Posts filed under 'novels'

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Dying Water by Amna Mufti

April 12, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Haider Shahbaz

We are related to the land in many ways, but surely the strongest tie is that of the grave.

This Translation Tuesday, we are thrilled to bring to you an excerpt from the novel Paani Mar Raha Hai (Dying Water) written by the award-winning Pakistani writer Amna Mufti. With the 1947 Partition of India looming in the backdrop, Irfan and Shahida move to Pakistan and confront not just a divided world but also a divisive secret. Adapted and condensed into a self-contained short story by translator Haider Shahbaz, this at once mythic and historical tale of ecological crisis from the Urdu is a riveting take on the fault lines between geological and geopolitical boundaries.

“The novel, Dying Water, focuses on the environmental consequences of the Indus Water Treaty between India and Pakistan. In this way, it connects our current climate catastrophe to longer histories of colonialism and partition. It also changes the language and framework we use to talk about the climate crisis—instead of scientific facts, it forms a narrative out of religious beliefs and mythical tales to create a unique prose style that emphasizes our ethical connections to nature.” 

—Haider Shahbaz

 

Irfan remembered the first time someone brought up the idea of his marriage to Shahida. 

Irfan was well-educated—an alumnus of Aligarh—and extremely good looking, but even he was taken aback when he first heard about the proposal. Shahida was rich and beautiful beyond imagination. Irfan, on the other hand, didn’t have any family. It’s not like he was born from a stone. When times were good, he used to live in Amroha with all his relatives. He got his degree in engineering from Aligarh and went to Delhi to look for a government job. Around the same time, the British decided to leave and partition India. Irfan heard that government officers could choose if they wanted to stay in India or leave for Pakistan. 

What does a blind man want? Two eyes! Irfan sent a telegram to his family and told them they were moving to Pakistan. The family was scared. They didn’t want to leave. But what could they do? Eventually they mustered up the courage to get a train from India to Pakistan. Each and every family member was killed on that train. Nobody survived. 

Irfan got his Pakistan, and he loved it with all his heart. Pakistan gave him a high-ranking position in the government bureaucracy. And Pakistan gave him Shahida. He was completely blown away by her beauty, grace, and refinement. Even touching her was overwhelming for him.  READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: April 2020

April 13, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Austyn Wohlers, Clémence Lucchini, Jacqueline Leung, and Sarah Moore

New literature from Algeria, Guadeloupe, Italy, and Japan!

In the newly ruptured world, the questions that arise all seem perplexingly novel. It is somewhat of a tonic, then, that one turns to literature to find that the queries that confound us now are more specific reiterations of questions that have plagued humanity for a long, long time. What is freedom? How do we persist through the turmoil of our nations? What does the past mean for the present? And, perhaps most pertinently, what survives? In this month’s selections in translated literature, four astounding works from around the world encounter and contend with these problems in their singular styles. Below, discover a passionate novel about a real-life Algerian bookseller, a Guadeloupe-set fiction that intermingles personal and national revolution, the latest English-language volume in Roberto Calasso’s grand series on human civilization, and a Japanese literary sensation which contends with feminine pain and perseverance.

our riches

Our Riches by Kaouther Adimi, translated from the French by Chris Andrews, New Directions, 2020

Review by Clémence Lucchini, Educational Arm Assistant

Though one cannot truly stress all the qualities of Our Riches, Kaouther Adimi’s first translated novel into English by Chris Andrews, within the limits of a book review, Adimi has certainly proved that she is able to convey Edmond Charlot’s life long passion for books in less than two hundred pages. In this historical fiction, recognized with two French literary awards, Adimi finds a new way to portray her native Algeria: through Edmond Charlot’s many literary endeavors.

For those who do not know Edmond Charlot (I was among that group before reading this book), he left a great gift to the publishing world by being Camus’ first publisher, by publishing under-represented authors, and last but not least, by pioneering the design of book covers as we know it today in Western Europe, referred to as “the talk of the publishing world” in Adimi’s work. READ MORE…

New Year, New Horizons!

January 1, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Rachel Allen, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Reading resolutions for 2020—brought to you by the blog team.

Happy New Year, reader! To ring in the ’20s, we are getting personal and sharing our own reading resolutions. From literature engaged with the effects of climate change to classic theological texts, here are the reads we have on the radar for 2020. Maybe our titles overlap with some of yours? If you’re inspired, share your resolutions with us in the comments below.

Xiao Yue Shan, Assistant Blog Editor:

We are becoming ever more impelled by the worst-case scenarios, the ultimate consequences of our carelessness. Climate change is cemented at the pinnacle of every engaged mind, consuming the concerns of those on the forefront of human progress—the writers. December is a month of returns, and a trip across the Pacific on my part meant a reabsorption into the beloved stacks of books left behind by a past self who had endlessly imagined the present. I found in those volumes an incredible vitality—it takes considerably more courage to speculate on the future now, yet in our infinitely ideating language, we can’t help it, we imagine naturally, as we have always done.

