Posts filed under 'literature'

Louisiana Literature Festival: Portraits of Language in the Flux of Loss

August 28, 2023  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

Just beyond the white backdrop of the stage, a multiplicity of silent, unspoken languages lingers.

From August 17 to 20, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Zealand, Denmark, hosted the twelfth edition of the annual Louisiana Literature Festival. Since 2010, on the lawns parenthesized between Louisiana’s wings and the Øresund Strait, authors from around the world—including Adonis, César Aira, Olga Tokarczuk, László Krasznahorkai, Mariana Enríquez, and Itō Hiromi—have participated in readings, interviews, and conversations. The festival has also regularly hosted the most exciting names in Danish literature, such as Naja Marie Aidt, Dorthe Nors, and Signe Gjessing. This year, Asymptote’s Assistant Editor Michelle Chan Schmidt was in attendance, and reports now on the festival’s fascinating intersections, discussions, and performances. 

The Louisiana Literature Festival has no theme, and as such, widely varying discussions of language and writing recur across the four days. In this year’s line-up of forty authors, sixteen write in languages other than Danish. Most of them are authors of English or Swedish, and thus there are only a few individuals representing other languages: Haruki Murakami in Japanese, Constance Debré in French, Claudia Durastanti in Italian, Eva Menasse in German, Camila Sosa Villada in Spanish, and Fríða Ísberg and Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir in Icelandic. Despite the limitations of this Euro-heavy selection, the festival’s vibrant dialogues present studies across language—including that of signs, of family, and of binaries in societies marked by syntaxes that divide rather than combine. In an interview, the Irish English-language writer Claire Keegan says that “narrative feeds on loss,” and this idea of loss feeds back across the festival’s symphony of languages in conversation.

Icelandic:

During an interview with her Danish translator, Erik Skyum-Nielsen, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir states that her favorite childhood books were dictionaries. Each letter was a new chapter in a book of thirty-two chapters—a history of a language “in the margins” of global literature. Writers like Ólafsdóttir and Fríða Ísberg, as well as their translators across most European languages (with the addition of Arabic and Turkish in the case of Ísberg’s novel, The Mark), are instrumental in not only the continuance of Icelandic literature, but also in diversifying Icelandic modes of expression in a language anchored in the legacy of the sagas.

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Principle of Decision: Translation from Urdu

June 28, 2023  |  in Principle of Decision, Translations  |  by Farah Ali, Haider Shahbaz, Hammad Rind, Naima Rashid, and Sabyn Javeri

Each of the four translators interacts with the same, short poem through the filter of their individual personalities.

This edition of Principle of Decision—our column that highlights the decision-making processes of translators by asking several contributors to offer their own versions of the same passage—provides a look at how translators render the subtleties of a poem with multiple layers of meaning in a new language.

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I chose a poem by Iftikhar Arif, a revered Urdu poet. It was written for his son, Ali, and was published in his first volume of poetry, Mehr-e-Doneem (The Divided Sun, Daniyal Publications, 1983). This poem is a father’s sendoff; as he says a farewell to his son, he feels a lump in his throat and slips some blessings and lessons for the future into his farewell, barely masking his fear. A companion piece, the short poem “Dua” (Prayer), was written for his daughter, and published in the same volume, containing a similar wish of goodwill.

The poem is not to be read at face value. Defeat is baked into its premise, and what the poet is saying out loud, he knows to be the opposite of the truth. It is a prayer for the impossible, asking a grown man not to lose his innocence. There is rupture in the title itself: Aik tha raja chota sa—(once upon a time) there was a little prince. It’s the tone in which you speak to a child, who is uninitiated into the realities of life. It’s the tone of lullabies. There is a clinging to a make-believe world in the language, an attempt to soften the edges, to make the truth less harsh, to almost wish it away.

The first word of the first line starts with the son’s full name, Ali Iftikhar. The once-little prince is a grown man, which the poet acknowledges, but then slips back to addressing the grown man through his mother, a line repeated thrice in the poem: “I have told Ali Iftikhar’s mother not to let him…”.

