Posts filed under 'morality'

What’s New in Translation: March 2023

March 13, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Ian Ross Singleton, and Rachel Landau

New translations from the Yiddish, Japanese, and Esperanto!

In this month’s round up of the latest releases, we’re thrilled to introduce three singular works from rulebreakers, free thinkers, and true originals. From Japan, an early novella from the nation’s renowned enfant terrible, Osamu Dazai, gives a telling look at the writer’s internal monologue. From the Nobel laureate Issac Bashevis Singer, a bilingual edition of the Yiddish author’s story—in multiple translations—opens up an inquest into the translator’s pivotal role. And from the Ukrainian émigré Vasili Eroshenko, a collection of the author’s fairy tales, translated from the Japanese and Esperanto, presents a well-rounded selection of the transnational author’s politically charged work. Read on to find out more!

gimpl

Simple Gimpl by Isaac Bashevis Singer, a definitive bilingual edition with translations from the Yiddish by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, and David Stromberg, and Illustrations by Liana Finck, Restless Books, 2023

Review by Rachel Landau, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

Whether you choose to know him as “Simple Gimpl” or “Gimpel the Fool,” the main character of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novella is a likable, rambling man who finds himself in an unfortunate situation. His wife, Elka, is frequently using their shared home for affairs with other men, and all of Gimpl’s attempts to come to terms with the situation are complicated by his deep love for her. Even when the pair are forbidden by the town rabbi from seeing each other, Gimpl works tirelessly to provide for the children and for Elka. He feels betrayed to learn, at the end of Elka’s life, that the children were not really his—and his reaction to this deception is a surprising one.

The narrative in Simple Gimpl is slow-moving, reflective, and witty. It is an undeniable pleasure to read—and certainly not difficult to read multiple times in a row, as this edition of the book incites the reader to do. This “definitive bilingual edition,” released by Restless Books, includes back-to-back translations of the Yiddish work; first is Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Simple Gimpl,” which is followed immediately by Saul Bellow’s “Gimpel the Fool,” and this compendium of translations is decidedly about translation itself. Over the course of more than one hundred pages, one must realize that this is not a book about Gimpl, and not even about the differences between Saul Bellow’s Gimpel and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Gimpl. It is about the role of the translator; it is about the strange impossibility of rendering a story. READ MORE…

Texts in Context: Glynne Walley on Kyokutei Bakin

August 29, 2022  |  in Texts in Context  |  by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

Hakkenden represents a whole other side of premodern Japan: big, messy, intellectually sophisticated, verbose, and populist.

Welcome to our new monthly column, in which Katarzyna Bartoszyńska seeks out academics who contribute to and elucidate the world of literary translation, revealing their deeper studies into texts both well-known and overlooked!

The following interview, conducted with Glynne Walley of the University of Oregon, spans Walley’s unprecedented efforts in bringing a titanic work of classical Japanese fiction to light. In his monograph Good Dogs: Edification, Entertainment, and Kyokutei Bakin’s “Natso Satomi hakkenden” (Cornell University Press, 2018), Walley explores the oft-ignored popular literature of nineteenth-century Japan, and how Bakin’s master epic foregrounds fundamental questions of morality, virtue, and the functions of fiction in society.

Katarzyna Bartoszyńska (KB): Tell me about your book, Good Dogs: Edification, Entertainment, and Kyokutei Bakin’s “Natso Satomi hakkenden.” Can you briefly describe the central idea or argument?

Glynne Walley (GW): Essentially, I’m looking at how a mid-nineteenth-century popular writer with aspirations toward capital-L Literature used a rhetoric of didacticism to satisfy both the demands of entertaining readers and his own desire to turn the novel into something Serious. The writer in question, Kyokutei Bakin (1767–1848) was one of Japan’s first professional authors of fiction, and he accomplished that by being acutely aware of what audiences wanted. At the same time, under the influence of masterworks in Chinese vernacular fiction, he had an idea that fiction, which his society considered beneath intellectual notice, could be a vehicle for serious ideas. It was a negotiation that other novelists in other places were also engaged in, but since Japan was operating largely outside their influence at that moment, Bakin makes an interesting case study of how the tensions between commerce and Art played out in a different and very specific context.

