Posts filed under 'philosophy'

What’s New in Translation: March 2024

March 11, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Bella Creel, Daljinder Johal, and Kathryn Raver

New works from Alexander Kluge, Marjane Satrapi, and Jón Kalman Stefánsson!

The latest text from one of German New Wave’s founding members and all around heavy-hitter; a wide-ranging compilation of art and testimony championing the Iranian feminist movement from Marjane Satrapi; and a moving, braided narrative of grief and recovery from a lauded Icelandic author. Our editors review some of the most exciting works in translation coming to the Anglophone this month. 

kluge

The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul by Alexander Kluge, translated from the German by Alexander Booth, Seagull Books, 2024

Review by Bella Creel, Blog Editor

Filmmaker, author, and philosopher Alexander Kluge’s most recent oeuvre, The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul, is an act of rethinking. Born in Germany in 1932, Kluge blurs the edges of the many years of his life in this ambitious work, expanding beyond the first-hand, beyond generations, drawing connections between now and before, all in order to fully describe the experience of a single life. Alexander Booth offers a wonderfully dense and witty translation from the German, with no aversion to a confusing syntax that demands rereading and rethinking.

Kluge is trying to find the right words throughout this collection, which, in the process of its creation, must have been turned over and inside out, stretched to snapping and magnified to the molecular; reading it, in turn, requires a certain liquifying of the brain. This giving-in allows one to absorb the words, which only then can be reformed into some sort of meaning. Kluge himself seems to follow a similar process:

Where does all my ‘fluent speech’, my rabid desire to write, come from? I listen to others. And carefully! A word that flies towards me, an observation that charms me into conversation, a quotation that I read: all of this gets stored inside me for the long-term.

I usually tear books to shreds, marking any places that captivate me in colour pencil before ripping the page out. These I attach to other findings of mine with a paper clip. They’re often annotated. My flat is full of these piles of paper. My personal bastion against the ‘ignorance that shakes the world’.

READ MORE…

The Intricacies of Human Experience: Natasha Lehrer on Translating On the Isle of Antioch

January 25, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Ruwa Alhayek

There's a collective responsibility in engaging with these stories, reflecting on our own roles, and finding meaning in the midst of uncertainty.

On the Isle of Antioch is lauded Lebanese-French author Amin Maalouf’s philosophically rich take on the end-of-days novel. Told through the journals of Alexander, an artist living out his days on an island he shares with only one other person, this solitary existence is suddenly upended by a total communications blackout and power failure, followed by growing threats of global nuclear warfare. Through this narrative that builds on our contemporary forebodings, Maalouf weaves in the grand resonances of history and delicate moments of human connection to gather the touchpoints between consciousness and civilization, reality and belief. Skillfully taken into English by award-winning translator Natasha Lehrer, this modern myth was our final Book Club selection for 2023, and in the interview below, we speak to Lehrer about On the Isle of Antioch’s massive range, the novelist’s role, and the importance of ambiguity.

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 USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.  

Ruwa Alhayek (RA): On the Isle of Antioch resonates strongly with contemporary events like the COVID pandemic or current geopolitical tensions; it’s intriguing how the novel captures such fears, then deviates from initial impressions. Did ongoing events have an impact on your process of translation?

Natasha Lehrer (NL): The narrative absolutely echoes real-world concerns like the Ukrainian invasion and geopolitical tensions between the U.S., Iran, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Sardar Sardarov initially appears as a Central Asian warlord, a nod to figures from the former Soviet Union. The theme of missing nuclear warheads also aligns with post-Soviet anxieties, cleverly naming and then subverting those fears.

But personally, translation is more of an intellectual exercise for me. I focus on achieving the right tone and voice for characters, especially when translating philosophical dialogues. For instance, translating an American character from French back into English is quite interesting, and Maalouf’s characters often speak in a philosophical manner rather than realistic dialogue. Reading the novel again after a year, I’m struck by the atmosphere of dread, fear, and eroticism. It’s exciting to realize that it works well, even though I wasn’t consciously conjuring specific atmospheres during translation. It’s more about accurately conveying Maalouf’s ideas. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: April 2023

April 10, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor, Rachel Landau, and Sofija Popovska

New translations from the French, Swahili, and Polish!

This month, we are taking a look at works from world literature that unveil the universal intersections at the centre of society: an empathetic interrogation into the cross-section of contemporary life in a superstore by the inimitable Annie Ernaux; a brilliantly curated selection of humanist stories from the Swahili; and a subtle, delicate look into the nature of happiness as written into dialogue by lauded Polish author, Marek Bieńczyk. Read on to find out more!

look at lights

Look at the Lights, My Love by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer, Yale University Press, 2023

Review by Laurel Taylor, Assistant Editor

Even at its best, ethnography is an ethically tricky subject; at its worst, it can dehumanize, tokenize, and Other the people who fall under its burning eye—an eye so often situated in wealth, power, whiteness, and patriarchy. Annie Ernaux is all too aware of the treacherous ethnographic ground she walks in Regarde les lumières mon amour, originally published in 2014 and translated now into an incisive and unadorned English by Alison L. Strayer as Look at the Lights, My Love. In this brief but gripping nonfiction entry, Ernaux records her various visits to the French big-box store Auchan from November 2012 to October 2013, a period which happens to coincide with the 2013 Rana Plaza building collapse in the Savar sub-district of Dhaka, Bangladesh. 

