Posts filed under 'feminist literature'

A Gazan Woman’s Voice: Michelle Hartman and Caline Nasrallah on translating Asmaa Alatawna’s A Long Walk from Gaza

October 23, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

. . . even in the face of oppression, Arab women . . . take a role in constructing their realities, demonstrating agency despite what they endure.

When it was first published in 2019, A Long Walk from Gaza resounded with Asmaa Alatawna’s evocative descriptions of girlhood, migration, and life under occupation, gathered in an acute testament against the societal and political repressions of a woman’s liberties. Today, in light of the events over the last year, it also preserves a city that has since been overwritten with violence, layering the streets, neighbourhoods, and homes of memory over the present map of destruction. In this following interview, translators Michelle Hartman and Caline Nasrallah discuss their process in translating this nuanced portrait of Palestinian life, the element of double marginalisation within the narrative, and the emotionality of working with a story that evokes the now-gone.

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. 

Ibrahim Fawzy (IF): How did you come across A Long Walk from Gaza?

Michelle Hartman (MH): I have a relationship with Interlink Publishing. It’s a smallish, independent publisher based in Northampton, Massachusetts, and the only Palestinian-owned publisher in the United States. It’s committed to doing many different things, particularly bringing fiction written in Arabic to English readers—and it’s been doing this for a very long time. There’s a significant list of Arab writers whom the publisher wants to bring to life in English. They occasionally send me novels, and A Long Walk from Gaza was one of them. As Caline and I were working on another project at the time, I sent this book to her for her opinion.

Caline Nasrallah (CN): As Michelle said, we have already worked on several things together, so we have this relationship of her sending me books to read. I’ll then go through these books and decide if we could continue working on them. Once she sent me Asmaa’s novel, I was so taken by it, and I thought it was an important project we had to work on. I felt a duty. I read it, then we discussed it more, and we went ahead.

IF: That’s great. As a literary translator, I usually read a book and find something that speaks to me, motivating me to translate it. What drew you to this book? What are the elements that convinced you to spend much time with it?

CN: Asmaa’s novel is a must-read because of the way it describes life under occupation and all of the hardships that come along with that, specifically in Gaza. There’s little that comes out of Gaza because of the situation on the ground, so the book felt like a lens into something we had never really seen before—that made it feel more relevant. Asmaa reveals this double layer of life under occupation, tracing life as a girl and a woman under occupation, the reality of occupation and internal issues impacting the society in which she lived. While united within a cause, women were also affected by society’s actions. It’s imperative to recognise this aspect, even though it’s often overlooked in literature focusing on a common enemy. Calling out injustice wherever it exists is essential.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

October 18, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Christina Chatzitheodorou, and Kathryn Raver

The latest literary news from France, Greece, and the United States!

In this week’s roundup of world literary news, our team members fill us in on France’s literary awards season and exciting festivals in Greece and the United States. From the race for the Prix Goncourt to feminist literature in Athens, read on to find out more!

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France

As the leaves begin to shift their colors, France’s literary scene is shifting into awards season. Last week, Jean-Pierre Montal took home the Prix des Deux Magots for his novel La Face nord, the Prix Medicis announced their 2024 shortlist, and the contenders for the prestigious Prix Femina are to be revealed in just a few weeks. That’s only to name a few!

Perhaps the most esteemed French literary prize, however, is the Prix Goncourt, and the time for its conferral is fast approaching. Awarded annually in November, the Prix Goncourt is bestowed by the Académie Goncourt upon “the best and most imaginative prose work of the year.” They also give separate awards for poetry (conferred this year to Haitian poet Louis-Philippe Dalembert), biography, and a large variety of international works, among others.   READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

October 11, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Asymptote, MARGENTO, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest in literary updates from Ireland, Hong Kong, and a special on the Nobel laureate!

A world of news in this week’s roundup! From Ireland, discover the ambitious and innovative work of Macha Press, a collective pursuing a literature that is “international and intergenerational”; from Hong Kong and China, the fifteenth edition of the renowned International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong highlights the topic of translation; and from the Asymptote team as a whole, catch up on Han Kang, this year’s Nobel laureate in Literature.

