Posts filed under 'multilingual writing'

Language Is the Horse: On Rebecca Suzuki’s When My Mother Is Most Beautiful

November 2, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Jay Boss Rubin

More surprising than Suzuki’s work as a translator is the presence, in her book, of a translation’s ghost.

When My Mother Is Most Beautiful by Rebecca Suzuki, Hanging Loose Press, December 2023

Technically classified as a book of poetry, Rebecca Suzuki’s debut collection, When My Mother Is Most Beautiful, contains verse, prose, drama, and haibun, a form that combines prose and haiku. Across the delightful hybridity, the author achieves thematic cohesion through her enthusiastic embrace of multilingualism. From the first entry to the last, Suzuki demonstrates multilingualism’s ability to make more resonant questions of identity that, trapped within a single tongue, remain stifling. “When I was 産まれた,” reads the book’s opening line, followed by a footnote that states, simply, “born.” For Suzuki, who immigrated to Bayside, Queens, from Nagoya, Japan, when she was 9, being born was an event that took place—and takes place for the author still—in a combination of English and Japanese. By comparison, Suzuki’s description of New York pizza (“cheese oozing off the side with hot orange oil pooling at the top”) is decidedly monolingual. Meanwhile, the dialogue in that same entry—between the author-speaker, her mother, and her sister—appears in Japanese. What the three family members say amongst themselves is translated in footnotes.

For a reader who does not know Japanese, the entry, titled “early days,” presents a kind of inverse experience of Suzuki’s initial weeks in New York, which involved navigating a new cultural environment, plus the logistical challenges of trips to the welfare office and the Herculean task of finding an apartment. The pizza, despite its mouthwatering description, feels public facing and familiar; what’s said between family members, on the street and in the restaurant, feels private. In a painful but poignant possible coincidence, the pizzeria in which the mother and sisters land for their respite may have once belonged to Suzuki’s Jewish-American father. The family’s move to the United States follows his death—an event, no doubt tragic, that the author addresses mostly obliquely. With much more directness, Suzuki confronts her preoccupations with the well-being of her ancestors at large. In an entry titled “eggplant,” she lays her fear bare: “My biggest worry has come true. How do my ancestors get home?”

The titular eggplant, which is also depicted in evocative original artwork on the book’s cover, is also a horse. Suzuki introduces the eggplant horse, her most striking metaphor, in an early entry about Obon, Japan’s festival of the dead:

my aunt makes a horse out of a thin cucumber or eggplant by sticking disposable chopsticks into them as legs. We all walk to the beach with the horse. When we get there, we light incense and let the eggplant horse float away in the water. That is how the spirits travel back to heaven.

Note the absence of simile: the creature isn’t like a horse or intended to represent one. It is alive, moving, capable of transporting others. The eggplant horse doesn’t only cross between the world of the living and the world of the dead. It traverses borders between the United States and Japan, English and Japanese, meaning and word, word and image. Suzuki’s horse reminded me viscerally of a moment in The Magical Language of Others, by E.J. Koh. In that hybrid-genre, multilingual, translation-obsessed text, Koh, who longs for a pet parakeet and flight from loneliness and isolation, fashions a bird out of a plastic bag tied to a string. The make-shift kite soars: “So little labor could bring so great a reward,” she writes. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 23, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, José García Escobar, and MARGENTO

The latest from Spain and Central America!

In this week of literary news, we hear from our Editors-at-Large on Spanish-speaking countries around the world! From Spanish-Romanian literary intermingling in Spain, to recent award winners across Central America, to medium-bending poetry across sound and space in Mexico, read on to learn more!

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Spain

As the summer season is kicking in and tourists are about to take over Spain—as is the usual for this time of the year—certain portions of the literary world are seeming to gain fresh momentum. That goes particularly for the transnational and translational endeavors. 

The latest issue of the Madrid-based literary journal Ágora – Papeles de Arte Gramático offers a rich overview of contemporary Spanish poetry while including a generous Catalan special feature. A substantive section on Romanian literature is also featured, with reviews of Encarnación García León’s recent anthology of Romanian fiction in Spanish translation and articles on Spanish translations of the legendary writer and internationally revered religion phenomenologist Mircea Eliade and the symbolist Ion Minulescu. 