For all its drab ubiquity and late-capitalist imbrication, Ernaux treats the site of the superstore not only as a place perpetuating a unilateral and devastating economics (in the broadest sense of the word), but also one which engages humanity in complex ways—affectively, socially, temporally.

. . . when you think of it, there is no other space, public or private, where so many individuals so different in terms of age, income, education, geographic and ethnic background, and personal style, move about and rub shoulders with each other. No enclosed space where people are brought into greater contact with their fellow humans, dozens of times a year, and where each has a chance to catch a glimpse of others’ ways of living and being. Politicians, journalists, “experts,” all those who have never set foot in a superstore, do not know the social reality of France today.

Indeed, it feels almost taboo in the often inward-facing world of Parisian literature to engage with something so blasé as a big-box store. At one point, Ernaux even says in an aside, “I don’t see Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, or Françoise Sagan doing their shopping in a superstore; Georges Perec yes, but I may be wrong about that.” For me, this is what makes Ernaux’s earnest attempt at engagement all the more relevant (and close-to-home, as I grew up in a squarely middle-class family that did most of its shopping at a big-box store). In addition to the unconventional topic, this particular book also feels difficult to classify. Neither journalism nor something so structured as a dialectic, Look at the Lights, My Love is something more akin to mindfulness. It is an attempt to deliberately undo the asynchronous pace of the superstore—a place where flash sales, labyrinthine design, ever-changing displays, and the press of daily chores all collude to entrap and entangle us in the past, present, and future all at once. Ernaux’s thick descriptions, in trying to circumvent these snares, work to better provide us with “[a] free statement of observations and sensations, aimed at capturing something of the life of the place.”

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2022

December 12, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal and José García Escobar

New work from the Philippines and Palestine!

This week, we’re proud to present two brilliant publications from authors Hussein Barghouthi and Rogelio Braga. From the former comes a wondrous autofiction that uses the vehicle of a companionship to explore philosophies of life, memories, country, and conversation. From the latter,  a vivid collection that examines the various intersections and conflicts between life and work, concentrated in the electrifying, volatile urbanity of rush hour. Read on to find out more!

barghouthi

The Blue Light by Hussein Barghouthi, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah, Seagull Books, 2023 

Review by José García Escoba, EaL for Central America

Hussein Barghouthi’s The Blue Light is the story of a Palestinian writer also named Hussein, as told through his relationship with Bari, a Turkish American Sufi. Though their lives come to be somehow intertwined, one can hardly think of Hussein and Bari as friends. They’re acquaintances. They may, objectively, care for each other. There are signs of concern, empathy, and camaraderie. Solidarity, even. Pity. The connection between them is not a simple development of shared experience or mutual interest, but forms from the fleeting yet memorable encounters between the two, wherein our protagonist learns about life, the meaning of life, life after death, addiction, the mind being “an expansive entity,” and other philosophies.

—What’s the mind? I asked.
—The mind? Oh, man, it’s horrifying. See. . .
He gestured to the neon light, asphalt, skyscrapers, the pier, the closed supermarket, the university library, and said, “That’s the mind.”

Hussein, the protagonist, is a Palestinian writer who grew up in Lebanon, and goes on to study Comparative Literature at the University of Washington in Seattle. Bari, on the other hand, is an elusive figure, introduced as “that Sufi from Konya.” His theories and messages are cryptic and mysterious at best, often escalating into the contradictory and nonsensical. “He wants to control my mind. He might even be a secret agent,” Hussein writes. Nevertheless, their interactions are always memorable, filled with tension, sarcasm, empathy, and dry humor—somewhat reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. Within the novel’s dialogues, its characters discuss philosophical issues such as death and reincarnation, lucid dreams, the meaning of life, the meaning dreams, religion, and so on; not in an academic way, but in the discursive, organic way of friends.

On one occasion, Hussein and Sufi play chess, and their conversation veers from the meaning of Bari’s name, to the duality of bodies (mental and physical), to Arabic poetry, to Palestinian culture, and on. Eventually, however, Bari’s critical theories and aimless monologues veer into the territory of indoctrination. At one point, he asks Hussein to watch the water fall from his shower. Hussein does as he’s told, and additionally writes a poem about the experience of watching the water. “To hell with poetry,” says Bari. “Watch the water.” READ MORE…

Afternoons—A Case Study: On Teodora Lalova’s Afternoons like these

December 15, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Andriana Hamas

Lalova’s poetry confirms that regardless of the Other’s differences, we could always try and reach them by explaining . . . the unfamiliar details.

Afternoons like these by Teodora Lalova, translated from the Bulgarian by Jason H. Spinks, Kalin Petkov, and Gabriela Manova, Ars and Scribens Publishing, 2021

The Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov writes in one of his books that “August is the afternoon of the year.” With this subtle line, he takes his rightful place next to other insatiable thinkers who have dwelled on the special character of this particular time of day, either attempting a convincing explanation for its beguiling qualities or giving up once and for all their efforts to figure it out. So, even if we choose to ignore the all too famous quote by Henry James about the aesthetic pleasure he derives from the phrase “summer afternoon,” we should at least pay attention to what Jorge Luis Borges had to say on the matter. In one of his short stories, “The End,” he notes that “There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says it, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is as untranslatable as music.”