The Asymptote Team, Reporting from our Fortnightly Airmail

And the winner of the Nobel is . . . Han Kang! After Annie Ernaux, the latest female winner in 2022, Han Kang is the eighteenth woman—and the first from South Korea—to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel committee’s citation commends her “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. Her works confront acutely difficult subjects with a rare fearlessness and sensitivity, whether it be the personal, as in the Booker International Prize-winning The Vegetarian—a feminist classic of modern Korean literature that offers a powerful rebuke to a world that too often silences women—or the historical in Human Acts, where she depicts the Gwangju student massacre of 1980. In an exclusive essay for our Winter 2016 issue, her longtime English translator Deborah Smith describes the impenetrable potency of her style in this book: “Whenever I translate her work, I find myself arrested by razor-sharp images which arise from the text without being directly described there . . . the images themselves are so powerfully evoked by the Korean that I sometimes find myself searching the original text in vain, convinced that they were in there somewhere, as vividly explicit as they are in my head.”

After checking out our coverage of her latest novel in English translation, Greek Lessons, dive into more Korean Literature in the two Special Features we organized in partnership with LTI Korea, available for free in our Spring 2018 and the Winter 2023 editions.

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Ireland

One of the most significant events in recent Irish letters was the establishment of Macha Press in August and the subsequent announcement regarding its first two book launches, the debut already scheduled for October 17. Macha Press is a collective endeavour recently founded by seven poets with wide-ranging practices and experience: Siobhan Campbell, Ruth Carr, Natasha Cuddington, Shannon Kuta Kelly, Kathleen McCracken, Alanna Offield, and Lorna Shaughnessy. As stated in their first newsletter; “all founders are currently based on the island of Ireland and share a vision for the press that is international and intergenerational.” According to Lorna Shaughnessy, one of the founders, a poet-translator (featured in Asymptote Spring 2020), and a personal friend of mine, the aim of the press has always been to produce two books of poetry a year, one by an established or historical poet whose work the editors feel merits recovery, and one by an emerging poet.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

July 19, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng and Wambua Muindi

Literary updates from Kenya and Hong Kong!

This week, our editors-at-large take us around the world for the latest in festivals, book launches, and fairs! From Nairobi’s latest litfest, to a poignant memoir, to the interplay of film and literature in Hong Kong, read on to learn more!

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

This year’s NBO Litfest, a collaboration between Book Bunk and the international Hay Festival, was held 27–30 June across three public libraries in Nairobi (McMillan Memorial Library, Eastlands Library, and Kaloleni Library). Nothing short of a treat to literature enthusiasts, the festival was headlined by Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo, Stanley Gazemba, Lola Shoneyin, Taiye Selasi, Amitav Ghosh, and Djamila Ribeiro, among others. The festival’s first day was children-focused with incredible storytelling by Grace Wangari and Orpah Agunda, followed by a lineup of events over the weekend. As it happened against the backdrop of primarily youth-led protests against the 2024 Finance Bill, which by now have mutated to Kenya’s anti-government protests, the festival issued a statement in solidarity with the young people of Kenya.

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The Richness of the Fragment: An Interview with Oksana Vasyakina and Elina Alter

February 21, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Jaeyeon Yoo

I don’t believe in wholeness and I don’t believe in Chekhov’s gun. Language . . . isn't enough to reflect the fullness of the world.

What does it mean to hold grief—to physically carry your mother’s death with you in daily life? 

Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound documents the journey of a queer poet as she delivers her mother’s ashes from Moscow to Siberia. Translated from Russian by Elina Alter, the novel is an auto-fictional exploration of processing grief through language, and also a meditation on the Russian lesbian lyric—a polyphonic conversation with feminist thinkers across time and space. While making her way across Russia, the narrator weaves together a cycle of poetry, composed of recollections of her past sexual experiences and fragmented essays. Wound then began as a few pages typed alone in the dark, when Vasyakina was writing during the pandemic, and this sense—of both intimacy and intensity—persists throughout the book. Vasyakina writes, as Alter puts it, with a brutality and directness that feels “exceptionally clear-sighted.”

Wound is Vasyakina’s first novel and the winner of the 2021 NOS Prize. Since then, she has published Steppe and Rose, books that also center on family figures. In addition, her works include two collections of poetry: Женская проза (Women’s Prose) and a cycle of poetic texts titled Ветер ярости (The Wind of Fury). 

Alter is the editor-in-chief of Circumference, a journal of international culture and poetry, and has also translated It’s the End of the World, My Love by Alla Gorbunova. Her translation of Wound has been listed as one of Nylon’s Must-Reads of the Month and LGBTQ Read’s Most Anticipated Titles of the Year. 

