Posts filed under 'Religion'

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 15, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, Suhasini Patni, and Thuy Dinh

The latest in world literature from Sweden, India, and Vietnam!

This week, our editors report on literary news from around the world as summer gets under way, from threats to dissident writers in Sweden to censorship in India to the anniversary of a pioneering author’s death in Vietnam. Read on to find out more!

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

As Sweden’s application to NATO proceeds, the Turkish government has used the opportunity to raise demands on the country to extradite certain individuals. One such person is Ragip Zarakolu, a publisher, journalist, and human rights activist who has lived in Sweden since 2012 as part of an asylum program for threatened writers and publishers. Last week, the International Publishers Association voiced their concern regarding the situation and encouraged Sweden to safeguard Zarakolu’s freedom. Since then, the Frankfurter Buchmesse and the German publishers’ association Börsenverein have followed suit. In 1977, Zarakolu founded the publishing house Belge together with his wife, Ayse Nur, and they published books in Turkey for over thirty years. He was the 2008 IPA Prix Voltaire laureate and is the former chair of IPA’s Freedom to Publish Committee, as well as an honorary member of the Swedish branch of the international PEN organization.

Another writer who has taken up exile in Sweden is poet and Swedish Academy member Jila Mossaed, who last week was awarded the Prix Max Jacob for her poetry collection Det åttonde landet (The Eighth Country), translated into French as Le huitième pays by Vénus Khoury-Ghata. Mossaed was born in 1948 in Tehran, Iran, where she had her literary debut at age seventeen when her poetry was published in the literary journal Khoshe; she later worked as a playwright for Iranian radio and television. In 1986, she fled to Sweden for political asylum. Initially writing exclusively in her native Persian, since 1997 she has also written in Swedish. Recurring themes in her poetry include exile, injustice, and censorship. About writing in her second language, she has said: “To write in the language of exile is to create a small room in that country’s memory. It is a great triumph to become a part of the literary history of a foreign country.”

READ MORE…

To Protect Oneself From Violence: An Interview with Mónica Ojeda

March 16, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

I want to know what fear is. Why are we so afraid? What does fear make us do or not do? How does fear change our bodies?

Mónica Ojeda is one of the most powerful and provocative voices in Latin American literature today. With influences spanning from H.P. Lovecraft, to Stephen King’s Carrie, to anonymous internet horror legends called “creepypastas,” Ojeda’s novel Jawbone (Coffee House Press, 2021), translated expertly by Sarah Booker, explores the darkest aspects of relationships between women, amidst the suffocating atmosphere of an Opus Dei school for girls in Ecuador. 

In Jawbone, popular girls and best friends Annelise and Fernanda have created a religion of their own, outside of the classroom. The girls set up camp in an abandoned house, form a secret cult that worships “The White God”, and engage in a series of increasingly dangerous dares that threatens to tear their friendships apart. Meanwhile, their Spanish literature teacher, Ms. Clara, haunted by the ghost of her dead mother, begins to lose her grip on reality. Things take a sinister turn when Ms. Clara takes Fernanda hostage in a deserted cabin, intending to show her pupil the true meaning of fear. In her multivocal and lyrical prose, Ojeda demonstrates the pernicious ways that violence against women can be exercised, and reveals how victims can be transformed into perpetrators. I was lucky enough to be able to meet with Ojeda in person at a coffee shop in Madrid. Over orange juices, we discussed psychoanalysis in language, the implications of Latin American gothic literature, and her favorite horror films.

Rose Bialer (RB): The first book I read of yours was the poetry collection, Historia de la Leche, which investigates the strange violence of family relationships—specifically those between mothers and daughters. What drove you to return to this theme in Jawbone?

Mónica Ojeda (MO): I don’t remember if I first wrote Historia de la Leche or Jawbone. Well, I know that Jawbone was published first, but I don’t remember which book I wrote first. I could have been writing them at the same time. However, I do know that at the time, I was very interested in the violence within passionate relationships between women. I think the relationships between best friends, or sisters, or mothers and daughters are intense, and so of course there are a lot of possibilities for violence to get in. I’m kind of obsessed with how desire and love can be taken to the next level—the next level being sometimes absolute violence.