While I was reading Teodora Lalova’s debut collection of poems, united under the title Afternoons like these, I similarly found myself on the brink of grasping a curious feeling, too elusive for me to fully comprehend. From my perspective, the text appeared to be very close to capturing that crucial essence of the hours preceding twilight that so often escapes our miserable efforts to express it in words. Each poem, as is to be expected, achieves this in its own way. Some prefer the ironic twist of fate, while others choose to shed light on the more delicate nuances of existence. There is also a third kind that tackles complex philosophical questions in an “unbearably light” manner. Nevertheless, once the piece has located the throbbing heart of the unique afternoon, it offers a single or several lines that are certain to remain with the reader:

On afternoons like these I want to write poems about the smell of chimney smoke,
about the unread books and about first loves.
Of course, on afternoons like these
I don’t have my notebook with me.

READ MORE…

Tapestry of Coincidence: An Interview with Fate Author Jorge Consiglio

July 21, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Allison Braden

If you look at the quotidian under a microscope, the most mundane things become unrecognizable.

Jorge Consiglio’s novel Fate (Charco Press, 2021) charts a tangle of crossroads, both literal and figurative. A taxidermist, an oboist, and a meteorologist do their best to direct their destinies against the background of Buenos Aires’s frenetic streets. Their worlds tilt and collide, and the sum of their experiences poses an eternal question about whether our everyday lives—and the incidents that jolt us out of them—are the work of fate or chance. Here, Asymptote Assistant Blog Editor Allison Braden talks with Consiglio about how a befuddled immigrant, a surfeit of street names, and a relentless colony of ants propel the plot, and why English—and Charco Press—was the perfect home away from home for the Argentinian author’s fifth award-winning novel. This interview, translated from Spanish, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Allison Braden (AB): You begin Fate with an author’s note that explains your central question: “fate or chance?” What was it about this novel that inspired you to include the preface? How do you think the note shapes readers’ experience of the story?

Jorge Consiglio (JC): I included the preface at the suggestion of Charco Press. The introduction is part of the collection’s design, and I was delighted at the suggestion. In Argentina, there used to be excellent publisher called Centro Editor de América Latina which had a collection that used the same idea. I remember I used to buy the CEAL books and always enjoyed reading the author’s reflections. They were useful for situating myself within the context in which the work had been produced, and it offered a window into the author’s aesthetics and point of view. It felt like I was allowed to attend the rehearsals before seeing a play. I think in this case, in addition to that, Charco Press takes care to allow the authors to introduce themselves in their own words in countries where readers probably have never heard of them. That’s a big plus.

AB: Philosophers have grappled with the question of fate versus chance for millennia, and they’ve proposed various approaches for dealing with the vicissitudes of an unpredictable life. (The Stoics’ recommendation to face everyday frustrations and furies with grace and patience certainly would have benefited a couple of the short-tempered characters in Fate.) How did philosophy shape your approach to the novel’s central theme?

JC: When I was struck with the idea to write Fate, I didn’t think about philosophy or anything like it. What came to me first was a scene in which two characters whose destinies had been tapping on each other missed the chance to exchange a glance of recognition only by a few seconds. That was the trigger for the text, but as I made progress in the writing, I suspect because of the evolution of the plot, I was presented with the question of fate versus chance. I’m not the first to arrive at this question, of course. There were—and are—many writers who create their fiction out of this counterpoint. I guess it’s inevitable that, by dint of our ephemeral nature, we’ll stumble into these existential issues at some point. It’s true that philosophy seeks to reflect on the vicissitudes of the unpredictable. Religion and magical thinking, too. The characters in Fate aren’t thinking about these questions. They act without much reflection, but the plot development, like a poor imitation of life, embodies these questions that will never be resolved.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2021

June 14, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by David Boyd, Eva Wissting, and Julia Sherwood

The best and latest from Mexico, Sweden, and Poland!

This month, our selections of excellent works from around the world are manifold with mystery: some historical, some psychological, and some linguistic. From Poland, philosopher Remigiusz Ryziński attempts to figure out the sexual politics behind Michel Foucault’s hasty departure from Warsaw. The newest autobiographical novel from Linda Boström Knausgård contends with the author’s own experiences with electroshock therapy, and its impact on her memories. Lastly, in an essay collection by Mariana Oliver explores the act of moving between the various territories of cities and languages, between familiarity and curiosity. Read on to find out more!

foucault

Foucault in Warsaw by Remigiusz Ryziński, translated from the Polish by Sean Gasper Bye, Open Letter, 2021

Review by Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large for Slovakia

“Michel Foucault came to Poland in October 1958. He took a position as the first director of the newly founded Center for French Culture at the University of Warsaw. It was in Warsaw that he finished his doctoral thesis, later published as History of Madness. Yet in mid-1959, he was forced to leave Poland. The reason was a certain boy, Jurek. No one ever figured out who this boy really was.” With the mystery laid out, Remigiusz Ryziński opens his exploration of this little-known episode in the life of the philosopher as a young man, and his attempt to find out what led to Foucault’s expulsion from Warsaw.

