Posts filed under 'short stories'

A Place for Malice in Literature: On Izumi Suzuki’s Hit Parade of Tears

April 3, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Bella Creel

Women lead the stories in Hit Parade of Tears—with their desires, their passions, and their fears. . .

Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, and Helen O’Horan, Verso, 2023

In the moody, deliriously humorous worlds of Hit Parade of Tears, Izumi Suzuki’s protagonists embody searing emotions, from anguish to apathy, all felt at an apex that seems like a breaking point. Sharp and achingly present, these eleven short stories are transposed by writers Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, and Helen O’Horan, and present emotional and often unsettling glimpses into worlds both familiar and fantastical. Though each story stands on its own, there are elements that draw them together: the stream of Japanese rock from the 1960s and 70s playing in the background, a woman searching for her younger brother, a blurry line between mental illness and otherworldly abilities, and perhaps most consistently, a spotlight on some of the ugliest aspects of human nature—pettiness, cynicism, self-obsession, vitriol. We find these traits in her characters across the board, and those who veer from this standard are noted for their irregularity. Whether it’s a spunky teenage girl or an ungrateful husband, the dialogue in translation is natural and engaging, and each character reads with a distinct voice; descriptions are elevated by clever word choice, from a “galumphing figure” to “laparotomized remains,” and each paragraph is a newly vivid scene.

While the women of Hit Parade of Tears occupy the traditional feminine roles of wives, mothers, and sexual objects, they are not held to stereotypical ideals of femininity when it comes to their emotions and motivations, which makes this a thought-provoking and relevant read for feminists interested in non-Western perspectives. Women lead the stories in Hit Parade of Tears—with their desires, their passions, and their fears—and the men often read like props to the women’s narratives, whether that’s a self-obsessed husband, an ex-lover, a wannabe sugar daddy, a sacrifice, or a younger brother. Men’s bodies are constantly on display and under scrutiny—balding, thin, hot, or literally cut open from the stomach and hung like an ornament in a medical facility—and they rarely have any part in moving the plot forward.

The men in the protagonists’ lives belittle them and take them for granted, but the stories paint them in all their egoistic ways. In the eponymous “Hit Parade of Tears,” we spend the majority of the story listening to the thoughts of a man born over 150 years prior, who hit his prime in the 1960s and 70s. He talks down on his wife and her job archiving that era: “She’s jealous of me, he thought. She’s seething because she couldn’t take part in my youth like someone from the same generation could.” Come to find out, she’s been alive just as long as he has—they even dated briefly a hundred years ago, but he, solipsistic and self-absorbed, forgot, and he can’t imagine her experiences living up to his. Suzuki’s fiction is explicit in its critique of men’s treatment of women—hypocritical, predatory, and strikingly uncool, Suzuki’s men believe they have the upper hand in their relationships. Behind this belief, Suzuki’s women pull the strings, using the hands they’ve been dealt (as housewives, as sexy schoolgirls, as the repressed desires of a depressed woman) to their benefit. READ MORE…

Translating at the Limits of Language: Lisa Dillman on Yuri Herrera

March 23, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Georgina Fooks

[Herrera's] writing is for everyone on an individual level, regardless of education, regardless of language, regardless of national histories.

In Ten Planets, our February Book Club selection, the acclaimed Yuri Herrera made his short fiction debut in the Anglophone, featuring a myriad of worlds and inventions as seen through the author’s signature wit, playfulness, and fierce intelligence. Through the inspired language of his longtime translator, Lisa Dillman, Herrera elucidates the workings of humanity through a series of sci-fi miniatures, engaging with the philosophical queries of contemporary existence as only the writer can—through imagination. In this following interview, Georgina Fooks speaks with Dillman about the narrative-political, how she navigated Herrera’s neologisms and idiosyncratic style, and how such writing continues to push limits.

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.   

Georgina Fooks (GF): Could you tell us about your relationship with the Spanish language and what brought you to translating it?

Lisa Dillman (LD): I’m sort of the poster child for study abroad programs. I was an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego when I went to Barcelona for a year and fell in love with Spanish, and also with Catalan—with the creativity and the ludic qualities I found in these languages. I don’t want to essentialize and say that Spanish is a particularly ludic language, but I found the possibilities for play really enticing.

Honestly, I think my entrance into translation was just the result of returning from studying abroad and having very stereotypical experiences of talking to friends who had not gone—telling a joke or something, and them not finding it funny. And that was frustrating: why is this funny in Spanish and you don’t think it’s funny in English? That kind of challenge was something I found infuriating to begin with, and then fruitful afterwards to try to deal with.

