Posts filed under 'humor'

Uncovering Truth Through Fiction: Liliana Corobca and Monica Cure on Too Great a Sky

December 2, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Regan Mies

I think optimism is a solution to our very deep trauma­ . . . If you didn’t view life that way, you just wouldn’t survive.

After The Censor’s Notebook, winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for debut translation, and Kinderland, about a village of children abandoned by parents working abroad, Too Great a Sky is Moldovan author Liliana Corobca’s third novel to be translated into English by Romanian-American translator and writer Monica Cure. Beginning with a harrowing deportation by train from Bucovina, Romania to the steppes of Kazakhstan, the story chronicles a girl and a people who are forced to find their way amid unspeakable conditions and political change. I spoke with Liliana and Monica about working between academic research and fiction; navigating culture and language across borders both contemporary and historic; and the ways in which faith, optimism, and humor are instrumental to survival.

Regan Mies (RM): Too Great a Sky opens with its narrator Ana telling her story to her great-granddaughter, beginning when she’s eleven and facing Soviet deportation from Bucovina. What was it like to write in the voice of a much older woman recalling experiences from her youth and adolescence?

Liliana Corobca (LC): My novel is based on the real testimonies of people from Bucovina deported to Siberia, and these were from survivors who were very old. My main character is not a real person, but because someone like her would have been deported in 1941, it wouldn’t be realistic to imagine a survivor as a young woman or child today. But my novel is also about memory, about remembering the experiences of past and childhood. During the journey on the train, Ana was a child—that’s why I move between ages. We have an old woman who tells the story, but we also have a young girl who feels the experience of deportation.

RM: In her translator’s note, Monica writes that you had previously edited over eighty of these oral testimonies of Soviet deportation during World War Two. What did the journey look like between working with those texts in an academic capacity and deciding to write this novel?

LC: At the time when I was editing the documents, I thought that documentation would be enough, and then I moved on. I decided not to write a novel. Almost ten years passed after that, but when I was working with those testimonies, I discovered certain themes. They said, like the refrain of a song, “We survived because we believed in God.” I was educated in a communist society, which wasn’t religious at all. For me, it was complicated to write from inside the skin of a believer. These people who believed so profoundly and seriously in God had a very religious way of speaking. Even if they weren’t mentioning God by name, he was still present in their stories. I was impressed that, in the worst conditions, their hope and faith allowed them to survive. I began to read religious literature, and I learned to pray. I also began reading orthodox prayer books. Even though it wasn’t very usual to read the same prayers over and over again every day, it was through that practice that I learned to say my own prayers, which was what I needed to be able to write this story in their voices.

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Blurring the Lines of Time: A Conversation with Ruoyi Shi

September 23, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Junyi Zhou

This sense of displacement, which many might perceive as humor, mirrors my relationship with language.

From a glass casket for sculptures, to a piece of a burial figurine cast into edible gummy bears, and gelatin-based fish placed on silver platters, Ruoyi Shi’s whimsical oeuvre spans the realms of the organic and the inorganic, the imaginary and the real to interrogate the nature of truth, storytelling, and language. An interdisciplinary artist working across the domains of sculpture, video art, and writing, inspired by the oral histories and mythologies she grew up with, Ruoyi invents a singular kind of artistic practice that transforms not only personal memory but also collective history. “I am interested in how people are encouraged to appropriate any image they encounter, and how our vocabulary was chosen and formed in today’s society. I consider my work as fragments I collected for creating an alternative reality,” she says in a talk with Shoutout LA. In the following interview, I spoke with Ruoyi about the role that humor plays in her projects, reinventing historical objects, and the everyday precarity of living with language and mass media.

Junyi Zhou (JZ): I’d like to begin with your work Tomorrow’s Comforts are Here Today, in which you built a casket for your glass skeleton sculpture, as if it were a living entity. “I always call my art creations creature,” you wrote in your artist statement for this piece. It seems that the relationship between the organic and inorganic, or the dissolving boundaries between the two, are central to your body of work. Could you speak more about this?

Ruoyi Shi (RS): Exploring the boundaries between nature and artificial existence, as well as the notion of truth and its fabrication, has been a central theme of my practice. I see my art-making as a process of building an alternative reality—one that can be fragmented, chaotic, and full of coincidences. This reality of mine lies in the area where the organic and the inorganic slowly merge into one another. My goal is to mimic nature and capture the moments when nature exposes its unnatural side.

