Posts filed under 'Magical Realism'

Domestic Escapisms: The Many Lives of Pauloma Chattopadhyay by Devangi Bhatt

Domestic bliss is clearly not as it seems, as there is still room for dissatisfaction and silent rebellions against complacency. . .

The Many Lives of Pauloma Chattopadhyay by Devangi Bhatt, translated from the Gujarati by Mudra Joshi, Niyogi Books, 2024

In The Many Lives of Pauloma Chattopadhyay, Devangi Bhatt’s novel of fantastic realism, the extraordinary is prefaced by a scenario of extreme normalcy. In Kolkata, Pauloma Chattopadhyay lives out her days as an ordinary middle-aged housewife. Her husband, Nikhil babu, is a civil servant and a man of a few words, set in his routine. Sharing their house are two sons and their families; there is a daughter too, but she is married and hence resides elsewhere. Theirs is a standard joint family and Pauloma is unquestionably the matriarch of the household, but it would be hard to say that she has any power to go along with that position—and even if she did, she is not one to exercise it. All things go about in harmony in house no. 11 with the well-practised dailiness of domesticity, and from the beginning, Bhatt makes it clear that her movements are not curtailed, and nor does she live in a state of unhappiness:

Pauloma is a vivacious woman with an abundant love for life. She likes gossiping with the neighbours, bargaining with the saree seller, watching Bengali plays with her daughters-in-law, and feeding her grandkids sondesh. Though Nikhil babu and Pauloma are very different, it can be safely said that their world provides a sense of stability. Everything has been well for a long time, and there have been no problems.

Stability, however, tends to get stale after a point in time, and even more so for a housewife whose life mostly takes place within four walls. While Pauloma is not exactly crushed by the mundanity, she nevertheless recognises it: “But… but sometimes a strange thought crosses Pauloma’s mind as she sits by the window, rubbing oil on her scalp. . . . As she turns the shell bangle on her wrist, she thinks that life shouldn’t be like a straight line without any exciting deviations.” These short moments are akin to revelation, brief ripples on a still body of water, and it is this feeling of the past slipping through her fingers, of the transience of her life, that sends her to the storeroom in search for her late mother-in-law’s large storage vessels—which have been gathering dust and are set to be sold. On a whim, she climbs into one of them, only to be immediately pulled inwards and magically transported. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest in literary news from Palestine and Greece!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us around the world for updates on recent publications and annual book fairs! From a discussion on ‘cancelling’ and its real-world parallels to the genocide of Palestinians, to the passing of a beloved Greek poet, read on to learn more.

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine

Has ‘cancelling’ subsided lately? Surely not for the Palestinians. Sadly, these times might even be the worst for them, to the extent that the ICJ is considering whether they are being subjected to genocide, i.e., literally a cancelling, an erasure! But when it comes to literature, this concept of cancelling, of erasing, often serves as a lens to examine social dynamics, power structures, and questions of identity.

This is the case of The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem. Originally published in North America by Syracuse University Press some five years ago, a revised and updated English translation (by the original translator Sinan Antoon) is appearing this month by And Other Stories.

Using magical realism to shed light on real-world tensions and human experiences in Israel and Palestine, this book is a thought-provoking novel that explores those complexities through a unique premise. The story imagines a scenario where all Palestinians suddenly vanish overnight. Azem skillfully uses this surreal concept to examine issues of identity, memory, and power dynamics in the region. The narrative alternates between the perspective of Alaa, a young Palestinian man, and the reactions of Israeli society to the mysterious disappearance.

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Macabre Absurdities: The Meat Market by Mashiul Alam

Violence is the throughline of Mashiu Alam's fiction ... it remains viscerally bubbling, right under the surface.

