Posts filed under 'irony'

English Words are Strewn All Over the Floor of My Brain: An Interview with Ági Bori

May 8, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Willem Marx

Living away from my motherland deepens my gratitude for my culture, which automatically deepens my appreciation for Hungarian literature. . .

A giant of contemporary Hungarian literature, Miklós Vámos melds vast existential questions with bread-and-butter concerns in his spellbinding short story, “Electric Train.” Published in Asymptote’s Winter 2024 issue, “Electric Train” approaches the traditional family drama at a slant, discarding the tropes of dramatic realism in favor of a jester-like narratorial voice that boldly announces, “In literature it is practically mandatory to see inside people’s heads,” before plunging headlong into the tattered lives of a family of four. Questions and answers rebound like so many jokes told at a party, but even as the humor attempts to efface the tragedy, what defines this story is a warm, humane glow that emanates from everywhere. Bringing years of expertise in working with Vámos, Ági Bori’s artful translation rises to the experimentalism of the story and crystalizes it into an English that is fresh, magnetic, and strange. In this interview, Ági and I discuss the art of translating a living author, the political history that subtly underpins “Electric Train,” her own circuitous path to becoming a literary translator, and much more. 

Willem Marx (WM): By my count, you’ve translated over a dozen of Miklós Vámos’ stories and essays, as well as conducted interviews with him and written essays on his oeuvre. Can you describe the experience of becoming so embedded—as a translator—in the work of a single writer? Are there ways this prolonged focus on one body of work has informed your approach to translation in general?

Ági Bori (ÁB): I have had a lifelong fascination with not only Hungarian, but also translated literature in general, so it seems only natural that over the last decade, I have metamorphosed into a literary translator—perhaps one of a small number of niche translators who, like you said, is embedded in the work of a single writer. The actual moment when something awakened in me was when, shortly after having fallen in love with Miklós’s books and writing style (particularly his unending gallows humor), I wanted to share this experience with my literary friends and discovered that only one of his books, The Book of Fathers, had been translated into English. I sensed that I was at an unprecedented crossroads in my life—and it turns out that I was. I reached out to Miklós and asked him if I could translate an excerpt, and he agreed. I still vividly remember choosing that excerpt, taking a deep breath, and saying to myself—perhaps somewhat naively—that it was time to listen to my inner voice, no matter how intimidating the craft of translating seemed. From that day on, I just kept going and never stopped. As my translation skills blossomed, so did our professional relationship, and it soon became clear that Miklós had an endless supply of materials I could work on, not to mention that as time went by, I became very comfortable with his writing style—by now it feels like a second skin. We work together like a well-oiled machine, one that runs on very little sleep and frequent communication via our transcontinental subway.

This prolonged focus on one body of work has certainly been a rewarding experience. It taught me how important it is to seek out the work you want to translate, and how immensely helpful it is mentally—and even emotionally—when you love the original text that you are about to render into your target language. I feel fortunate to have embarked on a writer’s work with which I was able to connect from the start. Lucky for me, Miklós’s writing style varies greatly within his oeuvre, including stream of consciousness and classic prose. At times I feel like a kid in a candy store. READ MORE…

Anti-Revolutions: How Nicanor Parra Predicted His Country’s 2019 Uprising, Part I

February 10, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Tim Benjamin

On a fundamental level, Parra’s antipoetry culminates at that point where parody and devotion coincide.

Chile and its writers are no strangers to the conjugation between revolution and poetry, having long applied the ardent and inciting potentials of well-elected words to fortify and give lyric to its people’s desires for social change. Amongst the most powerful letters of the country’s struggles, the language of Nicanor Parra possessed especially an indomitable power, with its colloquial, irreverent nature lending an imitable voice to the static nature of words. Though Parra passed in 2018, his verse continues to establish itself in the public expressions of dissent, most recently revealing their prescience in regard to the severe 2019–2020 protests. In the first part of this essay, Tim Benjamin puts the poet’s legacy in relation with the social fabric of both his time and ours. Stay with us for the second part, to be published tomorrow. 

I had already left Chile before the country’s 2019 uprising, but I was still living there when Nicanor Parra became a centenarian. The grand misanthrope of Chilean letters had conquered his personal century, and in a country known for wine, political troubles, and writers, there was considerable respect payed to the antipoet’s gesture toward immortality. TV and newspapers dedicated front-page space to a sort of celebratory pre-obituary, and on the night of, I went out for drinks with friends, who talked a little about Parra’s work but mostly about the idea that the old, disheveled fuck seemed to have made it to such a ripe old age just so he could take the piss out of death, like he’d done to poetry sixty years before. Death returned the favor a little under two years before the uprising, but as the introduction of Liz Werner’s overlooked 2004 “antitranslation” of his later work, Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great makes clear, Parra took his joke further than anyone before him.

