Posts filed under 'interpretation'

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2025

January 27, 2025  |  in News  |  by Bella Creel, Meghan Racklin, and Xiao Yue Shan

Reviewing the manifold interpretations and curiosities in our Winter 2025 issue.

In a new issue spanning thirty-two countries and twenty languages, the array of literary offers include textual experiments, ever-novel takes on the craft of translation, and profound works that relate to the present moment in both necessary and unexpected ways. Here, our blog editors point to the works that most moved them.

Introducing his translation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial in 2012, Breon Mitchell remarked that with every generation, there seems to be a need for a new translation of so-called classic works of literature. His iteration was radically adherent to the original manuscript of The Trial, which was diligently kept under lock and key until the mid-fifties; by then, it was discovered exactly to what extent Max Brod had rewritten and restructured the original looseleaf pages of Kafka’s original draft. It is clear from Mitchell’s note that he considers this edit, if not an offense to Kafka, an offense to the reader who has lost the opportunity to enact their own radical interpretation of the work: an interpretation that touched Mitchell so deeply, he then endeavored to recreate it for others.

In Asymptote’s Winter 2025 Issue, the (digital) pages are an array of surprising turns of phrase and intriguing structures—of literature that challenges what we believe to be literature, translations that challenge what we believe to be originality, and essays that challenge what we believe to be logic. I am always drawn to the latter: to criticism, and writing about writers. As such, this issue has been a treat.

With the hundredth anniversary of Kafka’s death just in the rearview and the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Trial looming ever closer, the writer-turned-adjective has not escaped the interest of Asymptote contributors. Italian writer Giorgio Fontana, in Howard Curtis’s tight translation, holds a love for Kafka much like Breon Mitchell. In an excerpt from his book Kafka: A World of Truth, Fontana discusses how we, as readers, repossess the works of Kafka, molding them into something more simplistic or abstract than they are. In a convincing argument, he writes: “The defining characteristic of genius is . . . the possession of a secret that the poet has no ability to express.” READ MORE…

Loss, Subversion and Womanhood: An Interview with Sara Elkamel, Translator of I Will Not Fold These Maps by Mona Kareem

September 27, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Ali Al-Jamri

I really admire Mona’s ability to find harmonious, synchronous threads across eras and geographies.

On the UK tour of I Will Not Fold These Maps by Mona Kareem, translated by Sara Elkamel, Sara met with poet and translator Ali Al-Jamri to dig deep into her process rendering Mona’s work into English. They began by comparing their individual translations of the book’s opening poem, “Perdition,” and what followed was an in-depth discussion of Sara’s process and Mona’s themes as they discuss threads of loss, subversion and womanhood in the works. Both translations of “Perdition” appear at the end of this interview. Elkamel’s translation was originally published as part of her translation of Kareem’s I Will Not Fold These Maps, available in the Poetry Translation Centre’s online store and in all good bookshops!

Ali Al-Jamri (AAJ): This first part of the interview is an experiment—but let’s see if it works? I am very interested in hearing you explain your process and the granular decision-making required in translation. By way of starting this conversation, I’ve attempted my own translation of the opening poem هلاك and I’ve shared my draft with you. I find that contrasts often help us define ourselves, and so my hope is that the contrasts between our translations will clarify your process. I’m interested in any reflections you have.

Sara Elkamel (SE): I found it fascinating to go through your (beautiful) translation attempts. Usually, when I reflect on a translation of mine, I experience a sinking feeling associated with the opportunities I missed out on, as well as a sense of (dare I call it) admiration for some of the choices made—as though they were made by someone else. Looking at your translation of “Perdition” has definitely inspired those two reactions within me.

For instance, you and I have translated the third stanza very differently, and that gap helps me think through my choices. What you translated as “Another ship / short of breath / struggles on the ocean’s throat,” I rendered as “Another ship / asphyxiates / the ocean’s larynx.” I realize now that I have entirely omitted the “shortness of breath” that appears in the original. Instead, I leaned on the sound of the word “asphyxiates” to mimic that breathlessness. I’ve always thought the “x” in that word was like a noose placed in its center.