I then ended up going to the UK to study translation at Middlesex, under Peter Bush. I had been in a Spanish literature doctoral program, but the US is really bad with translation programs and courses. There are more now, but none that I knew of at the time. In the UK and most other countries, translation is a proper field which you can study—so that’s what I did. I moved to the UK, I did my masters there, then spent subsequent years, you know, translating a short story, sending it to a journal by snail mail, waiting for five or six months to get a rejection letter, sending it out again, and eventually, finally I got somewhere.

GF: When did you first encounter Herrera’s work? And what motivated you to translate him? As you’ve translated all of his novels into English so far.

LD: I have. And I’m actually working right now on the one that came after Ten Planets. I had a friend who was asked to translate an excerpt for Symposia Way, which is the literary magazine of City of Asylum in Pittsburgh. The City of Asylum has writers in residence who are in exile from their home countries, and they were doing a series in which they asked the writers and residents to select one writer they thought deserved attention. Horacio Castellanos Moya selected Herrera.

At the time, it was just a short excerpt of  Kingdom Cons, which they published in their magazine, and I was thrilled to do it because it was immediately apparent that Yuri’s style is just so rich and nuanced and does so many different things at the same time. It struck me as incredibly poignant and beautiful, and very different from anything I had read. READ MORE…

Dimensions of Aram: On Jeyamohan’s Stories of the True

December 7, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

No matter the forces that amass against idealism—such as weapons raised by pragmatic tradition—it cannot be broken, and always spreads.

Stories of the True by Jeyamohan, translated from the Tamil by Priyamvada, Juggernaut Books, 2022

Aram—this was the original Tamil title of Jeyamohan’s collection of short stories first published in 2011, recently released in Priyamvada’s English translation as Stories of the True. Priyamvada deems aram a complex word, even going as far as to call it untranslatable. In other contexts, aram has been rendered as “virtue” or “ethics,” and while the former is possibly the closest in meaning, Priyamvada notes that “aram seems . . . a far more capacious word than ethics.” The familiar Sanskrit word “dharm”’ might be a near-perfect equivalent, and it has a Tamil variation as well, but Priyamvada resisted inserting Hindi or Sanskrit words in place of the Tamil, even if they would be relatively well-known and understood by English readers. This is in part her way of dissenting against the infamous political project of promoting Hindi as a national language, autocratically imposed in an attack on linguistic pluralism. Similarly, this choice served to geographically, culturally, and linguistically ground the stories in Southern India. She writes, “It wasn’t just the stubbornness of someone from the south of the peninsula, but I felt it takes away from the ‘place’ of the stories to be using terms from a different part of the country.”

In her search for a fitting translation of Aram, Priyamvada allowed herself to be guided by the stories themselves and to explore all the “dimensions of aram” that these narratives depicted, as well as the range of ethical codes they encompassed. However, it would be simplistic to consider them, in her words, “simple expositions of virtue.” She writes: “Reaching beyond the understanding of ethics as dichromatic, immutable codes of conduct, the narratives delve into deeper and more complex internal dilemmas . . . It is in this quest that the stories move from podhu-aram, a collective dharma, to thannaram or swadharma, the dharma of an individual.” In her estimation, the stories in this collection feature a mix of characters, some of whom have already finished their journey of self-discovery and some who are still on the way. Among the former, they are distinguished by “their steadfast adherence to ‘their truth,’” and for the latter, by “these ‘moments of truth’ [that] also stand illuminated.” In a nutshell: “The stories hold in tension a truth realized, and a truth to be discovered.” READ MORE…

Words Like Gunpowder: An Interview with Najwa Bin Shatwan

November 21, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Chinmay Rastogi

What you consider unreasonable, logically fallic, or absurd is our ordinary reality. . .

Najwa Bin Shatwan is a Libyan academic and novelist—or so you will find written across the pages of many journals’ and publishers’ websites, alongside her stories in Arabic and their English translations. But she is so much more, as anyone who has had the pleasure of reading her works can attest to. Born in a land continually reeling with political unrest, she has been denied the privilege of free learning—such as of foreign languages—and suppressed and prosecuted for shedding light on the suffering of people past and present. Still, she weaves magic with words, painting vivid scenes with surreal imagery, and draws you into dialogue and contemplation by first making you smile. 