Throughout the short poem, there is a push and pull. On one hand, there’s an attempt to glaze over the truth and to control the circumstances; on the other hand, there’s truth leaking through the veneer of denial. The repetition is like a broken record to convince the speaker himself. There is also a contrast between the naïveté of the language and the knowledge of truth beneath it—and bridging both, a father’s love. He tells the son to stay away from the corruption of the world by asking his mother to keep him from transgressing the different circles of protection: the garden, the neighbour’s garden, the street and the world beyond. Which grown man hasn’t transgressed these limits?

The four translators, sensitive to the central challenge posed by the poem, have found different solutions to address the tug in the original. Farah Ali is alert to the rhythm and pace in the original. Hammad Rind pays attention to calibrating the register and forms of address, important tonal considerations for the poem. Haider Shahbaz brings an experimental take to his reading, leaning into its dark undertones. Sabyn Javeri sees the poem through a feminist lens, asking questions that trouble her as a woman.

I’ve always seen translation as a conversation—a conversation between the author and the translator, the translator and the work, a translator and other translators, a translator and a reader. This folio shows how rich that conversation can be. Each of the four translators interacts with the same, short poem through the filter of their individual personalities.

—Naima Rashid READ MORE…

Principle of Decision: Translation from Chinese

March 29, 2023  |  in Principle of Decision, Translations  |  by Dave Haysom, Liuyu Ivy Chen, Mike Fu, Na Zhong, and Xiao Yue Shan

This column is an exercise in transparency, an effort to lift the curtain and show the undercurrents of the translator’s mind.

The second edition of Principle of Decision—our column that highlights the decision-making processes of translators by asking several contributors to offer their own versions of the same passage—demonstrates translation’s capacity to reveal shades of meaning in the source text. Here, Xiao Yue Shan poses to the translators a passage from Chinese writer 林棹 Lin Zhao.

轻而又轻的一天。时隔多年，那轻而又轻的一天生机犹在。如果你推却一切责任，对他人的痛苦视而不见，去拥抱巨大的明亮、明亮的寂静、寂静的自我，你就能短暂地占有那种轻而又轻。

qīng ér yòu qīng        de yī tiān            
轻而又轻                     的一天。
A light and light         day.

shí gé duō nián
时隔多年
After many years,

nà qīng ér yòu qīng de yī tiān     
那轻而又轻的一天
that light and light day

shēng jī yóu zài
生机犹在。
still exists.

rú guǒ nǐ tuī què                 
如果你推却
If you push aside

yī qiē zé rèn
一切责任，
all responsibilities,

duì tā rén de tòng kǔ         
对他人的痛苦
to the pain of others

shì ér bù jiàn
视而不见，
turn a blind eye,

qù yōng bào          
去拥抱
go to embrace

jù dà de míng liàng, míng liàng de jì jìng
巨大的明亮、明亮的寂静、
the enormous and bright, bright silence,

jì jìng de zì wǒ
寂静的自我，
the self of silence

nǐ jiù néng duǎn zàn dì zhān yǒu   
你就能短暂地占有
you can also briefly possess

nà zhǒng qīng ér yòu qīng
那种轻而又轻。
that kind of light and light.

This passage is taken from the Chinese writer 林棹 Lin Zhao’s debut novel, 流溪 Liu xi, published in 2020. Its narrative takes place throughout Lingnan, a region on China’s southeast coast, weaving through dense urbanities and viridescent ruralities, the subtropical heat and myriad languages, to tell the story of a young woman whose daily life, from its very earliest days, is inextricable from violence, metamorphosis, and fantasy. A tribute to high Nabokovian style, Liu xi is a stunning, inimitable example of what is possible in the Chinese language—the music it pronounces, the visions it conjures, the delicacy and intricacy that can be excavated from its logograms.

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Principle of Decision: Translation from Armenian

January 2, 2023  |  in Principle of Decision, Translations  |  by Kristina Tatarian, Lusine Kharatyan, Margarit Ordukhanyan, and Nazareth Seferian

[This] will, we hope, allow for a more direct look at the choices translators make—at the principle of decision they employ in their practice.

