Posts filed under 'independence'

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 She lodges memoir like a puzzle box within cultural commentary, historical documents from her ancestors, philosophical discourse, and literary criticism; the result is a densely textured memoir-in-fragments that is alive to the limitations of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…

On Żanna Słoniowska’s The House with the Stained Glass Window

November 1, 2017  |  in Reviews  |  by Victoria Miluch

A strikingly crafted window into how our lives are a mosaic of the things that happened before us.

Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. London, England: MacLehose Press, 2017. 240 pages. £12.99.

Toward the middle of The House with the Stained Glass Window, the Ukrainian-Polish writer Żanna Słoniowska’s debut novel, the unnamed narrator tells us that her great-grandmother occasionally falls into fits of hysterical sobbing, which her grandmother explains as having to do with “the past.” “I imagined ‘the past’ as an uncontrolled intermittent blubbering,” the narrator says. This definition is not a far cry from the idea of the past portrayed in The House with the Stained Glass Window: not blubbering, but certainly not controlled by human forces, intermittently entering the present day until it infiltrates it, saturates it, and finally becomes indistinguishable from it.

The novel centers around four generations of women who live under the same roof in Lviv, in a house noted for its enormous stained glass window. The window sets the present-day plot in motion: it is because of the window that the novel’s narrator, who we only know as Marianna’s daughter, meets Mykola, her mother’s former lover, and begins an affair with him herself. A relationship like that would provide enough internal and external conflict to fill a novel to its brim, but Słoniowska does not dedicate much page space to it. Instead, if anything, the affair serves as a springboard to the past, to exploring the irresistible pull of it.

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In Review: Ismat Chughtai’s Quit India

October 19, 2017  |  in Reviews  |  by Aamer Hussein

This varied and beautifully calibrated volume succeeds in sustaining the legacy of one of India’s most radical twentieth-century authors.

Twenty-six years after her death, Ismat Chughtai (1915-1991) is one of Urdu’s most famous short story writers; among her immediate contemporaries, only Saadat Hasan Manto’s reputation matches hers, and we can confidently say that she has no successor.

The Quilt, the first of her works to be presented to international audiences in the year of her death, was a collection of her short fiction. The title story, which had a lesbian theme, created a scandal and attracted the ire of colonial censors when it was first published in the early forties. Other stories in the volume proved the author to be a storyteller of the finest calibre. In 1995, more than half a century after its original debut, a translation of her magnificent feminist bildungsroman, The Crooked Line (1942), where the heroine’s life paralleled her own, pre-empted and fictionalised many of the ideas from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Although it is still in print in the US with the pioneering Feminist Press, the UK edition has been discontinued. Several more translations of her stories, essays, memoirs, and long and short fiction, accompanied by a slew of biographical and critical studies, have enhanced her reputation year by year and made her one of the most translated writers across the subcontinent. However, they have only been published in India and Pakistan and have not been picked up by Anglo-American publishers.

Chughtai’s fiction ranges from stories for children and reminiscences of her friends and family, to the harrowing low life in Bombay’s slums and drug-fuelled high life in the city’s gaudy film world, to a novel about Islam’s first martyrs—a choice that surprises admirers of this iconic socialist-feminist icon. But even today some critics claim that The Quilt overshadows her other fictions and use the early stories to measure her later work. Others, including myself, would say this is grossly untrue: Ismat, though she preferred to write about what she knew best, was versatile within her chosen range of subversive kitchen sink drama and outspoken social satire, as we can see from the several renditions into English of all her major works by Tahira Naqvi, her most frequent translator, which are published in Delhi by the pioneering Women Unlimited (Penguin India also publishes a handful of translations by Mohammad Asaduddin).

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Meet The Publisher: Antares Press’s Margarita Feliciano on Publishing from Spanish, French, and Indigenous Languages

October 11, 2017  |  in Publisher Profile  |  by Sarah Moses

I’m interested in bringing to the attention of readers in the world the fact that there are other languages—not known languages.