Foucault in Warsaw is the first non-academic book by Remigiusz Ryziński—a Polish philosopher and cultural critic who studied at the Sorbonne—and another addition to Sean Gasper Bye’s impressive portfolio of translations. Combining the techniques of literary reportage with the analytical tools of Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, Ryziński has unearthed secret police dossiers and trawled through hundreds of pages of reports filed by undercover cops and snitches: “Stories typed or handwritten, full of dates and places, names and connections, meetings, relationships, breakups, love, and suffering. Reading them felt like flipping through someone’s family photo album.” He immersed himself in the press and newsreels from the period, incorporating details, such as the price of everyday goods and statistical information, to conjure up the flavours, textures, and colours of Warsaw—the city that is as much a hero of this book as the philosopher himself, along with “the boys whose company Foucault enjoyed most.”

For those familiar with recent works of Polish literature, Ryziński’s reconstruction of the life of the gay community in Warsaw in the late 1950s will bring to mind Lubiewo, Michał Witkowski’s groundbreaking 2004 novel depicting gay life on Poland’s Baltic coast, before and after the end of communism. While Witkowski’s book presents fictionalised versions of real stories and characters, Ryziński has tracked down the actual people who knew Foucault during his time in Warsaw (including some who were romantically linked to him) or were active on the gay scene at the time. He retraced the places Foucault did—or was likely to—frequent, recreating a detailed topography of Warsaw’s cruising spots: an assortment of cafés and bars from the seedy to the sophisticated, steam baths both ornate and functional, public squares and monuments ideally suited for pulling soldiers, and public toilets such as the French-style urinals known as “mushrooms,” to the bathrooms at the Palace of Culture, considered “the height of luxury.” READ MORE…

The Indeterminacy of the Human: An Interview with Rainer Hanshe of Contra Mundum Press

March 31, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Rachel Allen

. . . we say to read for difference, for dissonance; read not to identify, or to sympathize, but from a principle of fascination.

Contra Mundum is a New York-based independent publishing house expressly committed to Modernist work and principles. Its catalog includes the dramatic writings and theatre criticism of Robert Musil; Celan’s posthumous prose as translated by Pierre Joris; two “pre-heteronymic” works from Pessoa; the generously-illustrated Letters of Otto Dix; and a late film script from Marguerite Duras. Preference is given texts with limited circulation, the under-translated and outré in particular. 

In 2012, for instance, Contra Mundum published Marginalia on Casanova, Tim Wilkinson’s rendering of Volume 1 in Miklós Szentkuthy’s cathedral-commentary-catalogus rerum, St. Orpheus Breviary. Contra Mundum is now five books into its tremendous project, bringing into English an immense cosmophagic-and-collapsing body of prose from a modernist still known as the “sacred monster” of Hungarian letters. In addition to works from the Breviary, Contra Mundum has so far contributed translations of Prae and Toward the One & Only Metaphor (also translated by Wilkinson, who died in October of 2020) and Chapter on Love (translated by Erika Mihálycsa, who will continue as translator for subsequent Szentkuthy works). That CMP should be the publisher to finally give Anglophone readers an adequate Szentkuthy is fitting: press and author share an understanding of zeitgeists alive—in art, in language—across history, unthreatened by chronology or multilingualism. Contra Mundum too experiences its periodic connection to modernism(s) without—or with different—temporal allegiances. In addition to Musil and Pessoa, CMP has published not only Baudelaire and Wordsworth and the Ghérasim Luca of Mary Ann Caws, but also Iceberg Slim, a new Gilgamesh (Stuart Kendall’s), Ahmad Shamlou, Maura Del Serra, and the collected prose of Robert Kelly. Many texts converge around performance, whether onstage, on screens, or in person(ae): CMP has published Elio Petri, Richard Foreman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, Rédoine Faïd, and Carmelo Bene. Adjacent to this swirl of codexical text and idea is Hyperion, CMP’s in-house and aptly subtitled journal: On the Future of Aesthetics.

Rainer J. Hanshe is the founder, editor, and publisher of Contra Mundum Press, as well as the author of two CMP titles, Shattering the Muses and The Abdication, and the translator of its three works by Baudelaire. We spoke recently about the nature of (his) modernism and its role in contemporary literature. Deviation, ambition, and heteroglossia were our major subthemes.

Rachel Allen (RA): How does Contra Mundum understand “modernism”? How do you recognize modernist work when you encounter it? (Is modernism limited, temporally? Geographically? Relationally? Formally? To whom is it available to be modernist?)

Rainer Hanshe (RJH): Although Modernism does occur within a specific epochal moment, I don’t see it as bound to that cluster of time, nor do I see it in absolute or purist terms. There is no kind of totemic Modernism with a unified set of precepts that every modernist abides by. Any kind of doctrinaire, sectarian, or dogmatic form of something cannot be abided. We are advancing modernism more as a kind of mobile act or event, like a type of living roving machine (not in a mechanistic sense but as a generative force) or combustion furnace and monster of energy. It is a question of extracting from any period, any event, any moment, its active, productive elements, like taking an arrow shot by Nature, picking it up where it has fallen, and shooting it in new directions, as Deleuze said of Nietzsche.