Each translation speaks with two voices; that of the author and that of the translator. Yet, it is often when they have done their work well that the voices of translators go unrecognized. Their names are left off of covers, and their efforts mentioned only as brief asides in reviews. 

This neglect fails to give translation its due. Walter Benjamin wrote: “Reading a translation as if it were an original work in the translation’s own language is not the highest form of praise;” it is, rather, a failure to fully considering a work in translation, with its two voices and two languages. In an essay for Astra, translator and writer Lily Meyer references Susan Sontag’s definition of style when discussing translation as an art, stating that “to make art without having or consulting your own stylistic preferences strikes me as impossible . . . [Sontag] defines style, more or less, as ‘the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of an artist’s will.’ Surely a translator’s will can also be found inside anything they translate, animating the text and powering it to full-fledged life.” 

This new column, Principle of Decision, is an effort to make the styles of translators more visible. In each installment, one translator will select a famous sentence or brief passage from the literature of a certain language, and several translators will then offer their own translations of it. The differences and similarities between the translations will, we hope, allow for a more direct look at the choices translators make—at the principle of decision they employ in their practice.

For our first edition, we are proud to feature a selection from the Armenian, chosen by Editor-at-Large Kristina Tatarian. Kristina’s word-for-word translation is accompanied by translations from three translators, whose work can also be found in the Fall 2022 issue’s Special Feature on Armenian literature. Kristina has also provided explanatory commentary on her selection, as well as on the translators’ choices.

—Meghan Racklin

 

One peaceful morning  was   one     sad      morning

Մի խաղաղ  առավոտ  էր  .  մի  տխուր  առավոտ :

Mi  haghah    aravot         er      mi   tehur  aravot
˘       ˘     ¯      ˘  ˘   ¯          ˘        ˘    ˘   ¯    ˘  ˘  ¯

This sentence is from the beginning of “Gikor” by Hovhaness Tumanian, one of the central figures in Armenian literature. Based on a real story that Tumanian had heard as a child, “Gikor” is a tale about the dreams and hardship of a twelve-year-old boy, the eponymous Gikor, as his father sends him away from his home in the village to “become a man” and earn a living in the big city. Unfortunately, the boy’s precocious aim to alleviate his family’s hardship eventually ends his life. This sentence marks the moment in the story when Gikor’s mother and siblings watch him leave; accompanied by his father, he moves further and further away from home. The story comes full circle as the father returns to the village—only this time, Gikor is not there anymore. The different translations of this sentence, which presages the early death of the young protagonist, highlight the theme of the Armenian Special Feature (half-lives) by presenting us the “half-life” of the protagonist, a life that prematurely ended. This poignant story may be seen as an emblem of cultural memory about the Armenian Genocide, as Tumanian himself was at the forefront of humanitarian efforts to save children. The contributing translators have each found their own way of translating this memorable sentence, which marks the day when this young and sensitive boy leaves his home, and never returns.

—Kristina Tatarian READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2022

January 24, 2022  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Erica X Eisen, and Xiao Yue Shan

The reconstituting of memories that have been erased is a central concern for the playful yet meditative Winter 2022 issue.

Asymptote’s Winter 2022 issue is now out, marking the magazine’s eleventh year in publication! The newest edition features writing from a record forty-three countries and twenty languages. Here to introduce you to what this issue has to offer are our blog editors with some thoughts on the pieces that stood out to them the most.

In Maria Stepanova’s 2021 genre-defying work In Memory of Memory, she wrote that her excavation of family history was motivated by a desire to discover “the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.” Stepanova was absorbed with not only recovering the stories of her Jewish family but also probing her own obsessive relationship with memory itself. The memoir suggests the faultiness of memory in its rips and tears, while betraying an anxiety over its artifice in the way the memoirist manipulates the archive through inclusion, exclusion, and distortion for the purpose of her narrative. The reconstituting of memories that have been erased through the forces of time and displacement is a central concern for the playful yet meditative Winter 2022 issue. Like Stepanova, the authors of these varied works construct complex inquiries into the past through reappraisals of memory, dreams of alternate lives, and imaginative play with form. They seek the truth through memories while contesting their inevitable artificiality and malfunctioning.

