Posts filed under 'history'

What’s New in Translation: May 2022

May 16, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor, Sabrina Parker Greene, and Samantha Siefert

New writings translated from Arabic, Croatian, and Italian!

In this month of new releases from literatures around the world, we present a poignant and transcendental collection of poems from Palestinian writer Maya Abun Al-Hayyat, a mesmerizing journey through Latin American from Croatian author Marko Pogačar, and a stunning psychological novel of detachment from Erica Mou, in her Anglophone debut. Read on to find out more!

leaf

You Can Be the Last Leaf: Selected Poems by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah, Milkweed Editions, 2022

Review by Laurel Taylor, Assistant Managing Editor

To raise one’s pen is a political act. As I write these words, it’s been less than forty-eight hours since journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was fatally shot in Jenin. Having acted politically, having written politically, her death is now being used for political means. Words within and about war function as powerful political weapons, bandages, sirens, and songs, all in one. This is what Maya Abu Al-Hayyat shares with us through her incisive verse, as translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah.

Lovers Swap Language

the way enemies exchanges stabs:
he takes a word from her lexicon
and she takes one from his book.
That’s how poems are made
and also bigoted speeches

And when lovers and enemies sleep,
the ether carries a hot hum
the universe digests
unaffected.

Words weaponize, the world marches on, but Abu Al-Hayyat rests between breaths, demonstrating through a brilliant puzzle of verbal turns the ways in which trauma has distorted our time. This collection, You Can Be the Last Leaf, brings together verses from multiple times and tomes, holding them in conversation, exchanging the writer’s lexicons and books through the years, and digesting the whole in the face of an indifferent universe.

In his brilliant introduction, Joudah describes Abu Al-Hayyat’s place both as an individual soul but also as someone writing to the collective trauma of the Palestinian people. “The multifarious Palestinian voice lives on in Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s words, ordinary as grief and daily as laughter.” In the vein of the kitchen table, many of her poems do indeed touch on the quotidian, the life of motherhood and of aging, of love and family. “Mothers Arrange Their Aches at Night,” for example, opens “Joint pain, high sugar, / rheumatic ailments, / a boy who missed school because of a cold”. Quickly, however, the shade of the larger region—of that political conflict—ghosts over the next lines. “mothers feel sadness for mysterious reasons, / like sadness over other mothers / who stand in public streets / holding photos of their sons’ / well-groomed faces / with sideburns and mustaches, / waiting for the camera to capture them / and their chapped hands.” Like Abu Akleh’s reporting, Abu Al-Hayyat’s verse is a camera, and what it captures, what it turns toward, is not only the violence but also the aftermath, the void left by time cut short.

In “Mahmoud,” for example, Abu Al-Hayyat imagines a different future for herself and her lover, who was killed by a bullet from Israeli forces on the first day of the second intifada, as Joudah tells us in his introduction. The poem opens in the hypothetical. “Mahmoud could have been our son. / I’d have objected to the name / and, for family reasons, you’d have insisted on it.” Midway through the poem though, other temporal modes wriggle in. “You’d have forgiven him, / you’re kind like that. He’d only smoked in secret. / But the first rock he’d have thrown / at soldiers at the checkpoint, / to raise his heroic stock in Mana’s eyes, / would have declared war in our house / biting followed by flying slippers.” Mahmoud is forgiven in another timeline, but the lover is kind even now. Mahmoud smoked, but he only hypothetically threw the rock. The poem ends with a slap, the same slap which never landed on Mahmoud’s cheek. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpts from “Galileo” by Yevhen Pluzhnyk

February 15, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Oksana Rosenblum

I am quiet as grass, even quieter still

First published in 1926, today’s Translation Tuesday features an excerpt from the long poem “Galileo,” first collected in Ukrainian poet Yevhen Pluzhnyk’s debut collection. Oscillating between the epic ambition of its length—running to more than twenty pages in its original publication—and the persona’s declaration of his own smallness (“I am quiet as grass, even quieter still”), this poem reads like an inverse of the Whitmanian celebration of the self even as it maintains its own brand of fierce solitude. Hear translator Oksana Rosenblum contextualise this poem that was written almost a century ago now: on Pluzhnyk’s proto-Existentialist spirit and the strange parallel journey the writer took when compared to his titular figure. 