In that way, art is no different from science in terms of advancements—once a certain insight or knowledge has been developed, there is no reason to abandon it, let alone restrict it to its original moment. Modernism (let’s avoid the term neo-Modernism) is to us protean and metamorphic, an open, indeterminate constellation. Beyond seeing it solely as a specific movement in time then, consider its principal elements as if they were discoveries: a conscious break with tradition (abandoning outmoded elements of classicism); a rejection of historicism and the grand narratives of Western metaphysics, not to speak of its morals and values; the displacement of reason as a ruling force (the curse of the Enlightenment) and fostering in its stead a chiasmic fusion of the rational and the irrational; an abandonment of bankrupt forms of art, such as naturalism and realism (and so representation), which different scientific developments essentially undermined, and Enlightenment-type encyclopaedic projects of totality; related to consciousness and new conceptions of the self and the indeterminacy of the human: interior monologues; stream of consciousness; perspectivalist viewpoints; fracturedness, fragmentation, heteroglossic language, en plus.

It is a literature of incommensurabilities, of a dynamism in signification, of a rejection of absolute truths, of an embracing of dissonance. A literature that is aware of language’s limits, of its fissures, of its cul-de-sacs and cracks, and it vigorously pursues such. Flaubert’s book about nothing; Mallarme’s Le Livre; Beckett’s search for a literature of the unword; et cetera. Modernism understands language as Bakhtin spoke of it: a dynamic entity consisting of an interplay between centripetal and centrifugal discursive forces. The combustive furnace. Heteroglossia. An amalgam of linguistic registers. The Tower of Babel is not a curse. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2020

December 14, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Allison Braden, MARGENTO, and Sarah Moore

The latest in literature from Spain, Romania, and France!

Our final selections in excellent translations for the year of 2020 are fittingly full of thought. Throughout these texts, one finds the endless potential roadmaps that chart out from the individual mind’s interrogation and contemplation of their surroundings, and one’s own place within them. From a wandering mind, everything is a pool for endless reflection; a Catalan collection draws from the sea, a Romanian notebook is filled with musings and defiances of authorship, and a French diary novel tells the lives of many through the life of one. 

salt water

Salt Water by Josep Pla, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush, Archipelago Books, 2020

Review by Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large for Argentina

On a recent virtual happy hour, my friend described a weekend camping trip on a secluded barrier island off the coast of Georgia, in the southern US. My envy verged on rage as I listened from my living room, which doesn’t get enough natural light. He said that after he and his wife kayaked over and set up their tent (annoying a resident heron in the process), they had done absolutely nothing—not even read. They sat on the shore and watched the sea. It’s easy to believe how that could have been enough.

Josep Pla would understand. In Salt Water, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush and released by Archipelago Books this month, Pla writes that “the mere presence of the sea is enough to sink into the deliquescent bliss of the contemplative life.” His curiosity courses through the book, a series of ten sketches that revolves around the coast of Pla’s native Catalonia: he describes shipwrecks, submarines, and harebrained sailing schemes. He relates stories from a salty, one-handed raconteur and imbues the rambling tales with strikingly lifelike texture. Though his plots unfold on or near the sea, human culture is ever present. Pla revels in detail, describing at length the joy of nearly black coffee on a marginally small boat: “That beverage makes an almost immediate impact: your mind projects itself onto the outside world, you are fascinated by everything around and a gleam comes to your eyes.” This book is a product of that fascinated, caffeinated gaze.

In the preface, Pla describes the stories as writings from his adolescence. In the translator’s note at the end of the book, however, Bush clarifies that they were written in the 1940s and hypothesizes that the preface was a canny attempt to evade censorship. He points out that Pla’s “articles containing veiled critiques of the dictatorship made him the most censored journalist in Spain.” Indeed, his biography offers helpful context for the conflicting claims that bookend the collection.

As a university student a century ago, Pla developed a clear, intelligible writing style and deployed it throughout his career as a journalist. He traveled widely across Europe as a foreign correspondent and served briefly as a member of Parliament for the Commonwealth of Catalonia, a short-lived assembly notable for its symbolic value. Over its eleven years in existence, the Commonwealth promoted Catalonia’s unity and identity, and evinced strong support for the Catalan language—Pla’s language. He became a chronicler of Spain’s tumultuous early twentieth-century history and spent multiple stints in exile. In the 1940s, he took to exploring his native coast and writing dispatches for Destino, a Burgos-based magazine at the forefront of the reemergence of Catalan-language culture. Throughout his peripatetic career, Pla never stopped writing: his complete works, compiled shortly before his death in 1981, stretch over thirty-eight volumes. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “My Friend Daniele’s Flight” by Ernesto Franco

August 25, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Anne Milano Appel

His hands were so clenched on the wheel that the knuckles stood out white from the force and concentration.