Moreover, the issue opens with poems by past Asymptote contributor Felix Nicolau in Elisabeta Boțan’s Spanish translation and some of Fernando Pessoa’s celebrated poems in Dinu Flămând’s Romanian rendering. The journal has had a long-standing interest in Romanian-Spanish literary cross-pollinations, as a previous issue featured a sizeable section dedicated to the Romanian inter-war writer Max Blecher, who passed away at the age of 28 after spending a decade ill, confined to his bed, and writing literature that would later be widely translated. Blecher’s collected poems in Spanish translation, edited by Joaquín Garrigós, was a highlight of the issue. Ágora’s Editor-in-Chief Fulgencio Martínez warmly recommends to his readers the summer issue of another Madrid-based journal, Littera Nova, profuse with Romanian writing. 

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From Two Solitudes to Quattro Books: An Interview with Bilal Hashmi

November 18, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Moses

Quattro will . . . shift the discussion so it’s no longer . . . English and French, but the multilingual nature of Canadian writing.

Quattro Books was founded in 2006 by Allan Briesmaster, John Calabro, Beatriz Hausner, and Luciano Iacobelli, with the aim of publishing established and emerging authors who represent the linguistic and cultural diversity of literature in Toronto and across Canada. As such, from the start, Quattro Books has sought to bring out works originally written in English alongside those translated from the multilingual voices of Canadians who have arrived in the country as immigrants or refugees. The press’s recent acquisition by Bilal Hashmi, president of the Association des traducteurs et traductrices littéraires du Canada / Literary Translators’ Association of Canada (ATTLC-LTAC), and a translator himself—from French, Urdu, Persian, and Hindi—has led to a shift in focus that favours the latter. This is evidenced by Quattro Books’s first catalogue since Hashmi took over as Executive Director and Publisher. Due out in the fall of 2020, it will feature English translations of Canadian works spanning six languages. Asymptote’s co-Editor-at-Large for Argentina, Sarah Moses, met with Hashmi in Toronto to discuss Canadian literature as international literature, works in translation as partnerships, and how he’s shaping Quattro Books into a translation-focused press.

Sarah Moses (SM): I’d like to begin by asking you about your involvement with the ATTLC-LTAC. How has it led to Quattro becoming what you’ve described as a translation-focused press?

Bilal Hashmi (BH): Beatriz Hausner is central both to the ATTLC-LTAC and Quattro. She’s one of the founding members of Quattro and was the president of the ATTLC-LTAC in 2017, when I joined. I had the privilege of being mentored by her in translation and advocacy work, and the one thing we all sort of agreed on is that there should be more international works in translation available in Canada. So the movement from the ATTLC-LTAC to Quattro was, in a way, organic—the work at the former led to the idea: now we have an opportunity, let’s see what happens. That’s the way I thought of it. I started off as membership secretary in 2017 and I’ve been the president since June. We continue to work through some of the same issues that we’ve dealt with in the past: translator visibility, proper recognition, and so on—these remain our goals. But I think what Quattro will possibly do in the future is shift the discussion so it’s no longer necessarily the “two solitudes” of English and French, but the multilingual nature of Canadian writing that comes through.

SM: Is this primarily how you see Quattro Books fitting in among publishers of translation in Canada and internationally—as a press that moves beyond translations between English and French?

BH: In our first catalogue we have translations from French, Serbian, German, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, and then two titles that were written in English. We’re not going to do exclusively translation, but that’s the focus, which I think is unique in Canadian publishing. Whether or not that continues is something we’ll have to determine. We’re really hoping to find out if publishing majority translations is a viable activity.

Working with translation has involved a very international cast of characters, which is really what I find most exciting about Canadian literature as international literature. I think those who are very skeptical about translation’s profitability or potential for success kind of forget that you do have access potentially to other markets. Typically, Canadian books are marketed internally for Canadian consumption and the expectation is that Canadians will buy fellow Canadians. It doesn’t always work that way. My hope is that these books will be seen as Canadian literature, plus whatever other literature they’re referencing—let’s say the Portuguese-Angolan return novel, of which there’s now a sizable and critically acclaimed subgenre in Portuguese fiction. So the hope is that they’ll cross over into other markets, beginning in the US.

