Posts filed under 'linguistics'

Motion and Emotion: Curtis Bauer on Home Reading Service

December 23, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Josefina Massot

As a poet, I need to hear how words sound to my ear, but also how they feel in my mouth.

Our November book club selection, Franco Morábito’s award-winning Home Reading Service, is a fast-paced tour de force rife with twists and turns. It seems fitting, then, that its discussion should touch upon various forms of change and movement. In the following abridged interview, Editor-at-Large Josefina Massot and translator Curtis Bauer talk about the possible shifts within an author’s oeuvre, the back-and-forths between translation drafts, the significance of a character’s subtle motions, travel’s impact on a poet’s work, and movement as great poetry’s defining trait—understood, among other things, as its ability to move us.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

Josefina Massot (JM): I read somewhere that you discovered Morábito’s work through El idioma materno (2014), a collection of short pieces that he originally wrote for Argentine newspaper Clarín. You said you found it different from anything you’d encountered before; that it instantly struck you as something you wanted to engage with. What was your first reaction to El lector a domicilio? Did it seem to follow some kind of line relative to Morábito’s prior work, or was it fundamentally different?

Curtis Bauer (CB): It’s a great question—thinking about the movement an author can have across different kinds of work. I immediately loved El lector a domicilio, and I found it very “Morábito-like” in that I didn’t know what to expect but when it happened, it somehow made sense. What I love about his work, whether it’s the short prose pieces or stories or this novel, is that (and I believe you wrote about this in your review) the characters are just average, run-of-the-mill people that don’t seem to have such interesting lives—but of course they do. Morábito finds that aspect to them, or rather, he exposes it; he shows us that we’re surrounded by interesting things taking place all the time.

JM: I think that’s a good point, and for me, it’s one of the most appealing aspects of the book; the other is that it’s very much centered around poetry—there’s Fraire’s poem (which you did a stunning job of translating), a very whimsical piece by Gianni Rodari, and in between the two, all this varied prose. Given that you’re a poet yourself, and that you’ve translated both genres before, what was it like dealing with the two within the scope of a single work? Did you find that you shifted from one headspace to the other? Or was the translation process overarchingly similar?

CB: I wish! The Fraire poem seemed to change throughout the book, because it appears in different sections. I gave myself this framework or “rule” where I couldn’t go back and look at what I had translated previously, so I just tried to translate from memory as I was moving through the drafts. With each draft, it would change, and when I’d go back and look at the beginning of the book, I’d question my choices.

I started out translating poetry, and I still do, but it was the hardest part about translating this book. It does indeed require a different headspace for me, a different pace or breath, although I also recognize some similarities in how I translate the prose: I’m listening to the rhythm of the sentence, and I think about repetitions of sounds and other issues that a poet naturally takes into account. At any rate, yes, the Fraire poem was the most difficult part overall; I was making little tweaks to it up until the last edit, and I’m really thankful to my editor at Other Press for allowing me to do that.

As for the Rodari, it’s actually different in the Spanish original. I think I may have translated it directly from the Italian, because Morábito truncates it in the Spanish. In the novel, Eduardo talks about certain parts of the poem, certain rhymes, with the Vigil children; he has them moving their feet to the rhythm, and I didn’t think it was enough to have these seemingly deaf kids reacting to just a few fragments. Initially I was focusing only on preserving the poem’s meter, but my partner is a linguist and insisted that I do the end rhyme as well. So even though it’s more playful than the Fraire poem, it was equally as difficult to translate.

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Within This Language a Home: On the Linguistic Exiles of Minae Mizumura and Jhumpa Lahiri

July 5, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

We seek within language the stable perceptions of identification; we are looking for the words to pronounce ourselves.

Minae Mizumura was born speaking Japanese, adopted English upon moving to America, studied French diligently at the Sorbonne and Yale, then in adulthood, returned to Japan to become a novelist in her native tongue. Jhumpa Lahiri was born speaking Bengali, quickly gained fluency and rose to literary prominence in English, then in the mid-nineties, fell in love with the Italian language, and began a prolific transfiguration of translating and writing Italian texts. In this following essay, Blog Editor Xiao Yue Shan discusses these two accomplished writers in the varying, intriguing ways they’ve travelled through the realm of language, and how the possibilities of exile provide for a rediscovery of selfhood.