“Yevhen Pluzhnyk’s poem ‘Galileo’ was published in 1926 as part of his poetry collection Dni (Days). The debut collection of the 28-year-old Ukrainian poet made a strong impression on Ukrainian literary circles. Pluzhnyk became instantly recognized as one of the most original poets of Ukrainian literature in the 1920s–30s, for the laconism and emotional strength of his poetry. The narrator assumes the persona of a fragile, traumatized person who went through the horrors of the Civil War—hunger, everyday survival, joblessness, and more broadly, a sense of not being understood or welcomed in a society ruled by the values of the NEP (New Economic Policy) adopted by the Soviet Union in 1921. In a way, he is that person, since he witnessed all of it: the upheaval of the Revolution, the trauma of the Civil War, life-long struggle with tuberculosis, and poverty. Even though the poem was written in 1926, before the appearance of Existentialism as a philosophical movement, there is an overwhelming sense of the narrator’s involvement with the kind of questions that an existentialist writer would ask: is there any meaning to life beyond what we assign to it? Why do some people always come to the top of the hierarchy, why do others suffer unspeakable pain and hardships?

Yevhen Pluzhnyk, a poet whose life was filled with personal and social hardships and was eventually cut short by the terror and purges of the 1930s, somewhat enigmatically entitled his poem Galileo. The title remains a mystery. We know that Galileo Galilei was forced to recant his views in front of the Inquisition. Pluzhnyk never addresses this fact in his poem; moreover, he mentions Galileo only in the very last stanza. Tragically, Pluzhnyk’s fate ran in parallel to Galileo’s: in 1935, he will have to recant his own views when accused of Ukrainian nationalism and terrorism. He would die of tuberculosis on Solovetsky Islands, thousands of miles away from his beloved Ukraine.”

—Oksana Rosenblum 

Galileo

Dedicated to Marusia Yurkova

Limitless spaces, familiar orbits
Still do not exhaust Earth’s purpose.
It rains again, and I struggle with doubts;
It’s autumn. 

As I walk by coffee shops, in my worn-out boots—
By the warm lights, people and daily affairs,
Suddenly, I feel so quiet inside:
Life or death, who cares?

Oh, autumn!
       It always wears me out,
       My heart is like a small tired stone . . .
Those days, wasted in a grey typhoid barrack,
And the black spots, ravens, and I am alone.

Listen up, you, competent people!
                                              You,
Whose jaws look like big ugly claws!
I am quiet as grass, even quieter still,
I am so easily unnoticed. 

Those who have strong nerves, they
Do not need to listen to my nonsense.
But for me, someone who starves every day,
Now’s my only chance to be open. 

Maybe I am a Philistine, saddened
by the absence of a warm winter coat.
Or perhaps I come from a land,
Where people die over and over.

Can I share one thought with you?
Being honest is not easy.
Under morbid rain, every day and night
I stand on the corner and howl.  READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2022

January 24, 2022  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Erica X Eisen, and Xiao Yue Shan

The reconstituting of memories that have been erased is a central concern for the playful yet meditative Winter 2022 issue.

Asymptote’s Winter 2022 issue is now out, marking the magazine’s eleventh year in publication! The newest edition features writing from a record forty-three countries and twenty languages. Here to introduce you to what this issue has to offer are our blog editors with some thoughts on the pieces that stood out to them the most.

In Maria Stepanova’s 2021 genre-defying work In Memory of Memory, she wrote that her excavation of family history was motivated by a desire to discover “the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.” Stepanova was absorbed with not only recovering the stories of her Jewish family but also probing her own obsessive relationship with memory itself. The memoir suggests the faultiness of memory in its rips and tears, while betraying an anxiety over its artifice in the way the memoirist manipulates the archive through inclusion, exclusion, and distortion for the purpose of her narrative. The reconstituting of memories that have been erased through the forces of time and displacement is a central concern for the playful yet meditative Winter 2022 issue. Like Stepanova, the authors of these varied works construct complex inquiries into the past through reappraisals of memory, dreams of alternate lives, and imaginative play with form. They seek the truth through memories while contesting their inevitable artificiality and malfunctioning.

In Rose Bialer’s deeply affecting interview, the Hungarian poet, memoirist, and translator George Szirtes speaks of returning to certain memories and themes in his personal history throughout his career in poetry, sometimes writing new poems that function as continuations of collections published decades before. This idea of Szirtes’s “return” to the same moments for their comprehension reflects his mistrust of memories but also his belief that truths are embedded within them. One of the talk’s many astonishing moments is when Szirtes claims that the return over time to the same memories in his poems reveals parallel narratives that add up to a palimpsest of personal history and identity. For Szirtes, formal constraints such as the terza rima continuously open the same memories to new facets and understandings. This illuminating conversation demonstrates how the fluidity of memory allows the poet-translator to construct an unstable past and self while “registering the sense of truth in all its complexity.”

READ MORE…

Mapping the Vast Landscape of Romanian Theatre

January 19, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by MARGENTO

[T]he anthology’s aim—as stated by Komporaly—is mainly to feature the country’s formal literary and cultural diversity . . .