ANTARES Publishing House of Spanish Culture is a trilingual press located at York University’s Glendon Campus in Toronto, Canada. ANTARES aims to bring literary and scholarly works from the Spanish-speaking world to North American readers. With this in mind, the press publishes non-fiction, fiction, poetry, and theater either written in or translated from Spanish, English, and French. In recent years, ANTARES’s interests have expanded to include the literature of indigenous languages such as Quechua and Ojibwe. Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Argentina, Sarah Moses, met with director Margarita Feliciano to chat about ANTARES’s catalog and their commitment to publishing translations of works written in Spanish and indigenous languages.

Sarah Moses: How did ANTARES get started?

Margarita Feliciano: The press started in the year 2005, but officially we started to publish in the year 2006. I’ve been a professor at York University since 1969 and I’ve always taught literature. In 1989, I started to publish a magazine called Indigo—before Indigo the store; I didn’t have a chance to register it. The subtitle of the magazine was The Spanish/Canadian Presence in the Arts. Things were not done in translation but published in their original language—it could be Spanish, English, or French.

I was forced to retire in 2005 because at the time we had lost a strike and one of the requirements was mandatory retirement for people aged sixty-five. The law is now gone but I unfortunately fell in that category. So in view of that, I decided to create ANTARES—to continue to do what I was doing and at the same time keep me at university because in my life all I’ve done is either be a student or a teacher. So I wanted to continue my work.

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Remnants of a Separation: Translating Intangibles into Tangibles

August 14, 2017  |  in Profile  |  by Sohini Basak

Seventy years after the largest migration in history, a visual artist is recording the objects and languages that tell stories of longing.

Seventy years ago today the British left the Subcontinent, and India and Pakistan became separate sovereign states. The Partition is often represented in terms of numbers—one million people were killed and twelve million became refugees. Visual artist Aanchal Malhotra has been making the migrants visible by recording the stories behind the objects the migrants brought to their new homes. One of the intangibles they carried were their languages. Asymptote Social Media Manager Sohini Basak sat down for a long chat with Malhotra to discuss her latest book that records these remnants. A very happy independence day to our Indian and Pakistani readers!

2017 marks not only seventy years of Independence of India and Pakistan, but also of the 1947 Partition, which saw one of the greatest migrations in human history. Close to fifteen million people were uprooted and had to migrate to or from India and the newly created nation, Pakistan.

In her book, Remnants of a Separation, artist and oral historian Aanchal Malhotra looks at the Partition narrative through the lens of the objects that the refugees brought with them as they made the journey. These objects were either the first things they could grab when they found themselves suddenly engulfed by communal riots, or things they considered essential or valuable as they prepared to settle in an unfamiliar land. Aanchal has also founded the Museum of Material Memory, “a digital repository of material culture of the Indian subcontinent, tracing family history and social ethnography through heirlooms, collectibles and objects of antiquity.”

I meet Aanchal in a café on a rainy afternoon in Delhi to talk about the languages she encountered while undertaking this curatorial project. After moving back to India from her studies abroad in 2013, Aanchal realized that in its race to be modern and in tune with the times, her generation—young, urban Indians in their twenties and thirties—often forgot to care about the items of the past. She started visiting historical sites every weekend and, from those visits and discoveries, extended the Partition project, which she started documenting on her blog. “I wanted to share the things I learned from people,” Aanchal says, when I ask her about the impulse that started it all.

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In Review: Abdulai Sila’s novel confronts the future of Guinea-Bissau

May 3, 2017  |  in Reviews  |  by Jessie Stoolman

She wants to create a school unlike those she attended, which were born out of the “civilizing” arm of the colonial regime.

“It was the first time the Sepoys had seen such a cowardly Chief of Post. It left them very disillusioned. They told everyone in the tabanca what had happened, adding a little salt of course.”

No “salt” appears to be lost in Jethro Soutar’s translation of The Ultimate Tragedy, which is the first Bissau-Guinean novel to be translated into English.

Reflecting the Bissau-Guinean oral traditions that influenced Abdulai Sila’s writing style, the novel reads like an uninterrupted conversation about what the future holds for this nation, seemingly on the verge of liberation.

Indeed, it is not difficult to imagine protagonist Ndani’s life (re)told in an oral narrative as she transforms from cursed outcast to abused servant, to the wife of a wealthy régulo in whose village she will meet her true love. With every change in Ndani’s environment, we are introduced to a different facet of colonial-era Bissau-Guinean society: rural, under-served poor; white, colonial elite; powerful, indigenous leaders; and finally, Church-educated citizens.

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