In Rose Bialer’s deeply affecting interview, the Hungarian poet, memoirist, and translator George Szirtes speaks of returning to certain memories and themes in his personal history throughout his career in poetry, sometimes writing new poems that function as continuations of collections published decades before. This idea of Szirtes’s “return” to the same moments for their comprehension reflects his mistrust of memories but also his belief that truths are embedded within them. One of the talk’s many astonishing moments is when Szirtes claims that the return over time to the same memories in his poems reveals parallel narratives that add up to a palimpsest of personal history and identity. For Szirtes, formal constraints such as the terza rima continuously open the same memories to new facets and understandings. This illuminating conversation demonstrates how the fluidity of memory allows the poet-translator to construct an unstable past and self while “registering the sense of truth in all its complexity.”

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Announcing our November Book Club Selection: At the Lucky Hand, aka The Sixty-Nine Drawers by Goran Petrović

November 30, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

One could spend a pleasant hour wandering inside nearly every evocative sentence of At the Lucky Hand.

As we inch towards the end of a year that has tested in turn the limits of our imagination, the capacities of our patience, and the extent to which we indulge our escapist tendencies, we have been encouraged to examine closely the narratives that perpetuate contemporary existence: narratives that not only exist within the pages of books, but that also thread our day to day, commanded by something as curious as it is unknown. So, in our second-to-last Book Club selection of 2020, we are thrilled to introduce a complex, mysterious, and commandingly beautiful novel by Serbian master Goran Petrović, which inquires into the infinity of literary invention in order to infer how fantasy contributes to reality.

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

At the Lucky Hand, aka The Sixty-Nine Drawers by Goran Petrović, translated from the Serbian by Peter Agnone, Deep Vellum, 2020

Goran Petrović’s At the Lucky Hand, translated from the Serbian by the late Peter Agnone, flatters the sensibilities of those enamored with the written word—within its pages, we become romantic leads and daring detectives. Our quality of “mild presence or mild absence at the same time” becomes a virtue, nearly a superpower, highly valuable to various profiteering types. In fact, the novel is Petrović’s contribution to what might be considered the devastatingly nerdy genre that animates literary theory. And yet, this is only one face of a multifaceted work. Irresistibly engaging and virtuosically crafted, At the Lucky Hand marries high theory with high drama in spaces so quiet and invisible, that their liveliness takes one completely by surprise.

Petrović strikes a winning balance between imaginative extravagance and sober social criticism. Adam Lozanić, a somber, lonely philology student and part-time proofreader, receives a lucrative job offer from a mysterious couple; he must revise a memorial already long out of print. The book, expensively self-published, contains six hundred pages of description with no plot or characters to speak of. Adam and his employers are practitioners of a sort of reading analogous to lucid dreaming, in which they can meet other readers enjoying the same book at the same time and explore the universe of the text in all the richness suggested, not explicated, by the words. The elaborately described estate, imagined by the deceased author in a state of devotion to a love no less real for having never escaped the page, provides a ripe stage. Adam and the few other readers, thrown together by happenstance, fill in the vacuums where conventional literary elements were missing. Love, murder, mystery, power, and ambition electrify places that tremble on the edge of existence and people who, by all appearances, sit in chairs moving nothing but their eyeballs.

Jelena, characterized mainly by her pleasant smell, fervent desire for escape, and careful companionship to an increasingly senile woman, unwittingly enchants the innocent Adam. But they are only the latest lovers to inhabit the home and garden. As the stories of their predecessors unfold, frustrated precisely because of the disjunction between the realities on and off the page, one yearns for Adam and Jelena to reconcile the two. However, the more decidedly a character chooses to exist inside the literary imagination, the more they develop a noble purity outside of it. Adam and Jelena learn what the more seasoned readers already know: that they neither need nor want anything of “real” life. The very food that nourishes them is cooked in fictional kitchens and the money they exchange in long-shuttered shops appears from memories of long-defunct banks. Using nothing, they are useful to no one, and the talismans that give them access to their imaginations are the only means one has to influence them. READ MORE…

Fascism and Fairy Tales: Ulrike Almut Sandig’s Grimm in Review

November 26, 2018  |  in Reviews  |  by Elliot Koubis

A significant project: to rethink the world within a time of political and economic crisis, wherein the female body is particularly precarious.