The art of self-introduction is a practice in brevity and precision. When I lived in China, I was Xiao Yue—yue as in moon. When my family moved to Canada, I became but you can call me Shelly. Later, when I carved a home-like enclave for myself in Japan, I learned the concise method of mental hyphenation: Shelly-Chinese-Canadian. Such is the way I moved through the world, always in dialogue with its perceptions. The self is not a distinct article of qualities, but a myriad web of associations—one spends a life following its appendix.

When an individual’s place in the world is rendered fluid by border-crossings and trans-oceanic migrations, it serves to learn that identity is not an indefatigable statement of presence, but a tenuous and mutable clay. Names, meant to be cemented by the fact of birth, become vulnerable to the phonetic insistences of other tongues. Language, the intact system by which to categorise the world, becomes scattered and dismembered with interruptions, contrarian rules, and adversarial vocabularies. One learns to see the multiplicities innate in all things—the layers of presence dispersed across the world, evoked by the differences in seeing. What you call that I call mine.

“‘My name is Minae’: how many times did I say this and then feel my mind go blank?” In Minae Mizumura’s novelised autobiography, An I-Novel, she peruses the same delicate network of memories, beliefs, and influences to reach herself. The three-hundred-some pages are held within the bookends of one day and night, perched on the structural lattice of phone calls with her sister, Nanae. The two sisters behold each other in both the comfort of familial intimacy and the strangeness of difference, made bolder by the contrast of similarity. Nanae, accustomed to American patterns, has settled into a life—however precarious—defined by an apartness from Japan, a homeland resigned to being occasionally ached for and remembered. Minae, however, spends the duration of this long, diaphanous day gathering pockets of assurances and assertions so that she may get up the courage to tell her sister about her decision to return to Japan—and their first language—to become a novelist.

The pull that Minae feels towards her birth country has everything to do with a knowledge that she has the power to excavate something profound and secret in the earth of Japanese language, a richness that the stone facade of English does not betray—“. . . the act of writing in Japanese transformed me to someone with knowledge of a rarefied world conveyed through the mix of different writing systems, knowledge inaccessible through English.” The lilting elegance of hiragana enchants her—writing its sweeping shapes embroiders her into the brocade of The Tale of Genji, calling towards a graceful world of balance, beauty, and softness. Even the repetitive, metronomic nature of learning kanji beholds an element of magic, displacing her into the transcendent history of the characters: “I felt like a monk in a temple, his body freezing in the bitter cold of winter, copying a sutra by candlelight.” Language—even beyond its purposes of notation and definition—is a gateway, a stage upon which the fantasies of self may spiral in its complex, infinite choreography. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “My Friend Daniele’s Flight” by Ernesto Franco

August 25, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Anne Milano Appel

His hands were so clenched on the wheel that the knuckles stood out white from the force and concentration.

A flying lesson allegorizes the lifework of Italian writer Daniele Del Giudice in “My Friend Daniele’s Flight,” our selection for this week’s Translation Tuesday. In this philosophical essay, writer and editor Ernesto Franco recounts Del Giudice’s views on the writer’s vocation, a discipline defined by the responsibilities of precise language and careful attention to the world. Del Giudice gives Franco the controls of his plane—upon which we are guided through Del Giudice’s philosophies on writing, friendship, and ways of knowing the world. Franco turns to three key words to describe Del Giudice’s enterprise: Sentire, the feeling that relies upon lived knowledge and experience to avoid sentimentality; Mania, the obsessive energy that demands precision and allows one to know the world; and Phantasia, a creative contrast to shallow, mimetic ways of writing. Franco’s memoir comes to a tragic revelation, but the allegory nonetheless has Del Giudice safely returning us from our flight, illustrating what his philosophies can teach us outside of literature.