Plays from Romania: Dramaturgies of Subversion, edited and translated by Jozefina Komporaly, Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2021

In the pretentiously Francophone Bucharest of the late nineteenth century, Ion Luca Caragiale’s plays were met with harsh criticism for their alleged sexual innuendos and outrageous immorality—what one might nowadays call subversion. Caragiale, whose reputation has now grown into that of an unparalleled classic and a quintessential influence on a host of Romanian/international avant-garde luminaries, was in fact of mixed Balkan heritages. He spent his later years as an émigré in Berlin, thus proving himself an ambivalent maverick and avant-la-lettre transnational.

Almost 150 years on, Romanian drama boastfully continues this legacy of subversiveness, diversity, and transnationalism. In that respect, the best possible illustration of such variation is the recent anthology, Plays from Romania: Dramaturgies of Subversion, edited and translated by Jozefina Komporaly. From the very introduction, Komporaly pertinently places contemporary Romanian theatre at the crossroads of the culture’s emergence from communism thirty years ago, and situates its ever increasing representation of minorities—particularly Roma—in a global context. The very rich and nuanced landscape that Komporaly aptly charts is further complicated by the dualism of state-funded (more traditional) and independent (more avant-garde) theaters, as well as formal genre-related features—both text-based and experiment/performance-informed. The picture is then rendered even murkier by companies specializing in minority drama and/or being run by representatives of minorities striving to gain state-funded status.

While informed therefore by a knowledgeable historical and cultural perspective, the anthology’s aim—as stated by Komporaly—is mainly to feature the country’s formal literary and cultural diversity by illustrating the common grounds of “burning concerns rooted in Romanian realities” and the experiments “push[ing] the boundaries of the genre.” And indeed, unconventional approaches are featured from the very opening play: a stage adaptation by Mihaela Panainte of Noble Prize winner Herta Müller’s short story collection, Lowlands (thus forging a connection to the German minority in Romania). Panainte’s staging of Müller’s fiction rivetingly captures the latter’s poetic fragmentariness through what Komporaly rightly calls textual modularity—just as the translator herself lithely renders that same combination of poetry and alert colloquialism alongside a more ponderous social grayness and a haunting sense of death’s ubiquity. READ MORE…

Announcing Our October Book Club Selection: The Italian by Shukri Mabkhout

November 1, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

The novel lends itself to debates on more universal themes such as power, corruption, the idealism of youth, gender equality, and abuse.

In his seminal work on colonialism and subjugation, The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon asks: “how do we get from the atmosphere of violence to setting violence in motion?” Shukri Mabkhout liberates this idea into story gracefully in his debut novel, The Italian. Delineating the fermenting revolutions in late twentieth century Tunisia through the scope of one young man, Mabkhout paints a vivid reproduction of the oppressive conflicts between nationalism and religion, love and lust, ideology and action. We are proud to present this vivid text, and its detailed contours of individual life in the wider contexts of country, as our Book Club selection for the month of October.

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. 

The Italian by Shukri Mabkhout, translated from the Arabic by Miled Faiza and Karen McNeil, Europa Editions, 2021

Shukri Mabkhout’s The Italian, winner of the 2015 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, was first published in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Perhaps with some suggestion of history repeating itself, it is set during another period of political upheaval in Tunisia—the 1980s and 1990s, which saw a ‘bloodless coup’ led by Ben Ali, the leader who was to be deposed in 2011. Intricate and detailed, heavy with politics, philosophy, food, and sex, the novel is an insight into Tunisian history and society, human relationships, and the often politically motivated and self-interested inner workings of institutional power.

The novel opens with its own violent outbreak and fallen patriarch. At his father’s funeral, the protagonist, Abdel Nasser—nicknamed el-Talyani (the titular Italian) for his Mediterranean good looks—attacks the local imam. The family and wider community are shocked and shamed, but also perplexed; as the narrator, one of el-Talyani’s childhood friends, tells the reader, grief over his father’s death “didn’t fully explain it.” Abdel Nasser’s family members offer various explanations—the “corrupt books” he read as a child, his university classmates, the personal circumstances of his divorce, or the “deep-rooted corruption” of his morals. While the broader community simply consider him the black sheep of the family, none of these explanations seems to satisfy the narrator. Jumping back in time, the novel thus sets out to unpack what might have motivated Abdel Nasser’s outburst, and, along the way, also details much of the political history of Tunisia during these tumultuous decades.

Abdel Nasser has a complex and somewhat distant relationship with his family, and in particular with his brother, Salah Eddine. Salah Eddine left Tunisia as a young man, and is now an “esteemed academic and international finance expert” living in Switzerland—in other words, he is the epitome of cosmopolitanism and institutional economic liberalism. When Salah Eddine leaves Tunisia, Abdel Nasser assumes the throne as the de-facto eldest son—which Mabkhout explains endows a special status and freedom within the Tunisian family. He also takes up residence in his elder brother’s room, which provides him with an intellectual awakening through books and records, and in which he also experiences a sexual awakening: he is groomed by the family’s significantly older neighbour, who—by no means coincidentally—is his brother’s ex-lover. The room eventually also becomes a political hotbed where Abdel Nasser discusses philosophy, politics, and Marxist economics with select classmates, for he is set apart from others not only by his good looks, but also his astute mind and leadership skills. He goes on to study law at university, where he acts as a leader and recruiter in an activist student organization. READ MORE…

Writer and Translator E.J. Koh Explores the Bridged and Braided Histories of Language

August 23, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Ruwa Alhayek

If my mother’s letters could sleep, my translations would be their dreams.