The imagery used in her pieces is enchanting, which is perhaps not a surprise given how images drive her. Her novel The Slave Yards, which made her the first Libyan writer to be shortlisted for the International Award for Arab Fiction, was catalyzed from an incident wherein she saw a photograph of Benghazi at a friend’s place; the photograph compelled her to show the reality and horrors of the slave trade in Libya. While there have been attempts to shut her down—which have succeeded in making her emigrate to Italy—her oppressors have failed to silence a voice that incorporates the many people, dialects, values, and thoughts she embodies. 

Her latest publication, Catalogue of a Private Life, is a collection of short stories translated form Arabic by Sawad Hussain, and it is a tapestry that incorporates many dualities of a people and their identity: their quirks and rigidity, their ready acceptance of bizarre circumstances and tunnel vision in regular circumstances, their warm humour and the dread of their situations. It won the 2019 English PEN Translates award, and I had the pleasure to talk to her about her life as well as the stories in this collection.

Chinmay Rastogi (CR): Your work has been a guiding light towards the suffering of people in Libya, but it also unveils the atrocities conducted by people of the region in the past, as in The Slave Yards. How difficult is it to stand on middle ground, to give both accounts through your writing?

Najwa Bin Shatwan (NBS): Writing in culturally thorny areas such as the Arab region is not easy, especially if the writer dismantles topics of social or political sensitivity—whether from the past or the present. It is easy for a book’s subject to incite conflict or escalate into a declaration of hostility. Our writing, which focuses on real matters, creates enemies, and such antagonism does not stop at a point of view that differs from what the writer’s. Rather, it may escalate into bloodshed or physical assault, simply because the writer presents a proposal that is different from the society’s vision, and is not in line with the prevailing ideology.

I felt the ferocity of this difference in my writing in terms of its social and political orientation, and with the spread of freedom of expression—which reached a chaotic peak with the emergence of social media—it became possible for those who disagree with a writer to inflame or incite public opinion against them.

Words are like gunpowder—they can ignite at any moment, and the type of writing that touches open wounds is not welcome; people prefer to proceed with their lives in denial, and believe that adopting a false mental attitude regarding many issues is better than getting into trouble.

As a writer, I work honestly and impartially, without complacency, and I feel the danger to my life, to my chances and fortunes in general. READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Blow-Up

October 6, 2022  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by MARGENTO, Rubén López, Thuy Dinh, and Xiao Yue Shan

Ultimately, both Antonioni’s cinematic approach and Cortázar’s literary vision are simply two sides of the same coin.

Michelangelo Antonioni and Julio Cortázar form our double feature for this latest edition of Asymptote at the Movies—a perfect pairing in their own idiosyncratic way, as two auteurs who both formidably challenged the responsibilities and capacities of their mediums. Cortázar’s “Les babas del diablo” was published in 1959, and a short six years later, Antonioni’s Blow-Up hit the theatres. Both works have at their centre a photographer: Cortázar’s narrator, Michel; and Antonioni’s protagonist, Thomas. Both also see their leading men stumble across something sinister, which drastically—and perhaps irreversibly—alter their engagement with their respective realities. Cortázar and Antonioni have both declaimed any other significant crossover between their works, and indeed they seem to have little more in common besides an overarching narrative catalyst. . . but isn’t there always more to be found when two intelligences are in dialogue? In the following roundtable, Chris Tănăsescu, Thuy Dinh, Xiao Yue Shan, and Rubén López discuss these two masterpieces, their phenomenology, and how the mode of translation works between them.

Chris Tănăsescu (CT): I read Cortázar’s story only after watching the movie—actually, after watching Blow-Up multiple times over the years. But I believe this is far from being the only reason why, when I did finally read the Cortázar text, it seemed to me that the story had been written after the movie, and not the movie that was based on—or rather, “inspired by”—the story . . . The story struck me as a piece I would have expected Antonioni to write himself. “This is Antonioni,” I thought to myself . . . His cinematic poetics, the style and language (of characters in various movies of his, quite a number of them writers or artists), even his obsessive motifs (such as composition versus/and/as the machine) were all there. What’s more, Cortázar’s speaker’s moody, stylistic, grammatical, translational, topographical, and voyeuristic flaneuring seemed like the perfect illustration [and at times even (re)wording] of some of Antonioni’s most well-known statements about the art of modern filmmaking; particularly the ones in which he ponders over the director’s mission to capture a never-static flux-like reality by continuously staying in motion and incessantly gravitating towards, and away from, moments of potential crystallization. The “arriving and moving on, as a new perception.”

