Posts filed under 'Interview'

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

November 17, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou, Marina García Pardavila, and Miranda Mazariegos

News from Latin America, Greece, and Spain!

Join us this week with a new batch of literary dispatches covering a wide range of news from Latin America, Greece, and Spain; from censorship and literary awards to a slew of literary festivals, read on to learn more!

Miranda Mazariegos, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Latin America

In Colombia, Laura Ardila Arrieta’s book La Costa Nostra was pulled from publication days before going to print by Editorial Planeta, one of the most influential publishers in the Spanish-speaking world. Ardila Arrieta’s book investigates one of the most powerful families in Colombia and was pulled due to “three legal opinions that proved to us that the text contained significant risks that, as a company, we did not want to take on,” according to Planeta’s official statement. Ardila Arrieta was signed by Indent Literary Agency a few days later, and her book has instead been published by Rey Naranjo, an independent Colombian publisher who stated that the publishing of the book represents “the desire to contribute so that the future of our democratic system improves and that education and reading empowers us as a society.” 

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The Metaphysical Touch of Technology: An Interview with CŌEM

September 5, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

I am convinced that new poetic expressions that have never existed before will be born—and re-introduced to the page someday.

The Tokyo-based CŌEM is a multi-talented collective of poets, writers, and coders who explore the ever-evolving and curious intersection between poetry and technology. In creating immersive experiences and rethinking the potential of words, the group work to advance their writerly craft with feats of digital engineering, operating on the idea that poetry is not only a literary form or a vehicle for expression but a way of engaging with the world as it moves and changes. I spoke with two leaders of CŌEM, the award-winning poet Nagae Yūki and co-founder Jordan A. Y. Smith, our conversation touching on the singular life of the poem, how poetry can be enacted in physical and digital landscapes, and what transpires when minds of discreet intelligences converge.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): CŌEM brings together digital language and poetic language to create projects that aim to immerse readers further into the world of the poem. For you two as poets, what about virtuality entices you? What is particularly seductive or engaging about a poem existing outside of the page?

Nagae Yūki (NY): This addresses a fundamental question of how to determine the essence of poetry. The poetry on the page in the form of écriture can easily be understood as poetry itself—but spoken poetry, with the tongue and the throat and gestures, is a more primeval form than written poetry, as seen with the Iliad and the Odyssey. In fact, I feel that this physicality is key. Over the last ten years, as social media have reached the peak of their prosperity, the digital has largely been criticized as a medium that strips away human physicality; however, today, the latest technology (including the metaverse, which is a sensory technology) allows people to experience leaps in time and space that are possible only in virtual space.

Returning to the first question, what is poetry? Perhaps a metaphysical gaze that overlooks the branching, irreversible movements of time in simultaneity, a miracle of the tongue that freely draws in different places. Isn’t it the poet who makes such connections visible, translating them into something that can be sensed by others? If so, technology as a poetic medium can be considered to have this same power, allowing many people to approach the written word intuitively. Don’t get me wrong—I truly believe in writing, but at the same time, when poets manipulate digital devices and let their bodies and thoughts pass through the metaphysical touch of technology, I am convinced that new poetic expressions that have never existed before will be born—and re-introduced to the page someday. It is my intuition that within these exchanges lies hidden the actual potential for revolutionary changes in the expression of poetry.

Jordan A. Y. Smith (JAYS): Poetry on the page is a great nexus of experiences, but there’s nothing about the medium of paper except its tactility and scent that merits it being the primary locus of poetic form, and the digital “forms” that mimic paper actually sacrifice what’s good about it, remaining faithful to conventions like line shape and length, print-based traditions, and the simulation of book construction that actually deprive the digital of anything that could potentially justify that very sacrifice. There’s a place for poetry in printed forms such as books—I mean, I also edit Tokyo Poetry Journal—so this is not suggesting a replacement of “pages.”

What can be found “in” the poem through the digital is in many ways more akin to the actual poetic experience, which can be synaesthetic, hyperlinked, virtual, disembodied and re-embodied in new ways, spiritually haunting, uncanny, delusional, multilayered, and so on. I’m generally in favor of doing things with poetry—reading it out loud, writing it in my own handwriting, playfully removing parts to highlight, decontextualize, and emphasize them as units.