Grimm by Ulrike Almut Sandig, translated from the German by Karen Leeder, Hurst Street Press

“Is someone shaking the stories”, asks the narrator in the penultimate poem from Grimm, the new collection by the German poet and performance artist Ulrike Almut Sandig, translated by the German scholar Karen Leeder and published by the Oxford-based Hurst Street Press. The collection’s slant retelling of the Grimm tales, considered integral to the German psyche, belies a significant project: to rethink the world within a time of political and economic crisis, wherein the female body is particularly precarious.

Myth, legend, and folklore provide frameworks to writers and readers across all languages and cultures within which they can understand and contextualise crises, serving also as survival strategies for everyday existence and persistence. Grimm focuses on concerns that are central, yet which are by no means exclusive, to Germany, including, the rise of the far-right, misogyny and patriarchy, and the refugee crisis. The collection’s success is that by presenting itself as a poetic cycle, and by its use of language, it suggests that all these phenomena are related. Moreover, if the Grimm tales represent the collective German imagination (indeed, according to the critic Jack Zipes, the Brothers Grimm collected their tales in order to uncover the linguistic “truths” that formed the German people), Sandig reveals its violent, misogynistic, and patriarchal dark side, connecting the tales to the fascism, patriarchy, and racism of the German present and past. If, as Leeder notes, the collection directs a “rage” at this collective consciousness and the injustices it undergirds (‘Grimm’ also means ‘rage’), this rage is inscribed within the broken language of the women to whom Sandig’s retellings give voice.

We can see this at work in the poem “Fitcher’s Bird”, taken from the tale of the same name where a young girl is kidnapped by a man who wants to marry her against her will. During her confinement, the girl discovers the mutilated bodies of her sisters who had previously disappeared from the village. She brings them back to life, escapes disguised as a bird, and then musters the village to exact vengeance on her kidnapper. In the poem, the girl is multiply alienated from herself. Not only does her confinement alienate her from her body and the outside world, so does her disguise as her friends no longer recognise her: “I am an odd/ bird, nobody/ knows me, I/ scarcely know/ myself.” Crucially, this alienation is rendered linguistically. Her imprisonment and her kidnapper’s mutilation of her sisters confine her voice in short, staccato lines, of which the protagonist is well aware: “a globe is/ stuck in my throat/ that I can’t get down […] the beautiful bodies/ of my sisters are/ piled inside.” At the poem’s end, the girl resolves to “make/ all those anew, all those/ who were butchered overnight”, intimating how Grimm in its entirety interrogates the conservative, sexist didacticism inherent in the Grimm tales by exclusively representing female characters that resist patriarchy and sexism.

The collection’s opening poem, ‘Grimm’, connects the girl’s linguistic crisis with a political crisis. Two characters write messages on eggs which smash due to the urgency of their communication, their need to express their concerns. Then, most unnervingly, they “raised [their] sticky arms/ in salute and waved in greeting. then/ lowered [their] heads to a well-nigh limitless/ supply of fragments and rage most grim.” Their rage at the status quo, their political impotence, has broken their language, their selves, and their world-view. In the poem, the girls’ rage, their inability to express their needs or have their voices democratically represented has been misdirected to support the far-right, half-concealed here in the Nazi salute. All they are left within this tragedy are the broken eggshells of their words and a right-wing anger that, thanks to Leeder’s wordplay, is ‘grim’: both evil and implicated within the German cultural consciousness synecdochically represented by the Grimm tales.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

May 25, 2018  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar, Olufunke Ogundimu, and Rachael Pennington

International literary news for an international audience.

Another week has flown by and we’re back again with the most exciting news in world literature! This time our editors focus on Central America, Germany, and Spain. 

