out more!

Wambua Muindi, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Kenya

The end of May seemed to position itself as a direct communication to geo-literary production history; on May 27, a bilingual anthology of East African short stories, The Heart is A Bastard, launched at the Goethe Institut Library, Nairobi. Edited by Elias Mutani and Zukiswa Wanner, the collection is a result from the Kenyan writing workshop under the auspices of the Univerity of East Anglia International Chair in Creative Writing. The inaugural chair for Africa, Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangaremba, expressed her delight over the launch, which includes stories in English and Swahili translations. Some of the emerging writers featured in the anthology include Gladwell Pamba—from whose story the anthology’s title is taken, Fatma Shafii, Nyasili Atwetwe of Writers Space Africa Kenya, Charlie Muhumuza, Noella Moshi, and Sia Chami. The anthology not only holds space for these writers but also represents the creative breadth of the region, while simultaneously embedding a language politics given its bilingual character.

However, this joy was dislodged by the unfortunate news of a writer’s death. On May 31, Ama Ata Aidoo, the Ghanaian author of Our Sister Killjoy (1977), a pioneering feminist novel, died at the age of 81. As such, Africa is mourning; Ghana is mourning and Kenya, too, is mourning the novelist, playwright, short story writer, and committed radical feminist, who wrote to assert the agency of African women within literary history. As reverential eulogies have been paraded across the world, the Kenyan literary community joined in the outpouring of grief in a country where her influence not only transcends her writing, but is also compounded by a teaching stint she had at the then named Kenyatta College, now Kenyatta University, as well as the literary contributions of her Kenyan-born daughter, Kinna Likimani. Where Austin Bukenya, a leading East African scholar of English and literature, for instance, dubbed her “Queen of African literature”, Mukoma wa Ngugi, the author of Nairobi Heat and son to Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, sees her as a “pillar” without which “the African literary tradition wobbles”. While Joyce Nyairo, an academic and a cultural analyst, references the short story “Something To Talk About On The Way To The Funeral” as praise of her storytelling genius, Yvonne Owuor lamented, in proper proverbial fashion: “A great, and giant tree that sheltered many beings has fallen”. Moreover, her writings, which among others, include The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965), No Sweetness Here (1969), Anowa (1970), and Changes (1991) cut across the genres to show the depth of her imaginative oeuvre and demonstrate the commitment—in different but related ways—to the African woman’s cause, through literature and in society. Rest in Power Mama. READ MORE…

Salone del Libro 2023: Diversity through the Looking Glass

The theme for this year’s Salone was “Through the Looking Glass”, featuring over 1,500 kaleidoscopic encounters between storytelling and reality.

The Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino, or the Turin International Book Fair, was established in 1988 to connect every single participant in the wide-ranging world of literature—from publishers to librarians and, of course, readers. Throughout a large catalogue of readings, performances, conferences, and workshops, the Salone brings in guests from all over the country and abroad to share in the joy of the written world, discuss the current prospects and themes of the industry, and showcase both Italian-language literature and promoting international writing within Italy. This year, Catherine Xin Xin Yu attended the fair on behalf of Asymptote to find out what it has on offer, from migrant literature to eco-writing.

From May 18 to 22, the 35th Salone Internazionale del Libro—the largest annual book fair in Italy—attracted over 200,000 visitors to the Lingotto Fiere exhibition centre in Turin. Over five days of panels, lectures, publisher exhibitions, and literary initatives, perhaps the biggest news story to emerge from the event is an ecofeminist protest led by Non una di meno (Not One Woman Less) and four other Turin-based activist groups against Eugenia Maria Roccella, the anti-abortionist and queerphobic Minister for Family, Natality and Equal Opportunities. Protestors, along with members of the audience who spontaneously joined them, prevented the politician from presenting her newly released memoir in order to demonstrate what it is like to be silenced by the state institutions she represented—which tampers with women’s rights to abortion and surrogate maternity while muddying the water with media misrepresentation and cracking down on protests using police forces. While this peaceful protest was labelled as “anti-democratic” and “unacceptable” by the Meloni government, the Director of the Salone, Nicola Lagioia, defended the contestation as a legitimate democratic act. This is one way in which the Salone provided an urgently needed platform for repressed voices, while opening up a pathway to diversity.