Many decisions I had to make in my art were neither preplanned nor expected. My immediate environment, materials, and time worked together to provide me with options, and my choices were directed by instinct rather than logic. It’s a form of collective creation. In this era we live in, the term “organic” has been deliberately shaped into a manmade concept. By placing our collective creations on a more equal footing, I aim to express greater honesty and respect for the elements beyond my control.

Tomorrow's Comforts

Tomorrow’s Comforts are Here Today (2021). Performance, writing.
Courtesy of the artist.

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2024

April 22, 2024  |  in News  |  by Bella Creel and Xiao Yue Shan

A deeper look into our latest edition!

With so many stellar pieces in the Spring 2024 issue, where to start? Read the blog editors’ top picks.

In a Bethlehem of the future, no one is left. Some undetermined ecological catastrophe, shown only through a black, viscous flood tiding over the narrow alleyways, had sent volcanic streams of smoke up through the minaret and the turreted roofs, obliterating the limestone, the arched windows, the indecipherable urban folds. This is where Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind’s 2019 film, In Vitro, takes place: a world where two of the last remaining survivors of the human race meet in an abandoned nuclear reactor. One of them is dying, and the other seems to be a designed individual, a living archive. In the dialogue that unites the disparate scenes—some archival, some distinctly futuristic, some shimmering with ghosts—the woman lying in the hospital bed says to her visitor: “Your memories are as real as mine.” The younger woman gets up and walks to the other side of the room. “I disagree,” she replies brusquely. “The pain these stories cause are twofold. . . because the loss I feel was never mine.”

Living within an increasingly crowded media landscape, combined with modern technology’s dissolution of physical distance, the significance of these lines from In Vitro do not escape most of us. The theorist Alison Landsberg called it “prosthetic memory”: a phenomenon in which recollections are lifted from a cultural landscape and implanted almost seamlessly within an individual consciousness, culminating in a psychic patchwork that does not distinguish between what has happened to us, and what was simply witnessed. Uban Cristina Ali Farah’s “Three Short Pieces”, in a delicate and tender translation by Brandon Michael Cleverly Breen, sees the Somalian-Italian author picking over such stitches in her own life, examining what has been lived and what has been given; what has been inherited and what has been picked up along the way. Some of the memories she discusses, as in a shared experience of migration, have slowly unwound inside her by way of language, and others, as in the first three years of her life, are echoed into the body through photographs, tastes, trails, stuttering fragments that she pieces together into a portrait of lineage, a half-there origin story. 

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From Silly to Deadly: On Shalash the Iraqi by Shalash

June 21, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Alex Tan

. . .key to the humourist’s arsenal is none other than language itself—its malleability, its capacity for aggrandisement and diminishment alike.

Shalash the Iraqi by Shalash, translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren, And Other Stories, 2023

Anonymity fascinates and seduces. Endless speculations have circled invasively around who Elena Ferrante “truly” is; Catherine Lacey’s recent Biography of X reckons with erasing a layered past with a single letter of the alphabet; the first season of Bridgerton, the hit Regency-era romance on Netflix, has its narrative engine propelled by the question of Lady Whistledown’s real identity. These instances from the Global North exemplify the allure of mystery, but they fail to account for the stakes of remaining nameless in a political climate where to unveil oneself might be to threaten one’s own safety.

One might, in a moment of facetiousness, think of the eponymous chronicler of Shalash the Iraqi as the Lady Whistledown of Iraq’s Sadr City (or Thawra City, as it is lovingly christened by Shalash). Both issued frequent dispatches from within the epicentre of social disarray, guaranteeing the pleasure of gossip. More importantly, their pseudonymous veneers facilitated a lurid candour that might not otherwise have been possible.

There the similarities end. The respectable circles of upper-crust London did not live in the penumbra of foreign occupation. Nor were they plagued with the constant risk of spectacular sectarian violence, or hampered by a corrupt government that has “thieves, cheats, swindlers, traders in conspiracies” for politicians. It was against such chaos that Shalash released his explosive, timely blog posts, garnering a rapidly expanding local readership despite patchy Internet access in the country. The academic Kanan Makiya tells us, in his introduction, that people were printing out the posts, “copying them longhand,” “bombarding Shalash with questions and opinions.” Even high-ranking cadres could not resist partaking in the fanfare: one official expressed admiration while entreating Shalash not to mock him, for fear of his children’s potential disappointment. Another claimed that upon reading the daily communiqués, he would fall off his chair laughing.