This interview, conducted with Oksana and Elina separately, has been edited for clarity.

Jaeyeon Yoo (JY): How did Wound begin? 

Oksana Vasyakina (OV): As I rode a bus through Volgograd while carrying the urn [containing my mother’s ashes], it occurred to me that I would never be able to describe this experience. It wasn’t because the situation was tragic; I just saw how complicated it was, and I felt that I wasn’t equal to the material. This was in early 2019. 

A bit later, in the summer, I wrote a cycle of poems—which are included in the book—called “Ode to Death.” I had the desire to write, but I understood that poetry wasn’t sufficient for the challenge I saw before me. And then the pandemic began. I was shut up in my apartment, all events were canceled, all work went on Zoom. One night, I opened up my laptop and wrote the first few pages of Wound. I was writing in the dark, because it wasn’t clear to me how to write long prose, and before this I’d only written short poems, I didn’t know how to put together a novel. A week later I pulled up my draft, reread it, and understood that this was what I wanted to do, that I had to continue. 

I’m superstitious, so when I start writing a text, I name the file with a random combination of letters, just in case I never finish. But as I continued writing, I thought that the novel needed a simple name. The simplest word. The first word a child utters when it learns to speak is mama, and that was the original title of the manuscript. But some time later, I thought that mama rhymes with the word rana [“wound” in Russian]. It’s just as simple, and contains many meanings. After I wrote the scene in which the mother is lying in her coffin, I renamed the file. Since then, the book has been called Rana: Wound. 

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Tampoco tenemos nombre / We, too, are nameless: A Conversation with Ilana Luna

May 17, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

When I translate, my approach is much more of an interpretation, in the musical sense; it is a jazz riff, it is a feeling . . .

I discovered one of my favorite poets—the musician, filmmaker, and diplomat Gaspar Orozco—through Ilana Luna in the pages of Scotland-based Reliquiae: A Journal of Nature, Landscape, and Mythology. In Luna’s lulling translation, Orozco’s El Libro de los Espejismos (The Book of Mirages) meditates on the lacuna between memory and myth, and the interstices between sentience and sleep. In this interview, I asked Luna about, among other things, translating Mexican poet Gaspar Orozco and essayist Carlos Monsiváis, as well as Mexican literature in translation, with small indie presses as their prime movers. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): I love your translation of Gaspar Orozco published at Reliquiae Journal! And you have a forthcoming book of translation from Orozco’s poems under the Corbel Stone Press imprint, Xylem Books. What should Orozco readers like me expect from this new title? 

Ilana Luna (IL): In fact, we have several manuscripts we’ve been working on. The first we completed is El libro de los espejismos/The Book of Mirages. It’s quite a marvelous book, with prose poetry as well as formal poetry, haiku, sonnet, octaves. They were the most fun to translate, truth be told; I love the puzzle or game-like challenge that formal limitations pose. Several of these poems appeared in Reliquiae, as well as in the July 2021 issue of Indian publication Poetry at Sangam. The one you mention, with Corbel Stone Press, is what we’re currently working on. It is more of an anthology of Orozco’s work, with a focus on natural phenomena and a mythic tone, taken from across his ten-book corpus. As always, Gaspar’s poetry is full of luminescent landscapes, vignettes, and often, has a mesmerizing, rhythmic quality. I try to capture this in my translations.

AMMD: In his prólogo to Lapidario: Antología del aforismo mexicano (2014), critic-translator Hiram Barrios maps the presence of aforismos en verso (“aphorism taking refuge in the short poem”) within Mexican poetry since the late nineteenth century, naming Gaspar Orozco’s father as a practitioner of this “anomalous” free-verse that “questions the nature of genre.” Do you think Orozco has followed in his father’s footsteps, and how, if so, has that influenced the way you translated his works?

IL: I’m quite sure that Orozco was deeply impacted by his father’s love of literature, and he tells stories of youthful interactions with preeminent Mexican scholars and literati—for example, the infrarealist poet José Vicente Anaya, also from Chihuahua, whose famous poem “Híkuri” is a reference in our “Notas de un cuaderno de híkuri”/ “Notes from a Peyote Journal.” Orozco’s prose poetry has been elegantly analyzed in “‘Image Machine’: Gaspar Orozco’s Book of the Peony and the Prose Poem Sequence as Perceptual Trick,” Helen Tookey’s chapter of Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2022). As for how this paternal influence has impacted my translation, I’d have to say not very much—or at least not directly. I know I can’t be alone in this, but when I translate, my approach is much more of an interpretation, in the musical sense; it is a jazz riff, it is a feeling, it is something like a cover. It is always a direct interface between me and the poem, nothing else. As sheer as that, it is an immersion and a remaking, a new thing unto itself. 