This sense of play is embodied in Oulipo writers as well, and when I designed and taught a course in digital literature (at UCLA back in 2014), we spent a fair amount of time looking at antecedents of digital literature. Now we have increasingly more versatile tools, so this is just as natural a change as writers switching from quill and ink to ballpoint or mechanical pencil, and from printing press to print-on-demand or e-books.

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A Fine Balance: An Interview with Keerti Ramachandra

February 17, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Suhasini Patni

Isn’t that true of so many Indians? We inhabit several languages simultaneously and travel between them easily and unselfconsciously.

Keerti Ramachandra is a Katha AK Ramanujan Award-winning translator who works out of Marathi, Kannada, and Hindi. She has translated Vishwas Patil’s Sahitya Akademi Award-winning novel Jhadajhadati (A Dirge for the Dammed), which was shortlisted for the Crossword Prize.

This interview was conducted in two parts. I first met Ms. Ramachandra in her house on Residency Road, Bangalore, where she talked about her journey into translation. We continued the conversation over email where she discussed the various books she’s worked with, the process of collaboration, how her work as an educator and editor seeps into translation, and the state of Indian publishing.

Suhasini Patni (SP): You’ve been translating for several years now. Can you talk about how you came into translation?

Keerti Ramachandra (KR): I come from a bilingual family and a multilingual society. Every day, I would come home from school and report to my mother the events of the day in Marathi. Then repeat it all for my grandparents in Kannada, and then argue vociferously about the veracity of my stories with my brothers in English. Every now and then, our nanny used to ask me in Dakhani (her variety of Hindi): “Kya hua, bibi? Humkobhi bolo tho!” (What happened, baby? Tell us also!). And I would. Isn’t that true of so many Indians? We inhabit several languages simultaneously and travel between them easily and unselfconsciously.

Formal translation happened much later. Until 1994, I was a complete Anglophile. With a background in English literature and the extensive use of English in everyday life, I claimed English was my mother tongue.

Though we spoke all the languages at home, I had never studied Marathi, my mother’s tongue. I could read and write Kannada, my father’s tongue, since it was compulsory until matriculation, but knew only the classic “textbook” inclusions. I had better acquaintance with Hindi because it was a compulsory subject in school and college. Therefore, it seems outrageous, foolhardy, or audacious for me to get into translating Marathi literature!

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F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry (and the verse as an explosion, the book as an island)

January 7, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by José García Escobar

We wanted gender politics to enter literature as if it was its native part, as an irreplaceable part of reality.

The new poetry anthology F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry is the second work published in isolarii, as series of “island books,” released every two months by subscription. Edited by Galina Rymbu, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Ainsley Morse (with forewords by Eileen Myles and Amia Srinivasan), the groundbreaking collection features the work of twelve feminist Russian women and members of F pis’mo. As well as co-editing this anthology, Galina Rymbu is a famed Russian poet, whose own work was published by Asymptote in 2016 and whose poems are included in F Letter. Rymbu formed the F pis’mo poetry collective with other feminist and LGBTQ poets in 2017 in order to use language as a form of political protest. F pis’mo‘s work has since inspired a new generation of Russian poets to challenge patriarchal society by giving voice to their own personal experience through poetry. In this essay, Asymptote‘s editor-at-large for Central America, José García Escobar, speaks with Galina Rymbu as well as other F Letter poets, translators, and editors to discuss the collective’s work.

Saint Petersburg. January 2, 2017. Poetess Galina Rymbu was in her house, waiting for a knock on her door. Hopefully several. Galina had sent out an invitation to everyone interested in talking about feminism in literature.

“We thought that only a few people would come,” she writes, from her house in Lviv, Ukraine, where she has lived since 2018.

In the end, more than forty people crammed inside Galina’s tiny kitchen.

“Some were standing, some were sitting on the floor.”