KB: What led you to this topic?

GW: The novel I focus on—Nansō Satomi hakkenden (Hakkenden for short, and Eight Dogs in English)—was hugely popular in its day, acutely influential on the next couple of generations, and remains crucially important to literary history, both for its intrinsic worth and for the role it played in debates over the modernization of fiction at the end of the nineteenth century. Despite this, it has been almost entirely neglected in Anglophone scholarship—mentioned, but seldom analyzed. It was time for a monograph on Hakkenden, I felt, and if nobody else was going to do it, I figured I might as well give it a shot.

KB: I’m burying the lede here a little bit because you are also, of course, the translator of Bakin’s Hakkenden! This is a monumental task—Hakkenden is massively long, immensely complex, and challenging to translate. What were the particular difficulties that this translation posed?

GW: Hakkenden is a massively long work! The modern edition I work from is nearly six thousand pages. The biggest challenges relate to that—and no doubt that length is one thing that kept the work largely untouched by Anglophone scholars and translators. Perhaps the smartest thing would have been to come up with a volume of highlights (a few short excerpts had already appeared in anthologies), but since the scale was part of the point of the work, I really wanted to see the whole thing in English.

The other big challenge is the language. It’s written in classical Japanese, which is grammatically and syntactically quite different from modern Japanese. The author writes in a wide array of styles within classical Japanese, drawing from literary masterpieces from Japan and China as well as the popular theater and fiction of his day, making for a really diverse stylistic palette. And he’s also incorporating a lot of elements of vernacular (as opposed to classical) Chinese writing, which adds a distinctive flavor, but which is, in a way, much harder for the modern reader than classical Chinese. Understanding all these registers, which are freely mixed in virtuoso ways, is hard enough, but the translator, of course, wants to try to capture them in English . . .  READ MORE…

The Fine Wind Between Truth and Fiction: An Interview with Yun Ko-Eun, Author of The Disaster Tourist

January 25, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Sophia Stewart

Dystopia is the story of the present—the same present that we’ve been experiencing for a long time.

According to FEMA, there are four phases of disaster management: prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery. But in Yun Ko-Eun’s recent novel, The Disaster Tourist (translated by Lizzie Buehler), there can also be a fifth—monetization. At the center of The Disaster Tourist is Jungle, a travel company that turns disaster sites into “disaster destinations” for tourists to explore and enjoy. Yona, the novel’s protagonist and a Jungle employee, brags that the company boasts such packages as “earthquakes, typhoons, volcanoes, avalanches, droughts, floods, fires, massacres, wars, radioactivity, desertification, serial killers, tsunamis, animal abuse, contagious diseases, water pollution, asylums, prisons and more.”

As a programming coordinator, Yona’s job requires her to assess the profitability of various packages—that is, she must figure out how to sell horrific disasters to interested interlopers. “The packages Koreans like are those with something exotic,” she says, “the spirit of adventure.” Early in the novel, Yona is sent to the island of Mui, where Jungle hosts a six-day “desert sink-hole trip,” which promotional materials promise to be “frightening and grim.” But once she arrives, she discovers Mui isn’t what it seems to be.

Though Counterpoint Press published the novel’s English translation in August 2020, The Disaster Tourist was originally released in Korea in 2013. Despite its age, the novel is prescient, to put it mildly, in its handling of issues that have gained traction on account of the MeToo movement and the current Covid-19 pandemic—questions, for instance, of workplace sexual harassment and high-risk “essential” work.  

In the past few years, Korean literature has gained international traction, with authors like Yun, Han Kang, Bae Suah, Ha Seong Nan, and Hye-Young Pyun—notably, all women!—making significant waves with the English translations of their novels. The Disaster Tourist is Yun’s first novel to be translated into English, a compact and propulsive dystopian thriller that stands out as one of 2020’s best works of translated literature. With translations by Buehler, I talked with Yun about dystopian fiction, touch starvation, and why she never makes any compromises when it comes to writing.