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What’s New in Translation: May 2023

May 15, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal, Matthew Redman, and Rubén López

New translations from the Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese!

This month, our editors feature three titles that showcase what’s possible when a writer fully showcases a firm and brilliant insight into their reality. From a collection of short stories that investigate the violence of Latin American society, to a multifaceted depiction of colonial Mozambique, to essays that focus on the intimate dailyness of human lives in twentieth-century China, these works educate, provoke, and enthrall. Read on to find out more!

ampuero

Human Sacrifices by María Fernanda Ampuero, translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle, The Feminist Press, 2023

Review by Rubén Lopez, Editor-at-Large for Central America

In Human Sacrifices, a collection of short stories, María Fernanda Ampuero traces the deterioration of individuals who have survived an overwhelmingly violent reality. With guts, blood, and a dense anger, she escorts us to a precipice with each story, strips us naked, and delivers us to a place where the wounds of Latin American are made real, and thus can be dissected. Published by Editorial Páginas de Espuma in 2021 and now appearing in English translation by Frances Riddle, the collection contains twelve stories that question our reality as one occasionally resembling more a traitorous deception.

The stories in Human Sacrifices are profoundly Latin American, but more specifically, they describe the experience of vulnerable Latin American women: a unique kind of hell. Gendered violence is present in almost all the narratives—a bone that vertebrates the monster: “Desperate women,” states one of the protagonists, “serve as meat for the grinder. Immigrant women are bones to be pulverized into animal fodder.” The opening story, “Biography,” is perhaps the most intimate, narrating in first person the terror of being a migrant woman in a foreign country. The narrative implants the dehumanizing panic of crossing invisible borders in pursuit of a less harsh horizon, as well as the fear of becoming an anonymous number, a disappeared woman, a name written on a wall. As the narrator states: “I remember someone once told me that the stars we see have been dead for a long time, and I think that maybe the disappeared women might also shine on like that, with that same blinding light, making it easier to find them.”

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A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

August 25, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Cristina Pérez Díaz and Suhasini Patni

Our staff's recommendations from Greece and India!

This month, our editors select their recent favorite works, including Greek poetry that muses on the voices of cicadas and the natural world, as well as an Indian novel of friendship, philosophy, and the changing Delhi cityscape. Read on to find out more! 

Phoebe Giannisi already had me with her Homerica (2017), and now has got me again with her new book Cicada (New Directions, 2022). Beautifully translated, like Homerica, by Brian Sneeden, the book resounds with an “alien voice from the fence of the teeth.” Alien, not only because it is the song of the cicadas that is constantly evoked and lurks from underneath the pages since its clear-voiced announcement in the title, but even more so because the voice here belongs to all sorts of beings, especially the non-human ones. It’s the wind, and the earth, the figs, and the fish, and the egg, the sea, the rain. Words, “the thing that is most yours,” are borrowed from elsewhere. For how else could there be a meditation on the passing of time and transformations, unless out of attention to that which is always present yet is almost impossible to record: the sound or, to say it with Virginia Woolf, “the murmur or current behind it,” the humming of it?

–Cristina Pérez Díaz, Editor-at-Large for Puerto Rico

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

May 27, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa and Julia Sherwood

The latest news from the Czech Republic and Mexico!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on new translations of Czech poetry, as well as books fairs and celebrations of acclaimed writers in Mexico. Read on to find out more!

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting on the Czech Republic

On 19 May, Bianca Bellová launched the English translation of her award-winning novel The Lake at the Czech Centre in London. “Whether The Lake is better described as dystopian or realistic depends, I suppose, on one’s opinion about the state of the world and what can be done about it,” said the book’s translator Alex Zucker. For him, the book “stands out for the incisiveness of its style and the evocativeness of its setting,” he told Alexandra Büchler in an interview published as part of Parthian Books’ Talking Translation series.

