Posts filed under 'Post-Modernism'

Poetic Justice: Will Firth on Translating Andrej Nikolaidis’ Anomaly

May 23, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Sofija Popovska

Oh, plans. I can't make plans. I'm a translator.

The apocalypse has always been a popular topic in literature, but Andrej Nikolaidis’ Anomaly is no regular walk around the end of the world. From one of the Balkans’ most fearless voices, the last day of humanity sees a complete collapse of the timeline as everything that has ever happened begins to occur at once. All sins rise to the surface, the dead return to testify, and the Devil himself makes wry commentary on all the fluff and frivolity we use to conceal our deepest secrets. Incisive, indicting, but not without compassion, Anomaly brilliantly exhibits the vital and intrepid nature of Nikolaidis’ work, which, coupled with a poetically lucid style and explosive intelligence, provoke readers to consider our world’s most central and incendiary contradictions. As our Book Club selection for the month of April, we had the opportunity to talk to Will Firth, the translator of Anomaly, about his remarkable work in bringing Nikolaidis’ writing to English, and what it means to be both translator and advocate.

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. 

Sofija Popovska (SP): Anomaly isn’t the first novel by Andrej Nikolaidis that you’ve translated, could you tell me more about how you two met and began to collaborate?

Will Firth (WF): I was first drawn to Andrej’s polished prose, coupled with his intelligent black humor—or cynicism as some would call it, and the remarkable imagery that he uses in all of his books. It’s basically the dense, intense intellectual challenge of his writing that I really like.

I didn’t actually meet him until 2012; I had translated his first novel, The Coming, and we had a launch event in London, at the now defunct Europe House. It’s a typical situation, actually; I don’t always meet authors before I translate their books, but I’m in touch with them while I’m in the process of translating, and several have become friends, which is a nice spin-off.

SP: You mentioned in an email to me that Andrej’s written about the apocalypse a lot, and this isn’t the first apocalypse-themed book he’s written. Has he said anything about why he loves this theme so much? And is Anomaly sort of a step—or a conclusion—in his literary project?

WF: Well, I don’t actually know what his greater literary project is. I’m not sure what he has in mind for the next few years and decades, but he certainly is fascinated by this idea of the apocalypse. In a text that I’ve quoted in various places, he calls himself an apocalyptist. He really feels it as a part of his existence: that the world we live in is doomed, in a way, and that better things, greater things, different things can arise from that.

But he’s playing with this idea all the time in his different books, and approaching the topic of the apocalypse from different angles. I’m not really sure why he’s so fixed on it, but it probably has a bit to do with his intellectual interests and the writers he’s into—Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, the post-Marxist, fairly radical writers.

But his personal experience of having to flee from Sarajevo in 1992 as a youth was certainly scary, if not traumatic. Add to that the experience of war, of systemic change, of being uprooted, being a refugee—and all sorts of other things. I mean, think of the massive earthquakes that the whole Balkan region has experienced: Montenegro in 1979, and Macedonia in 1963. Those are things that create a sense of insecurity, a sense that this world is dangerous and has its limitations, and we could be dead tomorrow. Those feelings perhaps flow into his interest in the apocalypse. READ MORE…

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #4 Envy by Elfriede Jelinek

December 27, 2022  |  in News  |  by Matthew Redman

Their most pathetic longings are laid bare with sadistic glee; there are conspiratorial asides, loopy digressions about the financial crash.

“The waistband of Brigitte’s pants is so tight already, I’m surprised she doesn’t have to saw herself in half to get undressed! Her blouse, not so much: everything in there went south ages ago, but then that’s the way of all flesh. Brigitte has gone from the big top to the big bottom: in the one-ring circus of life, she is a one-woman seesaw, a no-man band.”

Number 4 is a monster of a text from our Summer 2022 issue, an extract of Nobel Prizewinner Elfriede Jelinek’s Envy, translated from the German by her frequent collaborator Aaron Sayne. Envy is viscerally unhappy in the finest Jelinekian tradition. Weirdness, deep pessimism, and misery are the big tonal flavors here. We are captive to a sadistic narrator who rants and raves and betrays her characters at every turn. Asymptote’s Liam Sprod puts it perfectly: this is the quintessence of “Mitteleuropa miserablism”: festering nastiness and narrative complexity and gallows humor.

