Posts filed under 'language politics'

Inside the Mind That Falls Apart: Aron Aji and Selin Gökçesu on Lojman

September 21, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

"Words by themselves don’t do much in literature; we encounter them inside syntax."

Our August Book Club selection, Ebru Ojen’s Lojman, is a vivid and absorbing novel that traces the depths and illusions of psychic agony, pulled along by a singular, poetic style. Within these flowing, absorbing pages of emotional surges, however, is a representation of how imposed orders and hierarchies can rob the individual of humanity. In this following interview, translators Aron Aji and Selin Gökçesu speak to us on the process of working with this language its rawness and its darkness, the narrative’s subtle political symbols, how it moves on from the Turkey’s social realist movement and its sociolinguistic history.

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 USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Lojman is a book that unleashes its narrative and its characters on us. There are so many uncontrollable elements in it, but what reigns it in is the prose, which is so precise and lyrical. I’m wondering what it was like reading this book in the original Turkish—if there was that similar effect, and if there were stylistic elements you were seeking specifically to preserve in translation.

Selin Gökçesu (SG): Lojman is very immersive, beautiful, and lyrical and Turkish too. I don’t keep up with contemporary Turkish literature as much as I would like to, but within what I’ve seen come out, this book is very in its lyricism—but also its topic and voice. Part of the unruliness of the narrative can perhaps be attributed to the Turkish editing style, which is definitely more open than in the American publishing industry; different voices will enter and come out barely edited—which has its drawbacks. The final translation, after Aron put the final touches on it, is a lot more polished in English then it’s in Turkish, but it still has the spirit of the original.

But I will say that Lojman’s forcefulness and gushing and uncontrolled quality, the very untamed writing—some of that is a product of how open the Turkish publication system is. They’ll allow people in, and they’ll publish things with very little editing or external control. So you get these really raw, powerful stories in different voices. Turkish contemporary literature is maybe less middle-class than American literature, so the class boundaries of allowing different voices in is a little bit more flexible, resulting in such unique products. I’m so glad we came together and caught Lojman amidst so many books being published in Turkey. It’s really serendipitous that this landed where it did.

Aron Aji (AA): I agree with everything Selin said about Ebru’s voice and writing style. To add to that, I was in Istanbul with Ebru this summer—she just finished her new novel. It’s being edited, and hopefully will be coming out in the next couple of months. It’s an entirely different novel. The form is entirely different, the language is incredibly elevated, but there was something very, very similar to the way she built the main character. I asked her to tell me what she was trying to do, and she mentioned how people always talk about the author as the witness of a character’s life and an author as the witness of her time. Then she said, “I want to put the reader in a position of witness, and the way I can do that is by pushing the reader as far into the mindset of the main character as possible.”

As you know, the characters in Lojman are very damaged, to say the least; your review also shows how that damage becomes pervasive. Ebru really is a writer that doesn’t want to stand in the way of the reader, so she writes with this incredible euphoria. There is another Turkish author, Aslı Erdoğan (also published by City Lights), who writes with euphoria, but it’s a lot more controlled, oddly enough. What we have in Ebru is really the rawest possible witnessing of a mind falling apart.

So by choosing to do this as a co-translation, we actually mixed two voices and two consciousnesses into the process—the splitting of voices. I should also say that Elaine of City Lights was incredible in her later editing. And the more voices and consciousnesses we incorporated, the more we were able to crystallize the language, but also retain its rawness. READ MORE…

A Language Like Life Itself: An Interview with Chus Pato

December 6, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Chus Pato and Erín Moure

Poetry has no future because the time of poetry is always the present.

Chus Pato is one of Europe’s most significant contemporary poets. She lives in Galicia, in Northwest Spain, and writes in Galician, a language that over time has weathered censorship, dictatorship, colonialist policies, and administrative neglect, all aimed at impeding its survival. Here, she converses with Erín Moure, Canadian poet and her translator into English for twenty years, on the occasion of the 2021 Poesiefestival Berlin. They discuss the current situation of Galician, the ways that poetry allows us to think out or rethink our relation to politics, the language of the poem and its difference from the language of consensus, and her current explorations into articulated language and human action in her work-in-progress, Sonora, from which she read in Berlin.

