Posts filed under 'immigrant'

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Inheritors of Silence by Abeer Dagher Esber

November 12, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Chloe Bordewich

When had my daughter grown up? Her sarcasm had turned harsher than a frostbitten child, her laugh so rebellious.

Inheritors of Silence (ورثة الصمت) is about the mutually reinforcing relationship between private catastrophes and the collective trauma of political repression. Tragedy metastasizes across time and space—from one generation of women to the next, and from the family’s origins in Homs, Syria, to Nice, and then to Montreal, where the narrator, Sami, and his daughter, Jano, now live. In this excerpt from the opening chapter, Sami is groping through the first hours after his daughter’s attempted suicide. As a Syrian immigrant in Quebec, he is one kind of outsider, a foreigner (though, as Sami himself points out, his neighborhood is full of foreigners like him living lives that are symmetrical but rarely touching). Suddenly, Sami realizes that he is an outsider when it comes to his daughter’s life, too. After a lifetime of loss, he is desperate to find a way back in. Arabic has a great capacity for metaphor, especially metaphors of sentiment, and capturing the full metaphorical repertoire of this text in English while maintaining the fluidity of the prose is challenging. But this allusive vocabulary is a cornerstone of Sami’s narrative voice. He is a poet, and even his quotidian surroundings conjure a stream of images that allow him, and the reader, to wander out of exile—if only for a sentence or two.

—Chloe Bordewich

The morning came with dull normality. A bright light pierced the windowpane as huge plows rumbled past, emitting a ceaseless stream of high-pitched beeps. The day before, a storm had inundated Montreal with snow, stuffing the city’s streets. I woke now to concussive rumbling and tried to shake the previous night’s madness from my body. Exhausted from insomnia, I remembered that what had happened the day before was not a dream. Without so much as a suitcase or a word of farewell, my daughter had, of her own free will, tried to go to her death. My daughter, only in her twenties, had been infused with the poison of knowledge she couldn’t bear and decided not to go on.

I leaped from bed as if stung by the memory of a torture chamber full of scorpions and traitors. I had to face the morning and confront reality in all its baseness, the depravity of events wilder than a wedding of lunatics. Fearing the darkness of night, as well as the light of day, I put my head underwater and fumbled like a slumbering blind man until the world stopped breathing. A deadly silence descended, and I groped for noise. READ MORE…

Brusque Lyricism: Liesl Schillinger on Translating Inès Cagnati

January 23, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Andreea Scridon

Cagnati’s images . . . her intentionally repetitive reflections and refrains, have a force and strength that are magnified by their rough grain.

Inès Cagnati’s award-winning Free Day is a potent and imagistic work that speaks powerfully on isolation, self-actualization, and freedom through the interior monologue of a young girl—we at Asymptote were incredibly proud to present it as our December 2019 Book Club selection. During a time in which much about our ideas of self is under scrutiny, Free Day is a fearless psychological exploration. In the following interview, Assistant Editor Andreea Scridon speaks to translator Liesl Schillinger on bringing Cagnati’s distinct roughness and rhythm into English, neologisms, and her “reservoir of lived memory”.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers in the US, the UK, and the EU. 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!

Andreea Scridon (AS): Inès Cagnati is not a name that has been frequently circulated in the Anglophone sphere up until now. Could you tell us what drew you to her as a writer, and why you thought her work would appeal to English-speaking readers?

Liesl Schillinger (LS): It was my editor at NYRB who brought Inès Cagnati to my attention; like you, I hadn’t known of her before. But as soon as I started reading Free Day, I became aware of her strong, glowing (sometimes searing) individual voice. Her writing struck me as brusque, incantatory, and strangely lyrical in places. Entirely original. Originality always compels me; and not only was her voice original, so was her subject. The experience of Italian immigrants in southern France during the postwar period was entirely new to me. In the past, I’d thought about immigration mostly in terms of how the country that received the newcomers treated them; I’d given less thought to how they treated each other. This book opened my eyes. Cagnati continually expressed emotionally gripping truths that disturbed and moved my heart and conscience. I read another of her books, Génie la Folle (Genius the Fool⁠—“Genius” was the nickname of the narrator’s unfortunate mother) and found it more haunting still. Wanting to know more about Cagnati, I went online, and was surprised to discover next to no biographical information, but I learned that every one of the books she wrote won a French literary prize. I felt it was time to shine a light on this forgotten writer and her experience—particularly at a moment when we, as Americans, ought to be reflecting on the refugee crisis at our southern border, and thinking about the men, women, and children who are suffering there. READ MORE…

What is Gained in Translation: Sarah Michaels and Jie Park on Teaching with Poetry Inside Out

August 26, 2019  |  in Asymptote for Educators, Interviews  |  by Barbara Thimm

Kids could really learn by doing both poetic, creative work and translation-based language work.