A flying lesson allegorizes the lifework of Italian writer Daniele Del Giudice in “My Friend Daniele’s Flight,” our selection for this week’s Translation Tuesday. In this philosophical essay, writer and editor Ernesto Franco recounts Del Giudice’s views on the writer’s vocation, a discipline defined by the responsibilities of precise language and careful attention to the world. Del Giudice gives Franco the controls of his plane—upon which we are guided through Del Giudice’s philosophies on writing, friendship, and ways of knowing the world. Franco turns to three key words to describe Del Giudice’s enterprise: Sentire, the feeling that relies upon lived knowledge and experience to avoid sentimentality; Mania, the obsessive energy that demands precision and allows one to know the world; and Phantasia, a creative contrast to shallow, mimetic ways of writing. Franco’s memoir comes to a tragic revelation, but the allegory nonetheless has Del Giudice safely returning us from our flight, illustrating what his philosophies can teach us outside of literature.

“Here, now you take it,” Daniele tells me, continuing to look straight ahead while at the same time taking both hands off the controls. It is a cold, sunny autumn morning toward the end of the nineties. We have just taken off from Nicelli Airport in Venice-Lido aboard a single-engine touring plane, whose model I don’t remember, and which Daniele has stabilized to maintain altitude. I had just experienced the words that I have not forgotten and that I won’t ever forget: “The run-up to take-off is a metamorphosis; here is a pile of metal transforming itself into an aeroplane by the power of the air itself, each take-off is the birth of an aircraft, this time like all the others you had had the same experience, the same wonder at each metamorphosis.” The precise, imaginative words of Staccando l’ombra da terra for something I had never experienced before, because taking off on the grass aboard a small airplane, a small “machine” as Daniele would say, sitting beside the pilot, is something completely different from taking off on a normal airliner. Among other things, with the title Staccando l’ombra da terra he formulated for all of us non-pilots an action and an emotion that did not exist before, and did so with the paradoxical effect (how can a shadow take off from the ground?) of the precision of the words concurrent with the added “shadow” of meaning which they alluded to. I actually felt as if wings had sprouted from my shoulders, but I didn’t dare move. “Go on . . .” Daniele says with a knowing smile. And I place two hands on the control wheel, remaining stock-still amidst the roar of the “machine.” Who knows why, but I feel like I have to be ready to make a move and resist with a decisive, forceful action. Perhaps, simply, my body is thinking about the powerful, rotational thrust of the rudder of a sailboat, with which I am much more familiar. But that’s not the case. The flight control is very light. You can practically move it just by thinking of moving it, but doing so moves the entire world in which we find ourselves. Steering on the edge of a subtle, brand new sense of equilibrium. That’s the sensation that I will have the whole time spent inside Daniele’s mania.

When I think of Daniele, of his books, his writing, his idea of literature, his way of thinking and understanding, even when I think of our friendship, the feeling I had at that moment comes back to me. I think about it even now, when I arrive in Venice and instead of San Polo or the hangar, I head for Giudecca, make my way through the maze of calle to the residence where he is housed, and speak my name into the intercom. Everyone here is very kind, the grounds, which overlook the lagoon and the Lido, are beautiful, but of no use to Daniele now, whom I always find in his room. A room that I could not distinguish from the outside, a room that is his, so to speak, in a neutral way: containing him, but without any trace of him. It seems strange only to me. His traces can be found, however, not only in his books, but in some universal words that speak of Daniele Del Giudice better than any other utterance. I will choose three. Sentire, to feel, to experience, has been one of “his” words since Lo stadio di Wimbledon and Atlante occidentale in fact. He applies it, I’ve always thought, not so much as an antidote to sentiment, but to sentimentality employed as an element, as recourse, rhetoric, to compensate for the aphasia of a lack, or absence, of experience. Sentire, on the other hand, is like improvisation in jazz: you can’t do it if you don’t know all the music, but you can’t do it if you don’t venture to the edge of the music you know, and from there love and know in one sound, in one action. READ MORE…

Internal Harmonics: Fionn Petch on Translating Luis Sagasti’s A Musical Offering

August 20, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Josefina Massot

It is a very delicate balancing act . . . Any discordant note, and the whole might collapse.

True to its title and Sagasti’s style at large, our July Book Club selection reads like a Bachian fugue: it features countless shifts in pace, genre, tone, and content, but it weaves them into soulful patterns; it’s filled with deliciously nerdy in-jokes, but it ultimately strikes a universal chord. How does one transcribe such a complex score into English, making sure its author’s voice still sings? Fionn Petch has done it twice (he translated Sagasti’s Fireflies to great acclaim in 2018), and here he talks about it at length. One of many priceless takeaways: don’t get lost in theory—get lost with the author in a maze-like garden crammed with sculpture-poems instead.

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): Like Fireflies, A Musical Offering flaunts a striking variety of literary genres: narrative, essay, aphorism, the occasional script-like quotation, and even something like blank verse (e.g., a fragment on the Voyager probe towards the end of ‘Sky Ants’). You’ve translated fiction, poetry, drama, and children’s books, among other things; did your experience with these different genres come in handy when translating Sagasti? Is there a genre you particularly enjoy working with?