The Meat Market by Mashiul Alam, translated from the Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya, Eka Westland, 2024

From its first story, The Meat Market amply indicates the weirdness that awaits readers. Written by Mashiul Alam, who was born and brought up in northern Bangladesh, this collection brings together short fiction originally written in Bengali, translated into English by Shabnam Nadiya, who continues to prove her skill. Described as “surrealist political horror,” the politics of The Meat Market is not an extraneous element limited to politicians and statecraft, but an omnipresent, embodied aspect of people’s lives; there is not a single sphere, no matter how small, devoid of it. Alam makes full use of affective disgust to drive this point home, letting the macabre and the absurd rise as the defining forces, thereby showcasing the hypocrisies of Bangladeshi society and the daily realities of the citizenry. These stories challenge social mores and underline existing fault lines, hidden behind the veneer of normalcy.

Perhaps the most chilling work in this collection is “Field Report from Roop Nagar,” which is written from the first-person perspective of an editor at a daily newspaper. As a regular work day passes, he slowly discovers that he is unable to get in touch with anyone who lives in Roop Nagar. He tries friends, colleagues, relatives—but the call either does not connect or just keeps on ringing, no one ever picking up. He asks people who live near the area to go and ascertain the situation, but they too become unreachable. Soon, the general public and the government also catch up to the fact that there is no way to connect to Roop Nagar. Only one piece of evidence is revealed: supposed field notes from one of the narrator’s eccentric colleagues, consisting of a video clip and some audio recordings. Together, they relate, in graphic detail, the horrific murder of a girl. READ MORE…

Compound Vision: In Conversation with Catherine Xinxin Yu on Translating Wu Ming-yi’s “Cloudland”

Blurring this boundary [between speech and thought] almost creates an overlap between the human self and the personhood of the landscape. . .

Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-yi’s short story, “Cloudland”, makes use of grief’s overwhelming ranges to set out a narrative of exploration, dream-making, and the multiplicity of life. After the death of his wife, the bereaved Shutter begins a journey to write the ending of a tale that she had not be able to finish, and on his way, he finds the wondrous methods that landscape and animals have long used to express and communicate, offering a way of thinking and feeling that his technologically dense, hurried world does not allow. A gorgeous, lush story that introduces Wu’s sensitive ecowriting, “Cloudland” merges the richness of language with the richness of the natural world. In this interview, Alex Tan talks to the translator of “Cloudland”, Catherine Xinxin Yu, about the operation of images in her methodology, the trick of incorporating definitions into the prose, and making use of a textual reality.

Alex Tan (AT): Technologies of perception populate this excerpt from “Cloudland”: the night-vision cameras placed in the forest by Shutter, the Rift in the Cloud constituting a virtual catalogue of a life, the mediatised footage of the train bombing, and most fundamentally, the unfinished story of Shutter’s wife—which of course precipitates his grief and the quest for the elusive clouded leopard. There’s such an ambivalence to some of these forms of knowledge-making, as Wu also seems to be commenting on the ubiquity—and the risks—of digital surveillance. I wonder how you navigated the interplay between the visual and the textual, when you approached this work as a translator. Did it stylistically inflect your translation in any way?

Catherine Xinxin Yu (CXY): I remember interviewing Wu Ming-yi for my MA dissertation, which included a translation and commentary on “Cloudland”, focusing on eco-conscious ways to translate nature-oriented writing. I asked him why he decided to stop using Facebook and other social media from 2019 onwards, upon which he talked about his apprehension exactly of the ubiquity of digital surveillance that you mentioned.

Both in real life and in the collection that “Cloudland” is from (Kuyuzhidi 苦雨之地, which I tentatively translated as Where Rain Falls Amiss), digital traces are so fine-grained and invasive that they can piece together the most secret aspects of individuals. According to Wu, it is both frightening and cruel to be forced to see a loved one’s dark depths; I think that is a crucial part of the pain that pervades “Cloudland”: not only losing a spouse and a wild species, but also discovering how little one knew about them: seeing that “rift’’ and realising there is no way to remedy it.

