Posts filed under 'survival'

Announcing our December Book Club Selection: On the Isle of Antioch by Amin Maalouf

December 29, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Ruwa Alhayek

[Maalouf] offers us a human way to experience cataclysm without masking the confusion and desperation that takes hold. . .

For our final title of 2023, we are proud to present the latest novel by acclaimed French-Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf, whose extraordinary work weaves fantasy and history with a powerful reckoning of contemporary issues. In On the Isle of Antioch, Maalouf turns to dystopian narrative to explore the frailties and failures of human empires, drawing a surreal evolution of events that escalate from the very real threat of total global destruction. With a philosophical richness that finds footholds in Maalouf’s elegant, nebulous depictions of desire and connection, the novel is a beautiful, necessary rumination on what survival means on the precipices of so much devastation.

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.  

On the Isle of Antioch by Amin Maalouf, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer, World Editions, 2023

There is something eerie about reading Amin Maalouf’s On The Isle of Antioch during the same days described by its narrator’s journal entries. In four sections, or “notebooks”, that date from November 9 to December 9, Maalouf’s surreal, thrilling novel is told through the experiences of Alexander, an artist and one of two inhabitants on the titular island of Antioch, as he travels in this brief window of time through isolation, doom, communion, and the unexpected orders and disorders of a dying world.

Having inherited the land from his father, who had refused to sell the deed despite financial difficulties, Alexander decides, in the wake of his parents’ death, to change his life. He begins drawing, releasing work under the pseudonym Alec Zander, and moves to Antioch in a reprieve of his childhood fantasies, calling it his “ancestral island.” Believing himself to be the only inhabitant and sole owner, he’s surprised to find, while waiting for his house to be built, that a woman and writer by the name of Ève had long ago purchased the remaining portion of the island that he did not own, and, being “eager for solitude”, she too has made it her home. Ève’s been in a rut, having published one masterpiece—a novel titled The Future Doesn’t Live Here Anymore—before losing her job and retiring to Antioch, where she sleeps all day and is awake all night, trying to work.

What drives these two loners together, after months of avoiding each other’s company, is a sudden blackout. When all the lights and appliances in Alexander’s house turn off, and even the radio plays only an ominous whistling on every station, he goes to see Ève, suddenly overwhelmed by a solitude that now weighs more heavily on him than ever, and feeling “for the first time in twelve years, [that he] slightly regret[s] not living in a town or a village like an ordinary mortal.” Having previously thought of Ève only as a “silent, ghostly, almost nonexistent” presence, it is only after this incident—which turns out to be a full blackout of all communication systems—that Alexander and Ève are able to find themselves in one another’s company. READ MORE…

State of Emergency: Helene Bukowski’s Milk Teeth in Review

September 13, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Anna Rumsby

Milk Teeth is a novel with a lingering taste, one that weighs on the soul.

Milk Teeth by Helene Bukowski, translated from the German by Jen Calleja, Unnamed Press, 2021

You can’t expect the world to be exactly the same as it is in books.

Milk Teeth is claustrophobic. The silent world of Skalde and her mother Edith is cut off from everything else by fog and a collapsed bridge; civilization has also crumbled, and they reside in its remnants on the edge of a small, loosely-knit group in a so-called ‘territory.’ Edith has arrived in this place as an outsider, so though they are treated with tolerance, still disdain and suspicion dominate their relationships with most of the few people they have any contact with. In this fearful landscape, Skalde loses herself in books—until the day she starts losing her milk teeth, and finds a girl in the forest called Meisis. Thereafter, she slowly finds the strength to rebel against her mother’s neglect, and to question the rules of the society she finds herself in.

As a child, Skalde rarely leaves her house and garden, bringing it to close relevance with our era, and the all-too-familiar confinement common to all of us. The world beyond the river is depicted as a scary, dangerous place that presses at the edges of their small existence, serving as a further reminder that we are living in an increasingly atomised age—an era of isolationism between nations sparked by telltale international shifts to the political right, along with increasingly popular feelings amongst world leaders that their ‘country is an island’—catalysed by COVID.

In the ‘territory,’ the suspicion of outsiders is overarching, echoing the eagerness of some to designate certain groups as responsible for their hardships. Half-truths and disinformation are rife; neighbours judge neighbours, and people are cast out for reasons as trivial as having red hair or failing to lose their milk teeth. The setting—dense fog followed by blazing heat in an indiscernible survivalist purgatory—only adds to the novel’s cloying nature. Reading this during quarantine felt akin to falling through the looking glass into a world only slightly more absurd than our own. READ MORE…

A Brief Introduction to Nermin Yɪldɪrɪm’s Secret Dreams in Istanbul

March 11, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Ümit Hussein

Secret Dreams in Istanbul is a work of literary fiction, but deals with issues that are very much on the agenda of today’s society.

Secret Dreams in Istanbul is a fascinating Turkish novel by Nermin Yɪldɪrɪm, published at the end of last year by Anthem Press. Before I go any further, I must confess that I am the book’s translator, but I would want to share it even if that weren’t the case. Only very occasionally does one come across a book that leaps out from all others and lodges itself in one’s mind. When that happens, it mustn’t be taken lightly.