Thuy Dinh (TD): I prefer to think that each work—whether the film or the story—exists independently of each other, with its own unique language and attributes, yet can converse with or sustain the other like a dance, a collaboration, or an equitable marriage: where no one has, or wishes, to have the upper hand. This idea of conversation seems more inclusive, and helps us to gain a more holistic view of what we call “reality,” don’t you think—especially since both Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Cortázar’s “Las babas del diablo” squarely address the limitations of subjectivity and/or the inherent instability of any narrative approach, and in so doing invite the audience/reader to accept the fluidity of all human experiences?

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): This concept of dialogic resonance operating inside the small words “inspired by” is so discombobulating and vast, it’s a shame that we only have the linear conceit of before and after to refer to it—but before and after it is. Chris, even though as you so precisely pointed out, the film is rife with Antonioni and his inquiries (that of the despair innate in sexual elation, that “memory offers no guarantees,” and that hallucinogenic quality of modern opulence), I think at the centre of his Blow-Up is this idea that life is always interrupted with seeing, and seeing always interrupted with life, and this is, I believe, a direct carry-over from Cortázar’s mesmerising, illusive tale of what it means when the gift of sight is led through the twisted chambers of seeing. Which is to say, I agree with both of you, that at the confluence of these two works lie a similar attention to fluidity. READ MORE…

Announcing Our September Book Club Title: No Windmills in Basra by Diaa Jubaili

September 29, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

[Jubaili] departs from reality and time to scratch at those seemingly eternal themes so often associated with fairy tales.

In this fantastic, sobering, and imagistic collection, Diaa Jubaili uses the folktale traditions of Iraq to reflect newly on war, country, and national history. Unlike traditional legends, where magic lives in the world as phenomenon and circumstance, the characters of these stories defy their grave realities with feats of imagination, in bold and moving demonstrations of how the mind can transcend matter. In humanizing the struggles of Iraq across its conflicts, Jubaili addresses the horrors of war with philosophical wit and metaphysical possibility.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, 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.

No Windmills in Basra by Diaa Jubaili, translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti, Deep Vellum, 2022

On the surface, fairy tales should theoretically be easy to translate (if there is a world in which translation is easy); they’re usually simplistically narrated, lexically limited, and short. But of course, texts that seem simple on the surface can often turn out to be immensely difficult, and in the case of fairy tales, perplexing questions arise almost immediately, because so much of what they impart depends on a reader’s pre-existing cultural knowledge. Can any of us remember a time when we didn’t know the story of Little Red Riding Hood?

The challenges of translation are made even more evident when the fairy tales are intended for adults, as is the case with Diaa Jubaili’s stories in No Windmills in Basra, translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti. In this collection of tales—some less than a page long, some ranging over several pages—Jubaili engages slantwise with the history of Iraq and Basra over the past seventy years. Rather than writing a collection of realist fiction, the author departs from reality and time to scratch at those seemingly eternal themes so often associated with fairy tales.

In the opening story of the collection, “Flying,” for example, a security guard named Mubarak thinks often of launching airborne as he guards the chickens at a poultry plant south of Basra.

. . . he flew twice—not on a plane, or by means of a hot air balloon or parachute, and not even on a giant demon’s wings or a magic carpet as happened so often in the tales from the Thousand and One Nights. Nor was he an admirer of the medieval scientist-inventor Ibn Firnas, who dreamed of flapping wings and soaring heights, since Mubarak knew that with that sort of thing, he would eventually end up a pile of broken bones on the side of the road.

There is no magic in this story—at least not the kind we associate with fairy tales—but that does not stop Mubarak from experiencing a journey from the everyday to the cosmic. In his first experience with flight, As an infantry soldier whose company is targeted by bombing, he is tossed into the air after a detonation, being sent briefly into a world where a man airborne is not shorthand for a fighter pilot honing in for the kill, but instead a miracle that allows for deferred violence and peace accords. Of course, Mubarak’s flight comes at the expense of his company, all of whom die in the explosion. Fairy tales are fantastic things, but they’re also dangerous things, and miracles usually have exacting prices. In fact, in this story, American munitions are the only means by which Mubarak can again take flight. The djinns and magicians of the Thousand and One Nights have been replaced by the darker realities of modern warfare. READ MORE…

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.

READ MORE…

Will the Present Suffice? On Disappearance in Fiction

September 21, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by MK Harb

It seems that disappearance creates even more presence, focusing around the individual instead of erasing them.

What is absence—this deeply felt substance that is not made of matter, but lack? In texts across time, writers have given form to vanishing and its metaphorical power, studying its mystery and its abjection, its myth and its experience. In the following essay, MK Harb discusses three cases of disappearance in short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Munro, and Danial Haghighi, and how the three authors use the duality of presence and absence to explore the psychology of those who go and those who stay, as well as experiences of class, gender, sexuality, and colonialism.