E.J. Koh’s memoir, The Magical Language of Others, was published in January 2020, but I read it in lockdown a few months later. Since March, I have read or listened to this book at least four times, each time encountering something else that makes me come back to it. Koh’s memoir is a coming-of-age story framed by translations of the letters her mother sent her from Korea, where she and Koh’s dad relocated for work. It tells the heartfelt story of a young Korean-American woman who comes to poetry and translation, to Japanese, and to a deeper understanding of her own languages, English and Korean. And she weaves into this story, with palpable sincerity and magnanimity, the stories of generations of women before her who survived the Japanese occupation, the Jeju massacre, and one abandonment after another. In this interview, she talks about avoiding seamlessness and translating war, wounding, and the seemingly impossible.

Ruwa Alhayek (RA): Has translation allowed you to inhabit your mother’s letters in a different way? 

E.J. Koh (EJK): Translating my mother’s letters for me is inseparable from experiencing the vast distance between us in my youth—from the US to South Korea, between English and Korean—and the violence of when that distance suddenly collided to a close. I am living my way back toward the pain of being separated and reunited again. I am holding two strings at the same time. One is the mother who delivered her child. The other is the child who can deliver her mother. That is why I say if my mother’s letters could sleep, my translations would be their dreams.

RA: If you were to issue a new translation of these letters, how do you think they might change? 

EJK: I am in love with and feel deeply grateful for the work of translators. I’d be honored to see her letters translated again, by different translators. What occurs to me is how I leaned away from seamlessness, translation as if written in the historically dominant English, and hoped to let Korean remain—against erasure—choosing instead words with sound, syntax, and rhythm to keep pace with my mother’s voice running circles inside me. But I feel there is no one way, and the assumption of one is the failure to see what can be different and what can be changed.

RA: I was really inspired by the scene of your morning ritual in Japan where you sit in the coffee shop with the hanging vines from dawn until your classes start, memorizing ten pages from your pocket dictionary every day—is there something about that type of immersion that resembles the process of translation for you?

EJK: When I lived in Japan, I starved myself. I wouldn’t eat a proper meal until I could order in Japanese without error. My eating disorder entered my language, and discipline became a place where I could intellectualize my self-harm. I learned the language quickly but with shame and guilt—not opposites to but the very sources of pride. I used language to isolate myself. I say, Languages, as they open you up, can also allow you to close. Where before I depended on separation, now I move in the world by way of connection and humanity. READ MORE…

Focusing Back on Smallness: On Defne Suman’s The Silence of Scheherazade

August 9, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

Suman’s tale is at its heart about those small people living their daily lives within the city, loving each other and loving the land beneath them.

The Silence of Scheherazade by Defne Suman, translated from the Turkish by Betsy Göksel, Head of Zeus, 2021

In the unfathomable numbers of our current reality, big players—political, economic, scientific—very often overshadow everyday mundanities, the smallness of ordinary people’s lives. In this case, smallness is not meant as an insult, but rather as an important facet that we all lose track of when inundated with the major headlines numbering pandemic casualties. Similarly, the lives of the many characters in Defne Suman’s epic and entangled The Silence of Scheherazade are also eventually dwarfed by the backdrop that consumes them—the fallout of World War I and the crumbling Ottoman Empire.

Part Victorian Gothic, part cosmopolitan modernist, and part metatextual experiment, The Silence of Scheherazade traces the lives of a massive cast of characters from the late 1800s to the early 2000s. Jumping across decades and points of view with ease, moving forward and backward in time, the novel weaves a tangled tapestry over the city of Smyrna. Scheherazade sometimes narrates her life in the first person, but more often draws on the ghosts of the past to let other players come forward and speak. “My birth,” the novel opens, “on a sweet, orange-tinted evening, coincided with the arrival of Avinash Pillai in Smyrna.” A few pages later, Scheherazade recedes and we shift to Pillai himself, with his first encounter of a new home. “The young Indian man, fed up with the smell of coal and cold iron which had permeated the days-long sea voyage, was inhaling the pleasant aroma of flowers and grass. Rose, lemon, magnolia, jasmine and deep down a touch of amber.” In and out Scheherazade leads us, from the Armenian quarter of the city to British spies in the consulate, from wealthier Levantine suburbs to humble Greek grocers.