He didn’t coin the term. At least two poets—Vicente Huidobro and the Peruvian Enrique Bustamante y Ballivián, who published a book titled Antipoemas in 1926—had used it before him. But the concept will forever be etched alongside his name in whatever circle of the literary pantheon he comes to occupy. Parra would pass away in 2018 at the very anti-climactic age of 103, just under two years before the country’s most significant political movement since the “NO” campaign rejected Pinochetismo in 1989. And despite—or maybe because—of his reputation as the antipoet, it seems safe to say that dying before the Revolution was the kind of providential malfeasance he would have at least tried to have some fun with. Indeed, Werner’s “How to Look Better & Feel Great,” chosen in apparently intimate collaboration with Parra, is one of those disembodied parodies that exist somewhere between a wink and a groan. But it also points the way toward the mentality of a country, which, despite the crackdowns and a global pandemic, has hung a definitive asterisk onto South America’s “economic miracle.”

Parra was born in 1914 in southern Chile to a bohemian father and a mother who shows up often in his poetry as the folksy sage “Clara Sandoval.” He was the brother of the legendary folk singer Violeta Parra, whose song, “La carta” was covered by Mon LaFerte during the uprising (The letter arrives to tell me / that in my country there’s no justice / the hungry ask for bread / the military gives them lead). He studied engineering at the University of Chile, physics at Brown, and cosmology at Oxford, which may or may not have contributed to the often sideways transgressions from formalism which defines much of his output—though Werner does emphasize Parra’s occasional use of an algebraic x and shorthand descriptions of relativity. He began publishing poetry marginally in 1938, but made his name in 1954 with the publication of Poems and Antipoems. As Werner’s introduction notes, one Chilean critic wrote that Parra’s book “Returned us . . . once again! [To the fact that] everything could be said in poetry.” Camus would make a similar point a couple of years later in The Rebel, claiming that an artist’s “rebellion against reality” affirms the same motivation as that of the revolt of the oppressed. Poems and Antipoems would go through multiple editions, and the 1967 English-language version would count among its translators Allen Ginsburg, who had joined Parra in an increasingly paranoid Havana two years earlier to give out the Casa de las Americas Prize. READ MORE…

Autoria Negra: An Interview with Cidinha da Silva

September 7, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Ana Luiza de Oliveira e Silva and Daniel Persia

We sought and insistently seek ways to affirm our existence, to demarcate places for the living human beings that we are.

I first met Cidinha da Silva about a year ago, at the International Literary Festival of Paraty (Flip), in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. At the time, I had just begun translating Sobre-viventes! (Pallas Editora, 2016), a collection of crônicas that approach Brazil, past and present, through everyday lived experience. In 2010, Cidinha coined the neologism Exuzilhar, a verb that combines the Portuguese encruzilhar (“to cross”) or encruzilhada (“crossroads”) with Exu (an Orisha in the Yoruba religion, the divine messenger or gatekeeper). Exuzilhamento is indeed a driving force of Cidinha’s work, which, as she reveals here, “revolves around Africanities, Orixalities, Ancestralities, and the tension and dialogue between tradition (African, Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Diasporic, and Afro-Indigenous) and contemporaneity.” The interview that follows, conducted alongside my fellow translator Ana Luiza de Oliveira e Silva, showcases the complexity of Cidinha’s creative process and her critical place in contemporary Brazilian literature.

                                                                                 —Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large for Brazil

Daniel Persia (DP): It’s great to connect with you again, Cidinha, especially after having featured some of your work in our Summer 2020 issue. Can you give us a general panorama of your career as a writer?

Cidinha da Silva (CS): I started publishing literature in 2006, in São Paulo, with a self-financed, independent book of crônicas, Cada tridente em seu lugar. It’s a book that still sells widely, fourteen years later. The fourth edition was just released, with Mazza Edições (Belo Horizonte, Brazil). I had always wanted to publish literature. I wrote crônicas for an online magazine and readers kept asking when we’d have a book. That’s what really got me thinking about publishing my first literary work; I had already published a book of essays in 2003, Ações afirmativas em educação—experiências brasileiras [Affirmative Action in Education: Brazilian Experiences] (Summus).

Ana Luiza de Oliveira e Silva (AO): Tell us about your creative process. Do you have a daily writing routine?