In a curious poem by the name of “Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage,” the late Larry Levis created, in words blown with the precision of a glassmaker, a philosophical text on life and desire. Beginning with, “It’s a list of what I cannot touch,” Levis narrates the myth of the Cumaean Sibyl, an ancient Greek priestess who, in her quest to ask the Gods for eternal life, forgot to ask for eternal youth. What ensues is a lesson in cruelty, for as time expands and centuries go by, she shrinks and dwarfs until she becomes as tiny as a thumb, upon which she is placed in a jar to “suffocate without being able to die.” As the years churn on, Sibyl eventually finds herself in a birdcage, placed there by an Athenian shop owner for her protection. She emits small bird-like whispers to Athenian boys, who often rattle her cage to ask: What do you want, Sibyl? To this she responds: death. Her voice goes mute as she witnesses an ever-changing Athens through to the Second World War, all the while continuing to be alive, shriveling and aging, yet somehow disappearing from living. Using Sibyl, Levis creates a melancholic irony in which a desire for a prolonged life leads to disappearance.

When I think of disappearance, I think of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and the soul-crushing friendship between Lila and Elena, two intellectual women haunted by the other’s abilities, acting out their insecurities through never-ending disappearances and reappearances within each other’s lives. I think of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1960s film Woman in The Dunes, where a depressive Japanese scientist spends the night with a seductive village woman in a remote sand dune. After their affair, the staircase leading outwards—a symbol of return to urbanity—vanishes, and the most Sisyphean struggle ensues. In such works, disappearance is an allegory for life and time, lost and spent.

Disappearance has long been a hallmark of serious prose, a thematic thread throughout literature of all variances. In three short stories set in Canada, India, and Iran, this allegorical device operates at the narratives’ center. The first is Jorge Luis Borges’ “Man on the Threshold,” which follows the tradition of narration through memory, telling us of the writer’s childhood friend, Bioy Casares, who brings with him from London to Buenos Aires a strange dagger. This object triggers another story from a friend sitting with them, Christopher Dewey, who served in the British colonies of India. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2022

September 12, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Irmak Ertuna Howison, and Rachel Stanyon

We review new releases from Romania, Guatemala, and Turkey!

In these brilliant feats of literature, three writers drive the vehicle of language through time and space to learn profound, painful, and complex truths about history and our inheritance of it. From Romania, Zsolt Láng braids imagination and reality to paint multitudinous portraits of the individual and society. From Turkey, Defne Suman tracks a family through present hauntings into the dark, deceptive recesses of the national past. From Guatemala, Eduardo Halfon opens up the question of a name as it is passed down through generations, delving into the chasm between who we are and what we are called. Read on to find out more. Also, for the first time since the magazine’s inception, we have included affiliate links to books under review. Please take note that we may receive a small commission for purchases made through these links, which will go toward supporting our mission of advocating for greater inclusiveness in world literature. Other ways include joining our Book Club or becoming a sustaining member. 

lang

The Birth of Emma K. by Zsolt Láng, translated from the Hungarian by Owen Good and Ottilie Mulzet, Seagull Books, 2022 

Review by Rachel Stanyon, Senior Copy Editor

What a swirling, kaleidoscopic reading experience. Zsolt Láng’s The Birth of Emma K. is a cracker of a book—albeit one that forces readers to commit to intricate twists and turns, before arriving at meaning within its refracted reflections on modern life.

Láng—a Hungarian writer from Transylvania, Romania—presents a plethora of perspectives in these twelve short stories, but unites them through a shared narrative style that constantly questions and blurs one’s sense of reality, while never quite descending into fantasy. The stories themselves are often equivocal, with endings that invite conjecture or remain opaque, and the plotlines that lead to these often ambiguous conclusions are full of hypotheticals, the language replete with conditionals and revisions, making every situation feel provisional and emphasising the contingent nature of the world.

