Posts filed under 'Swahili literature'

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

February 23, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Bella Creel, Ibrahim Sayed Fawzy Elsayed, and Wambua Muindi

The latest in literary news from Japan, Egypt, and Kenya!

This week, our team from around the world brings news of literary award shortlists and winners! From the launch of the inaugural issue of Debunk Quarterly, to the winners of the Sawiris Cultural Awards, to the recent closure of a historical bookstore in Tokyo, read on to learn more!

Bella Creel, Blog Editor, Reporting from Japan

Where are Japan’s bookstores going? In the last two decades, the number of bookstores in Japan has nearly halved, dropping to only 11,495 in 2023. The figure speaks to the many locally-owned bookstores that have had to close over the years, unable to keep customers in a rapidly digitizing era. Some of these closures have garnered international and domestic attention, the latest of which was the historical “Bookshop 書楽” (Shogaku) in Tokyo’s Suginami ward. 

Owned by Mitsuru Ishida, Bookshop Shogaku has a long history in its small corner of Tokyo, located just outside of Asagaya Station for the past 43 years. The area of Asagaya itself—dubbed 文士の街, or “Literati Town”—has been a hub for creatives for well over a century, lined with jazz clubs, Showa-era coffee shops, and of course, bookstores. While famous literary figures such as Dazai Osamu and Masuji Ibuse once frequented the street and its many shelves, playing shogi and drinking as the “Asagaya Club,” over time Bookshop Shogaku became the last bookstore selling new titles in the area, until it closed as well. 

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Translation Tuesday: The Garden of Tomatoes by Esther Karin Mngodo

February 20, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Jay Boss Rubin

Tuntufye had already made clear that he didn’t believe in such nonsense. Blood drinkers didn’t exist.

This Translation Tuesday, we deliver gripping fiction from Tanzania, a short story of domestic deception that spawns an unspeakable being, a sinister spirit. Who is to say who is at fault? Hear from translator Jay Boss Rubin on bringing Esther Karin Mngodo’s The Garden of Tomatoes into the English:

“In this story, I was fascinated with how it contains genre elements but is not really genre fiction. There’s a genre element, for sure, but we stayed away from terms such as “vampire” and “zombie” because of all the associations those carry. There’s also an element of free indirect discourse, one that I was aware of in the Swahili, but that came out more in the translation, toward the end of the revision process. Esther was also especially helpful in drawing my attention to moments in the story where the main character’s own words, or her words and actions, might contradict each other. These moments of ambivalence, or rich ambiguity, really, are central to my understanding of the characters in “Atuganile,” the forces that push and pull on them.“

Tuntufye Mwasakyeni raised his cup of milky tea to his mouth and sipped. The house was quiet, different than most Saturdays. Two days had passed since his wife, Atuganile, had left to go see her mother’s ailing brother over in Chunya District—around two hours away by automobile.

Tuntufye placed the index finger of his left hand on the table in front of him so it mimicked the second hand of the clock on the wall. Departing for her trip, Atuganile had promised that she’d be back by Saturday at nine. It was now eight minutes to 9am. He wasn’t worried that something bad had happened to her—not in the least. He was well aware that if there were some shrewd, intelligent women there in Isyesye, Atuganile was one of them. She was a known quantity, especially in Uyole, where she vended fruits and vegetables. But it wasn’t like her to be late.

When it reached nine on the dot, Tuntufye stood up and went outside through the door in the living room. He leaned against one of the white, exterior pillars, keeping his eyes peeled for Atuganile. When he saw her, he grinned. She was striding forward like a champion athlete, her kanga coming undone and starting to fall down as she ran. Colonnades of trees to Atuganile’s left and to her right framed the scene of her arrival. Their branches swayed in the wind like giant claws—as if to swipe at her and sneer, today, Atu, you’re going to get it.