Indeed, the theme for this year’s Salone was “Through the Looking Glass,” featuring over 1,500 kaleidoscopic encounters between storytelling and reality, with notable attempts to bring forward new, alternative perspectives. One such novelty was the focus on colonial legacies and decoloniality. A panel featuring the Somali-Italian author Igiaba Scego, Turin-based Albanian visual artist Driant Zeneli, and Italian crime fiction author Carlo Lucarelli looked at the removal of Italian colonial history from collective memory—drawing attention to the lack of guilt and the myth of “Italiani brava gente” (“Italians, good people”). Many place names in Italy still bear witness its colonial past: visitors in Turin might notice that the final stop of Metro Line 1 is called Bengasi (like the city in Libya); I myself have rented a flat on Via Tripoli and regularly run errands on Via Addis Abeba (like the capital of Ethiopia) and Via Macallè. But these quotidian reminders often go unnoticed, and colonial history is not systematically taught in schools.

salone del turino 1

At the heart of the discussions on how this silence can be broken are words that “tear apart, resist, and restore,” to quote Jhumpa Lahiri’s preface to Scego’s latest novel, Cassandra a Mogadiscio (Cassandra in Mogadishu). Another panel on decolonisation, featuring the Italo-Somali author Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, the Iraqi author and intellectual Sinan Antoon, and the Filipino trauma journalist Patricia Evangelista, insisted on the importance of reconstructing the lived experiences of victims from a non-Western point of view, and restoring names and humanity to these individuals. Italian, the language of formal education in ex-colonies like Somalia and Ethiopia, is both a line of coloured division and the language of cultural exchange. Recognising the plurality of Italian and using it to foreground individual experiences are both ways to decolonise while writing in the language of the colonisers. READ MORE…

A Place for Malice in Literature: On Izumi Suzuki’s Hit Parade of Tears

Women lead the stories in Hit Parade of Tears—with their desires, their passions, and their fears. . .

Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, and Helen O’Horan, Verso, 2023

In the moody, deliriously humorous worlds of Hit Parade of Tears, Izumi Suzuki’s protagonists embody searing emotions, from anguish to apathy, all felt at an apex that seems like a breaking point. Sharp and achingly present, these eleven short stories are transposed by writers Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, and Helen O’Horan, and present emotional and often unsettling glimpses into worlds both familiar and fantastical. Though each story stands on its own, there are elements that draw them together: the stream of Japanese rock from the 1960s and 70s playing in the background, a woman searching for her younger brother, a blurry line between mental illness and otherworldly abilities, and perhaps most consistently, a spotlight on some of the ugliest aspects of human nature—pettiness, cynicism, self-obsession, vitriol. We find these traits in her characters across the board, and those who veer from this standard are noted for their irregularity. Whether it’s a spunky teenage girl or an ungrateful husband, the dialogue in translation is natural and engaging, and each character reads with a distinct voice; descriptions are elevated by clever word choice, from a “galumphing figure” to “laparotomized remains,” and each paragraph is a newly vivid scene.

While the women of Hit Parade of Tears occupy the traditional feminine roles of wives, mothers, and sexual objects, they are not held to stereotypical ideals of femininity when it comes to their emotions and motivations, which makes this a thought-provoking and relevant read for feminists interested in non-Western perspectives. Women lead the stories in Hit Parade of Tears—with their desires, their passions, and their fears—and the men often read like props to the women’s narratives, whether that’s a self-obsessed husband, an ex-lover, a wannabe sugar daddy, a sacrifice, or a younger brother. Men’s bodies are constantly on display and under scrutiny—balding, thin, hot, or literally cut open from the stomach and hung like an ornament in a medical facility—and they rarely have any part in moving the plot forward.