Our narrator possesses total knowledge of the inner lives of the characters who litter her monologue, (a middle-aged piano teacher; the eighteen year-old boy she lusts after; his divorced mother who works all day in the bank the next town over). Their most pathetic longings are laid bare with sadistic glee, there are conspiratorial asides, loopy digressions about the financial crash and cannibals, and awful, awful puns; after a while it dawns on you that the mockery is not only for her benefit, but also possibly for ours. You get the sense she might be trying to make us laugh—worse, she might be trying to impress us, to curry our favor, even. There’s a pervasive meta-awareness to all the scorn and mockery—these may well be repulsive gifts laid at our feet. Is she afraid of us? Should she be? Is she insane? Read and decide for yourself. It’s powerful, polarizing stuff—a narrator so finely poised between awareness and delusion—and it rewards rereading. This may well be why it climbed so high on this list.

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DISCOVER OUR FOURTH MOST-READ ARTICLE OF 2022

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Translating Finnegans Wake: An Interview with Hervé Michel

March 6, 2017  |  in Interviews  |  by Derek Pyle

I would advise that a reader approach Finnegans Wake like a work of art—a composition of sounds and colors, music and painting...

Can Finnegans Wake be translated into another language? As the joke well-known amongst Joyceans goes, “Which language are you translating it from?”

If it is possible to translate Finnegans Wake, the next question might be: who on earth is willing and able to undertake such a task? Who even has the time to translate this work Joyce spent 17 years writing?

The Wake has been translated into French twice. Philippe Lavergne translated the book in the early 1980s, but unsatisfied with this edition, Hervé Michel has spent the last two decades working on a translation of his own.

Michel was born to French parents, in 1950s Morocco. He spent his youth “wandering across Europe, America, Africa and the Near East.” From 1979 until 1984 he lived in Casablanca, studying Arabic. Michel joined the French civil service in 1986 and eventually attended the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA). With an annual acceptance rate of only 6%, ENA is an extremely elite graduate school for French government administrators and officials. After a decade of varied work ranging from finance to international relations, in 1996 Michel accepted a high-ranking position within the French Ministry of Defense.

In his spare time, Michel reads the Wake. He first encountered the book in 1980 and began translating the text in 1997. He has tried at various times to find a publisher for his translation, but the audience for Finnegans Wake translations is limited. In 2004 Michel decided to publish his translation as Veillée Pinouilles online, a format that allows him to make ongoing updates and revisions à la Leaves of Grass.

As Michel prepared to retire from his career in the civil service, he graciously took the time to speak with me about this longstanding fascination with the Wake. The interview was conducted over email, a format allowing for conversation as well as textual elucidation and analysis.

Derek Pyle (DP): How did you first get interested in Joyce?

Hervé Michel (HM): My interest first went to Finnegans Wake, not to James Joyce. By 1985, I had returned to Paris from a five-year sojourn in Morocco—a country where I happened to be born and raised from 1950 to 1962 and where I had returned with my newly-met wife Constance Hélène in 1980—where I had spent a jolly good time studying Arabic and reading the Qur’an. Back in Paris I felt compelled to go to the Galignani English bookshop on Rue de Rivoli to buy Finnegans Wake, on the back cover of which I discovered the man-in-the-street allure of James Joyce which was a sort of a shock. For me, Finnegans Wake was the Sacred Scripture of the Modern Era. I was not to be deceived by a text displaying all the phatic function I expected and smearing a thick semiotic matter, so I immediately felt the need to have it rendered in French.

DP: So you began with Finnegans Wake. Did you go the bookshop specifically seeking out the Wake? Or did it just one day catch your eye, while you were in the bookshop? Can you also explain a bit more what you mean that this was a text ”displaying all the phatic function… and smearing a thick semiotic matter”?

HM: Reference to James Joyce was paramount in the French literary critique between 1960 and 1980, people like Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, all drove me to consider Finnegans Wake as the nexus of the modern literary fabric, which I, with my gross ignorance of the finesse of the English language and of the encyclopedic richness of Joyce’s culture, took at first as the thick material somebody like Jackson Pollock smeared on his canvasses, but eventually I craved to emulate this latter Indian creation dance myself with the French language.

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Dispatch from Diggi Palace: The Politics of International Publishing

February 2, 2017  |  in Dispatches  |  by Janani Ganesan

But as the Dalit writers discuss their literature and politics, turbaned working class men serve rotis.