Once she’d drawn close, Atuganile set down the load she’d been carrying on her head and began explaining the reasons for her delay. “Forgive me, my husband. Forgive me, Baba,” she gasped. “The bus broke down. I had to hop aboard a different one. You know how difficult transportation can be here in Mbeya. Forgive me, Baba, for being late.”

Her husband said nothing. He jutted his lip forward, returned to the kitchen, sat down at the table and poured himself another cup of tea. Then he took his Bible and began reading. Atuganile sat with him and started sorting kisamvu, separating the good greens from the bad. In the middle of sorting, she picked up a sheet of Isyesye Oye!, the newspaper that had been used to wrap the cassava leaves. Alert: Blood Drinker on the Loose in Isyeye, the headline warned. Atuganile read on:

An individual in Isyesye is being sought by police for abducting children younger than twelve. According to the information available, five children have now disappeared as a result of coming into contact with the suspect, who is said to be a drinker of blood. Parents are advised to keep close watch over their children, and see that they don’t roam about after dark.

The newspaper described the child of one woman, known as Mama Samweli, who’d been missing for five days. When Mama Samweli went for a consultation with a local healer, the mganga advised her not to bother searching—her child had already had the life sucked out of them. When news of the blood drinker reached the Regional Police Chief, he stated that the government does not officially recognize witchcraft, so he was unable to comment on the rumor any further. But he assured the citizenry that efforts were ongoing to locate Samweli, along with the other four children who had gone missing over the past five months.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 14, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Julia Sherwood, Sofija Popovska, and Wambua Muindi

Literary news from Poland, Kenya, and North Macedonia!

In this week of updates on world literature, our Editors-at-Large bring news on an upcoming film adaptation of Władysław Reymont’s The Peasants, a monthly calendar highlighting African writers and literatures, and the most recent winner of the esteemed Golden Wreath in North Macedonia! From Asymptote contributors’ recent accolades to a brief look into Vlada Urošević’s poetry, read on to learn more!

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Poland

A film version of the modern Polish classic, The Peasants by Nobel-prize winning author Władysław Reymont, will hopefully hit the screens later this year, following a lengthy delay caused by COVID and the war in Ukraine. Those familiar with the Gdańsk-based filmmakers Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman will know that this won’t be your run-of-the-mill costume drama; the film uses the same painstaking hand-painted technique that the team pioneered in their earlier acclaimed short film Loving Vincent. Originally scheduled for release in 2022, the production of The Peasants came to a standstill, as twenty-three of the artists working on the film were Ukrainian and based in a studio in Kyiv. Interestingly, it is the film that we have to thank for the new English edition of The Peasants; since the existing translation published in 1924 was rather outdated, Welchman commissioned Anna Zaranko, winner of the 2020 Found in Translation Prize, to translate a couple of chapters for him and subsequently managed to persuade Penguin Classics to publish the complete novel, which is nearly 1000 pages long. 

In 2021, one year after Zaranko won it, the Found In Translation Award went to Ewa Małachowska-Pasek and Megan Thomas for their new English version of Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz’s 1932 satirical novel The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma. They discuss the novel with Daniel Goldfarb in the first episode of his series of Encounters with Polish Literature. Now in its third year, this consistently illuminating series of monthly videos that Goldfarb has been producing for the Polish Institute in New York has clocked up twenty-six episodes so far. In Episode 2, which focuses on Andrzej Sapkowski, Goldfarb is joined by David French, who has translated six out of the fantasy writer’s eight novels in the Witcher series into English, as well as all three parts of his Hussite Trilogy. In the most recent Episode 3, Goldfarb and the scholar and translator Benjamin Paloff introduce Leopold Tyrmand, author of one of the great Warsaw novels and popularizer of jazz in mid-twentieth-century Poland, a transformative figure in Polish culture between the death of Joseph Stalin and the post-Stalin thaw.