Many of his works contain a multiplicity of perspectives, where vision functions as a means and a metaphor for perceiving, conceiving, and knowing. Reality (or its shadow) shapeshifts from the visual to the textual. As a photographer myself, I identify with this and I know how an entire narrative can be encapsulated in one gaze. Short of actually visiting and seeing the landscape where the story is set, I looked at a lot of images and videos while translating Cloudland, so it wasn’t just a text-to-text translation, but also image-to-text. Visualisation allowed me to embody the text and then perform it in English. I suppose the result is that, by describing the visual rather than simply transferring words from one language to the other, the translation ends up being more vivid and immediate. Or so I hope. READ MORE…

The 2023 PEN/Heim Grantees Talk Translation: Part III

. . .to rely not on formulaic logic but the magical leaping flame that brings to life static words on a page, that defamiliarizes. . .

In this three-part series, Asymptote has asked the 2023 PEN/Heim grantees to talk about their work in progress; their responses, brimming with excitement, conviction, and connection, are a testament to how much translators put themselves into their labor. Through the varied approaches and languages, they share the important commonality of surety: that the work they’ve been entrusted with has an immense potential to illuminate our reality, enlarge our world, and enrich our experiences of literature.

For this final instalment, Margaret Litvin is moved by the living mind behind the words; Priyamvada Ramkumar renders a vivid polyphony of suffering and survival; and co-translators Noor Habib and Zara Khadeeja Majoka work together on poems that both gather and transcend meaning.

Margaret Litvin on Khalil Alrez:

At first it was the rhythm of his sentences: polished and wry, leisurely but not ornamented, like no Arabic prose style I had seen. Next it was the Russianisms: what were all these references to Chekhov, Turgenev, and Bondarchuk doing in contemporary Damascus, as if tailor-made for my research on the literary legacies of Arab-Soviet ties? Finally, it was the personality of Syrian novelist Khalil Alrez himself, glimpsed through every gleaming line. Who else could write such a lovable and quirky novel while escaping from bombed-out Damascus suburbs through Turkey and Greece, eventually completing it in a refugee shelter in Brussels? Who else, well aware of Russia’s role in the war, would set that novel in a fictional zoo run by a Russian former journalist named Victor Ivanitch, and furnish it with a wall newspaper, two wolves, three eagles, a hyena, an Afghan hound, and her friend the poodle Moustache? Khalil and I spoke over Zoom, and for a while I told myself I was just asking questions, not preparing to translate the book. But who was I kidding? The Russian Quarter had captivated me; I needed to share it.

Keeping the Syrian civil war in the background for most of the novel, The Russian Quarter reads nothing like a news dispatch. The action stays close to the unnamed narrator and his Russian-speaking girlfriend Nonna, who live in a rooftop room inside the zoo, next to rebel-held Ghouta. The book’s moral center is a giraffe. Time plays Proustian games, uncoiling spirals of memory. The virtuosic opening paragraph sets up the tension between the narrator’s mounting anxiety (his girlfriend is late in a war zone) and his cool descriptive eye:

On the roof of the zoo in the Russian Quarter, my 14-inch television, balanced on its table near the giraffe’s snout, was showing an archival soccer match between Spain and Uruguay. The rumble of nearby mortar fire had not stopped since early morning; my tea had gone cold waiting for the apple fritters baked by Denis Petrovitch, the clarinet teacher at the Higher Institute of Music, as I sprawled next to the giraffe watching tiny black-and-white goals filmed in Madrid fifty years ago. The artillery was shelling neighboring Ghouta from the orchards of the Russian Quarter. But my ears were trained on the long, still-empty staircase behind the couch on which I lay, expecting it to fill with the sound of Nonna’s elegant footsteps at any moment. She had gone to the cultural center in downtown Damascus to visit her dad. The full moon shone on me, and the screen’s silver light reflected brightly in the giraffe’s wide black eyes and flowed over her thick-fuzzed lips, which nearly touched the long-vanished players, the long-vanished spectators, and the long-vanished grass of the soccer pitch. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Dispatches from the Philippines, Croatia, and the Romanian diaspora!