The catalogue started as kind of an exercise in fantasy, which I think I shared with you a couple of summers ago. It was an exercise in what works within the funding paradigm. Readers of Asymptote should know that in Canada the main translation activity is English-to-French, French-to-English, but the official requirement for funding from the Canada Council for the Arts is that the author be Canadian. There’s no limitation on the source language so long as the work is translated into French, English, or an indigenous language. I did a little bit of a research and I found a list of about twenty or so Canadian writers who brought in different literary histories with them. All of these works are technically eligible for Canada Council for the Arts grants, and we’re very lucky and grateful to the Canada Council for funding all six, which may be a first in Canadian publishing for one season, and probably unique in this part of the world. So that’s how it started. I think we have another half dozen languages already in the pipeline if not already under contract, also all Canadian authors. My hope is really to explore this lesser-known part of Canadian literary history, which tends not to see that much exposure in the current framework.

In the first couple of years, the focus will be on Canadian content, but we’re also starting to acquire from outside, including translations. That’s a challenge since I will insist that everyone gets paid at the Canadian rate, which is the determining factor. Because if it’s a five-hundred page novel and there’s no funding for it, then we’re probably not going to be able to pay the eighteen-cents-per-word rate—that’s the rate for prose. I believe the per-word rate remains at twenty cents for theatre and twenty-five cents for poetry. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Zackary Sholem Berger

July 16, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Zackary Sholem Berger

The night sings in my arms. / It’s bedtime, flesh-and-blood.

The newest issue of Asymptote is coming out this Thursday, and in anticipation of our special Yiddish Poetry Feature, we bring you three poems from poet and translator Zackary Sholem Berger. Translated from the Yiddish, these poems are inventive and playful even as they explore serious and philosophical themes.

Guilty

This bird in town

Eyes me up and down:

My sin is known

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An Interview with Jordan Stump

January 14, 2019  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Alyea Canada

The words on the page told me everything I needed to know.

Our final Asymptote Book Club selection for 2018 was The Barefoot Woman, Scholastique Mukasonga’s “haunted and haunting love letter” to her mother. In this latest edition of our Book Club interview series, translator Jordan Stump tells Asymptote’s Alyea Canada why he leapt at the chance to translate both The Barefoot Woman and Scholastique Mukasonga’s earlier memoir, Cockroaches, and why “this is a really good time for translation.”

Already broken a few New Year’s resolutions? How about making one you’ll really enjoy? Like reading the world with Asymptote Book Club, now open to E.U. residents! It’s still not too late to pledge to read adventurously in 2019: Sign up for the Asymptote Book Club by Jan 16 and receive your first book in January!

Alyea Canada (AC): How did you come to translate The Barefoot Woman? What drew you to Scholastique Mukasonga’s work in general and to this book in particular?

Jordan Stump (JS): It was Jill Schoolman who introduced me to Mukasonga’s work, not long after Notre-Dame du Nil was published. I was immediately taken by it, so when the chance to translate Cockroaches and The Barefoot Woman came along, I leapt at it immediately. I translate books that say something in a way that strikes me as so perfect I want to try to say it myself—like learning to play a piece of music you particularly love instead of simply listening to it.  Reading is like listening; translating is like playing. There are always many reasons why a given book has that effect on me, but in this case I loved the sharpness of Mukasonga’s eye, the graceful construction of her chapters, the way a story wrapped up in unimaginable loss is told with a little smile, and the way in which that smile sometimes abruptly disappears.