—Sophia Stewart, Assistant Interviews Editor

Sophia Stewart (SS): You’ve said that “translation isn’t a neutral delivery of information, it’s a new creative experience” and compared the process of translating The Disaster Tourist to “writing the book a second time.” Can you talk more about the experience of having your work translated, and what the relationship between you and translator Lizzie Buehler looked like during the translation process? (And perhaps even what it looks like now!)

Yun Ko-Eun (YK): Lizzie Buehler sent her first email to me in March 2017. She was translating three of my short stories for her senior thesis as a comparative literature major at Princeton University. I still have the files that she sent me then—they were three stories from my collection, Table For One, the English translation of which is forthcoming this year from Columbia University Press. This sparked regular email correspondence between me and Lizzie over the past several years, and finally our names came together as author and translator on the cover of The Disaster Tourist. Lizzie paved the way for the novel’s publication in English; she allowed it to reach English readers. One of my favorite books is Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Night Flight, and in one sense it feels like Lizzie was a mail pilot blazing a trail through the dark night.

After years of communicating only through email, Lizzie and I were finally able to meet in Seoul in the summer of 2019. I remember that day well, because it was so hot and humid. There weren’t very many people downtown. As everyone else tried to conserve their strength by staying inside, Lizzie and I walked through Seoul like we were bewitched. We explored alleys, drank tea, ate noodles, ate bingsu, and visited the time capsule plaza and department store roof that were the settings to two of my short stories—all as we showered ourselves in sweat. That day, I was amazed to realize that even though Lizzie and I are different ages and from different cultural backgrounds, we have so many similar characteristics. We have similar fears, and we’re curious about many of the same things. As we stood at a sunbaked crosswalk, I asked Lizzie about the title my novel that she’d translated. “The Korean title of the book is Travelers of the Night, but the English title is The Disaster Tourist. What do you think about that?” She answered that the original title was more poetic and metaphorical, while the new title was a bit more direct. We shared a similar feeling about the title change; in the English publishing market, we thought, The Disaster Tourist would attract more attention.

One year later, when the book finally came out in the summer of 2020, we were in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. If not for the pandemic, I would have gone on a book tour in the UK and the US. Disappointed that we were still limited to exchanging messages by email, I decided to mail Lizzie a gift—Korean cosmetics and a pen engraved with her name. This went wrong, too, when the package was lost in the mail. I was all too upset about it (since then I’ve been afraid to send international mail), but Lizzie’s reaction breathed fresh air into the situation. “So I guess someone is using a pen with my name on it?” she messaged me, the day after the package was confirmed to be lost. As soon as I heard those words, a new story started to take shape into mind. I asked Lizzie if I could write about what had happened. And that was the beginning of another story. READ MORE…

A Full Zola Cycle: England Welcomes the Rougon-Macquarts

January 6, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Samuel Kahler

Many . . . translations bear [the] unfortunate marks of censorship, which more broadly detract from the impact of Zola’s naturalism and integrity.

Émile Zola, master of nineteenth-century naturalism, was revered by most but reviled by some: his unflinching account of social decadence during the Second Empire didn’t sit well with France’s more puritan neighbors across the Channel. For decades, English translations of his Rougon-Macquart cycle were bowdlerized in the name of good morals, depriving readers of the full scope and weight of his social critique. Over twenty-five years ago, one of Britain’s most reputable publishers began to make amends, and it has recently completed the mammoth task of fully and faithfully translating Zola’s famed cycle into English. In this incisive historical essay, former Communications Director Samuel Kahler walks us through what was lost to undue censorship, and why it’s such a joy to get it back.

Fans of French literature, it’s time to read and be merry! With the recent publication of Doctor Pascal by Oxford University Press, those at work on new English translations of Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle have at last—after more than a quarter century—completed their epic and honorable task. For the very first time, anglophone readers may fully appreciate the scope and vision of the twenty-part masterpiece as its author intended it.

During his lifetime, Zola enjoyed widespread popularity in France and abroad (wherever translations of his novels, stories, and plays were available); he was viewed as the standard-bearer for a groundbreaking style of literary naturalism that presented an unflinching, often critical view of society through its portrayal of vice and corruption across all strata.