In this week’s literary roundup from around the world, people in the literary community are both paying tribute to celebrated icons and paving paths for contemporary voices. From the Romanian diaspora, an exciting new publication threads the past and present, adding to an incredible legacy of literary journals. In the Philippines, book fairs are highlighting minority languages and independent publishers. In Croatia, new literary projects orient their local communities around the act of reading and writing, as well as making intellectual space to consider the role of the political novel. 

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting for the Romanian diaspora

One of the most significant recent events involving the Romanian diaspora was the debut release of the literary journal Littera Nova in Madrid, Spain, earlier this week. With an impressive range of established and emerging writers contributing literature both in original languages and in translation, alongside essays and criticism, the journal confidently joins a rich market as well as a solid and long-standing tradition. As the founding director Eugen Barz states in his prefatory note,  previous frontrunners in the literary journal landscape include post-WWII Romanian periodicals published in metropoles as diverse as Paris, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Honolulu, and edited by legends such as Mircea Eliade, Alexandru Busuioceanu, George UscatescuStefan Baciu, Vintila Horia, and many others.

In the wake of iconic late-Romantic/early-modernist Eminescu’s 173rd birthday, the issue also includes a significant number of remarkable texts referring to the great classic: an erudite and incisive essay from Asymptote past contributor Felix Nicolau drawing parallels between Eminescu and both Shakespeare and Dimitrie Cantemir; poems translated into English by K.V. Twain; and a selection from the poet’s correspondence by Ovidiu Pecican. The journal deftly balances criticism and creative writing/translation, featuring classic modernists such as Lucian Blaga and Ion Pillat (translated into Italian by Stefan Damian and Bruno Rombi, and into French by Gabrielle Danoux), and Surrealist master—and past Asymptote contributor—Gellu Naum (in English translation from Nicoleta Craete), amongst others.

The Romanian diaspora continues to contribute significant texts and translations in platforms all around the world; for example, Asymptote contributor Diana Manole has recently had one of her plays featured in EastWest Literary Forum, released a collection of new and selected poems by revered Nora Iuga (co-translated with Adam J. Sorkin), and is gearing up for the release of her own forthcoming poetry collection in Canada. Also, major diasporic poet, novelist, and critic O. Nimigean, whose rare social media posts are at times almost as impactful as his best-selling books, reasserted on Facebook the continued relevance of the late paradigmatic fiction writer and anti-Ceaușescu militant Paul Goma (himself an epitome of both domestic and exilic heroic resistance), particularly as reflected by Flori Balanescu’s recent books on the subject. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2022

We review new releases from Romania, Guatemala, and Turkey!

In these brilliant feats of literature, three writers drive the vehicle of language through time and space to learn profound, painful, and complex truths about history and our inheritance of it. From Romania, Zsolt Láng braids imagination and reality to paint multitudinous portraits of the individual and society. From Turkey, Defne Suman tracks a family through present hauntings into the dark, deceptive recesses of the national past. From Guatemala, Eduardo Halfon opens up the question of a name as it is passed down through generations, delving into the chasm between who we are and what we are called. Read on to find out more. Also, for the first time since the magazine’s inception, we have included affiliate links to books under review. Please take note that we may receive a small commission for purchases made through these links, which will go toward supporting our mission of advocating for greater inclusiveness in world literature. Other ways include joining our Book Club or becoming a sustaining member

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The Birth of Emma K. by Zsolt Láng, translated from the Hungarian by Owen Good and Ottilie Mulzet, Seagull Books, 2022 

Review by Rachel Stanyon, Senior Copy Editor

What a swirling, kaleidoscopic reading experience. Zsolt Láng’s The Birth of Emma K. is a cracker of a book—albeit one that forces readers to commit to intricate twists and turns, before arriving at meaning within its refracted reflections on modern life.

Láng—a Hungarian writer from Transylvania, Romania—presents a plethora of perspectives in these twelve short stories, but unites them through a shared narrative style that constantly questions and blurs one’s sense of reality, while never quite descending into fantasy. The stories themselves are often equivocal, with endings that invite conjecture or remain opaque, and the plotlines that lead to these often ambiguous conclusions are full of hypotheticals, the language replete with conditionals and revisions, making every situation feel provisional and emphasising the contingent nature of the world.