Meanwhile, Büchler’s own translation of the poetry collection Dream of a Journey by Kateřina Rudčenková has been longlisted for the coveted Oxford Weidenfeld Prize. You can read a tribute to Büchler, a tireless advocate for the translation of literature from Wales in both English and Welsh into languages across Europe through her role at Literature Across Frontiers. Those in the UK can catch Rudčenková and her fellow Czech poet Milan Děžinský at the Kendal Poetry Festival on 25 June, while poets Stephan Delbos and Tereza Riedlbauchová will be reading translations of each other’s poetry in Prague on 26 May.

There is more Czech poetry just out from Karolinum Press as part of its Modern Czech Classics series: The Lesser Histories by Jan Zábrana (1931-1984). In the words of its translator Justin Quinn, the collection “at times resembles a loose, shifting congregation of voices, some talking clearly, others muttering indistinctly, on occasion shifting from one language to another.” Quinn’s foreword, excerpted in LARB, provides a great introduction for Anglophone readers to Zábrana, a towering figure in Czech literature who, in addition to being a poet, was an outstanding translator from Russian and English, as well as a diarist whose “thousand pages or so of selected diaries bear witness to a splendid, if bitter, solitude.”

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Unexpired Bodies: On Malika Moustadraf’s Blood Feast

May 4, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Alex Tan

Vignettes, as building blocks of Moustadraf’s narrative, are wielded to strip away at illusions of respectability.

Blood Feast: The Complete Short Stories of Malika Moustadraf, translated from the Arabic by Alice Guthrie, The Feminist Press, 2022

More than a decade after the original publication of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley infamously called the book her “hideous progeny.” A whole critical tradition was born in the shadow of that phrase, obsessively sewn together by the umbilical connections between writing, motherhood and the monstrosity of autobiography; no one could forget that the complications of Shelley’s birth had literally sent her own mother—the pioneering English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft—to an untimely death.

Like giving birth, writing exacts an extraordinary sacrifice in order to grant the gift of life to another. It’s difficult to imagine a more tragic illustration than the story of Moroccan cult feminist icon, Malika Moustadraf. Debilitated by chronic kidney illness but dogged and uncompromising in her devotion to her craft, Moustadraf skipped rounds of essential medication to fund her first publication. This literary progeny consumed her—heart, soul, and kidney; still she insisted, “writing is a kind of sedative for the pain I live with.”

Every word she set down on the page sustained as much as it killed her, as Alice Guthrie tells us in her tender and comprehensive translator’s note, appended to her crisp rendering of Blood Feast: The Complete Short Stories of Malika Moustadraf (issued in the UK by Saqi Books under the title Something Strange, Like Hunger). Beyond its ambitious sweep of contextual detail, Guthrie’s essay represents a loving tribute to Moustadraf’s tempestuous and painfully ephemeral existence in the karians of Casablanca—a monument to all the work she could have written if not for the overlapping violences of the systems that failed her, one after the other.

Karian, a term unique to Casablanca, is cleverly left untranslated by Guthrie and glossed as impoverished neighbourhoods—with “unregulated improvised residential structures,” “often inhabited by recent migrants to the city from rural areas.” Fringed by a context of Sufi marabouts and witchcraft, these spaces are rife with djinn and black magic curses inflicting impotence, lovesickness, and malady on the integrity of bodies. Throughout Blood Feast, Guthrie’s familiarity with the rituals, superstitions, and slang of the region are not simply evident in the cadences of her translation, but further substantiated by the specific Arabic and Darija expressions she opts not to translate. READ MORE…

Announcing Our February Book Club Selection: Quake by Auður Jónsdóttir

February 28, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla

Jónsdóttir presents a compelling theory about selfhood that has a post-humanist flair.

In Auður Jónsdóttir’s award-winning Quake, there is no such thing as absolute clarity. Depicting the aftermath of memory loss, this novel of mystery and recovery is a subversion of certainties, a blurring of the demarcations between fact and fiction, self and other, past and present. By blowing the pieces of identity apart, Jónsdóttir is asking the ever-pervasive and urgent questions: where does one start, where does one end, and what happens amidst it all, in the in-between?

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.   

Quake by Auður Jónsdóttir, translated from the Icelandic by Meg Matich, Dottir Press, 2022

“Let me be frank . . . There’s something to be gained from having another person look at your life.” So goes the advice that Saga, the narrator of Auður Jónsdóttir’s Quake, receives from her older sister Jóhanna as the former contemplates the reasons behind her divorce. But are other people—and the narratives they create about you—always reliable? Are they always useful? And what if, faced with the prospect of rebuilding your identity, all you had to go on was what other people remember, or think they know about you?