“Here, now you take it,” Daniele tells me, continuing to look straight ahead while at the same time taking both hands off the controls. It is a cold, sunny autumn morning toward the end of the nineties. We have just taken off from Nicelli Airport in Venice-Lido aboard a single-engine touring plane, whose model I don’t remember, and which Daniele has stabilized to maintain altitude. I had just experienced the words that I have not forgotten and that I won’t ever forget: “The run-up to take-off is a metamorphosis; here is a pile of metal transforming itself into an aeroplane by the power of the air itself, each take-off is the birth of an aircraft, this time like all the others you had had the same experience, the same wonder at each metamorphosis.” The precise, imaginative words of Staccando l’ombra da terra for something I had never experienced before, because taking off on the grass aboard a small airplane, a small “machine” as Daniele would say, sitting beside the pilot, is something completely different from taking off on a normal airliner. Among other things, with the title Staccando l’ombra da terra he formulated for all of us non-pilots an action and an emotion that did not exist before, and did so with the paradoxical effect (how can a shadow take off from the ground?) of the precision of the words concurrent with the added “shadow” of meaning which they alluded to. I actually felt as if wings had sprouted from my shoulders, but I didn’t dare move. “Go on . . .” Daniele says with a knowing smile. And I place two hands on the control wheel, remaining stock-still amidst the roar of the “machine.” Who knows why, but I feel like I have to be ready to make a move and resist with a decisive, forceful action. Perhaps, simply, my body is thinking about the powerful, rotational thrust of the rudder of a sailboat, with which I am much more familiar. But that’s not the case. The flight control is very light. You can practically move it just by thinking of moving it, but doing so moves the entire world in which we find ourselves. Steering on the edge of a subtle, brand new sense of equilibrium. That’s the sensation that I will have the whole time spent inside Daniele’s mania.

When I think of Daniele, of his books, his writing, his idea of literature, his way of thinking and understanding, even when I think of our friendship, the feeling I had at that moment comes back to me. I think about it even now, when I arrive in Venice and instead of San Polo or the hangar, I head for Giudecca, make my way through the maze of calle to the residence where he is housed, and speak my name into the intercom. Everyone here is very kind, the grounds, which overlook the lagoon and the Lido, are beautiful, but of no use to Daniele now, whom I always find in his room. A room that I could not distinguish from the outside, a room that is his, so to speak, in a neutral way: containing him, but without any trace of him. It seems strange only to me. His traces can be found, however, not only in his books, but in some universal words that speak of Daniele Del Giudice better than any other utterance. I will choose three. Sentire, to feel, to experience, has been one of “his” words since Lo stadio di Wimbledon and Atlante occidentale in fact. He applies it, I’ve always thought, not so much as an antidote to sentiment, but to sentimentality employed as an element, as recourse, rhetoric, to compensate for the aphasia of a lack, or absence, of experience. Sentire, on the other hand, is like improvisation in jazz: you can’t do it if you don’t know all the music, but you can’t do it if you don’t venture to the edge of the music you know, and from there love and know in one sound, in one action. READ MORE…

“Ch’ayonel almost means boxer, in Kaqchikel”: Translating Eduardo Halfon Into a Mayan Language

February 24, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

Eduardo’s people and my people, Jews and Mayas, have been historically persecuted. . . So, it wasn’t that hard to get all the nuances of his story.

The work of Eduardo Halfon has been translated into English, French, Italian, Dutch, German, and many other languages. However, this year, thanks to the work of educator and translator Raxche’ Rodríguez, his most celebrated short story, and the one from which his entire bibliography sprouts out, El boxeador polaco (The Polish Boxer) has found its way to Maya readers. Entitled Ri Aj Polo’n Ch’ayonel, Halfon’s semi-autobiographical story about a grandfather telling his grandson about the origin of the fading tattoo on his arm was published in August by Editorial Maya’ Wuj.

The result is a tiny yet gorgeous pocket version, which includes Eduardo’s original story in Spanish and Raxche’’s translation into Kaqchikel—one of the twenty-two Mayan languages recognized as official languages. With a limited run of five hundred copies, Ri Aj Polo’n Ch’ayonel is a little gem that’s now part of the impressive body of work of Eduardo Halfon, recently shortlisted for the prestigious Neustadt Prize.

