Posts filed under 'Relationships'

Skin Has Two Sides: Bruna Dantas Lobato on Translating Jeferson Tenório

January 11, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

. . . racism and colorism affect all of us . . . there’s no interpersonal relationship that isn’t shaped by it.

In 2023, Bruna Dantas Lobato won a PEN Translates grant for her work on Jeferson Tenório’s The Dark Side of Skin, a moving, feeling novel of how relationships—between parent and child, between lovers, between a body and a city—change, develop, and intwine against powerful institutions and worldly violences. Through the story of Pedro—which is in turn told through the life of his murdered father—Tenório vividly inscribes the urbanity of Porto Alegre and the generations that move through it, along with the cruelty, the mystery, and the love. In this interview, Lobato speaks on the novel’s treatment of racism, its refractions of Baldwin, and how its author draws on Brazil’s rich aesthetic canon.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): You’ve spoken before about how passionate you are about translating titles from the northeast of Brazil, but The Dark Side of Skin takes place in in southern Brazil—Porto Alegre—and Tenório has spoken about how the racism it describes is one that is expressed more pointedly in regards to the city’s relatively homogenous population. Could you speak a little bit about how geography or regionality works in this novel, and also about what drew you to translate it?

Bruna Dantas Lobato (BDL): The Northeast of Brazil, where I grew up, is very underrepresented in literature both in Brazil and abroad. There are very few authors from that region available in translation, especially compared to the whiter metropoles. I’d love to see a greater range of stories from different parts of Brazil in English, so we don’t keep reading the same versions of Latin America over and over again. 

I was drawn to Tenório’s novel for similar reasons, for how it presents the experience of a Black man in a predominantly white city with insight and tenderness. It’s a beautiful and painful book, and to have Tenório join the slate of Porto Alegre authors widely available in English with a different kind of book was important to me. I hope the publishers who often tell me that they already have their one Brazilian author—or one author from a certain region—will see that one voice can’t possibly represent a whole country.

XYS: A significant portion of the novel is written in the second person, which is a literary point-of-view that I think is especially sensitive to each individual language and the culture it stems from (e.g. in terms of interpersonal hierarchies, categories of persons, speech-acts). How was it working with the second person here?

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Translation Tuesday: “Hems” by Ana María del Río

September 12, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Justin Sergi

Each day she appears to get larger. More thunderous in her love. More outrageous in her furies.

This Translation Tuesday, a short story about an odd couple. A husband is shrinking—physically eroded by the force of his domineering wife. In a lesser author’s hands, things would quickly turn risible: think grimacing stories of shrews and their nebbishes, or cheap, queasy raunch with betas and Amazons. But Chilean author Ana María del Río elevates the material by treating it with a disturbing, straight-faced intensity. Wife is elemental: she loves, cares, rages, panics, resents, and fucks with the same unremitting, meteorological violence. She is”thunderous” a natural disaster, yet possessed also of a brute guile for suffocation with which she strips her husband of his independence and dignity, as exhausted sentences attest.

Suddenly, I feel myself getting smaller. Little by little. I took my pants to the tailor to get the hem raised. She told me that it’s because of my shoes. In the summer people change to wearing low-tops or flats which make the pants seem longer. It isn’t that you’re getting smaller, she jokes, and tells me not to worry. She’s sweet. Her eyes are the color of roasted chestnuts. She raises the hem a bit anyway, just to humor me. She doesn’t seem to notice.

Still, I feel myself getting smaller. My wife tells me it’s nonsense.