Not only poets and writers went. Activists, artists, and theatergoers were there as well. Galina says that there were no feminist literary communities in Russia at the time. It is a country where the work of heterosexual, cisgender male authors sits, untouched, at the forefront, and where women and LGBTQ authors are often ignored. Galina describes Russia’s literary community as conservative and patriarchal.

“During that first meeting, we said that we didn’t want to be locked in our small circle of ‘feminist literature,’” she says. “We wanted to change literature to make it more gender-sensitive.”

In Russia, according to Galina, only artists working for the state receive financial support. They work under a set of rules, naturally. Don’t write about the LGBTQ community, don’t write about the occupation of Crimea and Donbas, cooperate with Putin’s regime, for example. Poets, writers, musicians, and film and theatre directors who abide by these rules have access to public platforms, large publishing houses, and galleries. These spaces must also follow the rules. Galina says that censorship is everywhere—in the media, television, literary, and film festivals—and compares it to Kafka’s Der Process. Those outside the cultural circuit of Russia’s state, like Galina, resort to independent publishing, where there’s no censorship, but also no visibility—much like Russian writers did before 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The existence of these artists is a political act. Their work is often, and by definition, dissident.

“It was impossible for us to remain feminist poets and express our views only in the space of political activism,” Galina says. “We wanted gender politics to enter literature as if it was its native part, as an irreplaceable part of reality.”

And thus, F pis’mo was born. READ MORE…

Back in (MONKEY) Business: A Japanese Revival

November 25, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Lindsay Semel

The heart of the publication, however, is its rich offering of delightful voices that have yet to garner much anglophone attention by other means.

It’s such a treat to welcome fellow journals of translation into the scene—and a rare one to welcome them back! We’re thrilled to announce that after a somewhat prolonged hiatus, acclaimed translators Ted Goossen and Motoyuki Shibata have put out the rebranded MONKEY: New Writing from Japan. The long-awaited edition features sundry gems from rising and established stars alike, and here to guide us through them is Assistant Managing Editor Lindsay Semel. Her interest in the project was piqued after covering prior MONKEY contributor Hiromi Kawakami’s People From My Neighbourhood (in Goossen’s own translation) for our August Book Club. Read on to learn why it paid off in spades!

After a nearly three-year hibernation, MONKEY: New Writing from Japan—formerly Monkey Business (2011–2017)—reemerged on the literary scene in full force this October. The annual journal aims to introduce anglophone readers to Japanese literature in its full depth and breadth. The mirror image of its eponymous predecessor, MONKEY is edited by two industry veterans who work in opposite directions: Ted Goossen, acclaimed translator from the Japanese, and his counterpart Motoyuki Shibata, one of the foremost translators of contemporary English literature into the same. Together, the two employ their formidable literary networks to facilitate the exchange of stories and ideas, challenge stereotypes, and offer promising new talent a foothold in a too-often impenetrable industry. 

The high-profile likes of Haruki Murakami, Hiromi Itō, Hiromi Kawakami, and Mieko Kawakami, for example, appeared frequently in the pages of Monkey Business, and they all reappear in its new incarnation. Their participation lends both legitimacy and visibility to the journal, as well as prestige to their lesser-known colleagues. “Good Stories Originate in the Caves of Antiquity” is an interview between Murakami and Mieko Kawakami translated by Goossen. The last in a series of previously published conversations between the two, it enacts a sort of passing of the baton from the old to the new vanguard. Murakami insists equanimously that the “weight and strength [of ‘good stories’] have endured over great lengths of time—stretching back to those caves of antiquity”; meanwhile, Kawakami grills him on difficult topics like true evil and writers’ responsibility to speak to the suffering of their time. The result is simultaneously a philosophical treatise on the role of art in society, an insight into the thinking of two great public figures, a glimpse into the struggle between institutions and artists for the soul of the nation’s literature, and a gentle assertion that that soul need not submit to a single owner. READ MORE…

Not Strictly a Serial Killer: An Interview with Carlos Busqued

October 5, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Samuel Rutter

A “monster” is made of the very same stuff as people who are, in theory . . . normal. We’re much closer to being monsters than we’d like to admit.