The original Galician conversation and German translation by Burghard Baltrusch are available; the interview has been translated into English by Moure with permission from Poesiefestival Berlin. Chus Pato’s most recent book in English, The Face of the Quartzes, appeared in Erín Moure’s translation from Veliz Books in fall 2021.

Erín Moure (EM): We’ve often discussed your choice to write poetry in Galician and how it is a political decision, a demand for justice for the language of your people—a language prohibited under Francoism—as well as a resistance to the political undermining of Galician and subtle promotion of a single and compulsory language, that of the unitary state of Spain, which we in English call “Spanish.” What I’d like to point out is that on the other side of the Atlantic, for your audience that is not Galician and that reads you in English translation, Galician is not a minor or defective tongue but simply a European language, and you a European poet. How do you see your role as poet, in Galicia, in Spain, in Europe, and now in the city of Berlin, a European capital of poetry as well as meeting point of the west and the east of Europe?

Chus Pato (CP): I think that in Galicia and in general I am well known enough as a poet and am read by the community of those interested in poetry. I know many loyal readers read my books when they are published. This is what I most value. Even so, I still perceive resistance on the part of canonizing institutions that I think has to do with what these institutions see as the difficulties in reading what I write (hermeticism, experimentalism, etc.) and with issues related to my political stance, a position that coincides neither with the right that governs us nor with majority nationalism.

That my work is known at all in the Spanish state is due in great measure to the efforts of my publishers and translators, and my feeling is that they have been remarkably successful. I can’t really gauge how I am perceived elsewhere in Europe. I feel I’m read more on the American continents. In Europe, my gratitude goes to Frank Kaizer, my Dutch editor at De Vrije Uitgevers, for his efforts and courage, and also to the Rotterdam festival and its former director Bas Kwakman.

EM: How would you describe the current situation of the Galician language, both in cultural milieus—where Galician figures prominently—and in daily life?

CP: The situation of Galician is dramatic, really. The Council of Europe, in its recent report on the fifth evaluation of Spain’s implementation of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, warns that only 23.9% of children in Galicia under the age of fifteen can express themselves in Galician.

Galician continues to suffer from a covert criminalization that has prevented generational transmission. The linguistic policies of the political party that systematically wins Galician elections are largely responsible for putting us in this extreme situation. Today, we can no longer say that Galician is strong in the private sphere, at least not in the case of younger generations.

We have to distinguish diverse political positions on linguistic diversity of the State: the Spanish right is always intolerant, and within the left there are degrees of tolerance. In the forty years that separate us from the end of the Franco dictatorship, we have not advanced much toward what is desirable, at least in my opinion.

What matters to me is what happens in Galicia, what the majority of Galicians think of their native language, and the reasons that lead them to turn away from it and not transmit it to their children as their mother tongue. These reasons have to do with the economic policies of the State, which has always viewed Galicia as a land from which to extract raw materials and labour. Two centuries of emigration and of the continual destruction of the values that constituted and still constitute us as distinct as Galicians largely explain the situation that faces us now.

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A Titan of Brazilian Literature: John Milton on José Bento Monteiro Lobato

March 18, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Shelly Bhoil

Lobato’s adaptations of Peter Pan and Don Quixote have become more so the works of Lobato than those of Barrie and Cervantes.

José Bento Monteiro Lobato (1882-1948) is one of Brazil’s most influential writers, a prolific translator, and the founder of Brazil’s first major publishing house. His lifelike characters have become an integral part of the Brazilian society, so much so that restaurants, coffee shops, wheat flour, or readymade cake packs in Brazil are named after Dona Benta, an elderly farm owner in Lobato’s fictional works. Despite the largeness of his influence and the progressive ideas he sought to bring in Brazil through his literary endeavors, however, Lobato has been posthumously accused of racism in his literary portrayal of black people. His work, Caçadas de Pedrinho, has especially come under scrutiny for calling Aunt Nastácia as a “coal-coloured monkey,” and he continually makes reference to her “thick lips.”