CS: My writing process has practical, creative, and other dimensions that are somewhat intangible. In practical terms, I’m a relatively organized and disciplined writer; I sit and write at predetermined times. I don’t have any problems with the “blank page,” but sometimes I’m faced with a lack of time to write. My writing routine depends on the volume of work at hand, on how much I need to accomplish to ensure survival: lesson planning; preparing and delivering lectures, workshops, and courses; reading; studying; traveling; keeping up with my online store and promoting my books. The time left for writing is very minimal, it boils down to just a few hours a week. I write very little on impulse; I usually write with a particular book in mind, one that I’m still developing or organizing. I also write a lot of commissioned work, for publications of the national press, primarily, but also theatre and essays.

As for the creative dimension, I prefer to write early in the morning, which is the best time of day for me. I write on my desktop computer, sitting in a comfortable chair in a large office, with a glass door on the balcony and the sun coming to visit me. I collect dictionaries and keep them in reach for consultation. My productivity is greatest in the morning, for about four to six hours (when I’m in a more intense process of production), but from the fourth hour onward, what I really do is reread, revise, consult reference materials. I read everything out loud, several times; that’s how I set rhythm and establish harmony. When I’m mulling over an idea for a new book, I tend to take a lot of notes in my notebooks—scattered things, like names for characters, beginnings of crônicas or short stories. I usually only write down ideas, but when I write down full sentences, they almost always unfold into one or two paragraphs at that very moment, when they’re first being recorded. And so there you have the beginning of a new text.

The unimaginable happens in dreams (of which I remember little or nothing), in conversations, in exchanges with real people, in observing the world, in interacting with stones, plants, flowers, water, earth and fire, and smoke, too. In intuition, which I’ve built over the years, in exercises and life tests, to pay full attention and remain confident. Spirituality communicates with me through intuition.

DP: What are some of the main themes in your work?

CS: Through two of my more recent books—Um Exu em Nova York (2018), a collection of short stories, and Exuzilhar (2019), the first volume in a series of selected crônicas—I’ve come to understand that my aesthetic interests revolve around Africanities, Orixalities, Ancestralities, and the tension and dialogue between tradition (African, Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Diasporic, and Afro-Indigenous) and contemporaneity. Other topics include racism, racial discrimination, and racial inequalities, though the central theme really is that tension and dialogue mentioned above. I’m also interested in themes of death, love, soccer, and politics. I write a lot about politics. READ MORE…

On Durian Sukegawa, Translation, and Literature in the Face of Crisis

July 9, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Kent Kosack

He said, “I just line up the facts and add flashes of poetry.”

I started working with the educational arm team at Asymptote this past March, when COVID-19 was just declared a global pandemic. As I read through the spring issue, I also kept an eye on the news, watching the US government lurch from outright denial of the disease to a hodgepodge and feckless response—then I came across Alison Watts’s translation of an article based on Durian Sukegawa’s book, Cycling the Road to the Deep North. The piece is a series of vignettes about Sukegawa’s bike tour to Fukushima, in which he tells stories of the lingering destruction from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster, the tsunami and earthquake, and the people carrying on their lives in its wake. Stories of the contaminated soil, of trees with toxic leaves. Stories of burned-out schools and shuddered businesses. And—the story still unfolding—of the Japanese government’s response: its ineptitude and indifference to the wishes of its citizens. The similarities to the current COVID-19 crisis were, at first, depressing, but as I reread Alison’s translation of Sukegawa’s words, I was heartened by them. Because though both crises remain dangerously unresolved, it was evidence that there remain people who are asking the necessary questions, telling the stories we need to hear.

Each issue of Asymptote is accompanied by an educators’ guide, a valuable resource for teachers who are interested in bringing world literature into their classrooms. Offering thematic breakdown of the issue’s content, contextual information, lesson plans, and possible discussion questions, Asymptote for Educators is one of our most exciting and collaborative endeavours. Learn more about it here!

Kent Kosack (KK): When I was preparing a lesson plan for the Asymptote Spring 2020 Educator’s Guide, I chose the piece you translated—an excerpt from Durian Sukegawa’s Cycling the Narrow Road to the Deep North; it felt connected to what is happening now, to the COVID-19 crisis.

Alison Watts (AW): Yes, and next year is the tenth anniversary of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster. It’s a timely opportunity.

KK: In more ways than one.

AW: When I first read it in 2018, I knew I wanted to translate it, but I knew it’d be difficult to sell.

KK: How was it received in Japan?

AW: It did win the Japan Essayist Club Prize, but it’s not a huge bestseller or anything. It was published by a small publisher; it’s Fukushima literature. There’s this new genre that has evolved since the disaster in 2011, all kinds of poetry, music, and literature that resulted from Fukushima, and the tsunami and earthquake as well.

KK: I read your Words Without Borders essay about your own personal reaction to the crisis. It seems to have almost coincided with your transition to becoming a full-time literary translator.