In September of 1982, Ricardo Melogno murdered four taxi drivers in Buenos Aires. The crimes happened in close physical proximity and over a short period of time, but to this day, neither the perpetrator nor the many teams of experts who have treated Melogno have been able to discern a motive. Writer Carlos Busqued spent over two years interviewing Melogno and compiling the material that would eventually become Magnetized, published in English for the first time in June 2020 by Catapult.

The novel’s translator, Samuel Rutter, exchanged a series of emails with the author that touched on the writer’s process, the singularities of Ricardo’s case, and life in Buenos Aires under quarantine.

Samuel Rutter (SR): How did you first learn about Ricardo Melogno, and is his case still well-known in Argentina today?

Carlos Busqued (CB): No, quite the opposite actually—it was quite a sensation when it first happened, but the news cycle at the time didn’t cover it for long. Ricardo committed the murders right at the end of the last military dictatorship—two months after Argentina lost the Falklands War—so his crimes were quickly buried under an avalanche of news and exposés that were even more macabre.

I was a kid at the time of the murders and never heard about them back then—I lived in Chaco, a province in the far north of Argentina, so we didn’t read the press from Buenos Aires so much, and we only got some of their TV channels. So it was many years later that I stumbled across Ricardo’s case by chance. I got to know someone who worked on his treatment team, and I noticed that on the occasions I joined the team for after-work drinks or a birthday party, they tended to speak of Ricardo with empathy and curiosity. Every now and again they’d speculate about one or another detail of the crimes, which piqued my interest right away.

SR: What drew your attention to the case as a writer? Was there something in particular that inspired you to write about it?

CB: It was the strangeness of the whole thing, the fact that there really was no motive. Even today there is very little understanding of crimes with no known motive, and barely any research on the subject. A person who commits four identical murders is not acting randomly, but even so, neither Ricardo nor the numerous teams of specialists who examined him have been able to come up with a motive. Broadly speaking, when someone kills, they do it to survive. How that applies to Ricardo’s mindset when he committed the murders remains a complete mystery. READ MORE…

I Have a Story to Tell: An Interview with André Naffis-Sahely

July 15, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Timmer Harvey

I was instantly struck by how Sibhatu had managed to balance a fabulistic tone with an exposé's sleuthy grittiness.

André Naffis-Sahely has been translating the multi-lingual work of Eritrean writer, poet, and refugee-rights activist Ribka Sibhatu for over a decade. Born in Asmara but in self-exile from Eritrea since 1982, Sibhatu has lived in Ethiopia, France, and Italy. First published in 1993, Sibhatu’s much-acclaimed Aulò! Canto poesia dall’Eritrea was revised, expanded, and re-released by Italian publisher Sinnos in 2009.  Sibhatu is also the author of Il numero esatto delle stelle, a bilingual edition of Tigrinya folklore. She is the subject of a 2012 documentary film, Aulò: Roma Postcoloniale, holds a Ph.D. in communication studies from La Sapienza, and has been widely published in journals and anthologies around the world.  

Poet, translator, editor, and critic, Naffis-Sahely has translated over twenty fiction, poetry, and non-fiction titles into English. And yet it has still taken Naffis-Sahely almost ten years to garner the funding needed to publish his full-length English translation of Aulò, Aulò, Aulò!, a collection of Sibhatu’s poems and retellings of Eritrean folk tales written in Tigrinya, Ahmaric, and Italian. Ahead of the Poetry Translation Centre’s Ribka Sibhatu Tour, a series of online events celebrating the publication of the book, I asked Naffis-Sahely about the significance of Eritrean sycamore trees, the long road to publication, and white gatekeeping in the publishing industry. André sought input from Sibhatu, and we conducted the following interview via email.  

—Sarah Timmer Harvey, June 2020

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): What was the first piece of Ribka’s writing you encountered? Do you remember your initial response, and how you were able to form a relationship with it?