The characters, meanwhile, are often driven by love, lust, hatred, or other forces of reproduction, but often also seem adrift, questioning their existence. This is evident from the very opening of the collection, which sees God observing and vacillating over the degree to which he should—and is able to—intervene in the lives of his creations. This version of God is not only not omnipotent, he has a heightened, anxiety-inducing awareness of the potentially negative consequences of his actions, and prays to another higher being that gave him his “not-quite-absolute power.” In the collection’s arch postmodernist style, which seems to use this initial framing by a semi-powerful God to parallel the figure of the author, scenarios are constantly retracted and resketched, and we are often told what is not happening, rather than what is:

That our Lord was sitting or standing about on the side of Gellért hill, at the top of Számadó street near the Sióvölgyi family’s villa, would be an exaggeration. Our Lord doesn’t tend to sit or stand about, he floats. But just so we aren’t constantly searching for words and forever refining what we come up with, let’s postulate that we’re not talking about the Father or the Holy Ghost, we’re talking about the Son, and then we can confidently say that there stood the Son of God…

READ MORE…

Uninhabitable Waiting: On Damodar Mauzo’s The Wait and Other Stories

August 22, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

Mauzo highlights the failings of human nature and critiques the resort to impulse.

The Wait and Other Stories by Damodar Mauzo, translated from the Konkani by Xavier Cota, Penguin India, 2022

Damodar Mauzo is a short story writer, novelist, and critic hailing from the Indian state of Goa. He writes in Konkani and his works have been translated into English by Vidya Pai in addition to his long-time collaborator, Xavier Cota. The Wait and Other Stories, a short story collection, has been translated by the latter. In 2021, he was the recipient of the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honour. The writer Vivek Menezes calls Mauzo “an exemplar of Goa’s fluid cultural identity, marked by an unabashed pluralistic universalism that persists despite threats and depredations.” His stories seamlessly bridge the gap between timeless and current, invoking the great short story writers of the nineteenth century—de Maupassant, O Henry, Saki—in terms of how often they take an unexpected turn at the end, but also modern practitioners of the form in post-Independence India like Anjum Hasan and Aruni Kashyap, in the way they evoke both a local and national sense of place.

Goa’s history is tumultuous much like the rest of India, but it is also unique due to its separate, and much longer, history of European colonization. In the fifteenth century, it was ruled over by the Adil Shahis of Bijapur. The Portuguese overthrew them and claimed Goa as their territory in 1510, a sovereignty that remained in place for more than four centuries. As such, Goa was never a part of the British Empire and its Indian holdings. Therefore, India’s eventual independence from British rule in 1947 did not impact its Portuguese-controlled status. When the newly established Indian government asked Portugal to cede all its territories on the subcontinent, it refused. As a result, India invaded to annex Goa, along with the Daman and Diu Islands, into the union in 1967. For two more decades, Goa remained just a union territory after a referendum but was eventually designated as the twenty-fifth state of India in 1987.

READ MORE…

Her Turn: The English and Russian Stories of Olga Zilberbourg, AKA Olga Grenets

August 3, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Ian Ross Singleton

The Russian language, here, gifts its writer a context. . .

When a writer earns a second language, what does it mean to write in the distinct spaces within and between the two? In this essay on Russian writer Olga Zilberbourg, who also goes by Olga Grenets, nonfiction editor Ian Ross Singleton explores the various ways that language can reveal, point to, and emphasize in both originals and translations.

What does another language afford an exophonic writer—one writing in a language other than her native tongue? Olga Zilberbourg, also known as Olga Grenets in her Russian publications, is both translingual and exophonic. The English-language collection, Like Water and Other Stories, was published in 2019 after a trio of Russian books; then, in 2021, many of the stories from Like Water appeared in Russian as Задержи дыхание (Hold Your Breath). The stories of Like Water and its edited, translated successor open up the span of Zilberbourg’s/Grenets’ linguistic experience. The Russian iteration of the tales are not word-for-word translations, and, as with any translation, they present a reflection of the English-language original—no matter how close, even the strictest of translations alters a story. So, while Hold Your Breath may be a closely related work, it nonetheless stands as its own expression of (in this case) Grenets’ work.

Many of the stories in both collections present reflections on an immigrant’s experience. “Plastic Film With a Magnetic Coating” is about mixtapes, and the part they played in childhood romances and gender roles during the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet nineties. It is almost identical in both the English original and Russian translation, but in the English, the last sentence makes a disclaimer: “I’m speaking, of course, of a very different time and place.” What is significant about Zilberbourg’s work is that the two versions of this story span those two different times and places. In the Anglophone literary world, Zilberbourg is allocated under the umbrella of writers born in the Soviet Union, a clear mark of difference; to the audience of Like Water, then, this sentence is clear, intended to describe the exotic content of the story.

However, what might sound foreign to a reader of Like Water may, of course, be more commonplace to a reader of Hold Your Breath. The Russian translation of the story has a completely different ending, omitting this sentence entirely. Such a drastic change make sense; presumably, for the majority of those reading Hold Your Breath, the setting would not be a completely different place, and the narrative time is simply the not-so-distant past. In the English version, Zilberbourg’s narrator belongs to a generation that would recognize the romantic exchange of mixtapes in that time and place, and in the Russian version, the narrator adds a more specific, personal passage to their story, and it’s this reveal that concludes the Russian version of “Plastic Film . . .”