RB: I think your poetry comes through in your writing, especially in such highly imaginative phrases such as “mother-God-of-the-wandering-womb,” “umbilical-cord love” and “that sleeping-angel-of-history voice.” Tell me about the process of constructing these new terms.

MO: I think invention comes to me because I do see the act of writing as a way of putting language in some kind of crisis. In conflict. So sometimes, you have to develop some new forms to express certain things; that is something which pulls me back to poetry even when I am writing narrative. Because I think that poetry does that. Poetry reverts language, re-births language. Sometimes when words join together, developing new concepts and images, it can sound strange because you have no familiarity with something which has just been born. As such, it develops some kind of extrañamiento (estrangement), which also provides an atmosphere that I like, having to do with the strange and something that Freud called lo siniestro (the uncanny), which is when something unknown reveals itself in the middle of what is ordinary, during your daily routine. That is scary: when you are surrounded by the things that you know and then the strange comes in. I like to do that not only in the story of my narrative or my novels, but also in language. READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash

December 9, 2021  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Edwin, Fairuza Hanun, and Lara Norgaard

If I were to visualize the novel’s plot, I would not draw a line, but instead a scatter plot of points [...] Shrapnel from an explosion. . .

Arguably one of the most recognised Indonesian writers in world literature, Eka Kurniawan has earned a global audience—most notably for being the first Indonesian to earn a spot on the Man Booker International longlist with translator Annie Tucker for the sweeping novel, Beauty is A Wound. This August, acclaimed Indonesian director Edwin bagged the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival for his adaptation of Eka’s Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (reviewed here). The story follows the young Ajo Kawir, who tries to compensate for his sexual impotence by turning to fighting, subsequently falling in love with the bodyguard Iteung. In this special edition of Asymptote at the Movies, we are honoured to have Edwin discuss his adaptation of Eka’s work with assistant editor Fairuza Hanun and former-Editor-at-Large for Brazil Lara Norgaard in a wide-ranging conversation that considers the role of language in the multicultural archipelago, critiques of masculinity, and how Eka’s famed fragmentation on the page can hold up as it moves onto screen.

Note: the following piece includes discussion of sexual violence.

Fairuza Hanun (FH): Edwin, I’ve been fascinated by your works, especially Aruna & Lidahnya and Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly, which have explored numerous topical issues, ranging from—but not limited to—gender, race, sexuality, culture, and identity. However, compared to the gritty action-packed Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, your earlier films retained more “domestic” and bittersweet compositions with a main narrative thread. Eka Kurniawan’s literature is well-known for its meandering plots and fusion of socialist and magical realism, and although Vengeance is one of Kurniawan’s more straightforward works, it still possesses his love for multiple threads. This poses my first questions: what are your thoughts on the process of adapting Kurniawan’s braided narrative into a limited screen time? Were there any challenges in transposing his subtlety and explicitness when approaching the taboos of Indonesian society?

I know quite little about the technicalities of cinematography, but I found the film to be absolutely stunning, every scene evoking emotion—the simultaneous isolation and communalism in a village community—and remaining faithful to the descriptions in the book; the actors did a spectacular job at fleshing out the characters. I noticed that the book’s dry, witty humour remains present throughout the film, as well as some of the vocabulary from KheaKamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (KBBI) being maintained in the dialogue. This intrigued me, as the effects of dialogue in literature and cinema often differ; for instance, how it is made more “acceptable”, or how it can be ignored, if dialect—i.e. contractions, local diction, etc.—is “smoothed out” in writing, reconstructed into a formal, almost mathematically-structured, rendition. Yet, in film, an accurate depiction of the setting can make such a move jarring something out of place in a village with perhaps limited resources to literature, as it seems the people are still steeped in traditional, often superstitious, interpretations. Language should be an intercultural exchange, and Indonesia is a multicultural, multilingual country; mediums of expression which strive to preserve culture should not promote or normalise the process of lingual centrism. I feel that the widespread use of Indonesian and its normalisation or expectations pose an issue of the slow erasure of local languages which have been cultivated throughout generations, to be replaced by the “central” national language.