Usually my reading directives are predictable, by which I mean they’re somewhat “in accordance” with my being a female Chinese poet—the tendency veers towards a healthy majority of women writers, plenty of Chinese literature, and as much poetry as possible. As we approach the new decade, however, I’ve turned my attention to literature more specifically in dialogue with our planet. In Amitav Ghosh’s beautifully urgent book-length essay, The Great Derangement, he convincingly argues for an overhaul of the fiction genre so that it may better address and reflect upon our contemporary precarity. Though the best of our stories are inevitably engaged with our environment, I found Ghosh’s take riveting in its insistence that we continue to build and invent language that is ever more precise, alert, and curious. READ MORE…

Where is Hausa Queer Writing?

November 1, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Sada Malumfashi

Find out how censorship, religion and conservatism affect the representation of queer lives and relationships in Hausa writing.

Queer culture around the world is inflected and influenced by local conditions and cultural nuances. In this essay, Sada Malumfashi takes us on a journey to investigate representations of queerness in Hausa literature.

Literature strives to depict a true picture—it is the mirror of society. While novel writing in Northern Nigeria is a fairly new innovation that began in the 20th century; queer relationships, however, have been a part and parcel of society for a much longer period. Same-sex practices have been an inherent part of African history, developing in a whole different way than in the Western context.

A queer section of the Hausa society that actually has had dominance in the literary field, without any cause for rancour, are the Yan Daudu—Feminine Men. These men comprise a bulk of the Hausa queer community and a direct translation of them as homosexuals in the western context tends not to give a complete picture. Yan Daudus have always been visible in the social strata, in close proximity to prostitutes, permitting them access to seek men for sex. The existence of Yan Daudu is well acknowledged and this translated to their reflection in almost every work of Hausa literature which cover aspects of prostitution and Bori – the Hausa cult of spirit possession. However, in a conservative culture where who you share your bed with is a private matter, it is no great surprise, then, that queer literature, or queer characters in Hausa literature apart from Yan Daudu, are relatively new.

READ MORE…

The 2018 Man Booker International Shortlist: the Subjective Nature of Literary Merit

April 26, 2018  |  in Essays, News  |  by Barbara Halla

"Fiction at its finest”, as the Man Booker tagline describes its self-imposed mission.

“A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a re-reader,” Vladimir Nabokov reminds us in his article “Good Readers and Good Writers”. There are so many books in this world, and unless your life revolves solely around books, it might be hard to be widely read and an active re-reader. Attaining this level of perfection that Nabokov describes is impossible, but the idea of re-reading as a tool to better understanding the value of a book underpins the philosophy of the Man Booker Prize International’s judging panel since its inception.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

March 23, 2018  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Diána Vonnák, and Jessie Stoolman

The most exciting world literature news—all in one place.

It’s Friday and that can only mean one thing at Asymptote: reports of exciting developments in the world of literature. This week our focus falls on a diverse set of countries, including Tunisia, Hungary, and Hong Kong. 

Jessie Stoolman, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Tunisia: 

In just a few short weeks, the 34th edition of Tunis’s annual Book Fair will begin, where numerous prize winners will be announced, including the winner of the newly created Prize for Literary and Intellectual Creativity, or prix de la créativité littéraire et intellectuelle.

However, if you’re itching for activity now, don’t fret, there are numerous literary events taking place throughout Tunisia in the meantime, with a special focus on young writers and readers. Specifically, the 10th annual Festival of Storytelling, organized by the Tahar Haddad Cultural Association in Tunis, has already begun and will continue until March 25th. The festival is dedicated to preserving Tunisian oral traditions, as each day it presents a storyteller, or حكاوتي, who brings to life tales taken from regional oral literature. Similarly, the literary association “Above the Wall” (فوق السور), created for young writers, will host its 10th annual assembly on March 20th and 21st in Benzart, one of the northernmost cities in Tunisia.

Further south, in Sousse, on April 1st, the Book Lovers Association of Sousse will hold a discussion at Le Paradoxe, a local cultural café, to discuss the Tunisian writer and poet Shafiq Tariqi’s award-winning novel, Lavazza (لافازا,) which questions the full realization of the Tunisian revolution. In 2015, the novel was awarded a monetary prize for creativity by the journal, Culture Dubai (دبي الثقافة). READ MORE…

The Man Booker International 2018 Longlist: At the Boundaries of Fiction

March 22, 2018  |  in Essays, News  |  by Barbara Halla

"Non-European works included in the longlist come highly recommended by readers and critics alike."