I got together with Raxche’ in late November. He said he was in a hurry—his bookstore and printing and publishing house Maya’ Wuj was working double-time to finish the books commissioned for 2020’s first trimester. But after realizing the grinding of all the machines inside would keep us from hearing each other, he suggested doing the interview somewhere else.

We went out, walked past a mortuary, a park, a couple of bakeries, the national conservatoire, and found our way inside a gloomy restaurant playing jazz.

“Just so you know, I thought it’d be easy,” Raxche’ said, holding his head. “The translation; I thought it’d be easy. It was everything but,” he said, and he chuckled.

“How did this book come to be?” I said, as a waitress, as swift as a bird, laid two glasses of rosa de Jamaica on our table.

“FILGUA,” Raxche’ said. “FILGUA and Humberto Ak’abal.” READ MORE…

An Impeccable English: Notes on the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature

November 18, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Erik Noonan

The unstated significance of the way the books are written in English is the meaning of the Translated Literature Award.

As both writers and readers anticipate the results of the National Book Awards this upcoming Wednesday, we at Asymptote, to no surprise, are keeping a particular eye out for the outcome of the Translated Literature category. In this following essay, Assistant Editor Erik Noonan gives us a probing and interrogative look at the five books on the shortlist, looking beyond content to pursue answers regarding the linguistic journeys that these works have taken, in order to be chosen.

With the reinstatement of the Translated Literature category, the National Book Foundation is clearly attempting to correct the gender and culture biases of years past. From the beginning of the category in 1967 until 1983, when it was discontinued, every winning author was European with only four exceptions: Yasunari Kawabata in 1971, the anonymous author of The Confessions of Lady Nijo in 1974, the anonymous Chinese author(s) of Master Tung’s Wester Chamber Romance in 1977, and Ichiyō Higuchi with the Japanese authors of the Ten Thousand Leaves anthology in 1982. Lady Nijō and Higuchi were the only two women, albeit long deceased, to be awarded during the prize’s first iteration. Among the translators, Karen Brazell and Helen R. Lane won in 1974, Clara Winston won with Richard Winston in 1978, and Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link won in 1980. The rest were male. In 2018, the category was reinstated and the entry criteria revised, so that both the author and the translator had to be alive at the beginning of the awards cycle to qualify. Last year, the first of its new phase, author Yōko Tawada and translator Margaret Mitsutani took the award for The Emissary. This year, you can expect this corrective trend to continue (for example, every book on the longlist was written in a different language). READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

June 7, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Jacqueline Leung, Nina Perrotta, and Paul M. Worley

June is a month of commemoration and celebration from opposite sides of the Pacific.

Literature has always been at the forefront in movements for societal change, and, in the efforts to continually push for action, we perceive the bold literary markers that fulfill art’s role to pay tribute, to inspire, and to call for attention. It’s been thirty years since the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred on June 4, 1989 in Beijing. It’s been over fifty years since the Latin American Studies Association was founded in the spirit of building civic engagement. It’s been fifty years since the Stonewall Riots began on June 28th, 2019 in New York City. From commemorations in Hong Kong, joyous displays of pride in the US, and unprecedented exchange of Latin American academic dialogues occurring in Boston, our editors bring you news that show a valiant, ongoing endeavour towards justice.

Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

2019 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, also called the June Fourth Incident, for which it is tradition among different parties in Hong Kong to hold annual commemoration. In light of the anniversary, the city’s literary journals are organizing special features and events to take stock of the cultural, political, and social changes the incident has caused in Hong Kong, China, and beyond.

Cha, Hong Kong’s resident literary journal in the English language, is publishing a special edition of original English and translated works, photography, and art exploring the incident and its aftermath. The issue will include a selection of translated works by Chinese poets Duo Duo (featured in Asymptote’s Summer issue last year, also translated by Lucas Klein), Meng Lang, Lin Zhao, Xi Chuan, and Yian Lian, as well as a translation of “One Family’s Story” by Ding Zilin, co-founder of the Tiananmen Mothers. Alongside the Tiananmen issue, Cha is also collaborating with PEN Hong Kong to hold a remembrance reading with local writers at Bleak House Books on June 3.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

September 8, 2017  |  in Dispatches  |  by Charlie Ng Chak-Kwan, Julia Sherwood, and Manel Mula Ferrer

Music, art and linguistics have been knocking on literature's door around the world this week. Asymptote members bring you the scoop.