This passage in question specifies the narrator’s sexuality as one not necessarily falling within heterosexual norms: “Разумеется, когда через кассету я получила признание от девочки, я решила, что сообщение предназначено не мне, и ничего не ответила.” (“Of course, when, by cassette, I received a confession from a girl, I decided that the message wasn’t meant for me and didn’t answer.”) In English, the story can be intuited as relating to heterosexual relationships; in the Russian, there is a potential lesbian romance. In this case, the question of what an attained language can offer might be inverted to ask what a return to one’s primary language can afford. READ MORE…

Ethical Extremes: On Sayaka Murata’s Life Ceremony

July 25, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Ruwa Alhayek

Over and over again, throughout these stories, we are confronted with the question of consumption, literal and figurative.

Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori, Grove Atlantic/Granta, 2022

From Sayaka Murata, the award-winning author of Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings, comes Life Ceremony, a debut compilation of her short stories. The collection is unsettling, paved with the disturbances of odd people and new customs nestled amidst familiar words and routines;. Instead of burials, human bodies are recycled—a beloved father-in-law’s skin might be used as a bride’s veil, a person’s hair for a cardigan, human bones for chair legs. Instead of funerals, there are life ceremonies, where mourners dress in “skimpy clothing” to partake in eating the body of the deceased before going off in pairs for “insemination.”  One woman is convinced that she has been reborn into an ordinary family in contemporary Japan, when in her previous (real) life, she was a warrior with supernatural powers from the magical city of Dundilas. Another woman falls in love with her curtain and feels betrayed when she walks in to find her boyfriend (who somehow has confused it for her) wrapped in its folds on her bed.

Sayaka Murata is a master of delivery, and in Ginny Takemori’s translation, it becomes clear that the way to convey these odd stories in all their philosophical force is to do it deadpan, matter-of-factly, and sometimes, coldly. But—there are breaks, moments that aren’t so much characterized by their coldness but by their sincerity, their characters’ confusion, and their loss. When Naoki, who is ethically opposed to using furniture or clothes made of human corpses, faces his late father’s dying wish to have his skin used in his son’s wedding, he is thrown off balance and says vacantly: “I can’t. . . I don’t. . . I really don’t know what to think anymore. Until this morning, I was confident about how to use words like barbaric and moved, but now it all feels so groundless.” We are made to sympathize with him even amidst bombardments of oppositional, universal ideas, derived from a new ethics that says discarding any part of a human is wasteful—one that asks: how is using human hair any different from using another animal’s?

In “Life Ceremony,” Maho can’t bring herself to partake in the ceremonial eating of the dead following an instance, thirty years ago, when she was bullied for suggesting the very thing that everyone does so casually now. She says to her friend Yamamoto, who also doesn’t eat human meat: “It’s just that thirty years ago, a completely different sense of values was the norm, and I just can’t keep up with the changes. I kind of feel betrayed by the world.” I too felt betrayed by the world in Murata’s novel, suddenly becoming painfully aware of how fast change comes via contemporary mediums—how many of our habits and values are dictated by global capital, and how much effort it takes to resist, even if only for the reprieve of a few moments to think and form opinions. How lonely it is both to belong to a world like this, and to be an outlier. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2022

July 11, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Charlie Ng, and Olivia Roslansky

Introducing new translations from the German, Gujarati, and Spanish!

In this month’s round-up of exciting new translations from around the world, our editors review an artful and intertextual graphic novel from Nicolas Mahler; a lyrical, genre-bending tale of creation and storytelling from Spanish writer Manuel Astur; and a compilation from Gujarati writer Dhumketu, a master of the short story. Read on to find out more!

sussex

Alice in Sussex by Nicolas Mahler, translated from the German by Alexander Booth, Seagull Books, 2022

Review by Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large for Hong Kong

Lewis Carroll’s Alice and Frankenstein’s monster make an unlikely combination, but in Alice in Sussex, Austrian comic artist and illustrator Nicolas Mahler brings the two together in his vivid reimagining of a classic tale. The title of the graphic novel makes references to both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and H. C. Artmann’s parody of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein—Frankenstein in Sussex, suggesting an intertextual playfulness that is further substantiated throughout the work. Mahler’s seven-year-old Alice—the same age as Carroll’s—experiences an adventure as equally nonsensical as the original’s, but her journey is even more rife with complexities, incorporating a wide range of literary and philosophical references. To sum it up, this adventure down the White Rabbit’s hole is a humorous, inventive set, in which Mahler can play with his own literary and philosophical influences.