The men in the protagonists’ lives belittle them and take them for granted, but the stories paint them in all their egoistic ways. In the eponymous “Hit Parade of Tears,” we spend the majority of the story listening to the thoughts of a man born over 150 years prior, who hit his prime in the 1960s and 70s. He talks down on his wife and her job archiving that era: “She’s jealous of me, he thought. She’s seething because she couldn’t take part in my youth like someone from the same generation could.” Come to find out, she’s been alive just as long as he has—they even dated briefly a hundred years ago, but he, solipsistic and self-absorbed, forgot, and he can’t imagine her experiences living up to his. Suzuki’s fiction is explicit in its critique of men’s treatment of women—hypocritical, predatory, and strikingly uncool, Suzuki’s men believe they have the upper hand in their relationships. Behind this belief, Suzuki’s women pull the strings, using the hands they’ve been dealt (as housewives, as sexy schoolgirls, as the repressed desires of a depressed woman) to their benefit. READ MORE…

A Perpetual Coming-of-Age: On Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü

Tezer Özlü will never be imprisoned in the traps of bourgeois norms and conventions.

Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely, Serpent’s Tail/Transit Books, 2023

Known as the melancholy princess of Turkish literature, Tezer Özlü is one of the most influential figures of women’s writing in Turkey. Inspiring generations of writers with both her life and distinct writing voice, Özlü has been a permanent fixture in country’s intellectual history; it’s surprising that such a beloved figure of Turkish literature is debuting in English only now. Fortunately for us, her glaring absence from international publishing has finally been remedied by Serpent’s Tail (UK) and Transit (USA), and English language readers can now discover the genius of a unique writer.

Despite being remembered as a leftist and feminist, Özlü was never a part of the revolutionary struggle like other famous Turkish authors recently translated into English. In Cold Nights of Childhood, she writes: “I was never a part of a revolutionary struggle. Not during the 12 March era, and not after it, either. All I ever wanted was to be free to think and act beyond the tedious limits set by the petit bourgeoisie”. She wasn’t imprisoned or tortured like Sevgi Soysal or involved in organized politics as her close friend Leyla Erbil. Even though she retained leftist sensibilities and occasionally wrote about class struggle, her revolt was more individual and existential. Accordingly, she wrote autobiographical novels which situate readers in the midst of her confrontation with different kinds of authority.

Cold Nights of Childhood is a compact example of her autofiction, and a perfect choice to introduce Özlü to new readers, encapsulating the themes and style that launched her as a tremendous force in the Turkish literary. In the afterward to the novel, translator Maureen Freely writes: “she was one of the very few who broke rules at sentence level, refusing continuity, and slashing narrative logic to evoke in words the things she truly felt and saw, that we all might see them”. Rejecting the linear narrative, she weaves together fragments of time; this experimentation with chronology enables her to reflect on her past while also imagine a way for a gratifying future. READ MORE…

Celebrate International Women’s Day with Women’s Writing!

Join us as we highlight the vital contributions of women to literature and translation.

March 8th is International Women’s Day, and we wanted to take the opportunity to lift up the work of women in world literature. Below, find a selection of pieces published on the blog in the past year, across essays, reviews, translations, and interviews, curated to represent the breadth and brilliance of women working in writing.

Interviews

A Conversation on Kurdish Translation with Farangis Ghaderi
by Holly Mason Badra

But when you look deeper, when you look at archives, and look at early Kurdish periodicals, you find women. You discover these forgotten voices. An interesting example of that is Zeyneb Xan, who published under the pseudonym of Kiche Kurd (“Kurdish girl”). In 2018, when a publisher was reprinting Galawej (the first Kurdish literary journal published in 1939–1949), they decided to have sections on contributing writers. They came across this name, and one of the researchers working on the project uncovered that the identity of the writer was Zeyneb Xan (1900–1963), the eldest sister of Dildar—a very well-known figure of Kurdish literature who wrote the Kurdish anthem. Although her family was a literary family and at the center of literary attention, her manuscript remained unpublished until 2018. Her truly fascinating poetry collection covers a wide range of themes from patriotism to women’s education and liberation.