The characters, meanwhile, are often driven by love, lust, hatred, or other forces of reproduction, but often also seem adrift, questioning their existence. This is evident from the very opening of the collection, which sees God observing and vacillating over the degree to which he should—and is able to—intervene in the lives of his creations. This version of God is not only not omnipotent, he has a heightened, anxiety-inducing awareness of the potentially negative consequences of his actions, and prays to another higher being that gave him his “not-quite-absolute power.” In the collection’s arch postmodernist style, which seems to use this initial framing by a semi-powerful God to parallel the figure of the author, scenarios are constantly retracted and resketched, and we are often told what is not happening, rather than what is:

That our Lord was sitting or standing about on the side of Gellért hill, at the top of Számadó street near the Sióvölgyi family’s villa, would be an exaggeration. Our Lord doesn’t tend to sit or stand about, he floats. But just so we aren’t constantly searching for words and forever refining what we come up with, let’s postulate that we’re not talking about the Father or the Holy Ghost, we’re talking about the Son, and then we can confidently say that there stood the Son of God…

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest literary news from El Salvador, Thailand, and Palestine!

This week, our editors from around the world report on a new poetry anthology promoting peaceful coexistence in El Salvador, new translations of Arab women authors, and discussions of magical realism and the Isaan dialect surrounding the Thai winner of a grant from English PEN. Read on to find out more!  

Nestor Gomez, Editor-at-Large, reporting from El Salvador

On August 5, Otoniel Guevara presented a new anthology titled Peace Isn’t Achieved Just With Desire at the Casa Morazán in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. In the anthology’s prologue, Guevara describes the project as a compilation of poems in defense of human rights, peaceful coexistence, and respect for life on the planet. He also characterized the anthology as a criticism of regimes that promote fanaticism, hatred, lies, totalitarianism, and disrespect for life in all its manifestations.

Inspiration for this project began several years ago when, in Guevara’s words, “a new religion was maturing in El Salvador, encouraged by a surge in journalism for sensationalism and blatant fake news in support of political projects empty of content, but rich in images and superficial concessions, especially to the youth. This populism, packaged to preserve and strengthen ignorance and ahistoricism, was rapidly coating a layer of corrosive mold: fanaticism.” Publication of the anthology was delayed because of the pandemic and the love affair that many Salvadorans established with the current ruler of El Salvador. However, supporters of the project continued to grow among friends and cohorts.

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Death, Hope, and Humor: David Unger on Translating Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Mr. President

Translation is often an act of revelation—of revealing what is hidden.

In 1946, Nobel Prize laureate and Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias published his magnum opus, El señor presidente, which would become one of the boldest and most inventive works of Latin American literature, an important predecessor for literary giants including Gabriel García Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende, and Roberto Bolaño. However, the text remains relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. In this intimate and revelatory interview, Editor-at-Large José Garcia Escobar speaks with Guatemalan American author and translator David Unger on the complexities of translating Asturias’s great work into English, balancing authenticity and readability, and its political and artistic legacy.

In 2015, I was living in New York and often got together with the Guatemalan-American writer David Unger. A year prior, he had won the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize (Guatemala’s highest literary honor), and his novel The Mastermind (Akashic Books) had just come out.

We met every other month, more or less.

We would go to Home Sweet Harlem, on the corner of Amsterdam and 136th, or Chinelos, a Mexican restaurant just around the corner, and talk about books, translation, and life.

He told me he was flattered that Cristina García had agreed to blurb The Mastermind. He told me of the time he met and had a strong disagreement with Nicanor Parra. When Parra died in 2018, David wrote a piece for The Paris Review. He told me to go see Andrés Neuman at McNally Jackson and read more of his work. Then one day, as we walked back to his office at City College, he said, “I’m translating El señor presidente.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

New translations and upheavals in publishing from India, Central America, and Palestine!