The clearest examples of this approach are found in the novels that comprise Les Rougon-Macquart. Similar in certain ways to Honoré de Balzac’s earlier La Comédie Humaine—a compendium of novels which were grouped together and sorted by theme—Zola’s cycle differs crucially in its design: it follows the members of one family rather than miscellaneous characters, and it was purposely conceived by its author from the onset (he initially planned a series of ten works, but soon expanded its scope). Inspired by breakthroughs in psychology and theories of heredity, it was further fueled by Zola’s desire to candidly portray life during his time.

The opening novel, The Fortune of the Rougons, makes no subtle hints about the author’s ambitions for the larger project. By weaving the family’s origin story into a larger plot, Zola announces to readers that the Rougon-Macquarts are not just a family; they serve more broadly as avatars for the passions and qualities of the era. His preface to the work states that “the dramas of their individual lives tell the story of the Second Empire, from the ambush of the coup d’état to the betrayal of Sedan” (indeed, the cycle’s subtitle is Natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire).

The Rougon-Macquarts are by and large—though not universally—a cutthroat clan of dreamers and schemers who stubbornly pursue grand ambitions, short-sighted affairs, and noble sufferings. When their passions lead them down dangerous paths, they do not stray or turn back; that would seem to be against their nature. Their behavior is part and parcel of Zola’s vision, which he delivers through vivid portraits of their interior and exterior landscapes, warts and all; he shows no prudery in depicting their immoral thoughts and acts.

But Zola’s intention was not simply to titillate audiences with sketches of naughty pleasures, bitter rivalries, and lavish excesses. Though the novels may foreground a mad rush of egos and appetites, the theme of nature’s cycles undergirds them; indeed, this theme frames the entire corpus. The subtleties of Zola’s overarching vision, however, did not make a strong enough impression on those who viewed his novels as cheaply sensational and injurious to society’s moral wellbeing. Many thought his works vile and opposed their publication, especially in England. READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Lolita, Double Feature

May 14, 2020  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Sarah Moore and Xiao Yue Shan

This week, we discuss Nabokov's most famed novel, adapted by Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne.

Of Lolita, that startling, monumental novel that—by Vladimir Nabokov’s own words—”completely eclipsed [his] other works,” of a story that continues to enthral, shock, and conjure up long-winding debates since its 1955 publication, of this classic that stunned the world . . . 

Though Lolita was originally written in English, Nabokov himself was, as Alfred Kazin said, “a man who turned statelessness into absolute strength.” In addition to being a well-respected translator of Russian poetry, he was also the one who took on the laborious task of translating Lolita back to his native language (albeit in bootleg copies, as it was banned in the Soviet Union until 1989). Though most authors would be reluctant at the thought of translating their own work, difficulties on Nabokov’s part was perhaps mediated by his translation philosophy, which was centred around the existence of a greater metaphysical language, of which all the various iterations of the same text—including the original—are fragments. 

In consideration of this greater language, of which the spirit of a text surges and infuses its renditions, we must also think of Lolita as study of an immense mind as it navigates the English language anew, amidst a collision of intercultural practices, literary traditions, and theories. In choosing this subject for the latest Asymptote at the Movies, our blog editors consider not only Lolita‘s textuality, but also the “collision of interpretations” that led to its varied existences. The films, directed by Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne, are supreme examples of the intertextuality, as defined by Brian McFarlane, that adopts the original novel as a resource, as opposed to the source. They are celebrations of translation as a wholly original art.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): It’s hard to think of an author less befitting of cinematic adaptation than Vladimir Nabokov—that indisputable master of runaway language, his generous verbosity that creates multifarious, dramatic textures . . . It defies the instantaneous appreciation for images. That is not to say that Nabokov isn’t a distinctly vivid writer (what is more lucid than that single configuration: “four feet ten in one sock”?), but that his work is the embodiment of that singular textual quality of transformation and reference—one word simultaneously impresses on the next while calling back towards the previous, a line denoting memory is startled by its knowledge of the present. The writer, in impeccable craft, moves from the tactile to the figurative to the emotional to the sensual. 