March 8 was International Women’s Day, and it strikes me as a very apt time to talk about this novel, given that it draws attention to so many issues that are relevant to the battles women have been fighting for over a century to combat injustice. These themes include domestic violence, forced marriage, feigned virginity, self-induced abortion, physical and social inequality, and, more broadly, the condition of being a victim. In varying degrees, all of the characters in this novel are victims: of their gender, their social class, their biological clock, their complexes, social taboos, social expectations, their physical, intellectual and financial limitations, and of their own family. This is a book in which the weak are oppressed by the strong: it’s about facing up to one’s insecurities and confronting one’s demons; it’s about the age-old problem of sibling rivalry. And running parallel to all of these conflicts is the other key theme in the novel—the role of memory in the human psyche.

To use a somewhat frivolous simile, if you have a diamond necklace, you wouldn’t leave it locked away in a drawer where nobody can appreciate it when it could be displayed for all the world to see. I am a translator in the very privileged position of making it possible for Anglophones to enjoy the literature of other languages, and I felt the need to share this particular gem. For that reason, I decided to translate the book and to now write of why I regard the book so highly, as well as the process of translating it.

I first encountered Ruyalar Anlatɪlmaz (as it is called in Turkish) in 2012 when I was commissioned to translate a section (the first seventy pages). It moved me very deeply; I knew there would be elements of this book that would stay with me forever. But it wasn’t until 2016 that I received the go ahead (at my instigation) to translate it in its entirety.

This is Nermin Yɪldɪrɪm’s second novel. She has since written another five, all of them very fine and more successful than this one. Yet it was Secret Dreams in Istanbul that I felt compelled to translate. Whilst re-reading it, four years after my initial reading, I was taken aback to discover it was almost unnecessary to keep reading because I remembered practically every word. I don’t recall that ever happening to me, either before or since.

To briefly summarise the plot, Pilar, the novel’s Spanish protagonist, returns from work one evening to discover that her husband, Eyüp, has suddenly and inexplicably disappeared from the home they share in Barcelona. She learns from the police the following morning that he has boarded a plane for Istanbul, the city of his birth that he has not visited since he left it almost two decades previously. Mystified as to what could have provoked such uncharacteristic behaviour, and assailed by her own insecurities, she decides to follow him there and bring him back. Packing a tiny bag with just a few clothes and the dream diary that Eyüp’s psychologist has asked him to keep (in an attempt to get to the bottom of what has been disturbing his sleep), she sets off for Istanbul, where she will embark on a journey of painful discovery. Meeting Eyüp’s dysfunctional family, from which he has been as good as estranged since before she has known him, and his friends, and seeing for the first time the city where he grew up, she pieces together the clues to uncover the horrifying truth about what drove Eyüp away. READ MORE…

Textual Echoes: Elisabeth Jaquette on Translating Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail

June 25, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Daniel Persia

In the novel, social and political commentary operate at the level of events, as well as at the level of language.

As thousands of Palestinians protest against Israel’s newly announced annexation plans for significant parts of the West Bank and Jordan Valley, Adania Shibli’s haunting, persistent novel, Minor Detail, seems especially potent as our May Book Club Selection. The text is written in two parts: the first is set in 1949 and details a horrifying act of violence committed by Israeli soldiers, while the second takes place during present day, in which another young woman discovers the crime and makes a place for it within her own life. As Palestinians continue to struggle in turmoil, Shibli’s masterful language transposes the past into now, in a profound recognition of violence and its intricate legacies. In the following interview, Daniel Persia speaks to the translator of Minor Detail, Elisabeth Jaquette, about how she has rendered this powerful narrative for English-language readers.

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Daniel Persia (DP): Time seems crucial to our understanding of Minor Detail, both in terms of its historical context and the passing of events. Can you talk a little bit about time in translation—how it’s expressed in the Arabic language, and whether this presents any challenges when thinking about English tenses or ways to recreate stillness and movement?

Elisabeth Jaquette (EJ): Time often poses challenges for me as a translator working from Arabic to English, but oddly enough this book didn’t pose particular conundrums in that regard. With other books, I’ve found that English publishing has a greater expectation that readers be able to place events on a precise timeline in relation to one another, whereas that’s somehow less crucial in the Arabic book. In Minor Detail, I felt that the reader’s sense of time was constructed less through events or tense, and more through repetition, pacing, and tone. In Part I in particular, there’s a somewhat paradoxical contrast between dates being directly stated: “9 August 1949 . . .Before noon, 10 August 1949,” and so on, and the way that the officer’s repetitive, enumerated actions make one day bleed into the next, creating stillness even though the passing dates are marked. In Part 2, I also felt that tone and voice, and especially narrative digression, were central to the reader’s sense of movement.

DP: The scene in which Israeli soldiers capture and hose down the young Arab woman is, I think, one of the novel’s most haunting. What was it like to translate this kind of trauma? Does a scene like this demand more of you as a translator—not only technical skill, perhaps, but something like emotional resilience?