Laughter, perhaps, can always be counted on to forge an affinity, if not a unity, beyond fractures of sect, status, and ethnic affiliation. Iraqis would “drop everything for a good laugh”; they gather in bars and down glasses of arak to immerse themselves in a “great, communal, and nondenominational drunkenness.” Shalash knows this, and abundantly turns it to his advantage. Nothing and no one is spared from the crosshairs of his ridicule, populated by a variegated cast that encompasses sermonisers, soldiers, suicide bombers, and donkeys. A vice-president’s verbal pomposity sounds like “he just ate a few expensive dictionaries and is about to lose his lunch.” A woman about to be married off to an Australian cousin is told, should her fiancé divorce her, “just tell everyone that he’s a terrorist and you’ll have nothing to worry about.” An odious neighbour, eager to save a spot for himself in paradise, proselytises the necessity of voting in the referendum for Iraq’s new constitution: “Don’t you know the going rate for rewards in heaven for helping ratify the constitution? It’s worth a hundred visits to the shrine of the Eighth Imam, and that’s on the far side of Iran!” When the narrator casually uses Google Earth, he is accused of lecherously spying on the women of his residence, sparking off a widespread hysteria—and court case—about the “violation of the morals of the block.” Each instance of mockery is a shard in a wider mirror of collective trauma.

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Fatal to the Satire: A Review of The Master by Patrick Rambaud

February 6, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Matthew Redman

The . . . parables [leave] Rambaud’s account of Zhuang’s life apocryphal and myth-tinged, and the China he roams becomes lurid and fabulistic. . .

The Master by Patrick Rambaud, translated from the French by David Ball and Nicole Ball, Seagull Books

Patrick Rambaud’s The Master tells the story of the life of Zhuang Zhou, a legendary philosopher, the progenitor of Taoism, and the probable author of the eponymous Zhuangzi, a collection of metaphysical teachings beloved by ancients and moderns alike. Zhuang Zhou lived two and half thousand years ago, only a few centuries removed from the misty limits of recorded history, during the Warring States period, a febrile, fractious time of geopolitical strife and civilisational flourishing. Historical accounts about him are nearly nonexistent, and what little is known of his life we can only glean from the Zhuangzi, whose lessons come in the form of parables supposedly inspired from events in his life. 

The life and times of a quasi-mythical master philosopher, so far away in time, so sparsely recorded by contemporary historiography, so enmeshed already in fable and allegory, are ripe for historical fiction: the genre’s usual constraints, born of the need to fictionalise within the bounds of the historical record, become looser as the hard truths of history become more difficult to pin down. Rambaud uses this unusual latitude cleverly, but also with scrupulousness. The Zhuangzi is his source text, and he treats it with immense respect—something clear in all of the literary inventions present in The Master, and clearest of all in Zhuang Zhou himself, his chief creation.  

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Each Sentence a Dagger: Tim Mohr on translating Alina Bronsky’s My Grandmother’s Braid

March 1, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Barbara Halla

Her world expands beyond the margins; there's the world that she's telling in detail, and then there's all this other stuff just outside the lens.

In our Book Club selection for January, we were thrilled to present Alina Bronsky’s brilliantly comic and irreverent My Grandmother’s Braid, a study of familial dysfunctions that renders its players in all their idiosyncratic fascinations. Now, Assistant Editor Barbara Halla talks with Bronsky’s translator, Tim Mohr, about his intimate connections to Germany and its language, the German tradition of immigrant literature, and the challenges of rendering Bronsky’s surprising and intuitive narration.

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!

Barbara Halla (BH): You have a longstanding relationship with Alina Bronsky, having translated five of her books. Could you speak a little bit about how you came across her work and what inspired you to translate her?

Tim Mohr (TM): Her first book, Broken Glass Park, was either my second or third translation. It came after I attended a speech at Carnegie Hall, under the auspices of a festival called Berlin Lights. I sat in the audience to watch these ostensible experts speak on the German publishing world, and they claimed there was no tradition of immigrant literature there.