It’s because of her. Each day she appears to get larger. More thunderous in her love. More outrageous in her furies. Larger eyes opening wider in the heat of more extreme panics. She’s on medication, but there are days when it doesn’t take. It’s because you don’t love me as you ought to, she says. And how ought I? Suddenly, I notice that I can barely get my arms around her, trembling with a violence I haven’t seen even in the most horrific withdrawals. Her muscles seem to slap against the bone. She kicks wildly. Her eyes, terrified, dart around the room, ah, that room, which is slowly becoming my prison. She knows. She bought padlocks for the closet. To protect us, she says, you should thank me. She fears they will come to kill her in the night. The tenants we evicted are murderers and drug-addicts, capable of anything, she says. It’s true we heard gunshots once or twice from down river. But it’s possible they were hunting rabbits. They were left homeless, after all. They were rude, she says. And if someone is rude to me, well, they’re in trouble. She hired a lawyer. Informed me we would split the bill. To throw them out. In the end, we did. All that’s missing is the judge’s order. When that day comes, she says, I’m gonna throw a fiesta. But who knows what fresh hell will arise that day. I’m exhausted, always a little more exhausted, waiting for days that never come and nice moments that only exist in the future. But she dreams of those moments constantly. When you realize all that I’ve done for you and return the favor. Scares the hell out of me. I don’t think we’re ever going to begin. Everything for us seems either to wither or to end completely. Or, in her case, to get larger. When the judge finally makes it official, I think we’re gonna find rats, huge ones, in the tenants’ place. But at least we’ll be able to go in—why are you always so negative that you have to wreck my dreams, she says. You don’t know how difficult it was to watch you fall off the wagon. Of course I know. She tells me all the time.

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Translating Multiple Dimensions: Sarah Timmer Harvey on Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About

August 24, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Daljinder Johal

Life isn’t one-dimensional; it’s a blend of emotions, absurdity, and different tones. . .

Jente Posthuma’s striking, moving novel, What I’d Rather Not Think About, delves into the aftermath of an unthinkable loss: the death of a twin. In tracing the patchworked life of a narrator who has long thought of herself as one-half, Posthuma explores the complexities of our most intimate relationships with evocative reflection and unexpected humor. This distinct work and our July Book Club selection has been translated beautifully by Sarah Timmer Harvey, resulting in razor-sharp prose that navigates the most intricate aspects of our selfhoods—how we are with one another. In this following interview, Harvey speaks about her discovery of this novel and her translation process, as well as the intricate journey of following this book’s many thought-paths and references. 

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. 

Daljinder Johal (DJ): I’m curious about your background and your journey into translation. I read that you’re Australian-born but ended up living in the Netherlands, where you began reading and occasionally translating Dutch fiction and poetry. Was there a particular work that played a significant role in sparking this interest?

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): Of course. Back then, while learning Dutch, I relocated to the Netherlands at nineteen with the intention of staying for a year. That single year evolved into a fourteen-year stay. During this time, I was working at a university, which eventually led me to translation as a second career. It happened somewhat unexpectedly. I strove to read while learning Dutch, focusing on more accessible books such as Hermann Koch’s The Dinner and even Harry Mulisch’s The Discovery of Heaven—which, while not mainstream, deeply resonated with me.

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One Thing After Another: On A Postcard for Annie by Ida Jessen

September 28, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Rachael Pennington

A Postcard for Annie is a collection of stories in which hope is masked in grief, regret, and yearning.

A Postcard for Annie by Ida Jessen, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken, Archipelago Books, 2022

Where did it come from, this hope of hers? From him. Her hope came from him. Without him she was shapeless. She would never be able to explain it to anyone, not even to herself.

A Postcard for Annie, Ida Jessen’s collection of short stories, opens with a woman named Tove, writing a note to her husband after an argument about herring; “I am not your fucking housewife,” she scribbles. Through the following six tales, Jessen tracks the inner lives of women, whose day-to-day lives in Denmark are as mundane and normal as they are dramatic and devastating. These stories explore what binds these women to the people in their lives against a backdrop as often comforting as it is bitterly harsh, putting into words what the characters themselves cannot.

From the outset of Tove’s anger, we sense that this is about much more than the raw fish fillets she had bought for dinner, and as she embarks on an “excursion” to put distance between her and her husband’s constant derision and judgment—which has rippled through her since the day they met—we become aware of the essential role he plays in her sense of self. Later, when a stranger spontaneously decides to sit at the table where she is dining alone, we quickly realise the approval and presence of this man are more important to Tove than her own discomfort. Without a member of the opposite sex there to notice her, Tove is “shapeless.”