“Voice of Rajasthan,” exclaims Zee News, a right-wing national news channel and the official sponsor of the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF), over and over again from big, bright roadside billboards. As I ride from the Jaipur airport to Diggi Palace, I am reminded of the commercial scale of this event. Formerly a royal palace, the venue now services a different kind of royalty as a heritage hotel and the site of the tenth JLF in the capital city of Rajasthan. Paradoxically, it is this corporate sponsor, which recently made headlines for telecasting fake news, that enables the participation of a panel of Rajasthani Dalit writers, among other lesser known writers such as Kashmiri poet Naseem Shafaie, Rajasthani writer and critic Geeta Samaur, and Odia translator Jatindra K Nayak. It also renders JLF the world’s largest free event of its kind, according to the official website. But as the Dalit writers discuss their literature and politics, turbaned working class men (Rajasthan is notorious for its discrimination against women) unaware of such a panel, serve rotis, providing the silk-clad speakers and delegates with an “authentic” and exotic Rajasthani-Indian experience. These servers aren’t invited to attend the panel on “Cultural Appropriation” either. I eat rotis off their tongs all five days. In a hurry to catch a beloved writer or a publisher “contact” at the lunch table and pushed by the impatient hungry guests, I don’t stop to ask what the turbaned roti-makers think of all this. I collude as well, to appropriate their stories and voices.

Jaipur BookMark (JBM) is a B2B event that focuses solely on translation. In this glitzy literature festival, translation finds a spot for the third-year running and Asymptote Editor-at-Large for India, Poorna Swami, and I, are at JBM to represent the journal. The B2B format asks that the speakers pay for their travel and accommodation, as opposed to the main JLF event. We camp with a generous family friend in the suburbs, but are still of a class that can afford flight tickets. Feminist publisher Urvashi Butalia of Zubaan Books would later rue this lack of funds in one of the panels, but not without asserting that some voices simply must be recorded and made available to the wider audience, even if it means waiting a long while before some of these books see the dingy light of a printing press.

Far from the madding crowd dressed in their winter festival best, right at the entrance to Diggi palace but unnoticeable, and covered by at least three security guards at all times, is the JBM venue. On a quaint terrace, it’s exclusive to invitees—translators, publishers, and writers. As one eager member of the audience fights to be let in, the Festival Producer Sanjoy Roy, who happens to be passing by, waves her in with a welcoming hand. The tame audience, hovering between ten and thirty, reveals that not many others have come upon such serendipitous generosity. The recurring few participate in enriching discussions over five days—on the politics of translation; the difficulty and the joy of it; and the omniscient complaint of abysmal funds and supporters, despite the obvious necessity for literary translations in an ever divided world.

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In Conversation with Vikram Chandra

April 11, 2016  |  in Interviews  |  by Naheed Patel and Vikram Chandra

"We have never been modern, and our newer forms—which are all hybrids—never have either."

Vikram Chandra was born in New Delhi and graduated from Pomona College (in Claremont, near Los Angeles) in 1984. His first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, was written over several years while getting an MA at Johns Hopkins and an MFA at the University of Houston. While writing Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Vikram taught literature and writing, and moonlighted as a computer programmer and software and hardware consultant. Red Earth and Pouring Rain received outstanding critical acclaim. It won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and the David Higham Prize for Fiction.

A collection of short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay, was published in 1997 and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book; was short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize; and was included in “Notable Books of 1997” by the New York Times Book Review. A novel, Sacred Games, was published in 2006 and won the Hutch Crossword Award for English Fiction for 2006 and a Salon Book Award for 2007; it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

Vikram made his nonfiction debut with Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code,The Code of Beauty published by Graywolf Press in 2014, which was described as an “unexpected tour de force” by the New York Times Book Review. Geek Sublime dwells upon the points of intersection between writing, coding, art, technology, Sanskrit and ancient Indian literature and philosophy.

***

Naheed Patel: Your latest book, Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, The Code of Beauty is quite a literary hybrid: part craft essay, part history of computer programming, part social commentary on Silicon Valley, and part treatise on Sanskrit philosophy. All these various part form a seamless mosaic that works to enlighten and totally fascinate the reader in equal measure. How did you make this magic happen?

Vikram Chandra: As is usually the case with writing, through endless rounds of revision, periods of complete frustration and despair, and fumbling around trying to discover the right shape for what I was trying to build.  I actually found this more difficult to do in non-fiction than I have before with fiction.  When I’m writing fiction, I have the characters to guide me; even though there are moments of unknowing and paralysis, I can always trust that if I’m patient and I keep following the characters, I’ll eventually figure out the architecture.  But with non-fiction, or at least this particular non-fiction, it was much harder.  I didn’t have the linear velocities of a plot to draw me forward, so it was much more—as you say—like building a mosaic, putting small pieces together and trying to see the patterns.  The epiphany about the overall structure came very very late in the process, compared to all my other books, and this was scary.  So much of writing is just keeping faith that you’ll work out what kind of beast you’re actually making, and this can wear on you. READ MORE…