I think you and I also came to different conclusions about the body running out of breath; you interpreted it as the ship, and I as the ocean. In my reading, I felt that this poem had the tendency to give human bodies to natural phenomena; the sky has a breast, the night wears a choker of stars around its neck, and the ocean has a larynx. I realize now that the fourth stanza, “The moon spills a cloud / into the sky’s breast” was a stretch on my part. The original text does not contain the action of “spilling”—but I think I was keen on extending the poem’s tendency to set up an anthropoid actor, an action, and a subject. For better or for worse, I was trying to stay true to the poem’s intentions—or what I perceived to be the poem’s intentions—not necessarily the language itself. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2023

August 14, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Irmak Ertuna Howison and Sofija Popovska

New work from Uruguay and South Korea!

This month, we take a look at two brilliant titles that embody the acts of interpretation and evocation. In Silvia Guerra’s poems, nature is given voice in stunning scenes of linguistic complexity. In Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s retelling of a Korean classic, beloved characters are brought to life in the graphic form. 

sea

A Sea at Dawn by Silvia Guerra, translated from the Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas, Eulalia Books, 2023 

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

What constitutes a translation? Thinkers like Mikhail Bakhtin and Jacques Lacan have argued that every utterance is a deeply intimate expression channeled through shared, culturally standardized verbal structures; that is to say, every time we speak, we are translating.

As with speaking, so with listening, as well. Bakhtin describes the act of conversing with someone else as a (re-)construction of our concepts upon the “alien territory” of the other’s mind. In A Sea at Dawn (Un mar en madrugada), a poetry collection originally published in 2018 and now out in English translation from Eulalia Books, the Uruguayan poet Silvia Guerra manages to push against even these (admittedly broad and inclusive) boundaries of defining translation. In her panoramic, evocative poems, she invites all kinds of life, organic and inorganic, to speak, thereby creating a delightfully strange linguistic landscape that is equally alien and welcoming to the voices of the world, all at once.

Given the vertiginous and heterodox nature of the book itself, it’s helpful to start with the afterword written by the translators Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas, which illuminates the process of recasting Guerra’s captivating and difficult voice into English, and offers various ways to think about her poetry. For those that have read her in Spanish, it might seem that translating Guerra might seem an exercise in futility, leading to “disappointment and outright lamentation”; however, Kercheval and Pitas’ exquisite translation evokes neither of those things. Instead, contemplating Guerra’s intricate verbal designs allowed the translators to experience “lost and found” moments—instances where English revealed its ability to produce accomplices to Guerra’s “extremely innovative soundscapes” and formulations. Kercheval and Pitas cite an instance where they rediscovered the potential of English words to be “sonically evocative,” in which editor Michelle Gil-Montero offered “hacked in half” as a match for “pensamiento imbricado hendido”—instead of the initial idea, “thought interwoven split.” Later, quoting Walter Benjamin’s notion that “translation makes one’s native language foreign to itself,” Kercheval and Pitas’ afterword shows that reading Guerra in translation not only allows one to experience her mysterious Spanish transformed into English (A Sea at Dawn being a bilingual edition), but leaves our image of English irrevocably altered by her expansive, multipotential approach to language. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2023

June 12, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon, Samantha Siefert, and Xiao Yue Shan

New work from Shumona Sinha, Dorothy Tse, and Berta Dávila!

In this month’s selection of the best in translated literature, our editors present a selection of texts that range from the intimate, to the surreal, to the furious. From Galicia, a mother writes a poetic rumination of abortion and post-partum depression. From Hong Kong, a love story unfolds between two unlikely characters as the city clamours in protest. From France, an interpreter gives a searing account of the immigration system and its many failures, in the aftermath of her own violent act.

the dear ones

The Dear Ones by Berta Dávila, translated from the Galician by Jacob Rogers, 3Times Rebel Press, 2023

Review by Samantha Siefert, Marketing Manager

Five years after becoming a mother, a woman chooses to have an abortion. This uneasy duality forms the premise of Galician author Berta Dávila’s intimate, probing exploration of motherhood in her memoir, The Dear Ones, now available in an excellent English translation by Jacob Rogers. “It takes nine months for a child to form in the womb and be born, but no one knows how long it takes for a mother to do the same,” Dávila muses, never pretending to know or even seek a precise answer to the unstated question, instead dedicating this short but intense novel to articulating plainly the spaces between the themes of motherhood—the ones discussed openly, and the ones that are not.