As such, despite a loveless, bitter marriage in which only hostile words are exchanged, Tove never loses sight of her husband, and similar strictures and relationships weave a common thread through these stories. Tine, who feels “doomed at fifty to be a fire that can’t be put out,” doesn’t give up on trying to get her husband to go to bed with her. Ruth finds herself at the hospital visiting her estranged son, who even as a baby would “would squirm from her embrace,” and Lisbet, caught in an enmeshed mother and son relationship that is tense and taut after twenty years of push and pull, cannot—or will not—break free from Malthe:

He turns and strides away, exuding as ever his own will; he cannot tame it, it surges towards her, away from her. He is surrounded by a light so fierce that even a bitterly cold day in a dismal parking lot feels like unrequited love.

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Memory in Present Tense: On Haruki Murakami’s First Person Singular

July 1, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Darren Huang

Murakami's latest collection returns to his perennial fixations with jazz music, baseball, and mysterious meetings with women and animals.

First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel, Knopf, 2021

In Haruki Murakami’s short story, “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning” (from his 1993 collection The Elephant Vanishes), the archetypal Murakami protagonist—an unreliable, doubtful man—fleetingly encounters an unfamiliar girl on the street and suddenly realizes she is the 100% perfect girl for him, though he has never spoken to her, nor finds her particularly beautiful. Instead, this melancholic, gently absurdist piece concerns itself with what the narrator would have said had he approached the girl. After dismissing a number of ridiculous ideas, the narrator decides on a long fabulist story, in which a young girl and young boy meet, discover they are one hundred percent perfect for each other, and separate to test their feelings. While apart, however, both lose their memories, and when they eventually encounter each other again, both only briefly acknowledge that they are perfect counterparts, but still go on to forever disappear from one another’s lives.

The story, which later served as inspiration for Murakami’s novel 1Q84, employs the author’s recurring narrative device of intermingling reality and unreality in the minds of his narrators, largely applied to the fleeting but transformative romantic encounters between men and women—most famously evident in his early bestselling novel, Norwegian Wood. It also reflects Murakami’s longstanding thematic concerns of loss, estrangement, doomed love, and loneliness. Notably, the young girl and boy not only become estranged from each other, but also from themselves in the loss of their memories; this theme of disconnection unites the stories in the author’s latest release, First Person Singular, fluidly translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel. The collection is his first since the English publication of Men Without Women in 2017, and returns to Murakami’s perennial fixations with jazz music, baseball, and mysterious meetings with women and animals. They are all narrated by an aged writer—resembling Murakami himself—who wistfully reflects on loosely chronological formative experiences. In this way, the stories blur not only dream and reality but also author and narrator, playfully employing the lens of memory to grapple with how we transcend—or fail to transcend— the disconnections that occur between others and ourselves.

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What’s New in Translation: April 2021

April 12, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Charlie Ng, Marina Dora Martino, and Rachel Stanyon

New work from Japan, Denmark, and Germany!

Our chosen texts from around the world this month denote a certain defamiliarization with one’s environment, whether due to an intrinsic sense of alienation, or an enforced strangeness by a world unexpectedly altered. In literature, disparity is a powerful, effective motif for both the urgency of social commentary, and the exploration of the personal psyche, and the works presented here are exemplifications par excellence in both respects. From a collection of short science fiction tales from a Japanese counterculture icon, to a dual text of two poetry volumes by acclaimed Danish poet Pia Tafdrup, and a harrowing tale of exile and forced peripatetics in the immediate fallout of Kristallnacht. Read on to find out more!

terminal boredom

Terminal Boredom: Stories by Izumi Suzuki, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi, and Helen O’Horan, Verso, 2021

Review by Rachel Stanyon, Copyeditor

Terminal complicity. Terminal addiction. Terminal jealousy. Terminal resignation. Terminal self-deception. Terminal love. Any of these could have been the title of Terminal Boredom, this engrossing first collection of short stories by Izumi Suzuki to appear in English translation. Given how prescient and succinct these tales are, it is surprising that they have taken this long to become available in English. With their worlds full of disillusionment and disaffection, youth unemployment and apathy, they will certainly strike a chord for modern readers interested in the emotional and societal effects of late capitalism, along with fans of sci-fi and speculative fiction.