The 2018 Oscars may be over, but the awards season for the literary world has barely begun, with the Man Booker International Prize receiving the most international attention. In the world of translated fiction, the Man Booker International holds a prestige similar to the Oscars, which explains the pomp and excitement surrounding the announcement of this year’s longlist, made public March 12. The longlist includes thirteen books from ten countries in eight languages, from Argentina to Taiwan.

The MBI used to be a career-prize akin to the Nobel, awarded to a non-British author for his or her entire body of work every two years. Since its merger with the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize its format has changed. Now the Prize seeks to honor the author and translator of the best book (“in the opinion of the judges”) translated into English and published in the UK for the eligible period. For 2018, all eligible submission were novels or short story collections published between May 1, 2017 and April 30, 2018. Much like its sister prize (known simply as the Man Booker Prize), the winner of the MBI tends to garner much attention and sees a boom in book sales. Its history accounts for its prestige, but just as importantly, the MBI is one of the few prizes out there that splits the monetary value of its prize between the writer and translator.

Part of the MBI’s unofficial mission is to raise the profile of translated fiction and translators in the English-speaking world and provide a fair snapshot of world literature. What does this year’s longlist tell us about the MBI’s ability to achieve that goal? Progress has been made from past years, especially with regard to gender equality: six of the thirteen nominated authors and seven of the fifteen translators are women. Unfortunately, issues arise when taking into account the linguistic and regional diversity of the prize not only this year, but with previous lists as well. For 2018, only four of the thirteen books come from non-European authors, with no titles from North and Central America or Africa. This is an issue that plagued the IFFP before it merged with the MBI and marks even the Nobel Prize for literature, as detailed by Sam Carter in his essay “The Nobel’s Faulty Compass.”

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2018

March 21, 2018  |  in New in Translation, News, Reviews  |  by Anaka Allen and Janani Ganesan

Looking for your next read? You're in the right place.

Whether this March the leaves are falling or only starting to grow, new books in translation continue to push through borders and languages. This month, our editors review new translations from Germany and Lebanon, whose stories span diverse regions and explore complex notions of belonging.
Pearls-new-cover

Pearls on a Branch by Najla Jraissaty Khoury, translated from the Arabic by Inea Bushnaq, Archipelago Books

Reviewed by Anaka Allen, Social Media Manager

“It happened or maybe no.
If it did, it was long ago
If not, it could still be so.”

For twenty years, in the midst of Lebanon’s civil war that lasted from 1975 until 1990, the traveling theater company Sandouk el Fergeh (the Box of Wonders) traversed the Levant searching for inspiration for their live shows. The actors and their marionettes would travel from shelters to refugee camps, villages to towns, performing the oral tales painstakingly collected by their founder Najla Jraissaty Khoury. It was no small feat trying to find and record stories during wartime when suspicion and fear were particularly acute, not to mention the difficulty in assembling complete narratives from a depleting cache of collective cultural memory.

Oral tales are one of the most fragile cultural legacies, and too often die with their storytellers. So, what happens to the oral history of a region suffering through war and displacement? That’s what Khoury hoped to find out, and the question is what inspired her to embark on a rescue mission in search of these unwritten remnants of Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian culture. She collected dozens of folktales, writing them down exactly as they were told (repetitive phrases and all), culled one hundred from that catalog, and published them in Arabic. English speakers now have the opportunity to read a selection of thirty stories in Pearls on a Branch.

READ MORE…

Translating Magpies: A Writer’s Travails in Translation

January 27, 2016  |  in Essays  |  by Rachel Cantor

Author Rachel Cantor on faking it until making it in Italian translation and her novel, Good on Paper

Shira, bless her heart, is a good but underachieving translator. She usually translates the lesser-known works of lesser-known writers (her relationship with translation is ambivalent, to say the least); more often, she temps in New York City’s outer boroughs. But because of a ground-breaking translation she wrote in grad school of Dante’s La Vita Nuova (using a Buber-Rosenzweig leitwort approach), the Nobel Prize-winning poet Romei commissions her to translate his latest work, which riffs off La Vita Nuova in ways he promises to explain. As Shira begins to translate his Vita Quasi Nuova, however, she begins to suspect that Romei has another agenda, one that involves her personally and has nothing whatsoever to do with poetry…

Shira is not real, of course: she’s the narrator of my novel Good on Paper. To do justice to her work, I read books about literary translation, theories of translation, the practice of translation, especially from the Italian. I used as much detail as I plausibly could, so that Shira’s work could feel real, and her translation dilemmas—essential to the plot—would seem both urgent and specific. She talks—knowledgeably, I hope!—about terza rima and the “eleven-syllable Italian line.” Research because I couldn’t draw on my own experience. Like Shira, I spent my formative years in Italy, but her skill with the language far exceeds mine. Asked to read Italian novels in school, I labored; asked to translate something (anything) once in high school, I chose a Petrarchan sonnet, and did a serviceable job, though there was one line in the octave I just couldn’t get right. READ MORE…