READ MORE…

Our Word Against Kafka’s

July 14, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Samuel Kahler

Kafka floats, shapeshifts, appears in many places at once; he is not a fixed subject.

Franz Kafka’s gigantic presence in the world of letters is undeniable, yet looking back along the labyrinthine volutes of history, one perceives distinctly the figure of a man who would likely be horrified at the depth and breadth by which we known his work. Having famously insisted that his texts be burned after his death, a betrayal by a close friend led to the remarkable corpus we freely access today. Since then, Kafka’s writings have undergone a dramatic escalade of ownerships, resulting most recently in its comprehensive release by the National Library of Israel. In the following essay, Samuel Kahler traces the events that led to Kafka’s legacy, delineating a writer’s intentions as they come up against the voracious appetites of the world.

 “I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”

—Franz Kafka

Part of the appeal of reading Kafka (or the madness, depending on who you ask) stems from the durability of the stories, parables, and novellas—their infinite resistance to decisive analysis enduring even after multiple readings. The texts evoke the quotidian anxieties of the modern age, achieving their incomparable effect by leaning into varied traditions of folklore, parable, horror, and the absurd, paradoxically balancing the polarities of universal relatability and a resistance against fixed interpretations. Can a body of work so ripe—so bursting with potential meanings—possibly be pigeonholed with a singular definition? To attempt a conclusive, complete answer—something like a grand unified theory of Kafka—would be the errand of a well-meaning but misguided fool.

Inseparable from the question, and equally difficult to answer, is another problem: namely, that of deciding which works belong in his official catalog and which do not. Mostly, we owe this state of affairs to a complex series of events that began with the discovery of Kafka’s will and continued onward through the next nine decades, through the many publications of his works and, later, the battles over his archival materials and the significance of the contents contained therein.

When the National Library of Israel released its newly digitized Franz Kafka collection this spring, it signified the end of a prolonged conflict over its acquisition. Yet, the collection’s publication does not portend a satisfying resolution for any facet of Kafka’s legacy; rather, it throws the spotlight on academia and the public at large, exposing our continued desire to make something concrete out of Kafka, despite his enigmatic condition.

Kafka’s posthumous drama—call it a tragedy, a passion play, a farce, or what you will—remains an unresolved mess, even after the curtain has supposedly come down. READ MORE…

How the Void Fills: Soje on Translating Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon

June 24, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Alexandra Irimia

I hope that the books that I translate collectively present a tapestry of Koreanness that challenges and upends orientalist views of the country.

Though the pandemic that serves as the catalyzing disaster in Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon seems immediate to our times, the novel was actually published in 2017—indicating towards the larger, lasting ideas and occupations alive beneath the tide of current events. Indeed, as Choi’s sensitive, dreamy narrative unfolds, the uncanny nature of its topicality is overshadowed by its larger, human concerns of foreignness, settlement, and the way we meet one another. In the following interview, transcribed from a live Q&A hosted by Asymptote Book Club Manager Alexandra Irimia, Soje shares their thoughts on translating the unique novel, and the many invisible challenges of translating Korean into English.

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 Q&As with the author and/or the translator of each title!

Alexandra Irimia (AI): From Italian opera and sound of the ocean, to radio static and the rain, To the Warm Horizon shapes a unique soundscape. The narrative relies a lot on its sensorial, synesthetic cues which usually demand a lot of skill and craft to be put into words and conveyed convincingly. Besides, as a reader, I felt a lot of intentionality in the author’s use of silence. Did you feel in this novel—or in the rest of your body of work—that there was any challenge particular to translating the musicality of the prose from the Korean into English? 

Soje: What a beautiful question! Virtually every translator of Korean literature has commented on this at some point, but repetition is a big deal in Korean literature. In prose, it becomes more noticeable because we, as readers, expect that kind of musicality more from poetry. One of the main stylistic things I noticed was the way Choi Jin-young breaks her sentences in staccato declarations, especially towards the beginning of the book where Dori is narrating her past life in Korea and journey to Russia. And because the fragmented nature of these sentences reflects the character’s state of mind, I tried to replicate every single beat in my first draft. But upon rereading and revising, I found that these dramatic pauses felt more gimmicky in the English than in the Korean, so I had to find a balance between the rhythm of the Korean and what the English language wanted me to do. My reasoning for this partly boils to the fact that the word count expands about 1.5 times from Korean to English, so the rhythm will absolutely change in translation unless details are cut.