In Japan, Suzuki is better known; there is even a novel (Endless Waltz by Mayumi Inaba, 1992) and a film (Koji Wakamatsu’s 1995 adaptation Endless Waltz) about the relationship between her and her jazz-musician husband, Kaoru Abe (Suzuki’s daughter sued over invasion of privacy at the book’s release, so read and watch as your conscience dictates). Suzuki, born in 1949, had a varied career, working as a key-punch operator, bar hostess, model, and actress, finding success as a writer before committing suicide in 1986, eight years after her then newly ex-husband had died of a drug overdose. These biographical details suggest that she understood intimately the sometimes hapless jobs, dependencies, and loneliness of the characters she depicts.

The scenarios constructed in the collections’ seven stories are varied enough to maintain interest, while the themes of apathy and detachment bind them together. “Women and Women” (tr. Daniel Joseph) describes a world plagued by resource scarcity in which men have been carved out of society and sent to a cunningly translated “Gender Exclusion Terminal Occupancy Zone” (GETO for short). This society is controlled through a sort of Orwellian erasure of history, and maintained by the complicity of the vast majority of its female inhabitants. Although the same-sex relationships are cast sympathetically, and, indeed, androgyny seems to be idolized throughout the collection, the story seems ultimately to condemn this ghettoized, vapid world. There does, however, remain a degree of ambivalence. The narrator soon comes across an escaped boy and “learn[s] the unexpected, dreadful truth about human life” before discovering that her mother was disappeared because she had fallen in love with a man and conceived naturally; in the end, though, our protagonist opts back into ‘normal’ life:

When I returned to my room, I noticed that my anguish was almost entirely gone. Women and women. Just as it should be. (. . .)

And yet . . . I put the pen down again before I was done. Now that I know about that thing, how can I ever be happy? To doubt this world is a crime. Everyone but everyone believes implicitly in this world, in this reality. I and I alone (well, probably not) know the great secret of this existence, and I’ll have to live out the rest of my life keeping it at all costs.

Right now, I have no intention of sacrificing my life for some underground resistance movement. But who knows, it might come to that someday.

The reader cannot, however, help but feel that it never will. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Night, wife, detergent” by Kaori Ekuni

August 4, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Sharni Wilson

I love my wife . . . But if she's asking for something that they don't sell at the convenience store, I don't know what to do.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, a husband construes his stubbornness as miscommunication in Kaori Ekuni’s “Night, wife, detergent.” Ekuni’s trademark wit guides us through this unreliable narrative: a self-assured husband thinks he’s tried everything to understand his wife—everything, that is, except actually listen to her. This messy “misunderstanding” reveals an even more unsettling truth about our narrator: he sees his relationship as a contest for dominance. A probingly comic take on gender dynamics and dysfunctional relationships.

My wife said she wanted to leave me. “We have to talk,” she said.

It was after 10:00 p.m. I was tired. We’ve been married five years, no kids.

“You can get along by pretending not to notice,” my wife said. “But pretending not to notice won’t make it go away.”

When I didn’t reply and kept looking at the TV, she turned it off. I had no idea what I was supposed to be pretending not to notice, or what wouldn’t go away. As always.

As she stood over me, glaring at me, I noticed that her pedicure was chipped. “Do you need nail polish remover?” I blurted out, with hope and relief mingled in my voice. You can’t remove nail polish without nail polish remover. Is that why she’s upset?

My wife shook her head.

“Well, then it must be those square cotton wipes. The ones you said you couldn’t do without, when I told you to use tissues instead—you’ve run out of those wipes.”

My wife sighed. “No. I don’t mean anything like that. I have nail polish remover and cotton wipes. The only reason my nail polish is chipped is that I’m so busy I haven’t had time to do my nails.” READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2018

October 22, 2018  |  in News  |  by Chloe Lim, Jonathan Egid, and Nina Perrotta

To give you a taste of the Fall 2018 issue, the blog editors share their favorite pieces from Russian, Catalan, and Vietnamese.