André Naffis-Sahely (ANS): I first came across Sibhatu’s work on a blog sometime in 2009, which featured an account of one of Sibhatu’s visits to a public school somewhere in Italy. The post also reproduced a snapshot of her prose poem “Virginity,” an autobiographical account of how Sibhatu had once been forced to pretend her virginity had been violated to avoid entering an arranged marriage at nineteen, by which time she’d already spent a year in prison for refusing to wed an Ethiopian army officer. I was instantly struck by how Sibhatu had managed to balance a fabulist tone with an exposé’s sleuthy grittiness. The writing was lyrical, yet economical, and the author’s personality was sharply on display: uncompromising and questioning, but never devoid of empathy. Sibhatu’s work clearly operated on a variety of engrossing levels: first and foremost, perhaps, her opus is deeply inspired by her native country’s ancient literary traditions; secondly, it is a song of exile, one which has seen her live in Ethiopia, France, and now Italy. The truth is that translating Ribka Sibhatu also enabled me to interact with my Italian heritage in a way I’d never thought possible. Although I mostly grew up in the United Arab Emirates, my earliest memories of Italy include being chased down the street by neo-Nazis, all for walking hand in hand with my older brother, who—having taken more after our Iranian father—had proved too dark-skinned for their liking. My other memories aren’t too different from that point of view. Thus, translating Ribka not only introduced me to realities I hadn’t experienced or knew little about, but she also helped me reconnect with my own roots. Here was a black woman from Eritrea crafting wonderful, engrossing literature out of a language I thought was too resistant to be employed by anyone as outward-looking as her. Of course, Ribka, like many so-called postcolonial Italian writers, has not received as much attention as she deserves. But I think that will only change with time, albeit perhaps too slowly for many of us.

STH: You have written that you tend “to think of Aulò as Sibhatu’s Leaves of Grass.” Can you tell me why this is?

ANS: As Sibhatu enthusiastically told me during one of our earliest meetings in London in 2011, Eritrean literature has been handed down through generations in the form of aulòs, the Tigrinya word for “bardic songs,” which are performed at public and private celebrations and religious rites. Performers always begin their tales by invoking the word Şïnşïwai, which roughly means, “I have a story to tell,” to which the audience replies, Uāddëkoi şęlimai, “We’re ready, we’re listening.” Sibhatu learned her craft in the capital city of Asmara and her ancestral village of Himbirti, in the high plateaus above the capital, where these stories can be traced back for centuries, and she spent a great deal of time talking to village elders in order to transcribe their stories. Despite falling into various different genres—poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—Sibhatu’s work essentially represents a reconstruction of Eritrea’s cultural heritage in exile, and it is a work that is continually evolving and growing, like Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. It is a deeply personal book, heavily fueled by its author’s biography and background, but it is also one of those rare books that is strong enough to carry a national sentiment—or spirit—on its shoulders. READ MORE…

Your Perfect Holiday Gift: An Asymptote Book Club Subscription

December 5, 2019  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Lee Yew Leong

To celebrate two full years of the Asymptote Book Club, we're taking 10% off three-month subscriptions this holiday season!

We interrupt our regular blog programming with an announcement (and a bit of humble-bragging): The Asymptote Book Club has now entered its third year! To celebrate, we’re taking 10% off three-month subscriptions this holiday season—just sign up by December 12 at this link here (coupon pricing already applied).

We didn’t know what to expect when we first set up this Book Club, but adventurous readers (which fans of Asymptote tend to be) in the UK, the EU, and the US, have shown that there is strong demand for a curated service dedicated to world literature. 

Since the Book Club launched in December 2017, we’ve introduced compelling titles from all around the world. At our blog, we have interviewed both the authors and the translators of our book club picks, including Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and translator Jhumpa Lahiri among many others. One of our titles, Love by Hanne Orstavik (February 2018’s selection from Archipelago Books, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken) even won the 2019 PEN Translation Prize! We’re happy to live up to our promise of delivering contemporary classics and future critical hits to your door. On the occasion of the Book Club’s second anniversary, we’re revisiting a conversation with founder Lee Yew Leong (also our the magazine’s editor-in-chief) at the launch of the service two years ago.

Why a Book Club?