The focus falls especially to the women of this world, women who are constrained by all those huge players above them to live their lives in accordance with the expectations of their classes, their religions, their families, their countries, and who are forced to extraordinary measures when they fail to comply. Whether the flighty Juliette, the willful Edith, the skillful Meline, the daydreaming Panagiota, or the madwoman Sumbul, each woman is faced with terrible personal tragedies which are locked away behind walls of claustrophobic cultural silences. Edith, for her part, becomes addicted to hashish in order to endure the agony of each day. “That day had come around again. No matter how much hashish she smoked or how many secret ingredients Gypsy Yasemin added to it, whenever this date came around, that long-ago memory returned, like the sun shining through fog.” Panagiota, undergoing a different struggle, agrees to a distasteful marriage in order to protect her family. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2021

July 12, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Barbara Halla, Ruwa Alhayek, Suhasini Patni, and Thuy Dinh

New texts from Italy, Brazil, Korea, Morocco, and Spain!

In this month’s selection of excellent literature in translation, there’s something for everyone. From a dreamy and architecturally expressive graphic novel that speaks to fates and futures, to a collection of strange and visceral short stories delineating the network between bodies and their definitions. And if science fiction or unsettling tales aren’t your thing, there’s also the powerful narrative on a prodigal son who returns to navigate the pathos-filled landscape of past tragedies, loneliness, and isolation; the masterfully told history of Catalonia as it plays out through the life of a woman embroiled in the tumult of her time; or a cunning satire of contemporary Morocco that traverses territory of both physical and virtual landscapes. Read on for reviews on each of these remarkable works; hope you enjoy the trip!

celestia

Celestia by Manuele Fior, translated from the Italian by Jamie Richards, Fantagraphics, 2021

Review by Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora

“. . . from above, this island is in the shape of two hands intertwined.”

                                                           —Dr. Vivaldi, from Manuele Fior’s Celestia

Such is how Dr. Vivaldi alludes to Venice—curved strips of land yearning to touch and engulf each other in blue space. Ambitiously realized by Manuele Fior and eloquently translated by Jamie Richards, Celestia—Venice’s oneiric double—is a visual poem and modernist dance in graphic novel form, encompassing diaphanous terrains and gothic undertow, exuberantly tumescent with allusions to literature, art, and architecture.

Born in 1975 in Cesena, Italy, Fior currently lives in Paris, France. Drawing from his studies at Venice’s University of Architecture (Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, or IUAV), he has, over time, developed a dynamic visual language with narrative elements drawn from both Western and Eastern aesthetic traditions. Several of his acclaimed graphic novels have been translated into English and published by U.S.-based Fantagraphics, and Celestia marks his fifth collaboration with Richards—a scholar and translator of Italian literature.

Deeply influenced by John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, Joseph Brodsky’s Watermark, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poem “Profezia” (“Prophecy”)—Fior depicts Celestia as a fusion of dualities that exist both in the history of Venice as well as in the fictional universe of his work: Gothic and Renaissance, spiritual and secular, traditional and modern, rational and organic, freedom and oppression, community and exile. While in Fior’s earlier work—such as The Interview—telepathy is depicted as an extraterrestial gift, in Celestia this ability has existed from time immemorial among certain people, possibly as an evolutionary process. When the story opens, the island of Celestia is home to a group of telepathic refugees, who long ago fled from a horrific invasion that had devastated the mainland. One of them, Pierrot—cloaked in his commedia dell’arte persona—now wishes to renounce his telepathic power, which he perceives as a tragic link to his childhood. After delivering vigilante justice to a member of the demonic syndicate that controls the island’s murky depths, Pierrot escapes Celestia with Dora—a seer also burdened by her gift, as well as the oppressive intimacy enforced by her mind-melding circle of elites, led by Dr. Vivaldi.

Beset by this innate ability that has become a form of enslavement, Pierrot and Dora set off—hoping their journey would both resolve the past and guide them toward a new future. The couple’s subsequent arrival on the mainland brings them into contact with an omniscient child, or Child—who embodies both the future of mankind and its messiah. READ MORE…

Agustín Fernández Mallo’s The Things We’ve Seen Holds a Trick Mirror up to History

April 15, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Maddy Robinson

The writer proceeds as though attempting an exorcism, dragging flesh and blood relics to the present.

The Things We’ve Seen by Agustín Fernández Mallo, translated from Spanish by Thomas Bunstead, Fitzcarraldo, 2021

In 1989, an extraordinary exhibit opened at the Zoology Museum of Barcelona. Visitors flooded the unveiling of a retrospective on the work of German zoologist Peter Ameisenhaufen, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1955, and his assistant, Hans von Kubert. The exhibit consisted of the meticulous field notes, drawings, photographs, and x-rays of the rare animals the scientists discovered on their travels: Perrosomus, a desert rabbit with exaggerated incisors, Squatina squatina, a leathery sea creature with grotesquely humanoid features, and Solenoglypha polipodia, a snake with birdlike legs running along the length of its body.