EJ: In the face of such traumatic scenes, should we understand readers as bearing witness, or as implicated onlookers? Translators, like writers of course, are more intricately involved: a translator recreates the scene word-by-word in English, actively crafting it. The scene where the soldiers hose down the girl, and her subsequent rape, were certainly the most raw for me. There is tension between the emotional trauma of the actions and the matter-of-fact way in which they is narrated, and I consciously worked to maintain that impassivity at the level of language, following the Arabic’s choice of neutral words, even though the emotional impact of these scenes is high. In some ways I felt that the distanced style of narration amplifies the horror, because the girl is all the more isolated in what she endures. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Battle” by Ana Luísa Amaral

April 14, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Margaret Jull Costa

Now, what mattered / was to survive, / to be a book.

This week’s Translation Tuesday pays homage to the books that grant us sanctuary amid chaos and absurdity. In “The Battle,” acclaimed poet and translator Ana Luísa Amaral deploys her Dickinsonian wit and wordplay to construct a humorous tale about literature and survival. A young girl’s personal library becomes a literary battlefield, book contra book, each title a moment in time seeking its own sentient survival. Renowned translator Margaret Jull Costa captures Amaral’s waggish metaphors and allusions as the poet anthropomorphizes the Great Books of history. A respite for fearful times and a tribute to the books that have become our friends when we need them most.

The Battle

Once upon a time,
in a young girl’s bedroom,
a drawer full of books
lay under permanent threat
of possible occupation
by a trousseau. 

What to do?
Should they just sit quietly
waiting for a lot of silly sheets
and useless towels
to come and invade their territory?
Or fight to hold on to
their hard-won
rights?  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: The Strawberry Pickers by Felix Nicolau

November 21, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by MARGENTO and Martin Woodside

freedom is expensive, paid up front!

This Tuesday, we’re excited to share a new poem by the Romanian poet, Felix Nicolau, whose work is a cutting and humorous comment on life for those crossing borders and coming into contact with other cultures, yet who are still at the very bottom of the social ladder. 


The Strawberry Pickers

is President Iliescu around—the sun will come out!
on Christmas we took our measure of freedom
seriously, didn’t the Star Poet of Pit Coal and his miner comrades from Jiu Valley invade
the capital?
didn’t they march through the springtime quarter or through the slums?
Hooray President Goatee!  Did he eat salami with soy like all of us?  Boo, Goatee!
we won’t sell our country out!
back then we had the means but no beans
now there’s lots of beans but no financial means
we’ve been hit by a nuclear bomb of whiskey and cigarettes
is President Iliescu around—the sun will come out!
the retirees applaud the miners the students heckle their grandparents
the scenery’s cleared of railroad locomotive plants
the sea is cleared of our fleet
freedom is expensive, paid up front!  Give us money to stay up front!
finally we can buy and sell the best football players
more powerful than the Chinese—we take all the strawberry picking jobs in Europe
we pick the strawberries on the bottom of the Atlantic
we emerge on the east coast and keep picking
watch out Alaska—WE’RE COMING!

Translated from the Romanian by MARGENTO and Martin Woodside


Felix Nicolau is Professor in the Faculty of Theology and Literature, Lund University, Sweden. He is the author of eight books of literary and communication theory, five volumes of poetry (Kamceatka—Time IS honey, 2014) and two novels. He is member on the editorial boards of The Muse—an International Journal of Poetry and Metaliteratura magazines. His areas of interest are translation studies, the theory of communication, comparative literature, cultural studies, translation studies, British and American studies, and Romanian studies. He is also swims, rollerblades, and rides a scooter. Sometimes he even reads more than writes.

MARGENTO (Chris Tănăsescu) is a poet, performer, academic, and translator who has lectured, launched books, and performed in the US, Southeast Asia, Australia, and Europe. His pen name is also the name of his multimedia cross-artform band that won a number of major international awards. He is co-author of poetryartexchange, his co-translations with Martin Woodside from Gellu Naum’s poetry (Athanor and Other Pohems) were nominated by World Literature Today as Most Notable Translation in 2013, and he has written the libretto for a rock opera composed by Bogdan Bradu. He deploys networks-of-networks and natural-language-processing algorithms in his collaborative poetry, and continues his work on the graph poem project together with Diana Inkpen and their students at the University of Ottawa. MARGENTO is Romania & Moldova editor-at-large for Asymptote.

Martin Woodside is a writer, teacher, scholar, and founding member of Calypso Editions. He is an interdisciplinary scholar who earned his MFA and a certificate of specialization in Children’s Literature from San Diego State University and his Ph.D. in Childhood Studies from Rutgers-Camden in 2015. He ​has written five books for children, a chapbook of poetry (Stationary Landscapes, Pudding House), and a full-length collection of poetry (This River Goes Both Ways, Wordtech). His translations of Romanian poetry have appeared in several books and journals, including The Kenyon Review Online, Asymptote, and the Brookyn Rail’s inTranslation. He’s published two collections of Romanian poetry in translation: Of Gentle Wolves, an anthology of contemporary Romanian poetry, and—along with MARGENTO—Athanor & Other Pohems, collecting the work of the brilliant surrealist Gellu Naum.


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