Well, in a nutshell: the idea was to take the important work we have done with our award-winning, free online journal and our Translation Tuesday showcases at the Guardian—that is to say, showcasing the best new writing from around the world, and giving it a physical presence outside of the virtual arena. We also wanted to celebrate (as well as support) the independent publishers who work hard behind the scenes to make world literature possible. READ MORE…

In Conversation: Susanna Nied

November 19, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by Sohini Basak

Acclaimed translator Susanna Nied on polymath author Inger Christensen and their parallel lives

A giant in world poetry and experimental text, much of Inger Christensen’s influence can be seen cascading to many generations of writers, in several languages. Her book-length poem, Det (1969) shook the foundations of Danish poetry, and in its translations, continues to startle and affect readers profoundly. Her essays have been translated into English and collected into a volume for the first time. To mark this literary event, poet and former Asymptote team member Sohini Basak spoke via email to Susanna Nied, who has translated into English Christensen’s poetic oeuvre as well as the forthcoming book of essays The Condition of Secrecy (New Directions).

SOHINI BASAK: For those of us bound by the English-language, it is because of you that we’ve come to know of Inger Christensen’s poetry. And as you’re the translator of her complete poetic oeuvre, it’s very interesting that you started with her first book (Light), and then the sequence almost coincides with the order in which the original collections were published … although not entirely. How did you decide your working order?

SUSANNA NIED: I actually didn’t do anything like choosing a working order. When I started on Light, in the 1970s, I didn’t know Inger had written anything besides Light and Grass. I didn’t even know who Inger was, and I certainly didn’t know that I was going to become a translator, much less her translator. I was just a university student browsing the library stacks for something Danish to read for pleasure, and I happened upon this little bibliography of contemporary Danish poets. When I got to “C” I found “Christensen, Inger”.

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Summer 2013: What a Tentative, Unruly Enterprise Language Is

September 11, 2018  |  in 30issues30days  |  by Dylan Suher

How miraculous it is when a translator is able to express someone else’s thoughts—it is already so difficult to express your own.

We have organized four IndieGoGo campaigns in all our eight years now, and each of the last three times, it’s sucked so much life force from us that we have, on one occasion, even had to skip an issue (there is no Spring 2015 edition) to recover from it. For some reason, however, it does not take long at all after our first campaign to hit our stride again. A sampling of what we were up to immediately after April 2013, apart from sending ‘thank you’s and perks to 231 supporters: We (1) launched our first-ever translation contest; (2) organized a massive translation project that saw translations into eighteen additional languages of Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s brilliant send-up of racial profiling; (3) revamped our website to include a map (thus allowing readers to access our content by geographical region); (4) nominated ourselves for a TED Prize (albeit in vain) and, last but not certainly not least; (5) held our largest recruitment drive ever. The rapid expansion takes a toll: my inbox is invaded daily by check-ins. Fortunately, around this time, we migrate to Trello for issue production work. To give you a sense of how much back and forths are required for just one article (say, Can Xue’s interview conducted by Dylan Suher and Joan Hua, as recounted by Dylan below): Trello records 84 comments by 12 team members spanning the period of May 28 to July 15. Here is Robyn Creswell of The Paris Review on the Summer 2013 issue: “It’s hard to read in a heat wave, but the July issue of Asymptote is so absorbing I hardly notice my sweat drops hitting the keyboard. Even more impressive than the diversity of things translated—book reviews in Urdu, fiction in Bengali, poetry in Faroese—is their quality.”

The Summer 2013 issue of Asymptote is a fine illustration of the principle that translation is just a special subset of the general problem of communication: the problem of trying to relate your experience to someone else, of trying to put something “in other words,” of trying to put something into words in the first place. This principle comes across most clearly in Naoki Higashida’s attempts to relate his experience as an autistic person, and in the visual section’s pieces on asemic writing and Ghada Amer’s use of Arabic script. All three remind us what a tentative, unruly enterprise language is. The shapes shackled into service by the Phoenicians millennia ago long to return to the wilds of visuality; when tasked with expressing the plentitude of the autistic mind, simple words seem as crude a tool as a chert axe.