Saga, a thirty-something divorced woman and mother to a three-year-old boy, is attempting to piece together her life story following a set of violent seizures. The condition has left her mind fractured, and though the gaps newly carved into her memory are few, they make it hard for her to establish a cohesive narrative about her life and her sense of self. “I can’t seem to shake the feeling that I’m an alien who woke up on the kitchen floor of my family’s house one day and convinced them I was one of them,” Saga says, attempting to position herself within her seemingly normal nuclear family. Such themes of alienation and identity are at the core of Quake, which tackles these questions with scalpel precision but also a sense of tenderness, singing through Meg Matich’s translation.

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Literature as Homeland: The English-Language Debut of Tezer Özlü

April 21, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Matt Hanson

[Özlü] attempted to make sense of life and death, and to create an individual by way of literature.

The conspicuous absence of Tezer Özlü’s work in the English language is, to many readers of Turkish literature, a huge oversight. With precise, knowing style and modernist sense of bending convention, the lyrically humanistic nature of her prose propelled her reputation as a writer in deep dialogue with the specificities and absences of her place and time. Now, in anticipation of her Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri, soon to be released as Cold Nights of Childhood by UK publisher Serpent’s Tail, Matt Hanson gives us a glimpse at the themes of Özlü’s oeuvre, as well as how the sensitivities of her writing continue to carry through to present day.

In 1980, a Turkish novel appeared under the name Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri (Cold Nights of Childhood), written by one of the country’s most beloved writers. As the text reached the public, Tezer Özlü had just six years left to live, before breast cancer would take her life at the age of forty-three. Even amidst illness, she continued to influence European literature from its fringes as internationalist writers—entering the late twentieth century—continued to adapt modernist expressionism as representative of individual, universal humanism.

Özlü wrote mainly in her mother tongue of Turkish, yet her style, temperament, voice, and life aligned technically and thematically with the earlier German and Italian writers she admired, from the Joycean experimentalism of Italo Svevo to the singular meta-fictions of Franz Kafka; yet, it was the atheistic loneliness of Cesar Pavese who inspired her to end her last book, Yaşamin Ucuna Yolculuk (Journey to the End of Life)—first published in German two years before her untimely death—in the very hotel room where he committed suicide. Along with the aforementioned, her four books, issued by Turkey’s prestigious publishing house Yapi Kredi, include a collection of letters with fellow lifelong comrade in literature Leyla Erbil, and a complete works edition of a plays, prose, and translations prepared by her sister, Sezer Duru.

In the last four decades, Özlü has not faded from the literary landscape of young readers. Between her books, the thirty-five printings of Yaşamin Ucuna Yolculuke are only outmatched by the thirty-eight printings for Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri. She is known, adoringly, as the melancholic princess of Turkey by the youngest generation of readers (such as the editor Dilara Alemdar), and as the wild child of Turkish literature by experts (such as NYU Turkish literature professor Sibel Erol). READ MORE…

A Brief Introduction to Nermin Yɪldɪrɪm’s Secret Dreams in Istanbul

March 11, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Ümit Hussein

Secret Dreams in Istanbul is a work of literary fiction, but deals with issues that are very much on the agenda of today’s society.

Secret Dreams in Istanbul is a fascinating Turkish novel by Nermin Yɪldɪrɪm, published at the end of last year by Anthem Press. Before I go any further, I must confess that I am the book’s translator, but I would want to share it even if that weren’t the case. Only very occasionally does one come across a book that leaps out from all others and lodges itself in one’s mind. When that happens, it mustn’t be taken lightly.

March 8 was International Women’s Day, and it strikes me as a very apt time to talk about this novel, given that it draws attention to so many issues that are relevant to the battles women have been fighting for over a century to combat injustice. These themes include domestic violence, forced marriage, feigned virginity, self-induced abortion, physical and social inequality, and, more broadly, the condition of being a victim. In varying degrees, all of the characters in this novel are victims: of their gender, their social class, their biological clock, their complexes, social taboos, social expectations, their physical, intellectual and financial limitations, and of their own family. This is a book in which the weak are oppressed by the strong: it’s about facing up to one’s insecurities and confronting one’s demons; it’s about the age-old problem of sibling rivalry. And running parallel to all of these conflicts is the other key theme in the novel—the role of memory in the human psyche.