Readers familiar with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland can certainly remember the beginning of the children’s classic, in which Alice complains that there are no pictures or conversations in her sister’s book. Mahler’s Alice encounters the same boredom when reading her sister’s copy of Frankenstein in Sussex, and thus initiates the White Rabbit’s invitation into his hole, promising to show her “a lavishly illustrated edition.” Drawn sitting by an infinity-shaped stream, the waters foreshadow Alice’s seemingly never-ending descent down the chimney into a huge house underneath the meadow, as well as the long, elaborated, and bizarre dream that follows. Although the promised book cannot be found on the Rabbit’s bookshelf, the graphic novel actualises it—illustrating Alice’s encounter with Frankenstein’s monster later in the story. It also tries to acknowledge her other desire—for conversations—by letting her meet and converse with other idiosyncratic characters. Both, however, turn out to be anything but desirable for young Alice.

In Lewis Carroll’s original, Alice ponders on her identity after experiencing a series of queer events: “Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” Likewise, Mahler’s Alice is confronted with the same crisis, visually represented by Alice falling into the huge, fuzzy cloud of smoke drifting from the pipe of the Caterpillar, who then asks her: “Who are you?” Alice is unable to answer the question, but she also doesn’t make any great effort; her desire to escape is stronger than any liking for strange conversations. A further existentialist twist is introduced when the White Rabbit can only find The Trouble with Being Born by Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran on his bookshelf, and the Caterpillar tells Alice an important thing about life: “Being alive means losing the ground beneath your feet!!!” Such aphorisms are commonly sprinkled throughout the graphic novel—reminiscent of The Trouble with Being Born; the pain of life is treated with levity and amusement, with Alice being tossed around on the Caterpillar’s body, and the Caterpillar’s writhing shifts with his many legs in the air. While Alice is dismayed at losing the ground beneath her feet, the Caterpillar is comfortable with it. Despite being infused with dark humor, Mahler’s style is never overly harsh on his characters; his drawings are delightful, exuding a sense of gentleness. READ MORE…

Unexpired Bodies: On Malika Moustadraf’s Blood Feast

May 4, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Alex Tan

Vignettes, as building blocks of Moustadraf’s narrative, are wielded to strip away at illusions of respectability.

Blood Feast: The Complete Short Stories of Malika Moustadraf, translated from the Arabic by Alice Guthrie, The Feminist Press, 2022

More than a decade after the original publication of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley infamously called the book her “hideous progeny.” A whole critical tradition was born in the shadow of that phrase, obsessively sewn together by the umbilical connections between writing, motherhood and the monstrosity of autobiography; no one could forget that the complications of Shelley’s birth had literally sent her own mother—the pioneering English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft—to an untimely death.

Like giving birth, writing exacts an extraordinary sacrifice in order to grant the gift of life to another. It’s difficult to imagine a more tragic illustration than the story of Moroccan cult feminist icon, Malika Moustadraf. Debilitated by chronic kidney illness but dogged and uncompromising in her devotion to her craft, Moustadraf skipped rounds of essential medication to fund her first publication. This literary progeny consumed her—heart, soul, and kidney; still she insisted, “writing is a kind of sedative for the pain I live with.”

Every word she set down on the page sustained as much as it killed her, as Alice Guthrie tells us in her tender and comprehensive translator’s note, appended to her crisp rendering of Blood Feast: The Complete Short Stories of Malika Moustadraf (issued in the UK by Saqi Books under the title Something Strange, Like Hunger). Beyond its ambitious sweep of contextual detail, Guthrie’s essay represents a loving tribute to Moustadraf’s tempestuous and painfully ephemeral existence in the karians of Casablanca—a monument to all the work she could have written if not for the overlapping violences of the systems that failed her, one after the other.

Karian, a term unique to Casablanca, is cleverly left untranslated by Guthrie and glossed as impoverished neighbourhoods—with “unregulated improvised residential structures,” “often inhabited by recent migrants to the city from rural areas.” Fringed by a context of Sufi marabouts and witchcraft, these spaces are rife with djinn and black magic curses inflicting impotence, lovesickness, and malady on the integrity of bodies. Throughout Blood Feast, Guthrie’s familiarity with the rituals, superstitions, and slang of the region are not simply evident in the cadences of her translation, but further substantiated by the specific Arabic and Darija expressions she opts not to translate. READ MORE…