There are seven speech levels in Korean, mainly indicated by the verb conjugation which comes at the end of the sentence. Korean novels usually employ the 해라체 (haerache), which means that every declarative sentence ends in the same syllable, 다 (da). So there’s almost this concealed rhyme, and I used to be so fixated on it that many of my sentences in English tended to parallel in structure. Thankfully, my excellent editors at Honford Star and translators such as Emily Yae Won and Anton Hur taught me to vary my sentence structures—something that I’m still honing as an early career translator.

AI: You manage to convey into English an intuition of lyricism that I often associate with East Asian poetry, and which I can imagine is deeply embedded in the original text. Is this lyricism something that flows naturally in your translation—an effortless emanation from the original text—or something that requires a deliberate attempt to preserve in the English version?

Soje: Wow, effortless emanation? I think that’s every translator’s wish! I probably struggled with this more because Horizon happens to be my first full length translation—the two poetry collections that I translated just happened to come out earlier. In the three years that it took to get this published, I think I did three or four major revisions, each time returning to the text with the knowledge I gained from working on the poetry projects. So maybe there’s some relevance there. READ MORE…

All Literature Is Worth Investigating: An Interview with Translator Stefan Rusinov

June 21, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Andriana Hamas

All cultures are exciting, both for their achievements and failures, for their beauty and nastiness.

In 1999, almost 170 years after his birth, Bulgaria honored publisher Hristo G. Danov’s legacy by establishing national literary awards in his name. In 2021, Stefan Rusinov, a translator who isn’t afraid to ask the important questions about the essence of his trade, won Best Fiction Translator for multiple books he had worked on over the course of twenty-four months. In addition to these admirable recent endeavors in Chinese prose, he juggles his work at Sofia University and his tasks as a freelance interpreter. Our conversation highlights his current projects, the importance of honest answers, and the value of simply “hanging out” with writers.

Andriana Hamas (AH): I would like to begin by asking you about your Бележка под линия (Footnote) podcast, thanks to which you meet fellow translators and discuss “behind-the-scenes torments,” the decisions they eventually have to make, and their inevitable missteps or failures. What have you learned so far?

Stefan Rusinov (SR): I’ve learned a lot, which was really the selfish reason to start this project to begin with. Private conversations with other translators and several years of translating gradually made me realize how case-specific this activity is and that mastery comes rather from accumulating solved problems than from learning universal principles (not to underestimate translation theory). That’s why I wanted to create a space where we won’t so much muse over the nature of translation and other such abstract questions, but we would dig into the specifics, where translators would be put in the position of explaining their considerations and decisions to someone who doesn’t know their working language. Nine episodes on, I’m even more certain that discussing actual problems encountered by translators from all kinds of languages is an important way to understand this activity (and also a major way to pump up my own translation skills).

I’ve learned, or rather, I’ve confirmed, that uncertainty is part of the game, and it should be. I find it very hard to trust a confident translator. There are tons of problems we need to solve and tons of decisions we need to make and, to borrow Wolfgang Iser’s idea of interpretation, the mere existence of these cases means that we are bound to create a gap between the original and the translation. So, in a way, we are bad translators by default.

I also learned that in French unfuckable means “incomprehensible.” READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Love in a Fallen City

June 10, 2021  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Allison Braden, Shawn Hoo, and Xiao Yue Shan

A literary style that lends itself so naturally to cinema has its pleasures and, in some cases, its perils when it comes to adaptation.

The allure of Eileen Chang’s prose is a bewitching combination of insight and precision—sensual acuity married with an editorial scrupulousness. Earning widespread renown with renderings of the delicate, tenuous relationships in the volatile societies of her time, Chang has become known for her ability to create vivid, lasting images. It’s no wonder, then, that her works have served as the material for several celebrated films; today, our blog editors are taking a look at Hong Kong director Ann Hui’s adaptation of Chang’s rich novella of courtship and compromise, Love in a Fallen City (1984). What follows is a discussion on the transposition of Chang’s “cinematic” language, the pitfalls of overly faithful adaptation, and the difficulties of portraying interiority.