Professor John Milton’s recently launched book Um país se faz com traduções e tradutores: a importância da tradução e da adaptação na obra de Monteiro Lobato [A Country Made with Translations and Translators: The Importance of Translation and Adaptation in the Works of Monteiro Lobato] (2019) examines how Dona Benta’s character is instrumentalized by Lobato in his stories to express his criticism of the Catholic Church, the Spanish and Portuguese colonization of Latin America, and the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas, among other socio-political practices of the times. In the following interview, Professor John Milton speaks about Lobato, a household name of Brazil, stemming from his long-term research on the author’s life and works.

Shelly Bhoil (SB): Monteiro Lobato’s famously said, “um país se faz com homens e livros” (a country is made with men and books). Tell us about Brazil’s first important publishing house, which was found by Lobato, and how it mobilized readership in Brazil? 

John Milton (JM): Lobato’s first publishing company was Monteiro Lobato & Cia., which he started in 1918, but it went bust from over-investment and economic problems in 1925. Then, together with partner Octalles Ferreira, he founded Companhia Editora Nacional. Both companies reached a huge public. Urupês (1918), stories about rural life in the backlands of the state of São Paulo, was enormously popular, and within two years went into six editions. Lobato quickly became the best-known contemporary author in Brazil. Dissatisfied with available works in Portuguese to read to his four children, he began writing works for children. In A Menina do Narizinho Arrebitado [The Girl with the Turned-up Nose] (1921), Lobato introduced his cast of children and dolls at the Sítio do Picapau Amarelo [Yellow Woodpecker Farm]. The first edition of Narizinho sold over fifty thousand copies, thirty thousand of which were distributed to schools in the state of São Paulo. By 1920, more than half of all the literary works published in Brazil were done so by Monteiro Lobato & Cia. And as late as 1941, a quarter of all books published in Brazil were produced by Companhia Editora Nacional. 

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Personal Histories, Sexual Politics: An Interview with Ayu Utami

December 9, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Lara Norgaard

The way we control our bodies and the way we control our morality is political. The two cannot be separated.

Jakarta in the 1990s was bubbling with new ideas of freedom. During the third decade of Suharto’s military dictatorship in Indonesia, punks met on the streets that soldiers patrolled. Cafés and bars pulsed with the energy of youth movements. Quality journalism found ways to wriggle its way around censorship, both official and communal. And when writers couldn’t get past the strict barriers imposed by military rule, they still circulated their critical narratives by donning pen names or disguising fact as fiction.

Ayu Utami was one of the journalists blacklisted from publishing openly in the late 1990s. A member of the group of artists and intellectuals that established Komunitas Utan Kayu, Jakarta’s first space dedicated to art and free expression under military rule, she nevertheless continued to publish her reportage anonymously. Only weeks before participating in the student movement that would pull Suharto from power, she also released her first novel, Saman, which caused massive controversy—in part because of its serendipitous timing, but also because of its uninhibited treatment of taboo topics, both political and sexual.

The novel follows the personal experiences of three young Indonesian women, their relationships to their bodies, as well as the life story of a socially conscious priest violently persecuted during the mass killings of perceived communists in 1965. In a total break from the prose of most of her contemporaries, who either perceived bodily concerns as lesser than politics or who used female sexuality as a narrative tool, Ayu’s fireball novel was not only wildly popular, but also set a precedent for contemporary feminist literature in Indonesia. In 1998, Jakarta exploded—and the shrapnel was Ayu Utami’s books, flying off shelves. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

October 26, 2018  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Diána Vonnák, Hodna Nuernberg, and Lara Norgaard

This week, the global literary world was busy with prizes, language politics, and festivals.

Join us on a journey around the world from Hungary to Morocco and Brazil to find out more about the latest festivals, prizes, and news in world literature. Come back to our blog next week for other news and pieces about world literature. 

Diána Vonnák, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hungary

One of the highlights of the Hungarian literary scene, Margó Festival and Bookfair took place between 18-21 October. The festival happens twice each year, and while the summer edition focuses on contemporary writers in general, autumn is dedicated to emerging new voices and to literary translation.

The Margó Award is a relatively new initiative that helps to launch a young prose writers’ career each year, awarded to the best debut novel or short story collection of the year. Previous winners include Benedek Totth, whose debut novel Dead Heat (Holtverseny) will be published in English by Biblioasis in 2019 and Mátyás Szöllősi, whose new novel Péter Simon is out now. Short stories of this years’ winner, Anna Mécs peek into young women’s lives as they navigate the chores of adult life. Mécs writes in a voice that merges accuracy with much-needed lightness and acerbic humour.