Around the globe, February has seen upheavals in Indian publishing, the release of new translations of Central American literature, and the loss of a giant in Palestinian letters. Read on to find out more! 

Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

The Indian publishing industry was taken by storm on February 1, when Amazon India announced that it was shutting down Westland Books, home to some of the fiercest writing from the country. The details of how it will affect the backlog of books, whether they will remain available or be taken out of circulation, are still unclear. Westland is one of the largest English-language trade publishers in India, with an imprint called Context that publishes literary fiction and another called Eka that publishes translations. They have consistently released daring titles, such as The Price of the Modi Years by Aaker Patel and Modi’s India by Christophe Jaffrelot.

The Mint Lounge, one of the first publications to break the news, wrote: “The editors of Westland were informed about the impending closure only earlier today, a member of the staff at the publishing house said, requesting anonymity.” After hearing the devastating news, many have posted on social media to appeal to readers to buy books before they run out. The Bookshop, an independent bookstore in New Delhi, wrote: “For a company to acquire an independent, local publisher of books that will in future certainly prove to be foundational texts of Indian literature, and then to arbitrarily shut it with no forewarning is a highly reprehensible act that the entire community of booksellers condemns.”

Westland recently published best-selling Malayalam author KR Meera’s latest novel Qabar, translated by Nisha Susan. A short novella of magical realism, the book is a riff on the Babri Masjid case. It explores increased communalism in India and ultimately magnifies the tensions that lead to lynching, mob-making, and dehumanization.

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What’s New in Translation: November 2020

Our favorite selections for the month, featuring David Diop, Yi Lei, and Pergentino José!

There’s plenty to get excited about in the latest offerings from around the world, bound to satisfy the desires of any readerfrom the emotionally visceral, to the patiently curious, to the surreal and the hallucinatory. In scoping for the finest translations, we bring you reviews of anti-colonialist fiction by a Prix Goncourt des Lycéens winner, a new collection from a leading figure of contemporary Chinese poetics, and the first ever literary translation from the Sierra Zapotec into English by a thrilling new voice. 

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At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop, translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020

Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

David Diop’s brutal sophomore novel, At Night All Blood Is Black, translated elegantly by Anna Moschovakis, is a relentless indictment of the colonial power structure. Through the utter dissolution of the protagonist, Alfa Ndiaye, the novel demonstrates its ripples and rhizomes throughout society—from the individual to the geopolitical to the environmental—rotting away what does not serve it. Though heavy and dark from beginning to end, this is a highly specific, deftly illustrated, poetically rendered critique that justifies the emotional slog.

Alfa is a chocolat soldier, a Senegalese man who has voluntarily travelled to fight on the side of France in the first World War. During the ensuing battles, Mademba, his childhood friend and “more-than-brother” is disemboweled before his eyes by an enemy soldier. We meet Alfa shortly after he has watched Mademba die slowly, refusing his pleas for mercy. In these scenes of articulate gore and moral anguish, Moschovakis reveals her poetic side in the restraint and somber vivacity with which she renders Diop’s descriptions. Alfa then finds himself in the throes of both deep regret and liberation from the moral conventions which had prevented him from acting in Mademba’s best interest. “No voice rises in my head to forbid me: my ancestors’ voices and my parents’ voices all extinguished themselves the minute I conceived of doing what, finally, I did.” The horror of both bearing witness to and being complicit in the suffering of a loved one silences the voices of morality in his head and marks his entrance into a world of alternate, competing guiding forces: his own tortured impulses and the abstract interests of the narcissistic state. He begins performing solo operations late at night in no-man’s land, disemboweling enemy soldiers and keeping one hand and a weapon from each kill.

