Posts filed under 'Francophone literature'

What’s New in Translation: August 2024

August 12, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Georgina Fooks, Matilde Ribeiro, and Sofija Popovska

New work from Mexico and Martinique!

In this month’s compilation of newly released titles, our editors take a close look at three works that cohere stylistic invention with unconstrained probings into reality. In a bold collection of psychogeography, Daniel Saldaña París vivifies the urban space as a transformative intersection of image and imagination. From Aimé Cesaire, one of the founders of négritude, an early dramatic work provides further insight into his potent discourse against colonial violence. And in the English-language debut of one of Latin America’s most vital political thinkers, a volume combining dialogue and essay introduces the essentiality of communal resistance in the thinking of Raquel Gutiérrez-Aguilar.

9781646222315

Planes Flying Over a Monster by Daniel Saldaña París, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney and Philip K. Zimmerman, Catapult, 2024

Review by Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large for North Macedonia

“The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations. . . It creates shadows and ambiguities within them. It inserts its multitudinous references and citations into them. . .” writes Michel de Certeau in his 1984 book, The Practice of Everyday Life. I thought of these words immediately as I immersed myself in the shifting landscapes of Planes Flying Over a Monster, a collection of ten essays by Daniel Saldaña París, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney and Philip K. Zimmerman. In writing about (and moving through) Montreal, Havana, Mexico City, Madrid, and other places, Saldaña París engages in a transformative cartography, rearranging bits of metropolises in turn into a tangle of ruelles frequented by a secret writer; a map of zones where different types of drugs can be purchased; a junction between “three different groups playing the same son cubano tune at different rhythms on three different corners of the plaza”; and a stretch of space-time existing only momentarily within a locked gaze between a shy, adolescent cult member and his adult self. Tracing the connections between places, people, and events, Saldaña París creates a sense of communion with the world that is at times uneasy, yet always shot through with radical tenderness and a rare species of honesty—the kind that doesn’t confuse itself with the truth. This self-awareness, rooted in the memoir aspect of the collection, intensifies the realism that the genre of nonfiction always purports to provide, yet only occasionally delivers.

The collection’s closing essay, “Assistants of the Sun,” is also the beginning of the story—chronologically speaking. In it, we meet a young Saldaña París, dragged into joining a cult by his father and uncle. The sect’s activities happen during nature retreats, and include rituals of varying extremity—anything from walking in a neat line to a live burial. Saldaña París is forced to confront these memories years later, watching footage of these events while sitting with his partner Catherine in a borrowed Brooklyn apartment—an arrangement he mentions multiple times throughout the essay, as though attempting to anchor himself amidst the flood of disturbing recollections. He faces the past with striking empathy—remembering his father as “softness personified, mildly alcoholic, holding down three jobs . . . and a radical advocate of tenderness,” despite his having roped his son into a scam. This compassionate clarity, spanning all ten essays, is consonant with the author’s mission—relayed to him by an extra-terrestrial during a cult activity—to “help the sun to illuminate the world.” READ MORE…

“. . . I am sure of it”: On Deranged As I Am by Ali Zamir

February 15, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

The readers . . . become interlocutors, individuals who would not easily dismiss him or his story, and give a patient ear to his list of troubles.

Deranged As I Am by Ali Zamir, translated from the French by Alice Banks, Fum d’Estampa Press, November 2022

In Ali Zamir’s third novel, Deranged As I Am, narrator-protagonist Deranged is an impoverished man, somehow surviving on the paltry daily wages he manages to earn through hard labour at the docks from transporting goods and cargo, who keeps himself aloof from his fellow workers who make fun of him, using his clothes as a calendar: “Deranged as I am I have only seven ancient shirts in all. Seven pairs of trousers and seven pairs of shorts all pocked with holes and on each of them a day of the week so I don’t forget remaining me that I shouldn’t wear the same outfit twice you see?!” The novel itself begins intensely in medias res with Deranged trapped in a confined space, wounded and on the verge of death, his limbs tied up as flies swarm around him. His crying out, while exaggerated, highlights a jagged agony. 

The rest of the narrative recounts the incidents that led to this low point, with Deranged refusing to keep quiet and hunker down in the face of his many painful oppressions: “Let me make you understand this loud and clear as long as my heart beats your ears will bleed they will bleed until my soul is dizzy lest I disappear with a stream of tears in my charmless eyes.” Situated at the dizzy intersection of various vulnerabilities, he has minimal hope of having his voice heard or his exploitation compensated, because to the “angels of darkness,” as he calls the flies that represent his numerous tormentors, he is nothing but a speck of dirt that they can wipe away and then go about their day. The readers therefore become interlocutors, individuals who would not easily dismiss him or his story, and give a patient ear to his list of troubles and problems. 

READ MORE…

Announcing Our December Book Club Title: Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? by Max Lobe

December 30, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

To open up poverty is to open up migration is to open up blackness is to open up the love between two men.

For our final Book Club selection of the year, Asymptote is proud to present a work emblematic of how writing can transform, subvert, and negate borders. In Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside?, Swiss author Max Lobe traces how the complex factors of race, class, sexuality, and migration can cohere in a single life, and how nationhood can be refracted and reinterpreted by those who refuse to be defined by the standard. Speaking in the extraordinarily vivid voice of his protagonist, Mwana, Lobe balances tragedy with joy, freedom with entrapment, and home with home.

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.  

Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? by Max Lobe, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, Hope Road Publishing, 2022

As in love, mystery, and metamorphosis, the name of country draws a long throughline in our world of stories. Add to it a possessive—my country, your country—and the resulting narratives are instantly elaborated with the ontological intersections, demarcations, and dialogues that enmesh our landscape. Through this simple addition, a life is juxtaposed with a society, a single act comes to emblematise a culture, and an experience constitutes an identity—not necessarily out of any active political consciousness, but simply from having left, at some point, that arbitrary and mutable shape of one’s birthplace. Paul Gilroy, in conceptualising diaspora, described it as positing “important tensions between here and there, then and now, between seed in the bag, the packet or the pocket and seed in the ground, the fruit or the body.” To move across our jigsaw world is to know the fluid weight of difference and sameness—that they can be at once interchangeable and oppositional. These shifts from strangeness to familiarity do not begin with the boarding of a plane or a boat, but occur in minute swatches of conversation, in the passing from one minute to the next, between two people looking out at the same scene, not knowing what the other sees.

In Max Lobe’s Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside?, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, country is introduced by the most immediate and intimate of desires—food. Our narrator, Mwana, is lugging “two huge sugar-cane bags” across Switzerland, with all the provisions and gifts of another nation inside: “Fumbwa, saka-saka, makayabu, okra and dried impwa.” The list goes on, rich with sugars and starches and svelte oils. Wrapped meticulously by his mother, the treasured packages have been carried by his sister Kosambela, across the continental divide from what Mwana calls Bantuland, to the nation where they both now reside: Switzerland of the Grütli Meadow and the Rütli Oath, of white-out peaks and lakeshore villas.

A recent graduate of the University of Geneva and a settled Swiss resident, Mwana is black, queer, and unemployed; it is this lattermost factor that rules his life, his daily preoccupations, and his physical and mental wanderings. With repeated trips to the unemployment office, small yellow coins dug out of household crevices, kindly deceptive calls to his mother—this scarcity is the precipice that Mwana dangles from, and as such it is the swinging, breakneck angle by which he interprets everything. The two bags he drags onto the bus from Lugano to Geneva contain emblems of home, of care, and of a beautiful eradication of distance, but most importantly, they are an antidote to hunger. Amidst Lobe’s warm, loquacious prose, we first see the dissipation of difference into sameness, the shift from displacement in country to immediacy in the body. In all the discursive paths the mind takes to arrive at a single place, we see the need to live. READ MORE…

Meet the Publisher: Simon Dardick, Co-Publisher of Véhicule Press, on Publishing Translations of Francophone Literature and Social History

August 30, 2017  |  in Interviews, Publisher Profile  |  by Sarah Moses

It’s wonderful working with translators. I love the whole complex process and appreciate how translators must have a foot in two cultures.

Véhicule Press is a Canadian publisher of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Located in the city of Montréal, where French is predominantly spoken, Véhicule has been publishing francophone authors in translation since 1980. In recent years, half their catalog has been dedicated to works translated from the French. Véhicule started out in 1973 on the site of the artist-run gallery Véhicule Art Inc. with a printing press and equipment inherited from one of its members. In 1975, they became the only cooperatively owned printing and publishing company in the province of Québec. Nowadays, the press is run by Simon Dardick, who stayed on when the coop broke up in 1981, and archivist Nancy Marrelli. From the beginning, Véhicule has focused on titles that celebrate and examine Canadian culture and society. Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Argentina, Sarah Moses, stopped by Véhicule’s office in Montréal to chat with Simon Dardick about publishing francophone literature in translation and some of the titles he’s excited about. 

Sarah Moses (SM): I’d like to begin by asking you about the origins of Véhicule Press.

Simon Dardick (SD): It grew out of an art gallery called Véhicule Art. It was at a time when artists were renting large spaces—for performance art and for large-scale colour field paintings. Véhicule Art was an artist-run gallery—the second one in Canada; the first was in Vancouver.The artwork was interesting—it was very international but also showed work from local people from Montréal and Québec. The press was situated at the back of the gallery. One of the artists had bought a huge printing press and printed, I think, one or two copies of a magazine called Beaux-Arts. The apocryphal story is that the printer got his hand caught in the press and it stood silent for many months until some people gravitated around it and decided to learn how to use it.

That was six months before I arrived in 1973. I became typesetter and general manager. We were all middle class kids, lots of long hair, who were involved in literary stuff. We were painters, writers, dancers, and video artists who came together. There was at various times seven or eight of us. We were incorporated in Québec as a cooperative printing and publishing company. We really wanted just to publish, but we would print our books on offcuts, the paper left over from jobs we had printed for other folks. We were the popular grassroots printer in town. We printed posters and invitations for artists and flyers for demonstrations and community groups. So essentially we started publishing more and more books of our own although near the end we still did jobs printing for people. The end was really 1980, 1981. The technology was changing—printing was becoming more electronic, rather than lithographic. We did low-end printing, except for our own books. We didn’t envision committing to a life of commercial printing. So we dissolved the printing company and my wife, Nancy, and I continued the publishing end of things. In 1981, we moved to a greystone in central Montréal—we live above the office—and immediately eliminated tremendous overhead in terms of rent.

Our approach has been very much influenced by visual arts—I was a painter. So for me the look of a book is important: the cover art and the text of the book has to work together. To this day I still typeset all our books, with the odd exception. We’ve been doing it here since 1981. We have a poetry editor and a fiction editor. My wife and I do the non-fiction.

READ MORE…