In regards to that, what are your thoughts on language in the arts, and the process of adapting a book to a film and vice versa? And what is your opinion or definition of a faithful adaptation?

vengeance a at the movies 2 READ MORE…

To Love God and Women: On The Last One by Fatima Daas

September 16, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Fairuza Hanun

The Last One . . . challenges what constitutes faith and its validity, between society’s shared meaning and love in all its variant forms.

The Last One by Fatima Daas, translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud, Other Press, 2021

Of the human world, love is both conflict and destination. Our understanding of love—what it is, how to do it—is immensely varied, and its dominating presence rules our formative years. To be deprived of, or shamed from, an open expression of love can be a numbing experience, one that rearranges the nucleus of our social interactions and emotional familiarities into a sinister puzzle. Still, no matter in estrangement or intimacy, our lives revolve around our need, or lack thereof, for closeness; the life of The Last One’s narrator, Fatima, is no different. For Fatima, the precariousness of love applies to her human relationships, but are further compared and contrasted with the relationship she nurtures with God.

The novel, comprised of vignettes and fragmented memories, is coalesced by Fatima’s attempt to comprehend, or perhaps mend, the conflicting multiplicity of her self—queer, Muslim, Algerian-French, woman. Each scene opens in a diary-like manner: “My name is Fatima,” followed by a personal fact—sometimes trivial, such as the consequence of her naming or her like/dislike for commuting—and other times, a profound reflective statement: “I regret that no one taught me how to love”. The entire book charts her pilgrimage of probing about in the study of love, of creating and maintaining meaningful and intimate relationships with other people, with God, or with herself. All of this is interlaced with disparate interpretations of cultures and languages, often governed by paternalistic attitudes.

From the beginning, we learn the precious nature of her name—that it “mustn’t be soiled,” or “wassekh”: to “soil, stir shit up, blacken.” The origin and meaning of her name is sacred, derived from the Prophet Muhammad’s beloved daughter Fatima—which means “little weaned she-camel.” She analyses the different definitions of “fatm”—the Arabic for “to wean”—compiling all three in the same paragraph as if to correlate them with one another: “Stop the nursing of a child or a young animal to transition it to a new mode of feeding; feel frustration; separate someone from something or something from someone or someone from someone.” In the same scene, she compares and contrasts her strained familial circumstances with the other Fatima’s:

Like Fatima, I should have had three sisters. […]

Fatima’s father deems her the noblest woman in heaven.

The prophet Mohammed—may God’s peace and blessings be upon him—said one day: “Fatima is a part of me. Any who harm her harm me.”

My father would never say such a thing.

My father doesn’t say much to me anymore. READ MORE…

The International Booker at the Border of Fiction: Who Will Win?

May 27, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

[T]his year’s shortlist . . . is explicitly focused with questions of archives, loss, and narration.

With the announcement of the Booker International 2021 winner around the corner and the shortlisted titles soon to top stacks of books to-be-read around the world, most of us are harboring an energetic curiosity as to the next work that will earn the notoriety and intrigue that such accolades bring. No matter one’s personal feelings around these awards, it’s difficult to deny that the dialogue around them often reveal something pertinent about our times, as well as the role of literature in them. In the following essay, Barbara Halla, our assistant editor and in-house Booker expert, reviews the texts on the shortlist and offers her prediction as to the next book to claim the title.

If there is such a thing as untranslatability, then the title of Adriana Cavarero’s Tu Che Mi Guardi, Tu Che Mi Racconti would be it. Paul A. Kottman has rendered it into Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, a title accurate to its content, typical of academic texts published in English, but lacking the magic of the original. Italian scholar Alessia Ricciardi, however, has provided a more faithful rendition of: “You who look at me, you who tell my story.” This title is not merely a nod, but a full-on embrace of Caverero’s theory of the “narratable self.”

Repudiating the idea of autobiography as the expression of a single, independent will, Caverero—who was active in the Italian feminist and leftist scene in the 1970s—was much more interested in the way external relationships overwhelmingly influence our conception of ourselves and our identities. Her theory of narration is about democratizing the action of creation and self-understanding, demonstrating the reliance we have on the mirroring effects of other people, as well as how collaboration can result in a much fuller conception of the self. But I also think that there is another layer to the interplay between seeing and narrating, insofar as the act of seeing another involves in itself a narrative creation of sorts; every person is but a amalgam of the available fragments we have of them, and we make sense of their place in our lives through storytelling, just as we make sense of our own.