I remember thinking that the last ten German novels I’d read were all by what you might call “immigrant” writers, or writers writing in German as a second language. I was really adamant about working in that field and trying to get more of that material into the U.S. market, so people would be aware that this tradition did exist over there, and that it was booming. And then I came across Alina. I loved her debut novel, Broken Glass Park, and because the translation went well, we wanted to continue working together. I wouldn’t want another one of her books to come out with a different translator.

As far as our relationship goes, I tend not to work closely with the authors when I’m translating, and a lot of them speak really, really good English, so it’s all the more daunting in some ways—I don’t want them to be looking over my shoulder, basically! I’ll email them a few queries sometimes, but for the most part, I’m trying to do it on my own. I am somewhat friendly with Alina, but when we get together we don’t really talk about translation or her books, we just have a cup of coffee or something.

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Autoria Negra: An Interview with Cidinha da Silva

September 7, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Ana Luiza de Oliveira e Silva and Daniel Persia

We sought and insistently seek ways to affirm our existence, to demarcate places for the living human beings that we are.

I first met Cidinha da Silva about a year ago, at the International Literary Festival of Paraty (Flip), in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. At the time, I had just begun translating Sobre-viventes! (Pallas Editora, 2016), a collection of crônicas that approach Brazil, past and present, through everyday lived experience. In 2010, Cidinha coined the neologism Exuzilhar, a verb that combines the Portuguese encruzilhar (“to cross”) or encruzilhada (“crossroads”) with Exu (an Orisha in the Yoruba religion, the divine messenger or gatekeeper). Exuzilhamento is indeed a driving force of Cidinha’s work, which, as she reveals here, “revolves around Africanities, Orixalities, Ancestralities, and the tension and dialogue between tradition (African, Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Diasporic, and Afro-Indigenous) and contemporaneity.” The interview that follows, conducted alongside my fellow translator Ana Luiza de Oliveira e Silva, showcases the complexity of Cidinha’s creative process and her critical place in contemporary Brazilian literature.

                                                                                 —Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large for Brazil

Daniel Persia (DP): It’s great to connect with you again, Cidinha, especially after having featured some of your work in our Summer 2020 issue. Can you give us a general panorama of your career as a writer?

Cidinha da Silva (CS): I started publishing literature in 2006, in São Paulo, with a self-financed, independent book of crônicas, Cada tridente em seu lugar. It’s a book that still sells widely, fourteen years later. The fourth edition was just released, with Mazza Edições (Belo Horizonte, Brazil). I had always wanted to publish literature. I wrote crônicas for an online magazine and readers kept asking when we’d have a book. That’s what really got me thinking about publishing my first literary work; I had already published a book of essays in 2003, Ações afirmativas em educação—experiências brasileiras [Affirmative Action in Education: Brazilian Experiences] (Summus).

Ana Luiza de Oliveira e Silva (AO): Tell us about your creative process. Do you have a daily writing routine?

CS: My writing process has practical, creative, and other dimensions that are somewhat intangible. In practical terms, I’m a relatively organized and disciplined writer; I sit and write at predetermined times. I don’t have any problems with the “blank page,” but sometimes I’m faced with a lack of time to write. My writing routine depends on the volume of work at hand, on how much I need to accomplish to ensure survival: lesson planning; preparing and delivering lectures, workshops, and courses; reading; studying; traveling; keeping up with my online store and promoting my books. The time left for writing is very minimal, it boils down to just a few hours a week. I write very little on impulse; I usually write with a particular book in mind, one that I’m still developing or organizing. I also write a lot of commissioned work, for publications of the national press, primarily, but also theatre and essays.

As for the creative dimension, I prefer to write early in the morning, which is the best time of day for me. I write on my desktop computer, sitting in a comfortable chair in a large office, with a glass door on the balcony and the sun coming to visit me. I collect dictionaries and keep them in reach for consultation. My productivity is greatest in the morning, for about four to six hours (when I’m in a more intense process of production), but from the fourth hour onward, what I really do is reread, revise, consult reference materials. I read everything out loud, several times; that’s how I set rhythm and establish harmony. When I’m mulling over an idea for a new book, I tend to take a lot of notes in my notebooks—scattered things, like names for characters, beginnings of crônicas or short stories. I usually only write down ideas, but when I write down full sentences, they almost always unfold into one or two paragraphs at that very moment, when they’re first being recorded. And so there you have the beginning of a new text.