Fionn Petch (FP): First of all, I’d like to thank you for a wonderfully insightful and deeply thoughtful review in Asymptote. It’s no exaggeration to say it brought new perspectives to the book for me.

Yes, it’s true that the short sections that comprise A Musical Offering switch between styles very rapidly. Sometimes, readers barely have time to find their bearings before they are propelled onto the next one. Of course, this is also a reflection of the swift changes in pace in the Goldberg Variations—which rather undermines the story that it was composed as a cure for insomnia! So in translating, it was important to be alert to these abrupt changes in tempo and intensity, and to what Sagasti is trying to get across with each section: evoke a feeling, make a subtle observation, set up an unspoken echo with another passage, or just convey a piece of information. Even the disarmingly straightforward segments that read like a line from a biography or encyclopedia require careful attention to how they are structured, as they have a very deliberate weight and emphasis. These are what Sagasti describes as ‘poetic facts.’

So there’s no doubt that all the genres you mention are relevant to draw on. You need a poetic ear for the specific weight of single words, a dramatist’s attention to gesture and glance—Sagasti is very precise in describing these—and you also need the innocence and sense of wonder often found in children’s literature. Of all the genres you mention, this last is undoubtedly the hardest to translate . . . But they all have their pleasures and challenges. READ MORE…

The Circumference of Love’s Primal Language in Ghérasim Luca’s La Fin du monde

June 10, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Jared Fagen

Love for Luca is not an ideal, but a configuration under constant scrutiny and forever reinvented (or misconfigured).

The legacy of Romanian surrealist poet Ghérasim Luca is his singular style: ferocious in desire, elaborate in theory, and fraught with the contradictions and impossibilities of translating human emotion into language. In the following essay, Jared Fagen situates Luca in his rightful place within the Surrealist canon in a comprehensive and discerning study of his love poem, La Fin du monde: Prendre corps.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
—Pascal

Ghérasim Luca’s La Fin du monde: Prendre corps (The End of the World: To Embody) deserves a place within any discussion of the surrealist love poem. Indeed, in the spirit of Pierre Reverdy’s contradictory conjoining of objects (following Lautréamont’s “dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella”), the chance amorous encounters of André Breton’s Nadja, and the startling, ambiguous juxtapositions of Robert Desnos’s Liberté ou l’amour! (Liberty or Love!), a resemblance between the French treatment of love and Luca’s own handling can be undoubtedly determined. But for all the impassioned intensity, violent eroticism, and revolutionary fervor it shares in common with the works of such surrealist masters, Luca’s poem can also rightfully be situated—like the poet himself—just outside this conversation, on the fringes, or raised perhaps after its conclusion, in the exhaustion and wake of interpretation.

A founder and member of the short-lived Romanian circle (1940–1947), with Gellu Naum, Dolfi Trost, Paul Păun, and Virgil Teodorescu, Luca and his contributions to surrealist aesthetics are distinct precisely because of the tradition from which they spring (and disrupt) and the origins they seek to restore. This subtle yet significant variation of love between Luca and the French surrealists relies primarily upon a deviation of linguistic usage: despite the spirit, a rift (or departure) can be discerned on the surface—the body—of La Fin du monde; one in which love is performed by a peculiar operation of language that is as native as it is natal, as in place as it is apart. “If I am speaking only the language I have been taught,” writes Breton in L’amour fou (Mad Love), “what will ever serve as a signal that we should listen to the voice of unreason, claiming that tomorrow will be other, that it is entirely and mysteriously separated from yesterday?” For Luca, the question is fundamental to his own poetic project, yet is itself futile: “Putting aside the precariousness of man’s existence, his rudimentary biology leaning towards the reactionary, the funereal, with the vague and progress-inducing hope that everything will be solved tomorrow, when I know that this very tomorrow will always be late in arriving, because any tendency to surpass and shatter our own limits is prohibited because of our good sense, because of our modesty and rationalism.”

These two quotes reveal an interesting disparity between an amorous poetic language in service to stifling the world of reason in order to eclipse and transform it, and an amorous poetic language whose endeavor to seek respite or refuge from the progressive world results in its anguished expression. This latter point is critical to our experience of Luca’s poem. For Breton, surrealist love offers possibility, optimism, hope: the perpetual pursuit, possession, and renewal of love’s meeting as if—like the penultimate poem in his L’air de l’eau professes—“Toujours pour la première fois” (“Always for the first time”). For Luca, love is a construct already narrativized, or “ready-made,” always despairing of the revolutionary freedom it purports yet ultimately fails to fully achieve. Like Antonin Artaud’s Van Gogh, the “I” of Luca’s La Fin du monde is suicided by society, discharging its lascivious behaviors within “the myth of reality itself,” a reality that is “terribly superior to all history, to all fable, to all divinity, to all surreality.” READ MORE…

Reflections on the Daily: Jean Giono’s Occupation Journal

May 25, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Sarah Moore

This is the journal of an established writer, who, even within these pages, grapples between his own identity and the "legend" of Jean Giono.