Literature is interdisciplinary by nature, and the world showed us how this week. From visual art exhibitions and a reading of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Hong Kong to a music festival infiltrated by writers in Slovakia and a commemoration of the late sociolinguist Jesús Tuson in Catalan, there is much to catch up on the literary world’s doings this week.

Hong Kong Editor-at-Large Charlie Ng Chak-Kwan brings us up to speed:

Themed “Fictional Happiness,” the third edition of Hong Kong Literary Season ran from June to late August. The annual event is organised by one of the most important Hong Kong literary organisations, the House of Hong Kong literature. This year the event featured an opening talk by Hong Kong novelist Dung Kai-cheung and Taiwanese writer Luo Yijun, a writing competition, an interdisciplinary visual arts exhibition, and a series of talks, workshops and film screenings. Five visual artists were invited to create installations inspired by five important works of Hong Kong fiction in response to the exhibition title, “Fictional Reality: Literature, Visual Arts, and the Remaking of Hong Kong History.”

Interdisciplinary collaboration has been a hot trend in the Hong Kong literary scene recently. Led and curated by visual artist Angela Su, Dark Fluid: a Science Fiction Experiment, is the latest collection of sci-fi short stories written by seven Hong Kong artists and writers. The book launch on September 2 took place at the base of Hong Kong arts organisation, “Things that Can Happen,” in Sham Shui Po. The experimental project was initiated as an artistic effort to reflect on recent social turmoils through scientific imagination and dystopian visions. The book launch also presented a dramatic audio adaptation of one of the stories, “Epidemic Investigation,” from the collection.

On September 6, PEN Hong Kong hosted a bilingual reading session (Cantonese and English) as part of the International Literature Festival Berlin (ILB) at Art and Culture Outreach (ACO) in Wan Chai. About twelve Hong Kong writers, journalists, and academics participated in “The Worldwide Reading of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” by reading excerpts of their choice from works that deal with issues of human rights.

Amid the literary and artistic attention to Hong Kong social issues and history, local literary magazine, Fleur de Lettre, will take readers on a literary sketching day-trip in Ma On Shan on September 9. During the event named “August and On Shan,” participants will visit a former iron mine in Ma On Shan to imagine its industrial past through folk tales and historical relics. READ MORE…

Inter-Lingual Translation as Pedagogy: Arabic Text Simplification

September 22, 2016  |  in Interviews  |  by Claire Pershan

My ultimate objective is to bring different manifestations of Arab culture closer to learners, to keep them interested in the language.

This interview marks the beginning of an ongoing conversation led by Asymptote’s new educational branch about the role of translation in the classroom. In addition to its Educator’s Guide released every quarter, Asymptote for Educators will soon host its own blog where readers and educators can find more classroom resources, lesson plans, contextualizing materials, and articles discussing the benefits and challenges of integrating global literature in diverse classrooms. Stay tuned! And if you’d like to participate in this new project, or tell us about your experience teaching literature in translation, do get in touch!

Claire Pershan (Asymptote for Educators) met Laila Familiar at NYU Abu Dhabi, where Laila was Claire’s Arabic language instructor. Among her many projects and accomplishments, this interview focuses on Laila’s innovative work as editor of abridged contemporary Arabic novels for Arabic language learners: Hoda Barakat’s Sayyidi wa Habibi: The Authorized Abridged Edition for Students of Arabic (Georgetown University Press – 2013). Sayyidi wa Habibi [My Master and My Love], by celebrated Lebanese novelist Hoda Barakat takes place during the Lebanese Civil War, tells the story of Wadie and his wife Samia and their flight to Cyprus. Laila’s adaptation provides introductory materials and exercises that develop linguistic and cultural competencies. (Free audio files of the author reading from her work as well as a recorded interview are available on the press website.) Additionally, she is project manager of Khallina, an open source website dedicated to the teaching and learning of Arab cultures through audiovisuals. The topics of Khallina’s cultural modules range from calligraphy to the Lebanese rock band Mashrou’ Leila. Check it out!