Shawn Hoo (SH): I have always thought of Eileen Chang’s prose style—her montage of overlapping timelines; her patient, exquisite visualising of scenes; her keen ear for dialogue—as having an affinity with the language of film. That is, her stories come to me almost ready-made for film. Unsurprisingly, Chang herself did write fourteen screenplays (a neglected part of her oeuvre), and several of her stories have been adapted by celebrated Sinophone filmmakers such as Stanley Kwan, Ang Lee, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and of course, Ann Hui (all of whom have no doubt disseminated Chang’s legacy to new audiences). A literary style that lends itself so naturally to cinema has its pleasures and, in some cases, its perils when it comes to adaptation. Just hear what Hui admits when asked about her interpretation of Chang’s story: “There is no interpretation at all,” she says, “It’s more a representation. The novel is so good that adding anything at all seems impossible.” If by “representation” Hui means to hew close to the original text, then this bears out in the film’s dialogue, which is used almost verbatim in its Cantonese translation, as well as in its rendering of key scenes which appear largely unmodified on screen. Consequently, what is arguably Chang’s most loved story has had a relatively lukewarm reception in its filmic context (and in Hui’s otherwise prolific oeuvre). Faithfulness—that contested word so frequently used to discuss translation—it seems, does not always reward.

This for me raises questions about the merits of transferring what is ostensibly cinematic writing onto the film medium, and how their relationship—as well as mutual realisation—can be understood beyond a scene-for-scene, image-for-image correspondence, which is at least how I conceive of Hui’s approach: too faithful. To be clear, there is much to admire in this film, especially Hui’s treatment of early 1940s Shanghai and Hong Kong. Whereas the former has the camera concentrated on the decaying, claustrophobic Bai household and moves between adjacent rooms only to hear Liusu’s relatives badmouthing her, the latter moves liberally between the historic Repulse Bay Hotel, couples dancing to a jazz number at the Hong Kong Hotel, outdoor Chinese opera, and a rendition of Greensleeves all heard while Liusu and Liuyuan walk the city. The film’s construction of these two settings dramatises the shifts in Liusu’s psychology, one that liberates her from the sad huqin of an insular household into the cacophonous colonial cosmopolitanism of British Hong Kong which signifies new beginnings. Or rather, three settings: if we distinguish Japanese-occupied Hong Kong for its distinct aural and visual qualities. Here, I think Hui successfully leverages on the medium to elaborate on Chang’s vision, that is the role of contingency—of situated time and place—to precipitate love.

At this point, I wonder if either of you might have a different take on the relationship between representation and interpretation, to borrow Hui’s own distinction?

Allison Braden (AB): The film did strike me as a fascinating testament to the idea that extreme faithfulness can be, paradoxically, a detriment to adaptation. Conventional wisdom holds that books deal in emotions, plays in dialogue, and films in images. The limited visual scope of the first part of Love in a Fallen City—the repressively close Bai home, the tight shots in various hotel settings—calls to mind a teleplay, with more reliance on dialogue than images. This approach shortchanges Liusu’s interiority and writer Eileen Chang’s careful attention to emotional nuance. I spent the initial Hong Kong portion of the movie baffled by Liusu’s ambivalence. She clearly needs to escape her family but also seems determined to make a match for herself rather than meet anyone else’s expectations. “The first marriage is for your parents,” she says, “the second is for yourself.” But can she afford to dawdle? To repulse a supremely eligible suitor? Sure, Fan represented a foreign sensibility and exhibited domineering and misogynistic traits, but Liusu’s alternate reactions—charmed and put off—and quiet (is it too much to say sulky?) responses to his overtures didn’t offer a sufficient window into her feelings. The viewer is left to project her own interpretation on Liusu’s mystifying reticence, which I see less as intentional ambiguity and more as a failure to adequately adapt the interiority of the novel to a medium that relies on a different form of exposition. READ MORE…

Pleasantly Odd Prose: An Interview with Translator from the Albanian, John Hodgson

March 29, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Sophia Stewart

When Albania was isolated under communism, Kadare tried to help his readers travel in their imagination.

Throughout Ismail Kadare’s autobiographical novel The Doll, recently published in English by Counterpoint Press, the narrator voices a dilemma that most writers know well: the insufficiency of language. “It was hard to explain because there were no words for it,” he says at one point. “Either I didn’t know them, or they weren’t yet invented.” And later: “No language could describe what I felt in my heart. I needed a different one. The one I had would not obey me.”