The unimaginable happens in dreams (of which I remember little or nothing), in conversations, in exchanges with real people, in observing the world, in interacting with stones, plants, flowers, water, earth and fire, and smoke, too. In intuition, which I’ve built over the years, in exercises and life tests, to pay full attention and remain confident. Spirituality communicates with me through intuition.

DP: What are some of the main themes in your work?

CS: Through two of my more recent books—Um Exu em Nova York (2018), a collection of short stories, and Exuzilhar (2019), the first volume in a series of selected crônicas—I’ve come to understand that my aesthetic interests revolve around Africanities, Orixalities, Ancestralities, and the tension and dialogue between tradition (African, Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Diasporic, and Afro-Indigenous) and contemporaneity. Other topics include racism, racial discrimination, and racial inequalities, though the central theme really is that tension and dialogue mentioned above. I’m also interested in themes of death, love, soccer, and politics. I write a lot about politics. READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2019

July 29, 2019  |  in News  |  by Ah-reum Han, Alexander Dickow, Eva Heisler, Joshua Craze, Lee Yew Leong, Sarah Timmer Harvey, and Victoria Livingstone

Standout pieces from the Summer 2019 issue of Asymptote, as selected by section editors!

Another issue of Asymptote means another dazzling array of voices, languages, and genres in translation. If you’re not sure where to begin, look no further than these recommendations from the editors who compiled this spectacular issue. 

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction and Poetry Editor:

This issue’s Fiction section is memorable for being the first fiction lineup in an Asymptote issue (and there are now 34 of them!) that does not include a single European author. Naguib Mahfouz and Bernardo Esquinca have already been singled out by the blog editors last week, so I’ll touch briefly on works by Bijan Najdi and Siham Benchekroun—two ambitious short stories that are remarkable in different ways. Showcasing the acclaimed narrative technique for which he was known, Najdi’s heartbreaking story “A Rainy Tuesday” (translated beautifully by Michelle Quay) unravels the thin seam between memory and reality, leading us on a nonlinear journey through grief. Benchekroun’s “Living Words,” on the other hand, is also a personal essay that exults in the very richness of language. Kudos to translator Hannah Embleton-Smith who masterfully tackled a text that leans so heavily on French phonetics to make synaptic leaps—and gave us something in English that preserves the delight of the original French. My personal favorites from the Poetry section this issue are the new translations of The Iliad by James Wilcox, which inject vigor into an ancient classic, and Tim Benjamin’s introduction of Leonardo Sanhueza, 2012 winner of the Pablo Neruda Prize for career achievement. Benjamin’s evocative translations bring into English for the first time an extraordinary poetic voice that deserves to reach a wider audience.

From Joshua Craze, Nonfiction Section Editor:

“Personal Jesus” by Fausto Alzati Fernández is a visceral study of the self that drugs make. Ably translated by Will Stockton, the prose slows down time, as we wait on the side of the highway, hoping for a fix, and then, finally, time stops, in the infinite space of the hit. Fernández explores an enchanted world, in which of all the dumb sad morass of the human animal is given the possibility of transcendence, and yet—cruelties of cruelties—it is this very transcendence that produces the animals living half-lives that stumble around his dealer’s living room. “Personal Jesus” is a love letter, written to a cleansing balm that leaves us only more pitiful than before.

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Reinventing the Novel: Gregor von Rezzori’s Abel and Cain in Review

April 4, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Chris Power

This book is as much a novel as it is a repudiation and critique of novel-writing.

Abel and Cain by Gregor von Rezzori, introduction by Joshua Cohen, translated from the German by David Dollenmayer, Joachim Neugroschel, and Marshall Yarbrough, New York Review Books, 2019

Gregor von Rezzori published Der Tod meines Bruders Abel in 1976, and the book was translated by Joachim Neugroschel into English in 1985. What the back of the book describes as a “prequel” (the term doesn’t quite fit) was published posthumously in German in 2001 as Kain. Das Letzte Manuskript and appears for the first time in English in this edition. The book is structured by four folders that lie in front of the narrator after he enjoys an evening with a prostitute: “Pneuma,” “A,” “B,” and “C.” The contents of the first three folders compose the first book (“Abel”), while “Cain” unveils the last folder (“C”).