The interview below is from their email correspondence.

Claire Pershan (CP): What do you call this practice of adapting novels into language learning resources? Do you consider it a form of translation or editing?

Laila Familiar (LF): The practice of adapting novels into language learning resources dates back to the 1930s. There is evidence in the scientific literature that this was done to help learners of French advance their language skills. Some call these works “adapted” texts, but they are also named “abridged” or “simplified” versions. There are differences in the meaning and connotations of each term, but I would not call it “translation” because the new version is in the same language as the original and the plot is usually the same. When a series of texts is adapted within the various proficiency levels of language learners, we call these Graded Readers. It is definitely a kind of editing.

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Translators’ Tools: Objects from Asymptote’s Virtual Translation Museum

June 23, 2014  |  in Essays, Interviews  |  by Nicole Idar

The Jawi Typewriter

Arabic Typewriter

Manufactured: c. 1966

Height: 5.9 inches, width: 15 inches

On display at the Malay Heritage Centre, Singapore

Jawi, an Arabic alphabet, was the dominant form of written Malay in Malaysia and Singapore for more than 600 years, but these days it’s in danger of becoming as obsolete as the typewriter.

Though the Malaysian ministry of education attempted to revive Jawi learning in the past—in 1970, elementary schools began teaching Jawi, and soon after high schools followed suit—by 1981, when I started Standard One (Malaysian first grade), Jawi was no longer part of the national curriculum. By 2006, Malaysia’s only remaining Jawi newspaper, the Utusan Melayu, which first appeared in Singapore in 1939, had ceased publishing.

As a translator of Malay into English, I’ve long been interested in Jawi, and when I spotted what I thought was a Jawi typewriter at the Malay Heritage Centre (MHC) in Singapore, I was immediately curious. I wanted to know where it came from, how old it was, who had owned it, how it was used. What follows is the conversation I had with the MHC concerning its typewriter, carried out over email. Noorashikin Zulkifli, Head of Curation and Programs at the MHC, helped trace the typewriter’s origins and explained its features. Encik Syed Ali Semait, Managing Director of Singapore-based Pustaka Nasional Pte. Ltd, the publishing and typesetting company that donated the typewriter to the MHC in 2012, helped identify the typewriter’s original owner. READ MORE…

The Joys and Dangers of Translating Asian Dictionaries: Part II.

March 24, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Eric Gurevitch

"An encyclopedia already performs one dangerous act of translation: it translates the language of things into that of man."

When last we left off (read part I here!), I was discussing an imagined translation of an ordering system devised by a (fictitious) king of Siam in the mind of the (very real) W. Somerset Maugham. This time, I will jump to a different author.

Jorge Luis Borges, like Maugham, takes us once again to a land East of Eden, more precisely, somewhere East of Suez (where the best is like the worst, where there aren’t no Ten Commandments). In his essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” Borges introduces us to “a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled ‘Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge’” that was discussed by one “doctor Franz Kuhn.” Borges writes:

In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.

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The Joys and Dangers of Translating Asian Dictionaries: Part I.

March 10, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Eric Gurevitch

"Do the Siamese differ from us just on the level of their names for concepts, or is their very conception of the world different?"

A few weeks ago, I sat down to write up a few thoughts I had been having regarding a twelfth century South Indian encyclopedia called the Mānasollāsa.  I’ve been reading from this encyclopedia with much guidance from Dr. M.A. Jayashree, who is currently leading up a massive translation and critical edition project. The encyclopedia itself is massive: much of its scholarship gives up halfway, and the translation project still has a long, long way to go.

Somewhere in the translation process, I picked up the rhythms and cadences of king Someśvara III. What was initially supposed to be a short blog post morphed into a bizarre trip down many (partially fictitious) orientalist caverns, eventually reemerging somewhere in what is now known as Karnataka. The editors at Asymptote followed me down the rabbit hole, offering guidance along the way, and together we decided to split up the piece into a series of more digestible fragments. Hang in there! I hope you all stick along for the ride.

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