Today, we share our favorite pieces from the Fall 2018 issue, released just four days ago, highlighting the diversity of cultures, languages, and literary styles represented. Chloe Lim, writing from Singapore, is joined today by two new blog editors as of last week: Jonathan Egid and Nina Perrotta, writing from the UK and Brazil respectively. Happy reading! 

From the visceral, violent power of José Revueltas’ The Hole to the lyricism of Osama Alomar’s “Nuclear Bomb” and the schizoid voices of George Prevedourakis’ Kleftiko, our Fall 2018 edition plays host to a typically broad variety of styles, forms, and languages. A piece that particularly caught my eye was “Epilogue,” a quiet, sombre short story by Irina Odoevtsova about two Russian émigrées in Nice, their separation and their separate fates.

The story follows the unhappy existence of Tatiana and Sergei, initially as poor migrants surrounded by the Anglo-American holidaying elite of the Riviera, through Sergei’s uncertain departure and Tatiana’s newfound wealth to a tragic conclusion, with much of the story being told through short, terse conversations between Tatiana and Sergei, Tatiana and her new lover and (more frequently) Tatiana and herself. The restrained, even sparse dialogue and plain prose nevertheless creates touching, vivid and tragic characters in strikingly limited space, conveying to us the tragic story of a woman struggling to understand her dreams and desires, and the tragic consequences that come from her acting upon those confused and conflicting desires.

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What’s New in Translation? March 2017

March 20, 2017  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alice Inggs, Hanna Heiskanen, and Layla Benitez-James

Our team reviews some of the newest translations published in English this month

heretics

Heretics by Leonardo Padura, tr. by Anna Kushner, FSG

Review: Layla Benitez-James, Podcast Editor

Leonardo Padura’s novel, Heretics, has finally made its way to North American shores and English speakers everywhere thanks to translator Anna Kushner’s work for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Originally published by Tusquets Editores of Spain as Herejes in 2013, Heretics is a startlingly, and in many ways disturbingly, relevant work for 2017—as rising levels of xenophobia and nationalism are straining already tense relationships across many borders and affecting refugees throughout Europe and North America. Padura’s novel opens in the Havana of 1939 with the rejection of the St. Louis, a German transatlantic liner sailing from Hamburg whose 937 almost entirely Jewish passengers were fleeing the Third Reich. Their tragic return to Europe—a effective death sentence—is watched by Daniel Kaminsky, the first character introduced and the namesake of the first of the novel’s four sections. Daniel has high hopes in his nine-year-old heart that his parents and sister aboard the ship will make it to land.

At 525 pages, Padura has ample space to leap through an ever thickening plot as his characters become more and more entangled in a seemingly unlikely series of events. Yet the read is a quick one, driven forward by drastic jumps between Havana and Amsterdam and a narrative structure which throws the reader several curveballs in the pages where a more traditional detective story might feel the need for resolution. It’s especially relentless in its final two dozen pages. This book, addicting in and of itself, will also compel readers to dive into the real history of the events on which it centers; they are oftentimes much stranger than any fiction could hope to be, even though Padura tells us right before we embark that “history, reality, and novels run on different engines.” However, to describe the work as a historic thriller, or even to focus on the mystery of a stolen Rembrandt that is woven throughout the larger plot, only hits at one level of Padura’s game. He lets us fall through history almost effortlessly, revealing the inevitable repetition of human cruelty from biblical times through the 17th century, the 20th and up through our own muddy 21st. He neither sugar coats nor exploits these horrors, to his credit.

While the novel takes one of Padura’s recurring characters, Mario Conde, as its hero, a reader uninitiated into this Cubano’s world will have no trouble becoming quickly acquainted. His prose style is elliptical; events and ideas are repeated by different characters as if Padura holds each piece of plot up to the light like a precious stone, turning it this way and that to appreciate its different angles and facets. Though Salinger undoubtedly receives the most attention, influences from Chandler, Hemmingway, Murakami, Kundera, and the occasional phrases from Voltaire’s Candide, which perhaps even inspired the name of Conde’s most pious friend, Candito, also find their place. Readers will note quite a bit of Nietzsche, too, as our hero is forced to try and make sense of the emo subculture springing up on the Island, not to mention a healthy dose of Blade Runner and Nirvana references to even things out.