Wild Women: An Interview with Aoko Matsuda and Polly Barton
by Sophia Stewart

For me, films and television programs, as well as books and comics, have always been the places where I can meet outsider women, weirdo women, rebel women, sometimes scary women. When I was a child, I didn’t care if these women were human beings or ghosts or monsters, and I didn’t care if they were from Japan or other countries. I was just drawn to them, encouraged by their existence.

To Protect Oneself From Violence: An Interview with Mónica Ojeda
by Rose Bialer

Maybe if I was born in some other place, I would be writing about something else, but I do believe that Latin America is a very violent continent, especially for women, and in all of our traditions of women’s literature, there have always been women writing horror stories in Latin America. . .  I do believe that it’s because you can’t write about anything else. That’s how you live life. You are afraid for your life. You are scared of the violence in your family, the violence between your friends, the violence in the street. You can’t think about anything else except how to protect yourself from violence.


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A Conversation on Kurdish Translation with Farangis Ghaderi

Translation is a commitment—a way of illustrating my commitment to making Kurdish literature known.

We speak here about the practice and politics of Kurdish translation, female representation in Kurdish literature, and the future of Kurdish literary works, culture, and understandings through digital archival projects. 

Holly Mason Badra: Can you talk about the project and translation process for Women’s Voices from Kurdistan: A Selection of Kurdish Poetry

Farangis Ghaderi: Women’s Voices from Kurdistan was the result of a collective initiative with my colleagues Clémence Scalbert Yucel and Yaser Hassan Ali. The idea behind it was that, as scholars and researchers of Kurdish literature, we were very aware of the invisibility of Kurdish literature in the world literary arena. The translation of Kurdish literature is emerging but still not comparable with other Middle Eastern languages. At Exeter, there were a number of Ph.D. students and researchers working specifically on Kurdish literature and we had been engaged in translation as part of our research, but these translations often remained unpublished (in theses or dissertations). Occasionally, some translations were published in scholarly publications, but they were only excerpts of the literary pieces and not the entire work. At the time, none of us considered ourselves literary translators. 

We also thought about how works published in academic outlets don’t reach a larger public audience. Reflecting on these issues and realizing our potentials, we hosted a translation workshop in 2017 that was led by Dr. Yucel and made possible by an outreach grant (by the British Institute for the Study of Iraq; BISI), where Ph.D. students working on Kurdish literature came together with researchers at the Center for Kurdish Studies at Exeter and colleagues in translation studies. Each participant had their own selections, but the overall theme was gender, with preference for female poets. Together, we practiced translation and held discussions for two days. After this workshop, Clémence, Yaser, and I continued to meet, discuss, and work on the translations and polish them. We presented our translations in a number of festivals in the UK and began thinking about publishing them. We then approached Transnational Press London about publishing the collection, and they were very enthusiastic about it. 

It was important for us to publish in an outlet that allows the publication of the original Kurdish language as well as the English translation. The collection includes poems from the nineteenth century to contemporary female poetry, written in various Kurdish dialects (Gorani, Kurmanji, Badini, Sorani) and in Arabic. 

HMB: When did you first start working in translation and what has that journey been like for you? 

FG: I started translating into English while pursuing my Ph.D. My research was on the emergence of modern Kurdish poetry. I had to translate classical and modern poetry in three dialects (Kurmanji, Sorani, Gorani) as part of literary analysis. The workshop I described above was foundational for me as a translator—following the workshop, Dr. Yucel and I conducted a research project on English translations of Kurdish literature which is now published. Both the workshop and the research project helped me to become aware of trends in English translations of Kurdish literature—the biases that translation can produce or reproduce and the politics of translation itself. I became more aware of the question of access and the politics of access. How a certain group of translators—in our case, a group of mostly Kurdish researchers at Exeter—were not thinking of ourselves as translators even though we were translating. Translation was part of our job. I began thinking about questions of confidence, exclusions, access (which is limited for Kurdish scholars). The journey has been one of gaining confidence and understanding what translation involves. It has been an educational process, too. 

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Turkish Tragedy Writ Small: Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn

A single night becomes the microcosm of the Turkish experience of militarism, gender inequality, and sexuality.