There have been nominations and prizes galore for Asymptote contributors: Marta Dziurosz has won the First Translation Prize of the UK Society of Authors 2022 for her ‘truly astounding translation’ from the Polish of Marcin Wicha’s Things I didn’t Throw Out, sharing the prize with editors Željka Marošević and Sophie Missing. Mikołaj Grynberg’s heartbreaking collection of short stories, I’d Like To Say Sorry But There’s No One To Say Sorry To, translated by Sean Gasper Bye, has been named a finalist of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish literature (the winner to be announced on September 12). Olga Tokarczuk’s monumental The Books of Jacob in Jennifer Croft’s translation finds itself on the shortlist of the 2023 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development Literary Prize alongside fellow Polish author Maciej Hen and Anna Blasiak, translator of his book According to Her (see interview). 

And finally, if you are a writer or translator with at least one published book, are currently working on a writing project, are interested in learning more about the Polish literary community, and have a connection with any UNESCO City of Literature outside of Poland, don’t miss the opportunity to apply for a two-month literary residency in Kraków (July 1 to August 31, 2023). The deadline for applications is April 23.

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What’s New in Translation: April 2023

April 10, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor, Rachel Landau, and Sofija Popovska

New translations from the French, Swahili, and Polish!

This month, we are taking a look at works from world literature that unveil the universal intersections at the centre of society: an empathetic interrogation into the cross-section of contemporary life in a superstore by the inimitable Annie Ernaux; a brilliantly curated selection of humanist stories from the Swahili; and a subtle, delicate look into the nature of happiness as written into dialogue by lauded Polish author, Marek Bieńczyk. Read on to find out more!

look at lights

Look at the Lights, My Love by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer, Yale University Press, 2023

Review by Laurel Taylor, Assistant Editor

Even at its best, ethnography is an ethically tricky subject; at its worst, it can dehumanize, tokenize, and Other the people who fall under its burning eye—an eye so often situated in wealth, power, whiteness, and patriarchy. Annie Ernaux is all too aware of the treacherous ethnographic ground she walks in Regarde les lumières mon amour, originally published in 2014 and translated now into an incisive and unadorned English by Alison L. Strayer as Look at the Lights, My Love. In this brief but gripping nonfiction entry, Ernaux records her various visits to the French big-box store Auchan from November 2012 to October 2013, a period which happens to coincide with the 2013 Rana Plaza building collapse in the Savar sub-district of Dhaka, Bangladesh. 

For all its drab ubiquity and late-capitalist imbrication, Ernaux treats the site of the superstore not only as a place perpetuating a unilateral and devastating economics (in the broadest sense of the word), but also one which engages humanity in complex ways—affectively, socially, temporally.

. . . when you think of it, there is no other space, public or private, where so many individuals so different in terms of age, income, education, geographic and ethnic background, and personal style, move about and rub shoulders with each other. No enclosed space where people are brought into greater contact with their fellow humans, dozens of times a year, and where each has a chance to catch a glimpse of others’ ways of living and being. Politicians, journalists, “experts,” all those who have never set foot in a superstore, do not know the social reality of France today.

Indeed, it feels almost taboo in the often inward-facing world of Parisian literature to engage with something so blasé as a big-box store. At one point, Ernaux even says in an aside, “I don’t see Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, or Françoise Sagan doing their shopping in a superstore; Georges Perec yes, but I may be wrong about that.” For me, this is what makes Ernaux’s earnest attempt at engagement all the more relevant (and close-to-home, as I grew up in a squarely middle-class family that did most of its shopping at a big-box store). In addition to the unconventional topic, this particular book also feels difficult to classify. Neither journalism nor something so structured as a dialectic, Look at the Lights, My Love is something more akin to mindfulness. It is an attempt to deliberately undo the asynchronous pace of the superstore—a place where flash sales, labyrinthine design, ever-changing displays, and the press of daily chores all collude to entrap and entangle us in the past, present, and future all at once. Ernaux’s thick descriptions, in trying to circumvent these snares, work to better provide us with “[a] free statement of observations and sensations, aimed at capturing something of the life of the place.”

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