I have started this International Booker prediction with Cavarero because I have found that this year’s shortlist—nay, the entire longlist—is explicitly focused with questions of archives, loss, and narration: what is behind the impulse to write, especially about others, and those we have loved, but lost? Who gets to tell our stories? It is a shame that Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette—as one of the most interesting interjections on the narrative impulse—was cut after being first longlisted in March. The second portion of Minor Detail sees its Palestinian narrator becoming obsessed to the point of endangerment to discover the story that Shibli narrates in the first portion of the book: the rape and murder of a Bedouin girl, whose tragic fate coincides with the narrator’s birthday. This latter section of the book is compulsively driven by this “minor detail,” but there is no “logical explication” for what drives this obsession beyond the existence of the coincidence in itself. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Ashes of Hell” by Brahim Darghouthi

January 19, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Essam M. Al-Jassim

I stared at the neatly made bed and whispered, “Forgive me, my dear, if I have to violate your secrets today.”

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, a son mourning his mother’s death unearths secrets of his family history in Brahim Darghouthi’s short story, “The Ashes of Hell”. Our unnamed narrator finds miscellaneous keepsakes of his parents in a locked box, including letters from his father, a Muslim murdered by the Nazis in an apparent case of mistaken identity. Reflecting upon his mother’s subsequent anti-Semitic resentment, our protagonist recalls a deeper pain beneath this prejudiced demeanour. A short but powerful portrait of compounding grief and the often-destructive ways we deal with it, “The Ashes of Hell” delves into the ethics of family secrets and our obligations to the dead. 

When I returned from the cemetery that bleak and fateful morning, I tapped on my mother’s door softly as if she were still lying asleep on her sickbed. I entered on tiptoe and went straight to her antique, oak coffer, decorated with all the colors of the rainbow.

Her distinct fragrance still hung in the air. I stared at the neatly made bed and whispered, “Forgive me, my dear, if I have to violate your secrets today.”

Taking me by surprise, she answered, “The coffer’s key is under the pillow, my darling.”

The scent of heaven immediately struck me as soon as I turned the key in the lock and slowly raised the paneled top. Some small items were neatly arranged inside: sandalwood, amber, small bottles of rosewater, a yellow quince, a small book of dhikr the size of a hand, three new candles, and a fourth that was half melted.

My mother had always hated power switches; to her, they resembled the fangs of rabid dogs. READ MORE…

Adam Sorkin and Romanian Poetry in 2020

December 16, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Andreea Scridon

Sorkin’s corpus demonstrate[s] exceptional verve and dedication—two especially valuable traits in a sometimes thankless publishing industry. . .

“All Romanians are born poets,” goes a local saying, but far too few are published in English. Among their faithful champions, award-winning translator Adam Sorkin stands out: while some of us forwent productivity in favor of survival this year, he managed to put out a whopping three Romanian poetry translations. In times of collective confinement, they fittingly tackle the self’s relationship to space: the city, the countryside, the foreign land. They hone in on different forms of love and fear, too, from the romantic to the maternal to the religious—the love and fear of God. Beyond these and other commonalities, however, they differ in structure and style: the first is an emotional bildungsroman, the second an epic, the third a hymn of sorts. This formal range attests to Sorkin’s chops, which Assistant Editor Andreea Scridon is only too happy to extol.

It’s always contentious to name someone the best translator of a language, a claim that is perhaps more trouble than it’s worth. I, for one, tend to shy away from such absolutisms, but Adam Sorkin gives me second thoughts. Undeniably, he’s at the top of his game, having published over sixty books of Romanian poetry in English translation (even in the year of the plague, he’s managed to publish several).

Of the three most recent ones—Mircea Cărtărescu’s A Spider’s History of Love, Ioana Ieronim’s Lavinia and Her Daughters, and Aura Christi’s The God’s Orbit—I must admit I’ve only read the first in the original (among contemporary authors, Cărtărescu is a firm favorite of mine, so the stakes were especially high). All three, however, merit attention.