If this is starting to sound far-fetched, it’s because it is.

Ameisenhaufen and von Kubert are the alter egos of Catalan photographers Pere Formiguera and Joan Fontcuberta, and the exhibition was, in fact, an artistic one. Designed to question the intentions of photography and its rich potential for deception and fakery (around 30 percent of those attending the inauguration with university degrees said that they believed the animals were real), the exhibit asked visitors to examine the blurred line between fact and fiction and see what truth they could extract.

In much the same way, Agustín Fernández Mallo’s latest novel in three parts, The Things We’ve Seen, sets the mind racing with blurs and glitches—periodic and perturbing reminders of just how malleable our reality, both past and present, can be in the hands of an expert. The English title of the book is taken from a line of poetry by Beat poet Carlos Oroza, which serves as one of the epigraphs to the novel, and subsequently appears with mantra-like regularity:

It is a mistake to take the things we’ve seen as given

With this as his cornerstone, Fernández Mallo creates an intricate network of information and stories, which sprawl outward and intersect seemingly at random, to form a vertiginous commentary on history, war, memory, and our interconnected, twenty-first century lives. In the first part, a writer not unlike Fernández Mallo himself attends a conference on the small Galician island of San Simón, where a group of Twitter-obsessed creatives and thinkers reflect on digital networks. He is accompanied by Julián Hernández, a real-life man who is part of a real-life punk band, Siniestro Total. With the mention of actual people, places, and events so early in the novel, it is tempting to think that what follows will be a species of essay. However, The Things We’ve Seen is published by Fitzcarraldo, whose color-coded covers give the game away (white for essays, Klein blue for fiction). Far be it from me to judge a book by its factuality, but in this case, it is as though the author is daring the reader to believe, to latch on to the recognizable markers of our shared world. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: February 2021

February 22, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Darren Huang, and Thuy Dinh

Please join us in celebrating three new translations this month from Russia, Mozambique, and Spain!

Amongst the great gifts that translation brings us is an awareness to the alternation and variegations of perspective, informed by ever-shifting factors of fact, selfhood, relationships, and hearsay alike. In this month’s roundup of excellence in world literature, our selection of texts brings expansive voices to light in exquisite explorations in what it means to remember, comprehend, and believe: a luminous text on family history from Maria Stepanova, the reimaginings of folktales by Mia Couto, and a deft fiction on self-deceptions by Sònia Hernández. 

in memory of memory

In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale, New Directions, 2021

 Review by Darren Huang, Editor-at-Large for Taiwan

In W.G. Sebald’s final novel Austerlitz, the protagonist Jacques Austerlitz—an art historian who arrived in Britain as an infant refugee from Czechoslovakia in the Kindertransport—searches for the fate of his parents, who were displaced and lost amidst the Holocaust and the Second World War. The novel is a poetic and digressive excavation of family history through the innovative hybrid of photography, travelogue, history, art criticism, and fiction, as well as a meditation on the horrors of the twentieth century, the unreliability of memory and memorialization, and the weight of the past on the present. This unique, peripatetic narrative method of ruminating over the past, which Sebald described as “documentary fiction,” is adapted by the highly acclaimed Russian novelist, poet, and essayist Maria Stepanova in her autofictional, essayistic memoir, In Memory of Memory, elegantly translated by Sasha Dugdale for New Directions. Like Sebald, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in her multi-genre novel Dictee, Stepanova adopts an oblique, multifaceted approach towards her central project of assembling a family history dating from the late nineteenth century. She lodges memoir like a puzzle box within cultural commentary, historical documents from her ancestors, philosophical discourse, and literary criticism; the result is a densely textured memoir-in-fragments that is alive to the limitations of its project—the lack of historical evidence, the inaccuracies in memory, the fraught relationship between the storyteller and her subjects, and the inevitable incompleteness of the family narrative.