The problem of referentiality epitomized by these pieces runs throughout this entire issue. The way Banaphool’s “Nawab Sahib” (translated by Arunava Sinha) seems to exist just outside the bounds of reality, its repetitive structure, and its surprising twists all suggest a fable (or a joke), but the moral to which it points remains sublimely hazy. E.C. Belli, translating Pierre Peuchmaurd, repeats the word “glimmer” again and again in a mantra of irreducible images: “The glimmers of lakes, of iron, of girls”; “The glimmers of otters inside their prey.” The insistence of the repetition pounds significance into a non-entity of a word. READ MORE…

One Author, Many Selves: Murathan Mungan in conversation with Filip Noubel

August 22, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by Filip Noubel

On how many pages have I appeared and disappeared?

Murathan Mungan likes to describe himself as a polygamous writer: not only does he write plays performed across Turkey and Europe, including his widely acclaimed trilogy, The Mesopotamian Trilogy; he also writes essays, song lyrics, poetry, and novels that have brought him national recognition as one of the most inventive Turkish authors for the use he makes of the Turkish language. Being himself of mixed origins (Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish and Bosnian), he is very sensitive to the life of underrepresented groups such as women, Kurds, the LGBTQI+ community, and explores taboo themes in his creative writing. I interviewed Mungan in the Czech Republic in the Month of Authors’ Reading Festival where the guest country was Turkey. His latest works include a novel called The Poet’s Novel and a play, The Kitchen. He is currently working on a novel describing the urban aloofness of Berlin.

Filip Noubel (FN): Murathan, you embody a plurality of personal origins, and seem to favor characters from various minorities. Why is diversity essential in your life and in your work? And how is it perceived in Turkey? 

Murathan Mungan (MM): Many people live inside of me. I come from the city of Mardin, in the southeast of Turkey, a city close to Syria and not too far from Iraq. Mardin mirrored the diversity of my own family: my father’s ancestors came to Turkey in the 17th century from Syria, my paternal grandmother’s mother came from the Kurdish regions; my mother’s side is from Sarajevo, which is in Bosnia today. Though I was born in Istanbul, I grew up in Mardin and within a mix of cultures and religions, mingling with people who are Turks and Kurds, but also Assyrians, Alawites, Yezidis, and Armenians.

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In Conversation: Adam Morris

August 8, 2018  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Jacob Silkstone

History is not entirely objective; it is what posterity makes of conflicting memories.

“Talk… speak… voice”: each word appears dozens of times in I Didn’t Talk, our July Asymptote Book Club selection. Beatriz Bracher’s novel blends together a chorus of voices, orchestrated by retiring professor Gustavo, to explore one of the darkest periods of Brazil’s history.

In conversation with Asymptote’s Jacob Silkstone, translator Adam Morris outlines how the novel came to be translated into English, why it resonates with a contemporary audience, and why the central question of whether or not Gustavo talked is perhaps best left unanswered.

Jacob Silkstone (JS): What led to you translating I Didn’t Talk? It’s the first of Beatriz Bracher’s four full-length novels to appear in English: do you have a sense of how it compares to Bracher’s other work?

Adam Morris (AM): I proposed I Didn’t Talk for Bracher’s English debut because its thematic concerns, although universal, seemed to possess fresh urgency in the context of ongoing political upheaval in Brazil. Censorship and various forms of state repression have re-emerged, and so has openly expressed nostalgia for a law-and-order society like the one the dictatorships professed to uphold. The crisis of democracy in Brazil is so severe that occasional murmurs of a return to military rule must be taken as a serious threat.

Of course, in the time since I first proposed the translation in 2016, authoritarianism has been on the march all across the world. I did not foresee that happening, but it makes the novel that much more timely—some fourteen years after its publication and nearly half a century since 1970, a pivotal year in Gustavo’s story.

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From the Headbanger, the Metalhead, All the Way to the Failed Hip-Hopper: An Interview with Wingston González

August 6, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

For me, poetry is the metadata of life.

If I were to describe Wingston González as a poet, I’d say he’s an unusual poet. Scratch that. To be more precise, the fractured aesthetics, the cadence, the triplets, the vertiginous narrative found in Wingston’s poetry, can only be summoned by the unusual artistic upbringing he had. Born in Livingston, brought up on Garífuna culture, traditional Guatemalan education, classical literature, and hip-hop music, Wingston stands as an undeniably original and musical wordsmith—utterly unique within the tradition of Guatemalan literature.