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Le Rouge et le Noir: Marrakech Noir In Review

December 10, 2018  |  in Reviews  |  by Clayton McKee

“Amerchich was the kind of insult you hurled at someone to accuse them of both foolishness and insanity . . . ”

 

Marrakech Noir, collection edited by Yassin Adnan, translated from the Arabic, French, and Dutch by various, Akashic Books

With the twisting, winding small alleys in el-Medina, the bustling Jemaa el-Fna, a main square and marketplace, with its storytellers and performers, and the endless souks frequented by tourists and locals alike, Marrakech is the perfect environment for myths, legends, and stories. Seeing a rather large population increase over the past two decades as villagers and immigrants move to the city for opportunities, as well as an influx of tourists come to explore the tanneries, cuisine, and find a bit of paradise, the Red City contains a diverse landscape unlike any other in the world. Storytellers, like al-Sharqawi in “The Mummy in the Pasha’s House,” control the city’s reputation, and they can even “incorporate [a story] into the city’s very soil, till it became a part of its reddish clay or the dark green of its palm trees.” This phenomenon is notable throughout Marrakech Noir as each story, despite being written in the noir style, doesn’t reflect a noir city, but the noir that can exist in its occupants.

Marrakech Noir joins Akashic Books’s Noir Series, a series of anthologies of dark short stories set in different neighborhoods and locations around the world. This exploration of Marrakech includes stories by Fouad Laroui, Fatiha Morchid, Halima Zine El Abidine, Mohamed Zouhair, and more translated from Arabic, French, and Dutch, showcasing not only the linguistic diversity of the city but also the cultural and societal differences found within Marrakech’s meandering back alleys and main thoroughfares. But, as editor Yassin Adnan notes in the introduction: “Despite their variety, these stories remain rooted on Moroccan soil . . . ” which provides readers with new insight into a city with ever-increasing global popularity. The noir genre, while an odd literary form to use to boast about a city, manages to emerge in most stories in the anthology. The authors, however, make a conscious effort to divert the noir from the city itself and place it within the mélange of people of the city. Adnan describes the Marrekechi’s desire to tell stories with a lot of pizazz and spice; however, noir is a genre that doesn’t work as “the Marrekechi impulse is to always remain joyful.” Fortunately, that impulse was placed aside, allowing the noir to seep into the work for some powerful moments in the diverse cityscape.

Jemaa el-Fna unites practically every story as its importance in the city draws performers, local guides, tourists, and locals. Whether there to make a spectacle or simply sit in a café and witness one, everyone passes through this square. It’s in this square that Abu Qatadah in “An E-mail from the Sky,” after receiving an email from the heavens, shouts in religious fanaticism and awaits his escort to Paradise. Although not present in the square with the other onlookers, Rahal and his entire cybercafé watch as Abu Qatadah terrorizes tourists and is taken away by the police. In the same square in a different story, “A Person Fit for Murder,” Guillaume, a Frenchman who comes to Morocco to escape the monotony of France, is picked up by a young Moroccan boy who’ll fulfill his fantasies and eventually murder him. It’s also where Yusuf in “Mama Aicha” goes to gift a precious purple silk to the eponymous character and visit his former comrade, Aziz, with whom he joined in revolutionary thought and action until Aziz’s arrest.

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2018

July 23, 2018  |  in Dispatches, News  |  by Chloe Lim, Ilker Hepkaner, and Sarah Booker

Our blog editors pick their favorite pieces from the Summer 2018 issue!

Here at the blog, we continue to be amazed by the breadth of the material featured every quarter at Asymptote. From our multilingual special feature to the urgent work of Lebanese artist Mounira Al Solh, who wanted to “recollect. . . Syria through the stories of the people,” and to “live its diversity,” our Summer 2018 issue again proves that incredibly groundbreaking material is being produced far from the centers of Anglo-American literary dominance. Gathering new work from thirty-one countries, this bountiful issue, also our milestone thirtieth, unfolds under the sign of the traveler “looking for [himself] in places [he doesn’t] recognize” (Antonin Artaud). Highlights include pioneer of modern Chinese poetry Duo Duo, Anita Raja on Christa Wolf, and rising Argentinian star Pablo Ottonello in a new translation by the great Jennifer Croft. Today, the blog editors share our favorite pieces from the new issue, highlighting the diversity of cultures, languages, and literary style represented. Happy reading! 

Perhaps because of my fascination with multilingual writing and the languages of mixed cultures, I was immediately drawn to the multilingual writing special feature in this issue of the journal. Shamma Al Bastaki’s “from House to House | بيت لبيت” in particular dazzles with its polyphonic quality.