The text is deliberately structured into three distinct portions: the first two sections alternate between cultural criticism, personal anecdotes, and historical documents. Certain “chapters,” wryly entitled “Not a Chapter,” are entirely composed of letters from her forbears, including her maternal great-grandparents, Sarra Ginzburg and Mikhail Fridman, her maternal grandparents, Lyolya and Lyonya, and her paternal grandparents, Nikolai Stepanov and Dora Stepanova, among others. The letters, chronologically arranged from 1942 to 1985, offer intimate glimpses into the personal lives of Stepanova’s family, and serve additionally as pieces of cultural history. They are redolent of a particular place and time, evoking what Stepanova calls “a feeling for the age.” Each epistolary “chapter” is accompanied by minimal context or commentary and separated from each other by essayistic inquiries into memory—ranging from such subjects as the photograph, Charlotte Salomon and her epic novel Life? Or Theatre?, Sebald and his writings on history, and the memory boxes of Joseph Cornell. In the first two sections of the text, this digressive arrangement interrupts the family narrative so that it only appears in decontextualized fragments. The effect of this bifurcated structure is that the family narrative remains mostly unexplored until the end of the second section and the third section, which consist of more conventional biographical accounts of family members. Stepanova’s delay in directly grappling with both her personal and family history reflects her anxieties about writing on the past. For example, she cites Marianne Hirsch’s concern that inserting archival photographic images might de- or re-contextualize them and distort their original realities. Therefore, the sections of cultural criticism represent the author’s hesitant, fitful attempts at approaching the past, which she finally accesses in the final third of the novel. In these critical chapters, Stepanova admits to “picking through different approaches to the past, as one might pick through dried peas, in search of one that might work.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Juan Andrés García Román

December 15, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Nick Rattner

You’re the blonde girl who all morning long turns her desk like a sunflower.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, the awe and dread of winter are at once historical and timeless in these selections by Spanish poet, translator, and scholar Juan Andrés García Román. In “The Hour,” a looming sense of nostalgia-fuelled Weltschmerz—allegorized here as passing seasons—prompts our speaker to recognize the fleeting joy of life and youth, while also imploring the importance of “staying” in the face of melancholy. In “For the First Time, You Feel Sad (Belisarius Sends His Troops Up Into the Trees),” our speaker deploys allusions and anachronisms—everything from Byzantium military history to Roman mythology to contemporary French children’s literature—to illustrate the love and longing of a winter-born absence. The cerebral maximalism of García Román’s verse is done justice here by Nick Rattner’s adroit translation of the poet’s layered metaphors and embedded historical/literary references. A learned take on the season-change poem which warrants a careful, meditative read.

The Hour

for Antonio Mochón

Who, after tossing and turning a winter
night while snow
covered the peaks, honored the refrain,
the brave old songs,
and the postcards of mountains
displayed in mountain lodges,
who, I say, did not this way pass
through a cemetery and, feeling a quaver
in their legs, partly from
fatigue of another world,
and partly to shield against wind and lightning,
did not slip themselves into an empty niche
to wait out the storm, and from this feel
suddenly tired of the path, READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2020

December 14, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Allison Braden, MARGENTO, and Sarah Moore

The latest in literature from Spain, Romania, and France!

Our final selections in excellent translations for the year of 2020 are fittingly full of thought. Throughout these texts, one finds the endless potential roadmaps that chart out from the individual mind’s interrogation and contemplation of their surroundings, and one’s own place within them. From a wandering mind, everything is a pool for endless reflection; a Catalan collection draws from the sea, a Romanian notebook is filled with musings and defiances of authorship, and a French diary novel tells the lives of many through the life of one. 

salt water

Salt Water by Josep Pla, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush, Archipelago Books, 2020

Review by Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large for Argentina

On a recent virtual happy hour, my friend described a weekend camping trip on a secluded barrier island off the coast of Georgia, in the southern US. My envy verged on rage as I listened from my living room, which doesn’t get enough natural light. He said that after he and his wife kayaked over and set up their tent (annoying a resident heron in the process), they had done absolutely nothing—not even read. They sat on the shore and watched the sea. It’s easy to believe how that could have been enough.

Josep Pla would understand. In Salt Water, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush and released by Archipelago Books this month, Pla writes that “the mere presence of the sea is enough to sink into the deliquescent bliss of the contemplative life.” His curiosity courses through the book, a series of ten sketches that revolves around the coast of Pla’s native Catalonia: he describes shipwrecks, submarines, and harebrained sailing schemes. He relates stories from a salty, one-handed raconteur and imbues the rambling tales with strikingly lifelike texture. Though his plots unfold on or near the sea, human culture is ever present. Pla revels in detail, describing at length the joy of nearly black coffee on a marginally small boat: “That beverage makes an almost immediate impact: your mind projects itself onto the outside world, you are fascinated by everything around and a gleam comes to your eyes.” This book is a product of that fascinated, caffeinated gaze.

In the preface, Pla describes the stories as writings from his adolescence. In the translator’s note at the end of the book, however, Bush clarifies that they were written in the 1940s and hypothesizes that the preface was a canny attempt to evade censorship. He points out that Pla’s “articles containing veiled critiques of the dictatorship made him the most censored journalist in Spain.” Indeed, his biography offers helpful context for the conflicting claims that bookend the collection.