He is also an entrancing performer and a fascinating poet that keeps changing and augmenting his cultural and intellectual heritage.

Early July, Wingston and I got together at Casa Cervantes in downtown Guatemala City to talk about his creative process. Of course, we effortlessly drifted towards other topics. We ended up talking about music—like we often do—and ignoring the mathematical structure on which language is based. Wingston’s poetry, I might argue, has almost an allergic reaction to the formulaic configuration of Spanish. And it is thanks to that free will and unhindered flow that his verses explode and reach out with utter casualness.  

Wingston argued that as time passes, he is less worried about fulfilling what is expected of him as a poet. The narrative fabric of his poetry is often based on everyday life and he admits he thrives on capturing that everydayness, either through the plot, though mostly through the words.

During the translation process of the Four Poems, featured in Asymptote’s Summer 2018 issue, he repeatedly confessed that while writing them he was concerned people might not understand what he was trying to say.

“I wanted to play with the language, but I was unsure if it made any sense,” he insisted, and months later, in Casa Cervantes, he repeated that line.

The result—and his poetry in general—though intellectual and highly literary, is also tinged with elements of the quotidian plus the type of slang and idiolects found in Livingston, in Guatemala. From references to Garífuna culture, musical narrative, unorthodox rhythmic pattern, ritualistic cadence, inventive spelling, stutters, theatrical delivery, and—as he calls them—a set of useless facts, these Four Poems show many of the poet’s tricks, antics, and cultural inheritance. His unrestrained flow truly showcases the vitality he wants to impregnate in his poetry.

José García Escobar (JGE): Your poems featured in Asymptote’s July issue, I think, are a perfect example of the type of aesthetics you used at the beginning of your career. In them, there is a lot of experimentation, musicality, unusual rhythm and unorthodox narration—things you rarely use now. How has your approach towards poetry changed over the years?

Wingston González (WG): I don’t know if my approach has changed, but the process definitely has. Naturally, when you start writing, you’re not entirely aware of what you’re doing. The act of writing becomes automatic. That happened to me. But right now I’m not as worried as I was in the past with the limitations of language. I’m more concerned with the limitations of human nature. I think that with my poetry I’m getting closer to how I speak every day. That is my intention now, to use everyday language. Even if these poems, the ones featured in Asymptote’s Summer 2018 issue, are pretty experimental, I remember I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to communicate what I was trying to say. I thought, “What am I doing with my ax!” I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to reach the reader. Now I’m not as concerned about this.

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In Conversation: Ketty Valêncio, Founder of Livraria Africanidades

May 31, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by Lara Norgaard

Teaching someone that she can be anything she wants to be is revolutionary, and that’s why what I do is activism.

Selling books can be a form of political activism. That’s according to Ketty Valêncio, who founded the initiative Livraria Africanidades, a unique bookstore in São Paulo that only sells books that focus on and valorize black women.

Africanidades Bookstore began online in 2014 and opened its physical location in December 2017. The walls of its new home have murals created by black women artists and its bookshelves are lined with fiction, poetry, feminist theory, nonfiction, and even cookbooks, the vast majority of which are written by black authors from Brazil’s peripheries. The space carries the fruitful results and future promise of selling books by authors who reside on the margins of the Brazilian publishing scene—or who are excluded entirely from the traditional literary market.

Here, Ketty Valêncio tells Asymptote Editor-at-Large in Brazil, Lara Norgaard, some of the challenges for women of color in Brazilian publishing and the power of increasing visibility for writers of color, both in Portuguese and in translation. 

Lara Norgaard (LN): How did you come up with the idea for the Africanidades Bookstore?

Ketty Valêncio (KV): The bookstore came about because of my struggle to understand myself as a black woman. I never felt that I fit in anywhere. And then I came across Afro-Brazilian literature, texts that have black characters as protagonists. I understood my blackness through literature, through these books written by black authors and also by a few white authors who place value on black characters. I came across these narratives and thought, wow, there are people writing about me, about who came before me, about my ancestors and my memories.

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