Perhaps one of the most delightful plays between reality and fiction is the one Padura plays with the genre itself.  Despite some dark passages, the work is deeply humorous and self-reflective, especially in the periodic wish of our narrator to compose his own hard-boiled thriller as he continually feels trapped in one himself. No stranger to taking on huge historical figures (from Adiós Hemmingway to The Man Who Loved Dogs, which stars Leon Trotsky), Padura’s Rembrant is compelling and once again does that work of blurring fact and fiction that inspires a desire for the work to have come wholly from the real world.

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What’s New in Translation? February 2017

February 8, 2017  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Saba Ahmed, Sam Carter, and Thea Hawlin

Asymptote reviews some of the best new books from French, Kannada, and Danish.

 

Goblet_cover_for_web_1024x1024

Pretending is Lying by Dominique Goblet, tr. Sophie Yanow, New York Review Books

Review: Sam Carter, Assistant Managing Editor

Dominique Goblet’s Pretending is Lying, translated by fellow cartoonist Sophie Yanow in collaboration with the author, immediately recalls the best work of those figures like Alison Bechdel, Adrian Tomine, and Chris Ware, who have done so much to insist on both the relevance and elegance of the graphic narrative form in the Anglophone world. Fortunately, New York Review Books is dedicated to showcasing the many voices contributing to an ongoing, worldwide comic conversation, and its latest contribution is this Belgian memoir. Originally titled Faire semblant c’est mentir, it centers on the experiences of Dominique—a fictionalized version of the author herself—as she navigates fraught relationships with her parents, including with her looming lush of a father. Also sketched out is a romantic relationship where Dominique attempts to grapple with that most fundamental question of heartbreak: why did he leave me?

A certified electrician and plumber, Goblet clearly understands a thing or two about the necessary connections running through structures to make them work, and her illustrations carry this skill into Pretending is Lying, her first work to appear in English. Image and text perform an intricate choreography, reveling in an aesthetic that frequently slips between the easily imitated and the utterly remarkable. If the easy analogy for reading comics is the process of examining a series of film stills—and even if we might be tempted to label parts of the construction of this work cinematic—I would instead suggest that Goblet offers something that more closely resembles a well curated series of photographs, each of which could easily stand on its own, given each frame’s clarity of vision and attention to detail.

In illustrations that move from Rothko-like explorations of pure color to nuanced collections of penmanship that gradually reveal a series of ethereal forms, the melancholia that we often find in other works emerges here as well—maybe there’s something about the form that lends itself well to expressions of such emotions in its ability to match words with alternatively visceral and measured strokes. The muted color palette of Pretending is Lying is also remarkably expressive. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Hedgehogs” by Amanda Michalopoulou

December 22, 2015  |  in Translations  |  by Amanda Michalopoulou and Patricia Felisa Barbeito

How do hedgehogs do it? She imagined them upright, then lying down, going at it all aquiver, jabbing each other with their spines.

They could hear them in the night. From the communal garden came a rasping, booming sound like an electric coffee maker empty of water.

“What the hell?” Martha said.

“It’s the hedgehogs,” Klaus answered.

“How do you know?”

“I know.” He muttered as he turned on his side.

She got up and opened the door to the balcony to hear better.

“Have you any idea what I do for a living?” Klaus shouted from under the covers.

Martha sighed and returned to bed. She lay down on the very edge, trying not to touch him. When he spoke to her like that, angrily and loudly in German, she punished him by increasing the distance between them.   At times, in the middle of the night she’d ask herself: Are we really sharing the same bed? Are we really Martha and Klaus?   She’d reach out with her hand, touch his knee to double-check and then immediately pull her hand away. The closeness they’d shared at one time now seemed unfathomable. READ MORE…