As a university student a century ago, Pla developed a clear, intelligible writing style and deployed it throughout his career as a journalist. He traveled widely across Europe as a foreign correspondent and served briefly as a member of Parliament for the Commonwealth of Catalonia, a short-lived assembly notable for its symbolic value. Over its eleven years in existence, the Commonwealth promoted Catalonia’s unity and identity, and evinced strong support for the Catalan language—Pla’s language. He became a chronicler of Spain’s tumultuous early twentieth-century history and spent multiple stints in exile. In the 1940s, he took to exploring his native coast and writing dispatches for Destino, a Burgos-based magazine at the forefront of the reemergence of Catalan-language culture. Throughout his peripatetic career, Pla never stopped writing: his complete works, compiled shortly before his death in 1981, stretch over thirty-eight volumes. READ MORE…

Announcing our May Book Club Selection: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

May 28, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Daniel Persia

This is one of Shibli’s greatest strengths as a storyteller: she trusts her readers to fill in the gaps.

One of the most powerful responsibilities of literature is to ascribe human voices to the momentous, overarching events of our world. This month, Asymptote has selected Adania Shibli’s unflinchingly powerful Minor Detail, a novelistic reflection on the violent and painful consequences of the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, from the War of 1948 to present day. With an astutely visual language and an unwaveringly intelligent morality, Shibli’s work is an impeccably crafted totem of resistance and justice. 

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette, New Directions (US), Fitzcarraldo (UK), Text Publishing (Australia), 2020

The smell of gasoline, the sound of a dog howling, the taste (or distraction) of a simple stick of chewing gum—these are only a few of the motifs surrounding trauma and pain in Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette. It is August, 1949, and a group of Israeli soldiers have set up camp in the Negev desert. As they patrol the nearby areas, they encounter and ambush a group of Bedouins, returning with a single survivor: a young Arab woman. Shortly after, she is hosed down and raped by the officer in charge. Over half a century later, a woman living in the West Bank crosses the border into Israel, looking to uncover the details of the case. Her journey reflects a changed Middle East.

As a literary project, a historical record, and a translation, Minor Detail is, simply put, brilliant. My knowledge of the Arabic language is limited, and so my goal here isn’t to compare the translation to the original text. Instead, I want to focus on narrative structure and style—two elements clearly on the minds of both Shibli and Jaquette, whose collaboration proves a success on all fronts.

READ MORE…

In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

May 16, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Sarah Moore

I remember that when everything starts to crumble, there are always people you can rely on, people who heal...who make everyday life more bearable.

For this week’s edition of In This Together, we present a text from the French writer, journalist, and musician Tania de Montaigne. Sarah Moore, translator and Assistant Blog Editor at Asymptote, introduces the piece:

This week, France ended its national lockdown that had been in place for almost two months. Yet, of course, life has not returned to normal and people have been adapting to the déconfinement, along with the many changes it has brought. During the lockdown, French daily newspaper Libération (popularly known as Libé) continued to publish its weekly column “Écritures” in its weekend edition, written alternately by four French writers including Tania de Montaigne. This particular article, “Pour mémoire” (“For the record”) looks back on everyday life before the COVID-19 pandemic, recalling past normality. Saying something ‘for the record’ is to let a voice ring out, to publicly declare that these words have value and should be remembered. The text’s power lies in its simplicity and honesty—evoking nostalgia for a pleasurable but naïve innocence that has been lost. 

De Montaigne alludes to the many small cultural references that can stir and unite a collective memory—song lyrics, TV shows, books, exhibitions—as well as our old habits and the importance of touch, which we perhaps took for granted. She also draws a link with the AIDS crisis and our various responses to something that is frightening, new, and unknown—that will inevitably be used politically. Most importantly, referencing other times of hardship, including the terrorist attacks in Paris and Nelson Mandela’s apartheid resistance, de Montaigne upholds the continual value of powerful words, voice, and support during times of crisis. 

For the record

by Tania de Montaigne

I remember the day when the word ‘AIDS’ entered our lives.
I remember Barbara’s song, “Maladie d’amour / Où l’on meurt d’aimer / Seul et sans amour, / Sid’abandonné”. (“Love sickness / Where you die from loving / Alone and loveless, / Aidsabandoned”.)
I remember fear.
I remember people who had first-hand info through “my mother’s aunt’s cousin who works at the hospital” or “my brother-in-law’s cousin’s best friend who works for the government”.
I remember the National Front saying: “People with AIDS are like lepers, they should be locked up in an Aidsatorium.” And how they also said: “It’s a lie, condoms don’t protect you from the disease.”
I remember how some people claimed that there were miracle cures.
I remember Hervé Guibert’s book, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life.
I remember a philosophy exam and this quote from Aristotle: “The ignorant man affirms, the learned man doubts, the wise man reflects.”
I remember when Corona was a Mexican beer that you drank with a slice of lemon.
I remember the quiz you always found at the end of summer magazine editions: “What about you, what would you take with you to a desert island?” I went crazy trying to decide.
I remember how we used to go to the theatre, to concerts, how everyone was packed tight, focused, emotional, vibrating in unison and how that’s what was beautiful. READ MORE…