So much of the literary translator’s work lies in courting the obedience of language. Translation makes intelligible the previously unintelligible, imagines new words to convey preexistent meaning. John Hodgson knows this well: The Doll is the sixth book of Kadare’s that Hodgson has translated. Considering his outsized role in bringing Kadare’s work to English-language readers, he cuts a modest, unassuming figure. One of the few Albanian-English literary translators working today, Hodgson has translated Kadare’s novels The Three-Arched Bridge, The Traitor’s Niche, and A Girl in Exile, among others. In comparison to the Albanian writer’s previous novels, Hodgson describes The Doll as “a gentle, reflexive, and humorous book” and found “the experience of translating it was correspondingly relaxed.”

Hodgson and I recently discussed his work as an Albanian-English interpreter and literary translator, as well as the inimitable pleasures of “a Kadare sentence.”

—Sophia Stewart, Assistant Interviews Editor

Sophia Stewart (SS): You were born in England and studied English at Cambridge and Newcastle. What initially drew you to the Albanian language, and what led you to pursue Albanian translation professionally?

John Hodgson (JH): In the 1980s, I taught English in several now vanished Eastern European countries: the German Democratic Republic, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. The British Council sent me to the University of Prishtina in Kosovo. I knew nothing about Kosovo when I arrived, but I was enthralled by the life there. Now, during lockdown, I’ve written a short book in Albanian about this time, which I recall with great affection. Soon afterwards I was head-hunted by the United States Government to translate Marxist-Leninist propaganda.

SS: Seeing as you were born in England, and therefore speak British English, do you actively avoid Briticisms in your translations? While there is no such thing as “standard English,” do you attempt to make your English translations as universally intelligible—that is, “unmarked” by dialectical indicators—as possible?

JH: When I worked for the United States government, my computer would bleep whenever I used a Briticism, and this taught me, for instance, not to write the word “whilst.” English is very rich and capacious, so it is possible to write in an “unmarked” style without lapsing into bland UN-speak. Albanian also has a lot of variation, particularly between the north and south, and Kadare writes in a non-regional literary Albanian that is quite a recent flowering, and which he himself has done a lot to shape and infuse with expressive power. Recently he has been consciously reviving old words and creating neologisms. A Kadare sentence in Albanian is quite unlike any other writer’s. I was pleased when a reviewer described the prose of one of my translations as “pleasantly odd.” I thought I had perhaps captured something of this. Dialectical indicators in the original language pose more intractable problems than a translator’s own idiom. So does slang. Kadare hardly ever uses slang, and presents none of the difficulties of, for example, the soldiers’ Bosnian in Faruk Šehić’s Under Pressure.

SS: The author-translator relationship can vary so much depending on the particular project or pairing. Having translated so much of Kadare’s work over the course of more than two decades, what does your working relationship with Kadare look like?

JH: Kadare has had dozens of translators and he can’t spend all his time dealing with us. I have been grateful for the confidence he has shown in me. Generally, after I have completed the first draft of each book in English, the editor and I put together questions for Kadare, which he has always answered conscientiously. He doesn’t use the internet, and I like to respect his privacy. READ MORE…

The Language of Non-Existence: Ümit Hussein on Translating Burhan Sönmez

December 12, 2019  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Sarah Moore

Ultimately, I believe the main challenge of [translating] literary fiction is that it’s a labour of love.

For our penultimate Book Club selection of the year, we looked to the occupations of memory and philosophy to find Burhan Sönmez’s masterful novel, Labyrinth. Brought into English from Turkish with every bit of its poeticism intact by the author’s long-time partner in literature, Ümit Hussein, the work tellingly arrives at a time when we as readers are questioning the integrity of our collective memories more than ever. In the following interview, Asymptote’s Assistant Blog Editor Sarah Moore speaks to Hussein on her relationship with Sönmez, the necessity of knowing where a novel “comes from”, and the lonely profession of translation.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers in the US, the UK, and the EU. Today is the last day to sign up to give or receive our Book Club titles—starting from this month! Take advantage of our special Black Friday sale and get 10% off three-month subscriptions. Once you’re a member, be sure to join our online discussion group at our Facebook page!