The audience could meet authors in dozens of readings and roundtable discussions during these densely packed four days. Man Booker winner László Krasznahorkai’s new novel, Aprómunka egy palotáért follows librarian Hermann Melvill’s wanderings in New York into his labyrinth inner world, delivered in Krasznahorkai’s signature, meandering sentences, while György Dragomán’s Rendszerújra collects his politically themed short stories that grapple with oppressive systems, be they political or technological.

Many eagerly awaited new works were discussed from the emerging new generation as well: Boldizsár Fehér debuted with a satirical utopia of social experiment, and a new novel by Péter Gerőcs follows a portrait photographer’s quest against forgetting, Sándor Neszlár published a volume of experimental prose that pairs every kilometre he ran with a sentence, while Ilka Papp-Zakor‘s new collection sketches out a surreal Budapest with zoo-animals on the run. Two documentary films rounded the experience, portraits of Nádas and Krasznahorkai.

As the festival is over, celebrations give way to anxiety over the ongoing culture wars of the Orbán government, that switched to a higher gear in the past months, dismissing the director of Petőfi Literary Museum, and airing plans about a potential centralisation of literary publishing. Meanwhile, many writers protested against a new law that criminalises rough sleeping. Politics and literary production are increasingly different to disentangle, but events like the Margó Festival are strong testimonies of resilience.

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In Review: Scales of Injustice by Loa Ho

August 2, 2018  |  in Reviews  |  by Vivian Szu-Chin Chih

Loa Ho is crucial to the development of modern Taiwanese literature

Scales of Injustice by Loa Ho, translated by Darryl Sterk, Honford Star, 2018

It is never easy to translate a founding figure in a literary field, let alone a pioneering writer who has been translated by influential translators before. Such is the tricky task assigned to Darryl Sterk of translating Loa Ho’s (賴和, “Lai He” in Mandarin Chinese pronunciation, 1894–1943) complete fiction collection, which includes twenty-one novellas composed by the “Father of New Taiwanese Literature.” Entitled Scales of Injustice and freshly published in May 2018 by the London-based publishing house, Honford Star, the book features Loa Ho’s fiction in Sterk’s brand new translations from vernacular Chinese, Japanese, and Taiwanese (the “Taiwanese varieties of ‘Southern Hokkien’,” as explained by the translator) into English. The mixed use of languages in Loa Ho’s writing reflects the historical background in which the Hakka author lived when Taiwan was under Japanese colonial rule. While Japanese was the official language, Taiwanese people with Minnan heritage still spoke Taiwanese at home, even as the Japanese government enforced an assimilation policy around 1937 and banned the use of Taiwanese island-wide. The use of vernacular Chinese in Loa Ho’s fiction, on the other hand, stemmed from the New Literature Movement in China. In addition to Japanese and Taiwanese, Austronesian languages were spoken by the aboriginal peoples.

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His Defiance: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the Struggle for an Independent African Literature

June 14, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Olufunke Ogundimu

These words cannot just exist in a vacuum; they provoke reactions that demand political change.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was born 5 January, 1938 in Limuru, Kenya and is a perennial favourite for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Ngũgĩ is at the forefront of a war of resistance regarding the use of language that has spanned many decades. He advocates that African writers write in their mother tongues, because he understands how integral language is to a culture and its identity. Since African literature is mostly written in languages of the minority, the language of the colonizers, Ngũgĩ asserts that this choice stifles the imagination of Africans and their propensity to be creative.

Nearly fifty years ago, Ngũgĩ wrote his first novel, Weep Not, Child (1964), the first written in English by an Eastern African. Ngaahika Ndeenda (1977), translated as I Will Marry When I Want, was co-written with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii. It is a play that depicts the injustices and excesses of post-colonial Kenya. It was acted by “non-intellectuals” in an open-air theater at the Kamirithu Educational and Cultural Center, Limuru. Ngũgĩ’s Gikuyu play sought to bring the theatre closer to the masses and encourage the audience to interact with the play. The play appealed to a wide audience and, because of the resultant reaction by people, the Kenyan government threw Ngũgĩ in prison for a year.