A progression that functions on multiple planes expands the novel upwards and outwards from where it remains firmly rooted—in viscera spilled. As time advances and settings shift, Alfa’s psychological state, the narrative mode, the realms of reality, the overarching value system, and the gender coding of these spaces evolve in conjunction. Generally speaking, the trajectory is from the concrete to the abstract, the sober to the unhinged, the current to the eternal, the “real” to the mythological, the individual to the collective, and the masculine to the feminine. Alfa remains our guide, however unreliable, through this uncertain terrain, until his psychological coherence evaporates entirely, leaving the reader stewed in his reflections and testimonies. READ MORE…

Of Dreams and Dames: Ted Goossen on Translating Hiromi Kawakami’s People From My Neighborhood

What Westerners . . . call magical realism … [is] a way of normalizing that which doesn’t easily fit into our categories.

Last month, we were delighted to bring you award-winning author Hiromi Kawakami’s latest in translation. Like much of her writing, our August Book Club selection tackles the everyday with a deliciously fantastic twist. In this interview with assistant managing editor Lindsay Semel, the inimitable Ted Goossen gives us a fascinating glimpse into the Japanese canon and the author’s place within it. He also shares his aversion to labels like “magical realism” or “women’s writing”: there are as many forms of the real and the female as there are cultures, he suggests, and that’s quite a gift.

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

Lindsay Semel (LS): You’ve mentioned in interviews (mainly in connection to MONKEY, the magazine of Japanese literature you co-edit) that you strive to bring non-canonical Japanese writers to Anglophone readers. Do you think there’s a difference between the Japanese literary canon and the Western canon of Japanese literature in translation?

Ted Goossen (TG): That’s an excellent question, and of course there’s a difference. Regarding the Western reception of Japanese literature, one of the earliest works was The Tale of Genji: a 1,200-page, thousand-year-old novel written by a court lady, whose manuscript was initially hand-copied and circulated among her female peers. The first English translation, Arthur Waley’s, was published around 1920. At that time, Genji was highly exotic, even for the Japanese, because it was written in a way they couldn’t read. So Waley did us all a great service with his beautiful translation, and since then, there have been four or five more.

Other than that, Japanese literature didn’t really gain a Western audience until the 1960s; at that point, the US had made Japan—its enemy in World War II—an ally, and it had tried to resurrect its reputation. Because of the war, Americans thought of the Japanese as cruel and heartless, so the US needed to make them more “human,” render them more attractive. Not only was there an element of exoticism when it came to Japanese culture, then, but also a need to rehabilitate it. When Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize in 1968, Japanese literature was prized for the kind of poetic, Zen-like quality present in his writing. Kenzaburō Ōe, who won the Nobel in 1994, distanced himself from that whole stream, and his literature is unlike any that preceded it; it did garner a Western audience, albeit a relatively small one. Now, of course, it’s Murakami. He dominates the West to such an extent that when we speak of “non-canonical,” it’s almost like we’re saying “non-Murakami.”

You’ve mentioned MONKEY, and the paradox there is that Murakami is one of our biggest supporters; he and my co-editor Motoyuki Shibata are very close, I know him as well, and Jay Rubin, a frequent collaborator, is one of his best translators. So ironically, we’re using the magazine to highlight the work of writers who aren’t Murakami, but we use Murakami to draw attention to it by publishing lots of interesting interviews, essays, and dialogues about or with him. Still, certain authors like Mieko or Hiromi Kawakami are getting lots of buzz in their own right, simply because they’re so good. There are others, too, so we’re seeing the rise of quite a few Japanese writers in the English-speaking literary world. READ MORE…

Announcing our August Book Club Selection: People From My Neighborhood by Hiromi Kawakami

The portrayal and analysis of collective experience makes this a text that truly meets our moment.

As we continue into the latter half of this increasingly surreal year, one finds the need for a little magic. Thus it is with a feeling of great timeliness that we present our Book Club selection for the month of August, the well-loved Hiromi Kawakami’s new fiction collection, People From My Neighborhood. In turns enigmatic and poignant, as puzzling as it is profound, Kawakami’s readily quiet, pondering work is devoted to the way our human patterns may be spliced through with intrigue, strangeness, and fantasy; amongst these intersections of normality and sublimity one finds a great and wandering beauty.