AW: I became a full-time literary translator in 2016. In 2015, I was ill for a year and I couldn’t work. At the end of that, I decided that life’s too short. I’m going to do what I want to do, nothing else. Sweet Bean Paste—the novel of Durian’s that I translated—when I read it, I thought: I love this book, I have to translate it, I’m the only person who can translate it [laughs]. I did the synopsis and samples and gave it to the agent and said, please use this to sell the book. Eventually, I got the job to translate it. As it turned out, that was in the beginning of 2016, the year I had decided to devote myself to being a literary translator. It all worked out. Like the gods were sending signals.

KK: Fortuitous. And how difficult was it for you to transition to translating this work versus Sweet Bean Paste?

AW: Essentially, it’s the same style. Durian has a tight, minimalist style. It’s quite difficult to translate because it can come across as too simplistic in English.

KK: Is that from his background in journalism, that more pared-back style?

AW: There’s that, but he’s also a poet. When I asked him before I translated Sweat Bean Paste: “How would you describe your style?” He said, “I just line up the facts and add flashes of poetry.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Short Tales” by Pere Calders

April 28, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Tiago Miller

Between going to heaven and staying at home, he preferred the latter.

This week’s Translation Tuesday presents a series of absurdist snapshots from one of the modern masters of Catalan literature. In this collection of contes breus (Catalan ‘short stories,’ often only a few sentences in length), Pere Calders embraces fragmentary quips as a mode of subversive storytelling. At times aphoristic, we’re taken through a series of disjointed narratives that shift between a satirical third-person to a self-referential first-person. We can follow this surrealism and satire as a kind of montage, connecting pieces of ironic wisdom to a kind of irreverent philosophical theme. Alternatively we can read the tales as a collage, allowing the shift in point-of-view to reorient ourselves to a new (and again, ironic) life lesson. Like a master class in non-sequiturs, Miller’s translation invites us to laugh and scratch our heads at the hapless soul who speaks here in mordant proverbs.

Biographical Note

My name is Pere plus two surnames. I was born the day before yesterday and it is already the day after tomorrow. Now, I only think about how I will spend the weekend.

Balance

Just as he was about to take hold of the pail, his leg gave way and he plunged into the well. As he fell, he experienced that well-known phenomenon of seeing one’s life flash before one’s eyes. And he found it so predictable, monotonous, and commonplace (to remain strictly between us, of course) that he let his lungs fill with water and drowned with exemplary resignation.

Obstinacy

Between going to heaven and staying at home, he preferred the latter, despite the powerful propaganda against it and the fact that his house was full of leaks and a whole host of privations. READ MORE…

Translating Contemporary Tibet: In Conversation with Christopher Peacock

July 8, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Max Berwald

We could say that there isn’t a demand to undermine or challenge our preconceptions of Tibet.

Publishing since the 1980s, Tsering Döndrup’s novels and short stories have been honored with Tibetan, Mongolian, and Chinese literary prizes. He’s among the most prominent Tibetan writers working today, but as with the great majority of Tibetan fiction, translations of his work remain scarce. This winter, Columbia University Press released the first collection of Döndrup’s work in English, with a suite of stories selected and translated by Christopher Peacock. 

Populated by a dizzying cast of characters—from corrupt lamas and venal deities to the incorrigible Ralo and the souls of the recently deceased—the collection The Handsome Monk and Other Stories presents us with both the diversity of subject matter that only decades of craft and experience can bring, and the discernible unity of vision we expect of a great artist. Peacock’s translation lucidly animates the stories, even as their author arranges separate realities for the action of each to unfold inside. Also preserved is the author’s humor: at times profoundly bleak, but always incisive. In this conversation, we discuss the challenges of translating Tsering Döndrup’s fiction, as well as the position of Tibetan fiction outside Tibet.

Max Berwald (MB): How did you first come to the work of Tsering Döndrup?

Christopher Peacock (CP): I first came to Döndrup through my academic work on contemporary Tibetan literature. I specialize in modern Chinese literature, and I am interested in the ways in which Tibetan writing does and doesn’t fit into the context of literature in modern China as a whole. Tibetan critics have interpreted Tsering Döndrup’s story “Ralo” as an equivalent of Lu Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q, one of the most famous works of modern Chinese fiction. I went to interview the author to get his thoughts on the matter (he doesn’t exactly agree), and while I was writing on the subject I decided to translate “Ralo” for my own use.

I kept on reading his work, and the more I read the more I felt it was essential that such a unique and fascinating writer should be accessible to English readers, especially given the extreme scarcity of modern Tibetan literature available in English. I kept on translating, choosing some stories that I liked personally and some that the author recommended, and eventually we had a collection.

READ MORE…