Posts filed under 'intersemiotic translation'

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

January 3, 2025 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Bella Creel, Carol Khoury, and MARGENTO

Literary updates from Japan, Palestine, and airports in Ireland and France.

Only three days into 2025, the Asymptote team is hard at work reporting on literature across the globe. In the first roundup of the year, our staff introduces a thirty-one day reading challenge of Japanese short stories, the liminal thoughts of a busy poet in European airports, and a look back on the numerous achievements of Palestinian writers throughout 2024.

Bella Creel, Blog Editor, Reporting from Japan

It’s often said that short stories and collections thereof sell poorly in the publishing market—and what a shame! There’s something about the short story, its attention to detail, the palpable shift between acts, the transience of characters and settings, that has made up some of the most impressive pieces of literature. Particularly in Japan, the short story has historically been a dominant mode of writing, pioneered by the “father of the Japanese short story” Ryunosuke Akutagawa, and is still today one of the most common genres seen in bookstores around the country.

To our delight, much of this oeuvre has been translated into English, and Read Japanese Literature (RJL), an extensive online resource for Japanese literature, has created a list of thirty-one Japanese short stories in translation available to read for free online—one for every day of January—in celebration of #JanuaryinJapan. These stories range from the great Akutagawa’s “Dreams,” a chilling and meandering tale of a paranoid artist, to Kenji Miyazawa’s satirical “The Restaurant of Many Orders,” an Alice-in-Wonderland-esque commentary on posturing and westernization following the Meiji period. Many of these stories and authors are also discussed in detail in the RJL Podcast, including deep dives into authors such as Osamu Dazai and Izumi Suzuki, historical context, and more.

If this is your first time hearing of this month’s reading challenge, don’t despair. We’re only three days into the month, and it won’t take you long to catch up—the stories are short, after all.

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine

2024 has been a tragic year for the Palestinian; still, Palestinian authors made significant strides in the literary world, garnering prestigious awards and recognition on both regional and international stages.

In April, imprisoned novelist Basim Khandaqji won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the Booker Prize) for his novel A Mask, the Colour of the Sky. His brother Youssef and publisher Rana Idris accepted the award in Abu Dhabi. Nabil Suleiman, chair of the judging committee, confirmed that the decision was unanimous. Moroccan writer Yassin Adnan, who hosted the ceremony, emphasized that Khandaqji’s win highlights literature’s ability to transcend borders.

Translation as Disorder in Carlos Fonseca’s Austral

August 23, 2023 | in Reviews | by Alan Mendoza Sosa

. . . disorder plagues the opening pages of the book, always in tight connection to translation.

Austral by Carlos Fonseca, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023

“What is the social impact of translation?” is a question that often buzzes in my ear like a hungry mosquito, especially when I read translated books, and even more commonly when I try to teach colloquial expressions in Spanish to my non-Hispanic friends—more precisely, Spanish from Mexico City, my hometown. Immediately, attempts at clear definitions become convoluted, uncertain, ambiguous—in a word, atropellados (literally “ran over,” an adjective that refers to stumbling over words). I sound more or less like this:

“Take ‘chido/chida/chide’ [CHEE-duh/-da/-de] (adj.). It can technically mean ‘cool,’ but also ‘good,’ ‘agreeable,’ or ‘comfortable’ (for things and places and preceded by the auxiliary verb ‘estar’); it also means ‘nice-kind-laidback-easygoing-friendly’ (for someone who meets all and every one of these attributes and with the verb ‘ser’); or ‘ok, no problem,’ and ‘thank you’ (in informal social interactions with a close friend but not necessarily an intimate one and, crucially, with an upbeat intonation)…but if you want to make things easier for you, just remember that in any colloquial situation where you would say ‘cool’ in English or the closest equivalent in your mother tongue, you can say ‘chido.’ Don’t forget to adjust the last letter for the grammatical gender of the noun, or the preferred gender of the person you are referring to. Recently, non-binary gender is expressed with an ‘e,’ but some people prefer ‘ex,’ or the feminine (a), or do not have any strong preference. When in doubt, ask.”

Similarly involved and protracted explanations often result in simpering faces and jocose efforts by my bravest friends to try out the words I share. More common, and more fun, is when friends also share their favorite colloquial untranslatables in their mother tongues, eliciting everyone’s excited perplexity and marvel at the abundance of meaning and the frustrating difficulties of carrying that meaning across languages and cultures. When we try to explain these terms, it is as though their translation abruptly hits the brakes on our language, pushing us into linguistic confusion with the inertia from the sudden interruption. In other words, translation begets disorder, upsetting the comfortable and normally thoughtless flow of everyday language. This sensation—which emerged in me after my recurrent attempts at translating colloquialisms—appears more subtly and robustly in the 2023 novel Austral by Carlos Fonseca and its translation by Megan McDowell. Disorder, Austral suggests, lies at the heart of translation’s social potential, as it makes translation (its exercise and its experience) essential for radical change.