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: May 2020

May 11, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Arabella Bosworth, Edwin Alanís-García, Marina Dora Martino, and Samuel Miller

New work from Hye-Young Pyun, Keiichiro Hirano, Andrés Neuman, and Jazmina Barrera!

The best that literature has to offer us is not resolution, but that Barthian sentiment of recognition—the nakedly exact internal sentiment rescued from wordlessness and placed in a social reality. In this month’s selections of translated works, the authors confront a myriad of trials and ideas—despair, rage, guilt, purpose, obsolescence—with stories that attest equally to the universality of human feelings and the precise specificities of localities. Read reviews of four spectacular texts from Japan, Korea, Spain, and Mexico now:

law of lines

The Law of Lines by Hye-Young Pyun, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell, Arcade Publishing, 2020

Review by Marina Dora Martino, Assistant Editor

How does the world change us? Is it life and its unpredictable events that bend us; or is it something more fundamental, something that has always been hatching inside ourselves, ready to ripen at the right occasion? These questions act as the fundamental hinges of The Law of Lines, a novel written by South Korean author Hye-Young Pyun and translated by Sora Kim-Russell. Although ambitious and abstract, these existential questions acquire here a concrete form—they are investigated—not by philosophical or religious means—through the stories of two young women, Se-oh and Ki-jeong. Set in the vast South Korean suburban world, The Law of Lines travels through injustice, poverty, and grief, and exposes the thin threads that run between people who didn’t even know they were connected.

Ki-jeong is a teacher. She doesn’t like teaching—actually, she hates it. To get through her day, Ki-jeong transforms her life into a performance, and herself into a mere act of herself. Only in this way she manages, with varying degrees of success, to hide her frustration, her disengagement, and her lack of empathy for the people around her. Se-oh is a young woman who lives as a semi-recluse at her father’s house. She doesn’t go out because she fears the world, that churning machine that ruins and distorts everything. Ki-jeong and Se-oh don’t have dreams of a better life, or not exactly. They are dormant and static. But their stillness is not only a desire for tranquillity—it’s a method for concealment.

Soon, the world presents them with irreversible and unpredictable events, and their apparently quiet lives break irrevocably. In the middle of a stressful day at school, Ki-jeong receives a mysterious phone call that throws her on a desperate search for the truth. Her half-sister, the one Ki-jeong and her mother had never managed to really love, becomes her only thought and anchor to reality. Se-oh is almost home after one of her rare trips to the stores when she is startled by the view of her house enveloped by fire. She sees the paramedics carrying away a man on a barrel, and from then on, her life turns into a quest—to track down and plan the destruction of the man she blames for everything that went wrong. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: January 2020

January 13, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eva Wissting, Leah Scott, and Samuel Kahler

A darkly comical Cuban fiction, the collected texts of an impassioned French thinker, and an Israeli story of radical empathy.

We’re starting up 2020 with what we do best: bringing you a selection of brilliant titles that have most recently landed in world literature. Our picks this month span the radical, the intimate, and the dark, with the stunning cross-section of twentieth-century Cuban society, a collection of essays by the notorious Jean Genet, and an Israeli tale of survival and struggle told in a great feat of imagination. Go ahead and take advantage of that new-year urgency to fulfill your resolution to read more, and start here.

black cathedral

The Black Cathedral by Marcial Gala, translated from the Spanish by Anna Kushner, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020

Review by Leah Scott, Social Media Manager

A dark mosaic of interwoven narratives, The Black Cathedral by Marcial Gala lures the reader straight into the complicated dramas of Cienfuegos, a small Cuban town riddled with poverty and conflict. The novel features a broad cast of idiosyncratic characters, whose histories we come to understand not only through their own unique voices, but by the tales told by others; Cienfuego’s harrowing history emerges through decades of local gossip, placing the reader right at the center of the town’s most turbid rumors and confessions—stories that ultimately culminate in a vicious and bitter end.  READ MORE…

Philosophical Thriller: Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s Chaos: A Fable in Review

May 15, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Alice Horne

Chaos might have the pace of a thriller, but it has the timely relevance and pointed insight of many a great novel.