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Asymptote Book Club: In Conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri

April 16, 2018  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Victoria Livingstone

"I’m old enough to look back on my life and to think and to marvel, and also be terrified by the randomness of it all."

In our fourth Asymptote Book Club interview, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri spoke with Asymptote Assistant Editor Victoria Livingstone about her translation of Domenico Starnone’s Trick.

In this discussion about her work and the forging of her own artistic identity, Lahiri reveals why translating Starnone seemed like “a sort of destiny.” Lahiri draws us into Starnone’s fictional world, but also reflects on her own mutable relationship with language and writing, and on the marvelous yet precarious ways in which our lives unfold.

Victoria Livingstone (VL): I wanted to begin by asking you what brought you to translation. I just finished reading In Other Words in which you reflect on your decision to switch from writing in English to writing in Italian. Did you see translation as a natural progression after working between multiple languages and living in Italy? And what drew you to Domenico Starnone in particular? 

Jhumpa Lahiri (JL): During the initial part of my stay in Italy, I wanted to translate something, but I didn’t know what it would be. I was reading only in Italian for many years. As my reading progressed, I would think that I would like to translate this person, or that person. Once my Italian was stronger and my reading in Italian seemed to have a larger ongoing purpose and focus, translation was something that really intrigued me.

I was considering it in this vague way and then I read Lacci by Domenico [Starnone] and immediately felt that if I were to translate something, that this would be the book I wanted to translate. I felt very close to it. It spoke to me very deeply. It felt like the natural first step. That’s how it started. When he asked me to translate the book, we were already friends and I felt—I feel now—that it was a sort of destiny. Everything was properly aligned in the moment that I was drawn to the idea of translating and was ready to translate with the appropriate amount of distance. That was when Lacci, which became Ties, won a prize which enabled the translation to be funded. It was a series of fortuitous circumstances that led to the translation of that book a couple of years ago.

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In Conversation: Annaliza Bakri on the Politics of Malay Language and Literature in Singapore

October 16, 2017  |  in Interviews, Profile, Translator's Profile  |  by Annaliza Bakri and Tse Hao Guang

I consider translation to be a key to understanding and elevating humanity.

Annaliza Bakri is an educator and translator. She believes that literary works can be the subliminal voice that cultivates greater understanding, awareness and consciousness of the past, present and future. An ardent advocate of works that are beautifully penned in Singapore’s national language, she strongly believes in the divine art of translation where shared heritage and mutual discovery promote humanity. Our Editor-At-Large for Singapore, Tse Hao Guang, recently caught up with Annaliza about her work and about the politics of language and literature in Singapore.

Tse Hao Guang (HG): You teach, write papers, translate Malay texts into English, and organise programmes and panels on Malay culture, language and heritage. What is the driving force behind all this work? What first got you interested in this? You seem to be one of a few people here doing what I’d call literary activism.

Annaliza Barki (AB): There’s a lot of commitment and responsibility when you call yourself an activist. I don’t think it’s as much about activism as it is about sharing ideas and knowledge. In class, I use literature to teach the Malay language. Grammar and syntax can make for a dry learning experience. With literature, however, you examine ideas, explore culture, and enrich your worldview. Literature reveals intricacies of the human identity to us, and, I believe, reignites in us a flame of humanity. This is also one of the many reasons why I translate literary works. What I gain from the interweaving of cultures in my translation work allows me to better understand humanity and human predicaments.

I was part of the organising team that initiated the cultural-literary seminar series CITA@The Arts House in 2012. We provided a platform for the sharing of Malay culture, in both English and Malay, to both adults and students. Part of CITA involved inviting our older writers to speak about their work, writers who were active in the 1970s and still continue to write today. The kind of honour and gratitude we have for them made younger people curious to attend and listen, as it had been a while since we last heard from them. It was interesting for me too, as a teacher who had read and even taught their books, but had no idea who they were apart from their role as writers, or what their aspirations were. Beyond giving these writers prizes like the Cultural Medallion or the Tun Sri Lanang, I think we, as a nation, honour them by giving them a chance to engage an audience in person once again.

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