Dawn by Sevgi Soysal, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freeley, Archipelago Books, 2022

Writing in the 1990s, the Turkish literary critic Berna Moran praised Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn for its historical urgency, but noted that it would not be a novel that survived the test of time—that its themes would lose their relevance. Perhaps Moran was optimistic in thinking that women’s struggles and militarism would be issues of a distant past in the years to come, or perhaps he undermined the strength of Soysal’s formal innovations. Whatever his reasons might be for painting the novel as a historical relic, his prediction did not come true; Dawn is now more relevant than ever, with Maureen Freely’s flawless English translation.

Soysal isn’t a stranger to English-speaking audiences. Her novels Tante Rosa and Noontime in Yenişehir have been translated into English, and she is a legendary figure in the history of feminism in Turkey. Along with writers like Leyla Erbil and Adalet Ağaoğlu, she defined the écriture feminine of Turkish literature long before it was coined and theorized by Western feminists. The eccentric, self-reflective, and often ironic tone of their protagonists reflected on what it means to be a woman—not only in a modernizing Turkey, but also in a leftist milieu dominated by men. While women’s struggle and sexual autonomy took the back seat in the leftist quest to liberate “masses,” these authors problematized the very notion of “masses.” Did the dream of a liberated people also include liberated women? The tension between how the outside world views liberated, intellectual women and how they view themselves is often the driving force of such novels, and hence their writing is often turned inwards, with sharp observations of situations and characters.

Dawn is a visceral and cinematic example of this kind of writing: where the embodied social experience of women takes central stage. It is also, as Moran notes, a novel about militarism and incarceration. Written in 1975, after Soysal’s own imprisonment following the 1971 coup, the novel situates the woman’s body in its confrontations with authority. The brilliance of the novel might be traced to the formal structure through which the author reflects on this confrontation; ever the innovator, Soysal sets her novel within the course of a single night, interspersing the narrative with flashbacks of different characters. The stories beget other stories of individuals becoming situated in their own relation to authority, only to return to the “present” moment where they are confined within the four walls of the town jail. A single night becomes the microcosm of the Turkish experience of militarism, gender inequality, and sexuality. READ MORE…

How a Polish Writer Created His Own Apocrypha: An Interview with Maciej Hen

Either we shall fight until we wipe each other out, or we shall talk and build mutual understanding.

Maciej Hen is a well-known writer in Poland, awarded the Gombrowicz Literary Prize and shortlisted for the prestigious Angelus Central European Literature Award. Perhaps because the twentieth century was cruel to his Jewish family—himself being persecuted as a child in 1968 when the Polish government launched a campaign against the Jews—the writer writes primarily historical novels, describing the world at the precipice of immense change. In his debut work, According to Her, readers observe the birth of Christianity; in the following Solfatara, he describes ten days of revolution in mid-seventeenth-century Naples; in the third, a lonely, older hero from Warsaw goes on an unplanned journey amidst a change in regime, and discovers that his ancestor was at the head of a bloody people’s rebellion. Hen told me that in a new work—one which is not yet published—Doctor Faustus will be written as a woman. It seems to me that if the books of Maciej Hen were to be widely translated into other languages, he would become a contender for the Nobel Prize; his writing is visionary. With According to Her to be published soon in English translation by Holland House Books, readers in the Anglophone will now be introduced to this beautifully written book about the alternative life of Jesus Christ, told from the perspective of his old Jewish mother. I was moved and delighted by it; someone finally gave the voice to the Virgin Mary. 

Wioletta Greg (WG): In According to Her, the story of a son is told by nearly a woman named Mariamne, who is almost a hundred years old, and uncannily resembles Mary of Galilea. A bold idea for an author who lives in a Catholic country.

Maciej Hen (MH): Not only do I live in a Catholic country, but worse still, I’m a Jew living in a Catholic country. And, to top it all, I’m a Jewish atheist. Actually, I grew up separated from the basics of Judaism, because my parents belonged to the first generation of Jews who felt that religion was not so important for their children.