To use a somewhat frivolous simile, if you have a diamond necklace, you wouldn’t leave it locked away in a drawer where nobody can appreciate it when it could be displayed for all the world to see. I am a translator in the very privileged position of making it possible for Anglophones to enjoy the literature of other languages, and I felt the need to share this particular gem. For that reason, I decided to translate the book and to now write of why I regard the book so highly, as well as the process of translating it.

I first encountered Ruyalar Anlatɪlmaz (as it is called in Turkish) in 2012 when I was commissioned to translate a section (the first seventy pages). It moved me very deeply; I knew there would be elements of this book that would stay with me forever. But it wasn’t until 2016 that I received the go ahead (at my instigation) to translate it in its entirety.

This is Nermin Yɪldɪrɪm’s second novel. She has since written another five, all of them very fine and more successful than this one. Yet it was Secret Dreams in Istanbul that I felt compelled to translate. Whilst re-reading it, four years after my initial reading, I was taken aback to discover it was almost unnecessary to keep reading because I remembered practically every word. I don’t recall that ever happening to me, either before or since.

To briefly summarise the plot, Pilar, the novel’s Spanish protagonist, returns from work one evening to discover that her husband, Eyüp, has suddenly and inexplicably disappeared from the home they share in Barcelona. She learns from the police the following morning that he has boarded a plane for Istanbul, the city of his birth that he has not visited since he left it almost two decades previously. Mystified as to what could have provoked such uncharacteristic behaviour, and assailed by her own insecurities, she decides to follow him there and bring him back. Packing a tiny bag with just a few clothes and the dream diary that Eyüp’s psychologist has asked him to keep (in an attempt to get to the bottom of what has been disturbing his sleep), she sets off for Istanbul, where she will embark on a journey of painful discovery. Meeting Eyüp’s dysfunctional family, from which he has been as good as estranged since before she has known him, and his friends, and seeing for the first time the city where he grew up, she pieces together the clues to uncover the horrifying truth about what drove Eyüp away. READ MORE…

Where Sunsets & Anguish Collide: Isolation in Lebanese Literature

July 22, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by MK Harb

Despite their preoccupations, be they literary or ideological, they both pause and capture love during calamity.

In the past few months, we’ve been forced to dwell on our place in the world in the light of extraordinary circumstances. As most of us experience a certain degree of forced isolation, we predictably turn to literature, in hopes that its wisdoms will enable us to regard our realities with increased awareness, understanding, and presence. In this following essay, writer MK Harb takes us through the various manifestations of isolation as seen in Lebanese literature, and more specifically via two extraordinary texts by two Lebanese-American authors, Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman and Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose.

“During these unprecedented times . . .”

I have heard and read this line over a thousand times since the pandemic began. In a fortnight, we have entered an echo chamber in which a voice is constantly screaming “unprecedented times” at us. Sometimes this voice comes in the form of an email, other times a news clipping, but mostly, it speaks to us as a marketing gimmick. Countless products remind us that these times are in fact unprecedented as they encourage us to buy sanitization stations, virtual university booths, luxury hazmat suits, and other products that commercialize placebo. Maybe the academic part of myself hates the word unprecedented; I have found that the cynicism of academia manifests in teaching that every time is precedent. From pandemics to famine to injustice, it has all been here before.

What is unprecedented in our current cataclysm is our collective online grief; from Zoom calls to Skype sessions, it has never been more ravenous and visible. However, after a while, one realizes that this excessive online engagement numbs the mind more than reassures it. Instead, resorting to literature has been one of the few escapes out of the confines of my living room to more alluring worlds. From Yasmine Seale’s new translation of Aladdin, to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness, I feel the intimacy of reading and caressing a text much more deeply than that of a video call. During these literary excursions, I discovered the omnipresence of isolation as a theme in contemporary Lebanese literature. The irony of this discovery was not lost on me; the isolation of a pandemic led me to isolation in fiction.

As I drew out these conceptual maps of society’s outcasts, I noticed their versatility. Sometimes it manifests in the trials and trepidations of a gay man in Hoda Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter, in which the character navigates a war-torn and derelict Beirut from his lonely apartment. Other times this isolation results from the acts of resistance and radicalism, as in Emily Nasrallah’s The Oleander Tree, which takes place during an epoch when the protagonist Rayya resists the feudal and patriarchal roles set for the women of her village. However, two authors in particular were naturally and strongly united in this theme: Rabih Alameddine and Etel Adnan.

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