I have no interest in writing a sycophantic or fawning piece; in fact, I would be embarrassed to be so generous with praise if I didn’t feel that Sorkin’s corpus demonstrated exceptional verve and dedication—two especially valuable traits in a sometimes thankless publishing industry that doesn’t necessarily have an interest in promoting a minor language. To put it simply, having worked with Sorkin myself, I knew he wouldn’t disappoint.

A Spider’s History of Love was published by New Meridian Arts in July, making it the first of three Cărtărescu books to come out in English around this time (Solenoid, translated by Sean Cotter, will be published by Deep Vellum in 2022, and Nostalgia, translated by Julian Semilian, is forthcoming from Penguin in 2021). The book’s title is Sorkin’s doing, a phrase he took from a poem included in the volume, which encompasses selections from multiple collections; these are curated into three sections, entitled “Once I Had . . . ,” “Bebop Baby,” and “Prisoner of Myself.”

Considered cumulatively, these poems do not seem to represent an overarching epic odyssey in the same obvious way that Ioana Ieronim’s Lavinia and Cărtărescu’s own Levantul do; rather, they resemble an emotional bildungsroman with porous boundaries, entirely dictated by the inner life of the poetic narrator as he bends, with force and delicacy, the world to his perception, and not vice versa.

In “Once I Had . . .” and “Bebop Baby,” the microcosm of the poet’s Bucharest serves as the stage for various amorous pursuits. With obvious erudition, indicated by winks to his forerunners in Romanian literary history, Cărtărescu combines Romantic and Levantine elements with communist shabbiness. Thus, contemporary banality, even poverty, are seen through an euphoric eye and become savoury for those who understand how to look the right way, thanks to the poet’s almost rabid attention to detail:

. . . and deep down in the digestive tract I could spy
death herself.

I saw her leaning against the iron fence of the TB hospital next to the police headquarters
stopping a kid on the sidewalk to send him to fetch a newspaper or a fresh bun
and I saw her shopping for bread and newspapers in the pinkest, most incomparable
xxxxxxxxxsunset.

(“Love Poem”)

Everything becomes effervescent and iridescent for this narrator, a master of the art of sublimation, who seems to be eternally in love. His are confessional narrative poems—a form which suits the sentimental experience, with its varied shades and seasons. Long as they may be, they read quickly, engaging with reality and avoiding excessive abstraction. The rhyme is ingenious thanks to both the author and the translator (“. . . the evening / deposited thin sheets of lapis lazuli / the parked cars seemed folded from tinfoil and smelled of patchouli”; “. . . and your figure reminds me so little of aesop / that I wrote you a bebop”). READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Whalesong” by Aurélia Lassaque

October 6, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Madeleine Campbell

And her child would have asked her one day why isn’t the Earth called Sea when it’s covered by all that water?

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, a mother’s heartbreak echoes the mournful music of the Earth in Aurélia Lassaque’s hybrid story “Whalesong.” Our protagonist is a prodigious scholar processing a loss so excruciating and traumatic that our narrator frames it via global atrocities and cataclysms. The Earth’s persistent gravity seems absurd, even obscene. Mass extinctions are viewed as unimportant. Through the speaker’s close-third reveries, we witness the massacre of the French Cathars—a gnostic community burned alive by the Church—and meditate upon the world’s cruelty as their ashes are washed away by a seemingly divine rain. Even the sea’s withdrawal evokes a desert’s emptiness. Excerpted from Lassaque’s forthcoming novel, “Whalesong” marries poetry with music, verse with prose—its aural artistry is preserved and accented by Madeleine Campbell’s exquisite translation, which strategically leaves passages in French, Occitan, and Latin to preserve bits of the source language’s sound. Just as our protagonist writes love poems in Occitan (the “language of secrets”), Lassaque’s prose itself reads like verse. A hauntingly beautiful selection by a contemporary troubadour.

She doesn’t know what to pack in her suitcase . . . Toothpaste. A translucent comb with a broken tooth.

When do milk teeth start to grow in? Why this amnesia of our early years? Why don’t our memories reach back to our birth? We are born, and then we step out on a tightrope without a net. We survive infancy. It takes so much effort there’s no room left to remember them. No room either for the future save for the thirst.

What is she to do with all the things they’ve given her? If only she could track the objects passing from nursery to nursery, outgrown in a matter of weeks. Why do people discard them so readily? What would a map of their journey look like?