Occupation Journal by Jean Giono, translated from the French by Jody Gladding, Archipelago Books, 2020

This is not a journal. It’s simply a tool of the trade. My life is not completely depicted. Nor would I want it to be. As I’ve said, here I practise scales, I break up my sentences, I try to stick as closely as possible to the truth. But sometimes events are so rich with drama or pathos . . . that practising scales—my scales— isn’t sufficient and I have to invent. For me, anyway, expressing truths of this order is impossible without inventing. Moreover, it’s to be able to express them simply that I force myself to do this daily work.

—Jean Giono, “December 25, Christmas”

In his own words, this book is an exercise: a series of attempts to train himself in writing, for when his “trade” is truly called upon. His goal? Simplicity and truth. Yet, reading this work in 2020, now available for the first time in English and translated by Jody Gladding, it is so much more than a mere exercise. Jean Giono’s Occupation Journal is a fascinating record of life under Nazi occupation in France, and an insight into the daily reading and writing practices of a dedicated author. Written between September 1943 and September 1944 whilst living in the town of Manosque in the south of France, it was only published in French in 1995 (by Gallimard, as Journal de l’Occupation). The diary entries are a fascinating historical record as well as immensely clever insights into the presence and importance of literature in a writer’s life.

By the time he began Occupation Journal, Giono was already a well-known writer, with over ten works published, including his famous “Pan trilogy.” He was also equally famous for his pacifism. Having been called up to fight on the frontline in WW1, Giono would never forget the horrors of his experience, and the resulting principles influence all of his early work. This journal, therefore, comes at a crucial time in his development; the majority of his work published after the war left behind pacifism, whose failure he witnessed in the coming of a second war, and adopted a greater pessimism with regards to human nature. Certain writers, including Stendhal and Balzac, also heavily impacted his later writing. This journal is a key into discovering this period of transition—a period so evidently crucial in the development of his thinking that its importance cannot be underestimated.

The infusion of literature into his daily living is remarkable. Giono notes profusely what he is reading, what he intends to read, and his reflections on what he has read. His reading is structured and often consists of long classics: Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, Balzac, Homer, Virgil. It’s almost enviable in its attention to detail and its scope—”I’ve read all of Proust carefully ten times”! Fascinatingly, he often views literature as a model, a possibility of this world, and he judges the world by the standards of those encountered in fiction. He views “nobility” and “grandeur,” for example, in terms of Lancelot and Don Quixote and applies this to war taking place in the “modern, mechanical world,” where, of course, society falls short:

But the quest for the Grail made the knights-errant gallop in a straight line. Even Don Quixote walks straight. Today it seems as though the Grail has shattered and they are chasing all the scattered bits of it in every direction.

READ MORE…

Soft Power: Gabriella Page-Fort on Editing Oksana Zabuzhko’s Your Ad Could Go Here

May 21, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Allison Braden

. . . both a fairy-tale reverie and a feminist call to action; the book offers a window on twenty-first-century Ukraine and on ourselves.

One could not conceive of contemporary Ukrainian literature without Oksana Zabuzhko’s wide-ranging body of work coming to the mind’s forefront. With volumes of fiction, poetry, and essays to her name, her remarkable fusion of lyric and philosophy has earned her the unceasing admiration of both critics and the general public. We were enormously excited to present her latest English-language work, the short story compilation Your Ad Could Go Here, as our April Book Club selection. The eight tales are ripe with her signature eye for detail and acute insight into the heart of human matters, and signify the triumph of an author whose trusted voice remains her greatest tool in combating themes both personal and political. In the following interview, Allison Braden speaks to the volume’s editor, Gabriella Page-Fort, about the significance of Zabuzhko’s oeuvre and the impact of these powerful stories. 

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!  

Allison Braden (AB): How did you go about selecting and arranging the stories in this collection? What sorts of criteria, aesthetic or otherwise, did you consider? 

Gabriella Page-Fort (GP-F): With topics ranging from Ukraine’s Orange Revolution to sexual empowerment and attractive tennis instructors, Your Ad Could Go Here is both wildly entertaining and intensely provocative. Oksana decided which stories to include and in what order, but translators Halyna Hryn, Nina Murray, and Askold Melnyczuk were also part of the conversation about how best to order these stories. The collection’s three central themes—sisterhood, truth, and aging—strike a balance between the personal and the political. The result is powerful: both a fairy-tale reverie and a feminist call to action; the book offers a window on twenty-first-century Ukraine and on ourselves. What would it feel like to have power? What structures that define our lives are worthy of our submission, and what are the true risks of, say, admitting weakness truthfully to a man?

AB: What was it like working with a diverse team of translators? Did you edit their work to create a cohesive narrative voice throughout, or did you welcome stylistic discrepancies from one story to the next?

GP-F: We worked with five different translators for this collection, each bringing their own element of style and theory to the text. This was a really exciting creative challenge. Oksana wrote these stories in a variety of voices, so a single tone for the whole collection would be inappropriate, but we also wanted to make sure the book flowed nicely. Rather than undoing the translators’ elegant individual contributions, Nina, acting as volume editor and an expert in Ukrainian translations and Oksana’s work, and I, with an eye toward an English-language reader, focused on developing patterns, such as consistent logic in punctuation choice, to result in a smooth read without compromising style or the diverse range of voices here.  READ MORE…