Poetry Inside Out is a cross-cultural literacy program designed to engage students from elementary to high school with collaborative literary translation. It was developed by the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco, California, and is now used in schools across the United States. The process begins when students receive a “poetry package” containing a poem in a foreign language, a picture and biography of the poet (written in English), and a “translator’s glossary” that provides meanings for the words in the poem. Students then split up in pairs to translate the poem “phrase by phrase.” Once they agree on a translation, they meet up with another pair of students to compare translations and to work on it further to “make it flow.” Lastly, all groups share their translations and discuss the similarities and differences across each group’s translation as well as the poem’s possible meaning. I first encountered Poetry Inside Out in a teacher workshop and was struck by the intensity of the process and by the sophisticated thought processes seen in videos of sixth grade students engaging in Poetry Inside Out.

Sarah Michaels and Jie Park, both professors at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, recently received an “Engaging New Audiences” grant to develop a curriculum and a seminar for ESL teachers to learn and use Poetry Inside Out in their classrooms. Both have been observing and documenting the implementation of Poetry Inside Out at Worcester public schools for more than six years.

Barbara Thimm (BT): Poetry and translation are unlikely subjects and skills to be taught in elementary and middle school. When and why did you get interested in Poetry Inside Out?

Sarah Michaels (SM): I first heard about Poetry Inside Out from Marty Rutherford, who was working at the Center for the Art of Translation and really revamped and energized it. We got Marty to come out here and give a workshop to a bunch of us teachers and do a Poetry Inside Out lesson in one of the schools that we collaborate with. I picked it up as part of a first-year intensive seminar with undergraduates: we did Poetry Inside Out in an after-school program at the same school where Marty had done her first lesson. That got undergraduates working with sixth graders.

Then Jie arrived, and she brought it to some teachers she was collaborating with in another school—teacher researchers who taught ESL. Probably the majority of kids at that school who speak English speak a language other than English at home, so there were lots of English learners and lots of bilingual kids in these regular classrooms.

Jie Park (JP): I was introduced to Poetry Inside Out six years ago when I got to Clark, and it really resonated with me as someone who looks at language and literacy with immigrant multilingual youth. But to answer your question: The teachers I work with would all say that translation makes so much intuitive sense when you’re working with multilingual youth because it is something these kids already do at home, for family members, for friends, at school, for classmates, for their teachers. That is, we are building on a tool or practice that they’re already confident and quite familiar with, and they have lots of ideas about the powers of translation but also the responsibilities, the dangers, or the stress. This feeds into what we’re trying to do, which is to build on the assets that kids come into the classroom with, not seeing them as lacking in something but to ask what they already have that we can leverage to help them. That’s why I think translation makes so much sense.

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In Conversation: Boey Kim Cheng on His New Novel, Gull Between Heaven and Earth

December 18, 2017  |  in Interviews  |  by Tiffany Tsao

You could say the entire novel is a work of translation...mediating between languages and cultures, memory and imagination...past and present."

Boey Kim Cheng’s reputation as a critically acclaimed writer rests on his work as a poet and essayist. He has authored five poetry collections—Somewhere-Bound (1989); Another Place (1992); Days of No Name (1996); After the Fire (2006); and Clear Brightness (2012)—the first two of which won Singapore National Book Development Council awards, and the last of which was selected by The Straits Times as one of the best books of 2012. His collection of essays Between Stations (2009) was shortlisted for the Western Australian Premier’s Prize in nonfiction.

This past October saw the publication of his first foray into novel writing. Set during a turbulent period in Tang-Dynasty-era China, Gull Between Heaven and Earth (Epigram Books, 2017) is a fictionalized biographical account of Du Fu, one of China’s most esteemed classical Chinese poets. The end-result of a ten-year-long, meticulously researched labor of love (the early fruits of which appeared in Asymptote’s inaugural issue), Gull represents the first extensive literary treatment of Du Fu’s life, fictional or otherwise, in any language.

In addition to venturing into the territory of prose fiction to complete the project, the Singaporean-born poet also undertook new translations of Du Fu’s poetry, which appear scattered throughout the novel, gem-like and epiphanic. In this interview with Asymptote Australia Editor-at-Large Tiffany Tsao, Boey recounts what compelled him to see this book to completion, as well as the challenges and joys of translating not only Du Fu’s poems, but his character and life.

Tiffany Tsao: On the one hand, your novel Gull Between Heaven and Earth represents a shift for you. Until now, you’ve been a poet and essayist. On the other hand, there’s considerable continuity between your previous works and this one: Gull is about a poet and his poetic calling; it contains poetry as well as themes of travel and nostalgia, which feature prominently in your past work. What prompted you to switch forms for this project? How have you found the experience of writing fiction in prose compared to writing poetry and nonfiction in prose?

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