Posts filed under 'Political unrest'

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

November 1, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest from Peru and Bulgaria!

This week, an exhibition honouring an iconic poet resonates with contemporary social movements in Peru, and a play causes quite the stir in Bulgaria. Read on to find out more!

Xiao Yue Shan, reporting from Peru

At the Casa de la Literatura Peruana (House of Peruvian Literature), space has appropriately been made for a poet who never wavered in his conviction of literature’s physical presence. Alejandro Romualdo (1926-2008) was a key figure of the Generación del 50—a Peruvian literary movement dedicated to a social ars poetica that would address daily realities and further political agency, formed amidst the dictatorship of Manuel Odría. Though few beyond the country will have knowledge of the power and continual influence of Romualdo’s works (which are regrettably yet to appear in English), this new exhibition, ‘Alejandro Romualdo: En la extensión de la palabra (in the extension of the word)’, firmly establishes the poet’s legacy, multiplicity, and role in shaping the Peruvian poetic landscape. Moving through not only his written works but his prolific activities as a graphic designer, humorist, cartoonist, and revolutionary, the brief but wide-ranging collection reveals a writer deeply embedded in the consciousness of his country.

‘The extension of the word’ is the title of Romualdo’s 1974 collection, which saw its writer interrogating poetry’s materialism for what more it could give to a world that demands a continuously evolving application of language. Working with concrete poetics, polyphonic constructions, and techniques of montage, Romualdo equalised the blank space of the page to the air—that which is both a separation and a link. In this era, he conceptualised the poetic form as a space where disparate or even antithetical ideas are held in a closed frame, thereby demonstrating the mind’s capacity to travel back and forth between them, uniting them as a single conceivable reality. Distance is relative in these poems, something easily breached by a long vowel sound or a dangling, dismembered line. READ MORE…

Translating the Ottoman Quartet: An Interview with Brendan Freely and Yelda Türedi

November 22, 2018  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Garrett Phelps

In practical terms, communication with the author is difficult: we can only communicate through his lawyers.

Ahmet Altan’s writing is sprawling, ambitious, radical—so radical that the author is currently serving a life sentence on charges of inciting the plotters behind Turkey’s 2016 failed coup. In the latest instalment of the Asymptote Book Club interview series, Altan’s co-translators, Brendan Freely and Yelda Türedi, reveal that their only contact with the author is through his lawyers. No written materials can be carried into or out of the prison where Altan is serving his sentence, but work continues on the final volume of the monumental Ottoman Quartet.

In conversation with Asymptote’s Garrett Phelps, Freely and Türedi give us an insight into how they came to translate Altan’s work, and why a novel sequence of novels dealing with the events of the early twentieth century has never felt fresher or more contemporary.

Garrett Phelps (GP): Like a Sword Wound is set during a momentous period in Turkish history and details the cycle of chaos which ultimately results in the Ottoman Empire’s collapse. As translators, did you feel the setting added to your burden of responsibilities?

Brendan Freely and Yelda Türedi (BF/YT): Both of us are quite familiar with this period, so the setting as such did not present any particular problem. However, we were aware of the echoes of the current political situation in Turkey, and of how little the main political currents seem to have changed in over a hundred years. In practical terms, although Like a Sword Wound was written in modern Turkish rather than Ottoman Turkish, Ahmet Altan made an effort to reflect the language of the period, often choosing outdated words and phrases. In our initial meeting to discuss the translation, he was concerned about how we would approach this. We agreed to take the same approach he did—that is, to prefer older words and phrasing to evoke the mindset of the period while still keeping the language current enough to avoid alienating contemporary readers.

READ MORE…