Bastaki’s three poems (“House to House,” “Clay II,” and “Barjeel”) refuse singularity, whether in terms of form, language, or register. Different voices call out from the text of each poem and are brilliantly rendered alongside an audio clip of sounds from interviews conducted by Bastaki herself. (I would recommend listening to the clips before or during your reading of the piece!) The poems are inspired by and based on the oral narratives of the peoples of the Dubai Creek, but speak also to a modern global phenomenon of language mixing and syntax shifting that many around the world will relate to. I enjoyed what Bastaki terms “severe enjambments”—defamiliarizing what is otherwise standard English syntax, creating an instructive experience for native speakers.

Form and language aside, “from House to House” in particular reminded me of the communal nature of colloquial language—the speech that we are most familiar with in our daily lives, and that which we use with our families. To present them in poetry is an attempt to memorialize what is so near and dear to us. The context of Eid is especially well suited to this project, and to the issue’s timing as a whole, in celebration of Eid just past in June. “Barjeel” on the other hand, reminds me of poetry looking back on childhood (Thomas Hood’s “I Remember, I Remember” comes to mind) and on the things that seemed so big then. The Emirati influences and polyphony of “Barjeel” take that idea and renew it—demonstrating how reflection often is not a solipsistic affair, but very often one that takes place with family, parents telling children of their childhood pasts.

—Chloe Lim

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Translating le multilinguisme

June 11, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Claire Jacobson

Translation is never a horizontal movement; there is always an uneven power dynamic between two languages.

Mektoub. Taleb. Mesquin. Cheb. Bezef. Each of these French words is also Arabic, albeit represented in French orthography. Through long proximity by colonization and immigration, Arabic influence has bled—at some moments more overtly than others—into the French language, and Azouz Begag’s 1986 autobiographical novel Le gone du Chaâba engages with this reality in each word choice and every line of dialogue.

The son of an Algerian migrant worker who settled permanently in France in 1949, not long before the brutal war for independence began, Begag employs a remarkable mixture of French, spoken Arabic, and Lyonnais slang to illustrate the linguistic realities of his community—something that poses problems for a translator who wants to retain its linguistic flavor without rendering the text totally opaque. Written in the eighties, the book and its projet linguistique is perhaps even more relevant at a time when so many Westerners think the Arabic phrase “Allahu akbar” is exclusively synonymous with terrorism.

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What’s New With the Asymptote Team

October 6, 2016  |  in News  |  by Theophilus Kwek

We've been keeping busy!

Contributing Editor Anthony Shugaar has been shortlisted for the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA)’s Italian Prose in Translation Award 2016. The winner will be announced at ALTA’s annual conference in Oakland from October 6 to October 9.

Contributing Editor Ellen Elias-Bursac’s new co-translation of Noemi Jaffe’s novel from the Portuguese, What Are The Blind Men Dreaming?, was published on September 20 by Deep Vellum and featured in Words Without Borders’ watch list for the month.

Criticism Editor Ellen Jones spoke at the British Library’s annual International Translation Day event. She and fellow panellists Simon Coffey, Elin Jones, and Fiona Sampson responded to the question, ‘What does multilingual creativity mean for translators?’ and Ellen discussed her experiences editing Asymptote’s Special Features on Multilingual Writing in 2015 and 2016, as well as her own research.

Commissioning Editor J.S. Tennant was interviewed for The Guardian’s recent feature on Fiction in Translation, on the state of world literature and translated book sales in the UK.

Editor-at-Large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood’s new co-translation of Uršuľa Kovalyk’s novel The Equestrienne will be launched on October 6 at Waterstones Piccadilly in London.

Editor-at-Large for the UK Megan Bradshaw, who organized Asymptote’s International Translation Day celebration in London last week, will be chairing a conversation with the prolific Japanese author and translator Mitsuyo Kakuta on October 26 at the Japan Foundation in London.

Assistant Managing Editor Sam Carter’s new translation of the Spanish poet Benito del Pliego’s collection Fábula/Fable (bilingual edition, Díaz Grey Editores) launched at a McNally Jackson event in New York on September 16.