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America: 

Sadly, Centroamérica has been officially put on hold this year. After five years of unflagging work, the festival Centroamérica Cuenta, hosted each year across Nicaragua, has become the most significant and important literary gathering of the region, annually welcoming writers, journalists, filmmakers, editors, and translators from over thirty countries around the world. This year’s CC was scheduled to unfold May 21-25. However, since Nicaragua’s tense political situation that has taken the lives of so many civilians shows no signs of slowing down, the Centroamérica Cuenta committee has decided to suspend the festival until further notice.

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Stephen Henighan on Globalization, Translation, and The Avant-garde

October 27, 2016  |  in Interviews, Publisher Profile  |  by Sarah Moses

Translation started not as a way of nourishing the avant-garde—it started as a way of bolstering national identity.

This interview marks the launch of a new series here at the Asymptote blog: “Meet the Publisher.” Every month, we will bring you an insider’s look at the world via in-depth, intimate conversations with publishers of literature in translation from around the globe. This week, contributor Sarah Moses brings us an interview with editor Stephen Henighan of Biblioasis in Ontario, Canada, on the process, politics, and passion of publishing translations.

Sarah Moses says: “Biblioasis started out as a bookshop in Windsor, Ontario in the late 1990s. In 2003, founder and owner Daniel Wells took an interest in publishing and, alongside editor John Metcalf, began to acquire, edit, and launch the press’s first titles. Biblioasis now publishes between twenty-two and twenty-five books a year divided between new literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, alongside reprints and regional-interest books. Biblioasis’s head office still includes a bookstore, and the press also runs a quarterly magazine, Canadian Notes & Queries. The Biblioasis International Translation Series, which accounts for four titles a year, includes works from French Canada and around the world, as well as books written in Canada in languages other than French or English. I sat down with series editor Stephen Henighan to chat about the press and literary translation in Canada.”                                                                                                                                    

Sarah Moses (SM): I’d like to begin by asking you about literary translation in Canada. How would you say it differs from other countries?

 Stephen Henighan (SH): In other cultures—and Buenos Aires, where you’ve just come from, is a good example, if you think back to Jorge Luis Borges and his friends in the early part of their careers, but also in New York or London or Paris—translation was an avant-garde activity. It was an activity that might nourish national literary debate, but above all it was there to give you aesthetic relief from the national context.

I think what happened in Canada is that, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, the literary elite was nationalist and therefore wasn’t all that interested in translation. There had been odd translations from French-Canadian literature to English-Canadian literature, mainly in the 1940s and 1950s, but the real translation culture begins in the late 1960s in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, where in the village of North Hatley writers of English and French were living side by side. That’s where Sheila Fischman, who has gone on to translate more than one hundred and fifty books, got her start.

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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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In Conversation with Gazmend Kapllani

August 10, 2016  |  in Interviews  |  by Gigi Papoulias

The desire to speak other languages invaded my mind. I, too, wanted to look strange, mysterious and attractive...

Gazmend Kapllani is an Albanian-born author, journalist, and scholar. He lived in Athens for over twenty years. He received his PhD in political science and history from Panteion University in Athens, with a dissertation on the image of Albanians in the Greek press and of Greeks in the Albanian press. In addition, he was a columnist for Greece’s leading daily newspapers. Kapllani has written his first three novels in Greek, which is not his native language. His work centers on themes of migration, borders, totalitarianism, and how Balkan history has shaped public and private narratives.

Kapllani’s first novel A Short Border Handbook (Livanis, 2006) has become a best-seller and has been translated into Danish, English, French, Polish and Italian. His second novel, My Name is Europe (Livanis, 2010), has been published into French. The Last Page (Livanis, 2012) his most recent novel, has been translated into French and was short-listed for The Cezam Prix Litteraire Inter CE 2016. Since 2012 he has been living in the US, where he was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Visiting Scholar at Brown University and Writer in Residence at Wellesley College. Kapllani currently lives in Boston and teaches Creative Writing and European History at Emerson College.  

Gigi Papoulias has a chance to sit down and talk to Kapllani on his work, language, and borders.

Gigi Papoulias (GP): You seem to have a passion for languages. You are fluent in five languages. Were you born into a multilingual family?