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My 2018: Jonathan Egid

December 20, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Jonathan Egid

I relished the opportunity to read texts with somewhat more invigorating prose than typically displayed in analytic philosophy journals.

Israeli writer Amos Oz and Cretan memoirist George Psychoundakis are two of the highlights of Assistant Blog Editor Jonathan Egid’s 2018 reading list. Addressing topics ranging from Israeli politics and the death of Jesus (Oz) to Renaissance poetry and home-brewed alcohol (Psychoundakis), the two writers nevertheless share a sense of humour and a talent for producing powerful and thought-provoking texts.

Having spent most of the first half of the year reading texts about, rather than in translation, as part of my research for a thesis on the philosophy of cultural and conceptual difference, I relished the opportunity to read texts with somewhat more invigorating prose than typically displayed in analytic philosophy journals, and my summer reading list was full of translated fiction.

High on this list was the Israeli writer Amos Oz’s first new novel in over a decade, Judas. An old-fashioned novel of ideas in the tradition of Tolstoy and Thomas Mann, Judas begins with an end; the protagonist Shmuel Ash is left suddenly by his girlfriend, and then learns of his father’s bankruptcy, which forces him to abandon his promising studies. He takes up work caring for an elderly cripple in an ancient house on the outskirts of Jerusalem, and the narrative follows Shmuel as he is drawn into the troubled history of this crumbling house and its mysterious and enticing inhabitants.

The narrative is interspersed with Shmuel’s reflections on his now-abandoned thesis, giving the story—which takes place almost entirely in the old house and the neighbouring streets, cafes, and alleyways—a dazzling historical and intellectual scope, as Oz spans continents and centuries from medieval Al-Andalus to Galician shtetls and kibbutzim on the Sharon plain, tracing the fraught history of Jesus and the Jews. The focus of these reflections is neither Jesus nor the Jews, but on the eponymous Judas, or rather on the figure of Judas, the figure of a most reviled and hated traitor.

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Announcing our November Book Club selection: The Hotel Tito by Ivana Bodrožić

November 29, 2018  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Jacob Silkstone

“We talked,” the narrator tells us, “about what it would be like when we returned home,” but the awful truth is that a return becomes impossible.

This November, we’re celebrating the first full year of the Asymptote Book Club. Over the last twelve months, the Book Club has brought its subscribers newly-translated fiction from twelve different languages, taking readers on a journey from the Arctic Circle down to the forests of Bengal, from the Ottoman Empire at the end of the nineteenth century to Bangkok in the postmodern era.

2018_1113_GIFSlides_Final

For our November Book Club selection, we’re excited to be showcasing one of the most powerful novels written since the independence of Croatia: a breathtakingly original coming-of-age story set in the aftermath of perhaps the most shocking massacre in recent European history.

For more information on Ivana Bodrožić’s The Hotel Tito, published in English by Seven Stories Press, read Assistant Managing Editor Jacob Silkstone’s review below or head to our online discussion group. If you’re not a Book Club member yet but would like to join us as we head into our second year, all the information you need is available on our Book Club page.

The Hotel Tito by Ivana Bodrožić, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać, Seven Stories Press, 2018

Reviewed by Jacob Silkstone

Literature, according to Ahmet Altan, is our best method of confronting “the dark and bloody face of history.” The Hotel Tito, which follows the first volume of Altan’s Ottoman Quartet as an Asymptote Book Club selection, spotlights a particularly dark and bloody episode of Europe’s recent past. Its chosen method of confronting history is no less courageous for being characterised by an impressively original subtlety and a surprising lightness of touch. While the earliest novels about the Yugoslav Wars (Slavenka Drakulić’s As If I Am Not There perhaps foremost among them) seethe with raw energy and anger, Bodrožić’s equally harrowing stories are interspersed with moments of humour: the comedy serves to enhance the tragedy.

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Translation Tuesday: “The Hindu Storm” by Ana García Bergua

February 6, 2018  |  in Translations  |  by Allana Noyes and Ana García Bergua

One afternoon during an electric storm, Adán Gomez comes home with a copy of the book, “Twenty Daring Positions for Lovemaking.”