She has fluoride toothpaste. She thinks it’s silly to deny herself a microwave yet use a toothpaste that causes cancer.

To lose your parents is to become an orphan. To lose your child, what is that? Why is there no word to express it?

*

Outside, it’s pelting down. In the South it rains less than in Paris. The rain is striking. In the tongue of Oc they say it’s raining millstones, raining anvils. A Christian god wouldn’t pelt them with anvils. Mind you . . . He did allow men, women, and children to gather in his temple, be massacred in his temple, even though the stones bleached out, all the blood had dried off centuries ago. That god had let it be known: Kill them all, God will know His own. The river of blood might be flowing still. There may be the odd mistake. A tiny martyr disappears down the river. Does God really welcome all innocents? The god who imposes baptism to save one’s soul, what does he do with the stillborn?

Dehors il pleut à coup de pelles. Plòu a palas.

It’s raining shovels. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from Naulakhi Kothi by Ali Akbar Natiq

August 18, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Naima Rashid

Maulvi Karamat would be furious and ask him why he had returned so late. Sometimes, he would give him a few whacks in anger.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, a slice of rural life frames decades of a family’s history in this excerpt from Ali Akbar Natiq’s acclaimed novel, Naulakhi Kothi. We’re treated to an abridged biography of Maulvi Karamat, an imam at a small village mosque. Maulvi Karamat is heir to his patriarchs’ accumulated knowledge, which he bestows upon his dutiful (but much abused) son, Fazal Din. An arduous errand to collect food (and consequently, money) unfolds into a lively character study of a mother, a father, and a street savvy son. Natiq deftly contextualises the present by manipulating narrative time, weaving generations into concise pockets of exposition.

“Maulvi Karamat”

When Maulvi Karamat left home, he could barely walk straight. Every few minutes, he would lean his full weight on his staff, and had a sharp headache. He had developed a slight fever because of being on an empty stomach for long. At intervals, he felt a renewed bout of anger against Fazal Din, who had still not returned with the rotis. Maulvi Karamat was afraid he might fall while leading the prayer. It was hard to sustain oneself till Zuhar on the glass of sweet buttermilk he had had at Fajr. As a result, he wasn’t too sure of what he had recited during prayer. In fact, at one point, he had said one verse out of place. It was a good thing that Zuhar prayers were not recited aloud, otherwise, he would have suffered a lot of humiliation, and the attendees would have begun to doubt his sanity. Performing the motions of sujood, ruqooh, and qayaam, he swore at Fazal Din countless times, and also thought ill of the attendees behind him, who were content to line up in prayer behind him, but could not tell whether he was hungry or not. In this state, he thought of the hadith that said, ‘If the time for prayer conflicts with the time for a meal, take your meal first, for one cannot pray on an empty stomach.’

For the past thirty years, Maulvi Karamat was the head imam of this small mosque. More than a village, it was a small cluster of around fifty to a hundred houses. Maulvi Karamat’s great grandfather, Khudayaar, had come here first, seeking alms from people who lived here. At that time, this mosque was an empty and unmarked spot. He was the first to mark the precincts as his own by throwing his patched quilt of rags on the floor here, and started saying a prayer. At first, the villagers would give him two square meals out of pity. Then slowly, some more people, seeing the earlier ones, began to join him there for prayers. Khudayaar had spent a year attending religious lectures in an institution. As a result of that experience, he had memorised some verses of the Quran, and also knew how to pray. On the basis of this knowledge, he started performing his duties as imam, and declared himself the maulvi of the village. Little by little, the functions of the mosque began to shape up around this. After his death, Maulvi Karamat’s father, Ahmed Din, succeeded him. Since that day, from generation to generation, they had remained here. Showing great foresight, Ahmed Deen had taught Karamat a few initial books of the Quran, and sent him off to attend religious lectures in Qasoor. Maulvi Karamat spent six years here. By the time he was fifteen, he was fairly fluent in Urdu, Arabic, and Persian. During this time, Maulvi Karamat’s father, Ahmed Din, passed away at the age of sixty. After his father’s death, instead of going elsewhere, he had preferred to stay in this humble mosque at Chak Rahra. He was sixty-five years of age now.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: January 2020

January 13, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eva Wissting, Leah Scott, and Samuel Kahler

A darkly comical Cuban fiction, the collected texts of an impassioned French thinker, and an Israeli story of radical empathy.