Sarah Moore (SM): You’ve translated several other books by Burhan Sönmez. How has his work evolved over the years in terms of content or style? Can you point to some longstanding themes? What stood out to you about this particular novel?

Ümit Hussein (UH): Burhan and I first met when we were both starting out. I have translated all his novels to date, including his first, North—the only one yet to be published in English. I don’t want to misquote the number of books he told me he read in preparation for it, but I believe it was over a hundred. Because the novel was still in manuscript form when I translated it (it hadn’t yet found a Turkish publisher), he kept revising it. I must say, that’s something that hasn’t changed over time! He’s incredibly meticulous. Every word he writes has been carefully considered and rethought and rewritten. I know because I work very closely with my authors; I think it’s important to establish a rapport during the translation process, and consequently I’m one of those tiresome translators who is constantly in touch with questions and comments and requests for explanations. 

While each of Burhan’s novels bears his unmistakeable stamp, they are all very different and have evolved over time. Istanbul Istanbul may be his most mature in terms of craftsmanship and poeticism, but my personal favourite is Sins and Innocents. Both revolve largely around storytelling, as does Burhan’s work at large. In Istanbul Istanbul, four prisoners sharing a tiny underground cell distract each other with stories. Similarly, half of Sins and Innocents is set in Burhan’s native village in Central Anatolia, and each chapter in the Anatolian half is devoted to the often dramatic story of a real life village character. These chapters could, if developed, comprise novels in themselves: there are tales of young girls being buried alive, a student mistakenly shot dead by his brother who is embroiled in a blood feud, a beautiful woman scarred for life when she is attacked by a she-bear maddened with grief after the death of her cubs. Burhan is a born storyteller, because he comes from a culture where the oral tradition is very prominent. READ MORE…

Classic Texts in Translation: David Buchta on the Bhagavad Gītā

April 3, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Nina Perrotta

It’s the fact that it’s been this vibrant text for millennia that makes it such an important text for us to read today.

Today’s post is the first installment in our new blog series, “Classic Texts in Translation,” in which we speak with scholars and experts about the challenges of translating canonical texts from around the world. In today’s interview, Assistant Blog Editor Nina Perrotta talks with Professor David Buchta of Brown University about the Bhagavad Gītā, an ancient Sanskrit text that forms part of the larger epic poem known as the Mahābhārata. Their conversation touches on the specific difficulties of translating complex philosophical and theological terms from Sanskrit into English, the questions around authorship that make interpreting classical Sanskrit texts particularly challenging, and the reasons that the Bhagavad Gītā has been such an influential text, both within India and around the world, for millennia.

Nina Perrotta (NP): I want to start off by asking you, in a general way, about some of the biggest challenges of translating Sanskrit into English.

David Buchta (DB): Sure. In some ways, it’s a hard question to answer in a general way, just because you’re talking about this language that has such an enormously long history, such a huge library of literature, and such a wide range. This would be the same for Latin or Greek—the kinds of challenges you face in one genre versus another are going to be radically different.

On the one hand, you’ve got these poems that have two meanings simultaneously, and that obviously is going to introduce one whole set of translation challenges. I often say this about Sanskrit: it’s such a highly cultivated language. In other words, the people who used the language cared about it, thought about it, put their time and energy into developing its toolbox. As a result, if you’re a skilled writer, you can, if you want to, be extremely precise and unambiguous, or you can be extremely ambiguous. There are these poems where you can tell seven stories all at once. It just depends on how the words are interpreted, whether the same sequence of syllables is broken into two words or three words, for example. You have these different ways that you can go if you’re skilled enough at using the language.

READ MORE…

Grab the Nearest Buoy: On Dimitris Lyacos’ Poena Damni

March 27, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Garrett Phelps

It’s a Euclidean landscape, stripped down and elementary, where desire is literally having to feel around in the dark.

How did a book of Greek poetry become one of the most-discussed and most-lauded pieces of contemporary European literature? Garrett Phelps, Assistant Managing Editor at Asymptote, explains what makes Dimitris Lyacos’ Poena Damni trilogy is so unusual—and so difficult to describe.