This week’s Translation Tuesday comes from the amazing Mexican author Ana García Bergua, whose story The Hindu Storm examines old age from a perspective that balances both humour and dignity. For more microfiction, head over to the brand new Winter 2018 issue of Asymptote!

One afternoon during an electric storm, Adán Gomez comes home with a copy of the book, “Twenty Daring Positions for Lovemaking.” He suggests to his wife, Rebeca that they try a few out. Oh Adán, for heaven’s sake, his wife says, but he persists. After all, he says, at their age, (they’re both pushing eighty), that’s about all there is left to do. After their afternoon snack, they start off with the position called, “Frogs in the Pond.” It goes pretty smooth, considering how long it’s been since they’ve done anything like that. Adán is a stamp collector and a very meticulous man. He didn’t buy the classic Kama Sutra because it seemed too confusing, unlike this book, where all the postures come numbered in order of difficulty.

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What’s New in Translation? January 2017

January 12, 2017  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alexis Almeida, Lori Feathers, and Nozomi Saito

Asymptote reviews some of the best new books from Spanish, German, and Occitan.

proensa_1024x1024

Proensa: An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry, tr. by Paul Blackburn, edited and introduced by George Economou. New York Review Books.

Review: Nozomi Saito, Executive Assistant

Translated from the Occitan by Paul Blackburn, Proensa: An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry is a remarkable collection of troubadour poetry, which had vast influence on major literary figures, including Dante and Ezra Pound. As poems of the twelfth century, the historic weight of troubadour poetry might intimidate some, but the lively language in Paul Blackburn’s translations is sure to shock and delight twenty-first century readers in the same way that these poems did for their contemporary audiences.

The context surrounding the original publication of Proensa in 1978 is nearly as interesting as the troubadour poems themselves. Although Proensa was in fact ready for publication in the late 1950s, lacking only an introduction, the collection was not published until seven years after Paul Blackburn’s death. The manuscript was then given to George Economou, who edited the collection and saw to its posthumous publication.

The circumstances of the publication of Proensa, of the pseudo-collaboration between a deceased translator and a living editor, are reminiscent of another publication that came out in 1916, Certain Noble Plays of Japan. This manuscript was a collection of Noh plays translated by Ernest Fenollosa, which Ezra Pound received after Fenollosa’s death.

Interestingly, it was Ezra Pound’s influence and the great importance he placed on the troubadours that ignited the fire of translation within Blackburn.  Pound, as Economou explains, “did more than any other twentieth-century poet to introduce the troubadours and their legacy to the English-speaking world”. Pound viewed the translation of the troubadours as an all-important task, and Paul Blackburn answered the call-to-action.

Six degrees of Ezra Pound. The coincidence (if it is one) begs the question of why Proensa is being reprinted now, thirty-nine years after its original publication, and one hundred years after the publication of Certain Noble Plays.

In the case of Certain Noble Plays, the significance of its publication was that Pound (as well as William Butler Yeats) felt that the Noh plays could revitalize Anglo-American poetry and drama in ways that suited modernist aesthetics. One might wonder if the same intention lies behind the reprinting of Proensa—if these troubadour poems are appearing again to twenty-first century readers to revitalize poetry and performance using literary forms from the past. READ MORE…

Working Title: Babylon

November 25, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Anna Aslanyan

Babylon became a hit in the Anglophone world—but only thanks to Bromfield's skill and verve.

Advertisements are the translator’s hell. Only the other day, I struggled with a Russian analogue to “a patient journey to asthma management:” each version sounded either too Western or too Soviet. That fruitless exercise has put me in mind of Victor Pelevin, one of the most popular contemporary Russian authors, whose books are often tributes to his early career in advertising.

A classic example is Generation “П,” originally published in Russian under this funky title in 1999. The П is for P, which is for Pepsi. It traces a copywriter’s journey (sic) to greatness in the formative days of Russian capitalism. Andrew Bromfield’s version, published by Faber and Faber, is called Babylon, referring to the name of the protagonist, Vavilen Tatarsky (his pet name, “Vavan,” is rendered as “Babe” here), which brings up a whole host of Sumerian associations in the book. The book’s US title, Homo Zapiens, is Pelevin’s own invention: a term for a model consumer, it appears in a text communicated by the spirit of Che Guevara by means of an ouija board, where it’s abbreviated to ХЗ, a shortened form of the Russian equivalent of “fuck knows.”

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