WG: I’m curious why you published your book under the pen name Maciej Nawariak. Were you afraid of being attacked for re-describing the life of Jesus from a Jewish perspective? 

MH: I took the pen name from pure vanity. My father is a writer who had earned himself a reputation long before I came up with my debut book, and I was so sure my publication would be a success, that, in order to fully enjoy it, I would have to disqualify in advance any suggestions people might put forward about my father’s name helping me enter the literary world.

WG: Your parents survived the Holocaust as refugees in Central Asia, and they met in Uzbekistan.

MH: Yes, they met in Samarkand in 1943. My mother was twenty-one at the time, and my father just under twenty. He was from Warsaw, and she was from a village outside Lwów. After the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union, they both evacuated eastwards and finally settled for a while in Samarkand, the former capital of Tamerlane. After the war, they returned to Warsaw. Out of their families—both once very large, as per custom—only five people survived, including themselves. My father changed his surname from Cukier to Hen, in time becoming a highly regarded writer in Poland, and my mother took care of the household, raising my sister and me—for a few years she was also a Russian language teacher. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2022

New work from the Arabic, the Korean, and the Ojibwe language!

In this month’s round-up of the latest in world literature, our editors bring vital texts addressing faith, (false) mythologies, desire, migration, and Indigenous culture to the forefront: a collection of penetrating, prismatic poems from the lauded Egyptian poet Iman Mersal; from South Korea’s Lee Geum-yi, a fiction that tells the long-silenced stories of women crossing the seas to be wed to strangers; and a new collection of poetry, documenting Ojibwe lives, by eminent writer Linda LeGarde Grover. Read on to find out more!

threshold

The Threshold by Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022

Review by Alex Tan, Senior Assistant Editor

Perhaps it begins with a search. The Egyptian poet Iman Mersal returns to her homeland in hopes of procuring a book by Saniya Saleh, an elusive writer no one seems to have heard of. Instead she finds a table, piled with the canonized words of men; nowhere in sight is the person she seeks: a wife, sister, and mother, who can only secondarily be a writer in her own right. “I don’t know how she likes to see herself,” she laments in a wandering essay. Left with the “wasted potential” of what survives, she can imagine only a voice of muted cadence, “a whispered song of mourning which slips through to me amid the din of revolutionaries’ rabble-rousing slogans, of warriors intent on victory, of those broken by defeat angrily denouncing state, dictator and society.”

A similar quality of whispering, of slipping through, inhabits Iman Mersal’s angular The Threshold, a collection of poetry translated delicately by Robyn Creswell in conversation with the poet herself. In the titular piece, a collective biography of sorts charts a path through the streets and labyrinthine hypocrisies of Cairo in the nineties: “one long-serving intellectual screamed at his friend / When I’m talking about democracy / you shut the hell up.” Elsewhere a speaker ventures, “Let’s assume the people isn’t a dirty word and that we know the meaning of en masse.” Yet this momentary compact reveals its own fragility; language with all its alibis and forms of subterfuge seems a poor vessel, too riddled with holes to hold “all the wasted days” and the “nights / of walking with hands stretched out / and the visions that crept over the walls.”

Mersal’s work is unafraid of its own promontories and edges. Often, the writing advances a crepuscular view of the self, ever-partial and shrouded in semi-obscurity, divided from its figurations. The opening poem dryly declares, “I’m pretty sure / my self-exposures / are for me to hide behind.” Her name, which contains the Arabic for “faith” and “messenger,” is too “musical” for “a body like my body / and lungs like these—growing raspier / by the day.” On what map might we locate the trembling contours of that occluded life, “whose existence I’ve never been sure of,” and which appears to “have neither past nor future” in an encounter with a stranger, on whose shoulder she accidentally falls asleep? How unwieldy it feels in its bulk, how relentlessly it has been anatomized, in spite of its wispy resistance to measurement:

This is the life into which more than one father stuffed his ambitions, more than one mother her scissors, more than one doctor his pills, more than one activist his sword, more than one institution its stupidity, and more than one school of poetry its poetics.

READ MORE…