Finally, Chief Executive Assistant Theophilus Kwek’s essay on writing about history and difference in poetry was published by The Lonely Crowd on September 25. Some of his poems were published in the latest issues of The London Magazine and The North.

*****

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Asymptote Podcast: Multilingual Writing

August 29, 2016  |  in Podcast  |  by Layla Benitez-James

A new installment goes live!

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In this episode, we crack a window into the creative impulses behind the multilingual writing in our Summer issue. There, Spanish and German, French and Arabic, Romanian, Sanskrit and Afrikaans all find their way woven in with English in poems and a story you don’t want to miss. Here, in this latest installment of the podcast, Omar Berrada and Klara du Plessis allow us a deeper understanding of how their linguistic backgrounds and travels shaped their current writing; while Greg Nissan uncovers other origins for his multilingual creations. So how does a translator go about translating a text already leaping across languages? And what does it take to write in the multilingual mode; does it create its own form, its own genre? What makes a writer feel driven and compelled to step outside the bounds of one language without leaving it entirely? To help us continue down this rabbit hole, Asymptote editor-at-large for Romania and Moldova, MARGENTO (Chris Tănăsescu), uncovers more about his process of translating Șerban Foarță’s poem “Buttérflyçion” for the Summer issue. We’ll explore radical nomadism, emotional chunks of language and more. This is the Asymptote podcast.

Podcast Editor and Host: Layla Benitez-James

Audio Editor: Mirza Puric

 

Ask a Translator with Daniel Hahn

August 3, 2016  |  in Ask a Translator, Interviews  |  by Daniel Hahn

Translation, like any kind of writing, depends on instinct, you mustn’t forget that. But remember, too, that even instinct can be trained.

We’ve been hungry for more since Daniel Hahn made an appearance at the Asymptote Literary Salon in London two weeks ago. This week, we’re back with translation advice from the author, translator, and editor answering the following question from Singapore-based Asymptote reader Michelle Loh.

What can a translator do to improve?

I’m writing this answer from a mid-week lull at the British Centre for Literary Translation summer school. It’s an intensive, six-day residential course for literary translators and would-be literary translators, which I’ve taken part in annually since more or less the start of my own career. (Alarmed to discover, upon quick calculation, that this is my tenth… Hmm…) The BCLT summer school is mainly structured around language-specific workshop groups, but this year I’m leading one of a pair of unusual “multilingual” workshops; the nine participants in my group for the week are all excellent literary translators into English, but from a wide and wonderful range of source languages. (Between them, my lot speak Polish, Italian, French, Spanish, Latvian, Hungarian, German, Armenian, Russian, Portuguese, Dutch, and probably one or two others I’ve forgotten.) So how do you examine the translation process all together if you can never look at a single common source? To put it another way, what the hell was I supposed to do all week? READ MORE…

Plunge into the Multilingual Writing Feature from the July 2016 Issue

August 1, 2016  |  in News  |  by Ellen Jones

Readers must ask themselves whether they are entitled to a full understanding —or indeed if such a thing is ever possible.

The past two Mondays here at the Asymptote Blog, we’ve brought you highlights from the July 2016 issue, THE DIVE. This week we’re back with Ellen Jones, editor of the vibrant and provocative multilingual writing section.

The Asymptote July issue special feature on multilingual writing is the second of its kind. The more than two hundred pieces of original poetry and fiction received in response to last year’s call for submissions—many, many more than we were able to publish—opened our eyes to the wealth of new writers who are experimenting with language mixing, and persuaded us that it was necessary to run the feature again.

What I love most about this work is its variety. There are seven contributions, from writers as far afield as Peru, South Africa, and India that, between them, incorporate English, German, Spanish, French, Romanian, Sanskrit, Afrikaans, Italian, Nahuatl, and Arabic. But more importantly, they also make use of the spaces in between these languages: unique cross-lingual sound combinations and associations, and spoken varieties that are thriving but have yet to be documented. There is some poetry, some prose. Some written by well-established literary figures and some by poets who are only just finding their voices. Some pieces for readers of only English, others best left to the true polyglots among us.

READ MORE…