Gazmend Kapllani (GK): Actually I was born in a shack. My father’s family was persecuted by the communist regime and was driven out of their house in the countryside and punished—sent to live in a shack on the outskirts of my hometown Lushnje. They were considered “enemies of the regime” because they were wealthy landowners. Stalin did the same with the so-called “kulaks” in the Soviet Union.

I grew up surrounded by a large group of monolingual relatives whose discussions always led to the glory days of their aristocratic past. I grew up surrounded by joyful uncles and aunts—all of them impressively good looking. I’m amazed today that in my memories that miserable place comes as a place of joy and love. I remember the flowers that were planted all around. My grandmother was an extraordinary woman—she had lost three brothers in the war against the Nazis in Albania—she did everything possible to make life in the shack seem normal. What has remained with me is the extraordinary love that I was given in that shack. I also learned what resilience and human dignity mean. But I refused the rest: living with the glory of the past. I understood though that when people are denied a present and a future they take refuge in the past.

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“Literary Controversies” by Alberto Chimal

August 8, 2016  |  in Essays  |  by George Henson

“Barroom squabbles,” some (writers) have called them. One must ask, however, the reason for such indifference.

In recent days there have been not one, not two, but three controversies among Mexican writers, in which some very serious issues have been raised, even beyond questions of aesthetics: the use of public resources, class discrimination, corruption, racism. However, the news of the day has been dominated by Mexico’s national soccer team’s defeat in a match against Chile (the score: 7-0). Or perhaps the Father’s Day holiday. Or, for those who follow such things, the death of Anton Yelchin, a young Hollywood actor.

Not even the brutal repression of dissident teachers at the hands of armed federal forces in Nochixtlán, Oaxaca, seems to merit as much debate, despite the seriousness of the event (to the point that the official communiqués either distort or minimize it, and important aspects of it are appearing first online or outside Mexico). But amid these news items, and those to emerge in the coming days, the three literary debates that I mentioned will soon be forgotten: they are but more filler in the news cycles on social media and the few other media outlets that have reported them.

What is certain is that these conflicts matter to almost no one: they do not resonate with anyone more than with the colleagues of those implicated, who jump in to defend a polemicist, to attack another, to complain about the general state of national literature (or the discussions of national literature); however, they barely manage to make themselves noticed beyond their own circles of friends.

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Weekly News Roundup, 10 June 2016: It’s Always Prize Season

June 10, 2016  |  in News  |  by Patty Nash

This week's literary highlights from across the world

Happy Friday, Asymptote pals! This week may not be “prize season” per se, but literary prizes abound this and every week, as usual. The United Kingdom‘s former Orange Prize for Fiction—then the Bailey’s Prize—and now titled the “Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction”—has been awarded to The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney. In France, the Prix du Livre Inter has been awarded to Tristan Garcia for his 500-page novel, 7 (fitting: the shortlist was seven titles long). And the British Commonwealth Short Story Prize (judged by Man-Booker-award-winner Marlon James) was awarded to Indian writer Parashar Kulkani, for the short story “Cow and Company.” Finally,  Akhil Sharma beat out 160 other contenders to win the International Dublin Literary Award for his novel, A Family Life.  READ MORE…

Three Must-Reads from the Spring 2016 Issue

June 8, 2016  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Allegra Rosenbaum, Nina Sparling, and Patty Nash

The blog recommends three more must-reads from Asymptote's April Issue—

Hi there, Asymptote readers! When Asymptote’s April Issue came out (nearly two whole months ago!), we recommended five slick pieces to start off your reading. The issue’s still fresh, featuring dozens of articles, poems, interviews, stories, histories, and visual art definitely worth your perusal. These’ll work to stave off translation cravings until you can get your keyboard on to the July issue—which is slated to come out in a little over a month. Let’s get started (in no particular order, of course):

  1. An Interview with Ha Jin, by Henry Ace Knight—recommended by Allegra Rosenbaum, blog editor

    When I first read Ha Jin in high school, by no means did I appreciate his writing. It wasn’t until I was applying to university that I really started to feel the effect that Waiting had made on my life. Part of the application process in the United States is a personal essay. I wrote the first draft and felt fairly confident about it. I told my mother when she got home. She had just seen Ha Jin talk at her job. READ MORE…