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

People From My Neighbourhood by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen, Granta, 2020

Like a box of chocolates, Hiromi Kawakamis People From My Neighbourhood (translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen) contains an assortment of bite-sized delights, each distinct yet related. This peculiar collection of flash fiction paints a portrait of exactly what the title suggests—the denizens of the narrators neighborhood—while striking a perfect balance between intriguing specificity and beguiling universality. The opening chapters introduce readers to each of the neighborhoods curious inhabitants, while later chapters build upon the foundation, gradually erecting a universe of complex human relationships, rigorous social commentary, immense beauty, and more than a little magic.

Existing fans of Kawakamis will surely recognize these common features of her award-winning body of work, while first-time readers will likely go searching for more. Goossen is better known as a translator of Murakami and editor of the English version of the Japanese literary magazine MONKEY: New Writing from Japan (formerly Monkey Business); ever committed to introducing Anglophone readers to non-canonical Japanese writers, he brings his flair for nonchalant magical realism to this winning new collaboration.

The first story, The Secret,” introduces readers to the anonymous narrator and sets the tone for the collection. First presented as genderless, (we only find out later that she is female) she discovers an androgynous child, who turns out to be male, under a white blanket in a park. The child, wild and independent, comes home with her. Despite occasional disappearances, he keeps her company as she ages, all the while remaining a child. In this story, we receive her only concrete—but general—description of herself: Ive come to realize that he cant be human after all, seeing how hes stayed the same all these years. Humans change over time. I certainly have. Ive aged and become grumpy. But Ive come to love him, though I didnt at first.” This one statement exemplifies many of the collections trademark characteristics and overarching themes: a version of time in which past, present, and eternity coexist, the supernatural, and the narrators fascinating method of characterization. READ MORE…

Intimate Work: Lisa C. Hayden on Translating Narine Abgaryan

Translation is a very intimate line of work and translating an author’s text tells you a lot about them as people.

Of her award-winning novel, Three Apples Fell From the Sky, Armenian-Russian author Narine Abgaryan said: “I wanted to write a story that ends on a note of hope.” We at Asymptote were proud to present, as our March Book Club selection, this magical realist folktale exploring both the merciless procession of worldly tragedies and the human capacity for courage and imagination. In the following interview, our own Josefina Massot speaks to Lisa C. Hayden, the translator of Three Apples Fell From the Sky and other renowned Russian fictions, about the book’s internal logic, the relief of routine amidst a global strangeness, and the instinct of switching between narrative voices.

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

Josefina Massot (JM): You’ve made a point of only translating books you love, and many of them delve into the concept of history. Vladislav Otroshenko’s Addendum to a Photo Album and Marina Stepnova’s The Women of Lazarus seem to specifically explore it through the lens of family, which is also the case with Abgaryan’s Three Apples Fell From the Sky—the story of Maran is reflected in a series of family sagas: Anatolia’s, Vasily’s, Vano’s, and Valinka’s, etc. Tolstoy’s own War and Peace, which you’ve referred to as your favorite novel, chronicles early-nineteenth-century Tsarist society by honing in on five aristocratic clans . . . Could you elaborate on why you’ve been so consistently drawn to the theme of family history, and whether there’s something eminently “Russian” about it?

Lisa C. Hayden (LCH): I’m not sure I have a good direct answer to your questions! I’ll try to approach them from a slightly different angle, though. One of the elements I look for in books is a solid sense of internal logic: ideally, I want each piece of a novel, each layer, each word, to fit together harmoniously. That doesn’t mean they can’t be chaotic, but the chaos should fit the book’s logic. I wonder if perhaps fictional families—be they functional or dysfunctional, chaotic or calm—inherently bring a natural order to a novel. And if that order, which may at least hint at genre- and/or family-related hierarchies, structures, and motifs, might give the novelist a sort of head start on writing a book where all the pieces fit together. All that said, other aspects of novels draw me, too. Psychology and even a certain voyeurism are important to me as is (always!) interesting writing that innovates without becoming overwritten, purple prose.  READ MORE…