We’re starting up 2020 with what we do best: bringing you a selection of brilliant titles that have most recently landed in world literature. Our picks this month span the radical, the intimate, and the dark, with the stunning cross-section of twentieth-century Cuban society, a collection of essays by the notorious Jean Genet, and an Israeli tale of survival and struggle told in a great feat of imagination. Go ahead and take advantage of that new-year urgency to fulfill your resolution to read more, and start here.

black cathedral

The Black Cathedral by Marcial Gala, translated from the Spanish by Anna Kushner, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020

Review by Leah Scott, Social Media Manager

A dark mosaic of interwoven narratives, The Black Cathedral by Marcial Gala lures the reader straight into the complicated dramas of Cienfuegos, a small Cuban town riddled with poverty and conflict. The novel features a broad cast of idiosyncratic characters, whose histories we come to understand not only through their own unique voices, but by the tales told by others; Cienfuego’s harrowing history emerges through decades of local gossip, placing the reader right at the center of the town’s most turbid rumors and confessions—stories that ultimately culminate in a vicious and bitter end.  READ MORE…

(Inter)Artistic Dialogues in Contemporary Macedonian Poetry

December 27, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Vladimir Martinovski

Contemporary Macedonian poetry is dialogical—a spiritual fruit on the literary crossroads between the East and the West

The interplay between different art forms has long been a subject of poetry. How can visual art, color, or sound be translated into the medium of language? In the following essay, Vladimir Martinovski reflects upon such meeting points in contemporary Macedonian poetry: the poetic dialogue between Mateja Matevski and the Japanese haiku-master Kobayashi Issa; ekphrasis in the poetry of Blaze Koneski; musical instruments in the poems of Jovan Strezovski, Slavko Janevski, Jovan Koteski, and Bogomil Gjuzel; medieval Byzantium sacred art in the poems of Mihail Rendzov. Through a selection of extracts from his essay collection Literary Cross/roads, Martinovski explores the rich and subtle interaction between words and the artistic forms that inspired them.

Contemporary Macedonian poetry is dialogical—a spiritual fruit on the literary crossroads between the East and the West, between tradition and modernity, between different artistic forms of expression and the art of the poetic images. A dialogue is established between poetry and different modes of artistic expression. In the attempt to transform paintings into a poetic text, poets must inevitably choose which pieces of visual information is to be transposed into poetic discourse. During the process, the semantics of ekphrastic poetic text is inseparable from—even incomplete without—the connection with the work of art that is the subject of literary description. The poem always depends on the role of the viewer that the reader receives, connecting the words from the poem with the work of art to which they refer.Therefore, a work of art could be treated as a “visual catalyst” of the poem, whereas the poem is an opportunity—thanks to the art of language—to see the work of art in a new way.   READ MORE…

The Personal Apocalyptic Journey: On Liliana Ursu’s Clay and Star

December 19, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by MARGENTO

Only long, silent, patient, and focused respites spent really close to things . . . will perhaps spawn such indelible images.

Clay and Star: Selected Poems of Liliana Ursu, translated from the Romanian by Mihaela Moscaliuc, Etruscan Press, 2019

With an impressive record of thirteen collections in Romanian and five collections in English translation, it is no wonder Liliana Ursu has now arrived with a generous (over seventy pages) collection of selected poetry, published by Etruscan Press in Mihaela Moscaliuc’s translation.

It is just that, unlike your usual (American) volume of selected poetry, the book does not divide the poems by their appearance in previous collections, but simply lists their titles in the contents, every now and then mentioning under their last line where and when they were written. Other poems mention the location in the very title—Văratec Monastery in northern Romania, for instance, is both frequently present and representative of the poetics, but Sibiu, Bucharest, Boston, and San Francisco also appear—while others are dedicated, in their epigraphs, to people met in those places. The book thus amounts to a sort of journey that, while capturing fleeting specifics of literal locales in snapshots, is most prevalently a progress of the soul.