Chaos: A Fable by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, translated from the Spanish by Jeffrey Gray, AmazonCrossing, 2019.

Imagine finding yourself in an unknown country, with no understanding of how you got there and the taste of dread in your mouth, and you’ll have a good sense of how it feels to read acclaimed Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s novella Chaos: A Fable. According to the publisher’s synopsis, Chaos sets out to be both a “provocative morality tale” and a “high-tech thriller,” and, indeed, it seems to land somewhere between the two: think John le Carré “espionoir” meets Franz Kafka’s The Trial.

Translated from the Spanish by Jeffrey Gray, Chaos is Rey Rosa’s nineteenth novel (the seventh to be translated into English). It follows Mexican writer Rubirosa as he reconnects with an old friend in Morocco and, by agreeing to a seemingly simple favor, finds himself drawn into an international plot to end human suffering by bringing about a technological apocalypse. Chaos indeed.

For a novel titled Chaos, it is perhaps unsurprising that I found the reading experience itself disorientating; so much so, in fact, that as soon as I read the last line, I had to flick back to page one and read it all again to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. (Fortunately, at only 197 pages, you can pretty much do so in one sitting.) Starting—mundanely enough—at a book fair in Tangier, the novella takes the reader on a breath-taking ride via the United States and Greece to Turkey. And I’m sure that, even on a second read, there were allusions and references that went far over my head.

READ MORE…

In Conversation: Naivo and Allison Charette on Beyond the Rice Fields

April 11, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by Alice Inggs

"Each language has its own tolerance to gravity—or to weightlessness."

The Best Translated Book Awards longlist was announced yesterday, and it included Naivo’s singular novel, Beyond the Rice Fields. The first novel from Madagascar to be translated into English (from the French by Allison Charette), it comprises a narrative that unfolds like palm fronds. Set in 19th-century Madagascar, the narrative stem follows the evolving relationship between Tsito, a boy sold as a slave to a trader, Rado, and the trader’s daughter, Fara.

Naivo (the pen name of Naivoharisoa Patrick Ramamonjisoa), who is also a journalist, pairs a reporter’s unflinching approach to storytelling with a poetic style and distinctive orality that stems from the Malagasy literary tradition. The story moves from the Madagascan highlands through the midlands to the country’s capital, Antananarivo, the ‘City of Thousands’, and even to England. Through it all, the concept of “frontiers”—between traditions, social classes, countries, and historical moments—is posed as a question: how do we close the interstices between beliefs, and the gulfs between each other?

In Beyond the Rice Fields, Madagascar’s brutal history is revealed through individuals whose journey, relationship and thoughts are as important as the larger historical narrative, which sweeps them along, but is never in danger of sweeping over their story. In one instance, Fara’s grandmother’s tales dissolve into the outcome of the primary narrative. Here, the past is not viewed as finished, nor the present as momentary; rather, Naivo shows that the past is still with us, and that we are part of the past. This is evident even in his phrasing: the “evil red crickets” of an invading tribe; the juxtaposition of terms like “judge” and “earth husbands” within the context of a trial-by-poison. Although Naivo paints the march of time as implacably brutal, his is not a moral nor critical view of history; crimes are committed—in the name of both tradition and progress—but what is more important is what endures: love, nation, storytelling.

Asymptote spoke to Naivo and Charette about inspiration, the process of writing and translation, and the literary scene in Madagascar.

Alice Inggs: Allison, How did you come across Beyond the Rice Fields and how did you come to translate it?

Allison M. Charette: Back in 2013, I randomly found out that no novels from Madagascar had ever been translated into English. I decided to help fix that, and ended up traveling there the next year to meet authors, learn the culture, and acquire books. Beyond the Rice Fields was one of the thirty-some-odd books I brought home, but it was a particularly good one: it had been recommended to me by a couple of booksellers and several authors, who all called it one of the best literary debuts they’d ever seen. I read it and loved it, so it was one of the top 5 novels that I wanted to start shopping around to American publishers. I was fortunate enough to receive a PEN/Heim grant for it in 2015, which is how Restless got interested. And the rest, as they say . . .

READ MORE…