Late last year, Shoestring Press published a complete edition of Dimitris Lyacos’ Poena Damni trilogy, translated into English from a newly revised text. Not long after the first volume appeared in 2009, the work became the subject of near-unanimous praise. Fastforward about a decade and it’s widely acknowledged as a crucial addition to the literary canon, the strongest signs being its frequent inclusion in university curricula and its reputation in high circles as a masterwork, a post-modern epic, and a dystopian allegory for the cultural collapse of the West, whose legacy is only despair and rubble and war. Translations into French, English, and German have made it one of the most reviewed works of contemporary European literature, which is rare for any book of poetry and especially one written in Greek. That it’s a masterwork, or at least really near being one, is true. I gathered as much after my first encounter with it a few years ago, when Asymptote featured an extract from Shorsha Sullivan’s translation of Z213: Exit. It floored me back then and still does now.

I’m thankful that I read it before looking at anyone else’s thoughts, because the label “post-modern epic” is misleading, useful only for jacket copy. It reminds me of somebody like Umberto Eco, whose novels are long and fussy, and more about literature itself than that other rich wellspring known as real life. Dimitris Lyacos’ trilogy is definitely not that: whatever runs through its heart is too raw. Other postmodernists with actual talent, like Kathy Acker, are also a very different cut of writer. They tend to deal with ubiquitous cultural products—e.g., movies, music, targeted ad copy, the novel—whose influence pervades, or even dictates, modernity. Their work is heavy on pastiche and ready to relate, sometimes in a single breath, subjects as disparate as Nascar and archaic Greek poetry. Lyacos shares their skepticism of reigning cultural myths, although for him they’re free from the baggage of ideology, manifest destiny, and sense of self. Instead, myths revert to their most embryonic forms, such as the Homeric journey, leading some critics to argue that Poena Damni is in fact more modernist than post-modern. They’re right, too, but the claim sounds so dry when read aloud that I’ve already lost interest. Anxiety about missing the point usually means literature is doing its job. READ MORE…

Ambiguity and Bilingual Art: Pavel Arseniev’s Reported Speech in Review

February 27, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Paul Worley

Through art like Arseniev’s poetry, we gain a toehold, however momentary, from which we are better able to grasp the present and prepare a future.

Reported-Speech-Cover-Spread-Final-768x520

Reported Speech by Pavel Arseniev, Cicada Press, 2018

Reviewed by Paul Worley, Editor-at-Large

I tell my students that literature does things, but I prefer to do so in even less polished terms. From a more abstract perspective, I see current attacks on the humanities (especially literature) in the United States and elsewhere as being so vicious precisely because of the fact that literature does do things. It changes how we, as humans, relate to and understand others, as well as ourselves.

That said, there are moments when I profoundly doubt this. For example, I was recently discussing the fabricated crisis at the US-Mexico border and Trump’s wall with someone I had just met. During our discussion, this person informed me that Stephanie Elizondo Griest’s nonfiction All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the US Borderlands, a work that gives a nuanced, highly sensitive portrait of the US-Mexico border, actually serves to justify that border’s further militarization. It was like being told by someone with a very serious face that Shelley’s “Ozymandius” is a laudatory poem on the subject of indelible human achievement or that Swift’s A Modest Proposal provided a brilliant roadmap for the betterment of the Irish economy. And yet, even when my doubts about literature and its power dominate my thoughts, events like the murder of Iraqi novelist Alaa Mashzoub snap me back to reality. Literature matters, so much so that in other parts of the world literature can get you killed, even as I safely type this up in my home in the United States. Perhaps this will soon be the case here, too.

READ MORE…

Documenting Translators: The Political Backstage of Translation

October 29, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Denise Kripper

These films make protagonists out of the ultimate supporting actors in history, the translators.

Translators are often represented as mediators, actors in the communication of a text who are subordinate to the author. However, translators have often played crucial roles in politically pivotal moments. Denise Kripper tells us more about these translators, and the films in which their stories feature.

Coming soon this year is Les Traducteurs, directed by Regis Roinsard, a high-profile French thriller inspired by the true story behind the translation of Dan Brown’s novel Inferno. During this process, several international translators were shut away in a bunker in an effort to avoid piracy and illegal editions while aiming to launch the book simultaneously in different languages, all over the world. In real life, the book ended up generating $250 million, but in the action-packed film, “when the first ten pages of the top-secret manuscript appear online, the dream job becomes a nightmare – the thief is one of them and the publisher is ready to do whatever it takes to unmask him – or her” (IMDb).

READ MORE…