The confessional therefore sets the tone, but is at the same time placed in multifaceted perspectives that render the speaker both observant and observed. The title of a poem meaningfully speaks—for instance—of the “poem composed while being watched by a bird.” The multiple angles are accompanied by a functional synaesthesia that brings together the senses and speech alike. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2019

July 15, 2019  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Barbara Halla, Helena Fornells, and Lindsay Semel

Four reviews of translations you won't want to miss this month!

From translations by heavyweights like Ann Goldstein and Jennifer Croft to novels by writers appearing for the first time in English, July brings a host of exciting new books in translation. Read on for coming-of-age stories set in Italy and Poland, a drama in rural Argentina, and the tale of a young man and his pet lizard in Japan. 

cover_9781609455286_1595_600

A Girl Returned by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, Europa Editions, 2019

Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Editor

In A Girl Returned, Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s award-winning novel, a nameless young woman retrospectively narrates the defining event of her adolescence—the year when the only family she has ever known returns her to her birth family. From the title, the reader can already sense the protagonist’s conundrum. A passive object of the act of being returned, her passivity in her own uprooting threatens to define her identity. Ann Goldstein’s searing translation from the Italian inspires the reader both to accompany the narrator as she wades through the tender memories of that time and to reflect on her or his own family relationships through a new lens.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Haim Nachman Bialik 

July 9, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Dahlia Ephrat

There is Love in the world, they say. / Love—what is it?

This week features the Hebrew language poetry of Haim Nachman Bialik, a poet and cultural leader who influenced twentieth century Hebrew and Yiddish poetry like few others. Bialik’s commitment to innovation in stylistic Hebrew comes across in these skillful translations, which carry emotion upon a poignant succession of nouns that cover a stirring breadth of emotion in relatively few words. Verdant religious language is foiled by a personal lack. Yearning, the language evokes a sense of constantly thwarted arrival met with evacuation. Yet, the poems brim with hope for the future, foregrounding the hope which gives meaning to the barren condition of the present. Bialik remains the national poet of Israel.

Drops a Sprig in Silence

Drops a sprig in silence
To the fence.
Like him,
I’m mute. Shorn of fruit,
Estranged from branch and tree.
Shorn of fruit, the flower
Memory forgotten,
The leaves do sway,
Sure victims for the gale to slay.
Then the nights do come.
The nightmare—
The gall—
I thrash about in the dark,
I knock my head against the wall.
And spring will come.
Is splendour
A foil
To me, a barren twig,
Which bringeth forth
No fruit, nor flower, nor nill.

Take Me Under Your Wings

Take me under your wings,
Be to me sister and mother.
Let your bosom shelter my head,
Nestle my banished prayers.

Then in twilight, the hour of mercy,
Bend down to me, my anguish I’ll tell thee:
There is Youth in the world, they say.
My youth—where is it?

And another secret I’ll tell:
My soul, it is all burnt out.
There is Love in the world, they say.
Love—what is it?

The stars have all deceived me.
There was a dream, it too has passed.
I have not a thing in the world now.
I have nothing, at last.

Take me under your wings,
Be to me sister and mother.
Let your bosom shelter my head,
Nestle my banished prayers.

Translated from the Hebrew by Dahlia Ephrat 

Haim Nachman Bialik (1873-1934), recognized today as the national poet of Israel, wrote in Hebrew and Yiddish. Born in the former Russian Empire, Bialik, who wrote passionately about the persecution of the Jewish people in Russia, moved to Germany and then to Tel Aviv. He had a relationship with Ira Jan, a painter and writer who followed him to Tel Aviv. After his untimely death in surgery, a massive funeral procession mourned down the street which now bears his name, showing his importance as an icon of an emergent Jewish literary movement and a significant cultural leader. During his productive career, Bialik wrote extensively, and his poems are well known to the Israeli public. On top of his poetry and essays, which have now been translated into more than thirty languages and set to music, Bialik translated a book of Talmudic legends called Sefer Ha’agada (The Book of Legends). 

Dahlia Ephrat lives in Tel Aviv, where she was born. She began writing poetry at a young age, and began work as a translator at eighteen. She has translated scores of English language poetry into Hebrew. She remains interested in Hebrew, and embarks on linguistic studies of Hebrew etymology and thought. 

*****

Read more translations on the Asymptote blog: