Posts filed under 'Swiss Literature'

Translation Tuesday: “Incidents of Everyday Elephants” by Gianna Rovere

February 14, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Regan Mies

Sus tells us at dinner that elephants have always been her favorite animal. Elegant is the wrong word. Maybe exceptional, extraordinary.

This Translation Tuesday, we are privy to Swiss writer Gianna Rovere’s intimate musings on her encounters with elephants in a year— from overheard conversations on the train to a trip to Ikea. In direct prose, deftly translated from the German by Regan Mies, Rovere imbues her daily life with whimsy through the simple act of noticing in “Incidents of Everyday Elephants.”

November 12, 2020: Toys

I’ve always thought elephants made sense on children’s products and as toys because they have such a practical shape for small hands: a slender trunk for a child’s tight grip; an arched spine to be stroked; and four sturdy legs that stand solid and firm. Lovely, round shapes. I recently met a friend again for the first time in a while, and we got to talking about it all. Toys, elephants. He had cancer. Chemotherapy, hair all fallen out, weighed a hundred kilograms. He’d just become infertile. My friend’s doctor gave him a special offer, so now his sperm’s waiting for his cue from a nitrogen tank in Bern, in case the infertility stays. And what have I been doing? Looking for elephants in everyday life. Do you know, then, why they’re so often pictured on kids’ products? my friend asked. He said, My father’s worked in marketing for quite some time now and told me once, during a visit to the zoo, that elephants have positive connotations all over the world. So that’s why. Sure, dogs might be cute here, but in Asia, they’re dirty.

February 4, 2021: Relocation

I’m transporting an Ikea bag brimming with elephants. I’ve strapped it down onto two moving boxes, each of which I’ve tied tightly to a bike trailer. Forty-six elephants; small and large, made of porcelain, wood, or wax. I pull the trailer unhurriedly behind me. Halfway across the crosswalk at Albisriederplatz, I get a call. I hold the phone between my cheek and shoulder, and the elephants tip slowly left. At the last second, I catch their fall with my free hand. A car honks. Apologetic, I raise my hand, and the elephants spill down onto the asphalt. It sounds like broken glass.

February 23, 2021: New Message

Today, I was once again offered an elephant via telegram. A saltshaker.

February 28, 2021: Level

On the train to Luzern, a well-dressed man asks his son, who’s playing on a tablet:

“So’ve you managed to do it yet, with the little elephant like that?” READ MORE…

My Literature, My Voice: A Conversation with Max Lobe and Ros Schwartz

January 26, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Carol Khoury and Laurel Taylor

I’m always travelling, travelling, travelling, to preach the gospel of literature, of my literature, of my voice.

In our December Book Club selection, Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside?, Swiss writer Max Lobe paints a vivid psychic landscape of migration, queerness, and class. Centred around an incredibly intimate mother-son relationship that crosses from Cameroon to Switzerland, Lobe addresses the politics of a contemporary, itinerant existence with humour, wisdom, and frankness. In this following interview, Laurel Taylor speaks to Lobe and translator Ros Schwartz about the concept of a “national literature,” textual musicality, and what it means to belong somewhere, nowhere—or everywhere. 

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.  

Laurel Taylor (LT): Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? is a novel with an immigrant at its center, and the book has been described as a contemporary story of alienation, that feeling of belonging nowhere catalysed by migrancy. Max and Ros, how do you think the concept of belonging fits in this book? Where does the nature of belonging fit overall in books that speak of migration?

Max Lobe (ML): The fact of belonging nowhere is something that really speaks to me. I was born in Douala, [Cameroon,] and then I moved from Douala to Lugano, which is in the Italian part of Switzerland. Today, I live in Geneva, and most of the time I’m always travelling, travelling, travelling, to preach the gospel of literature, of my literature, of my voice.

In Cameroon, back in the day, I couldn’t feel at home because I didn’t fulfill the criteria of being a man. I was very girlish. And you see me with the red lipstick now because I’ve come to terms with who I am. Then, when I moved to Switzerland, there was another problem, because I discovered that I was black in our classroom at Università della Svizzera italiana, the Lugano university.

In those three years, I thought to myself: “Where is my place?” I think that we, or I, can make anywhere our own place, but you need to want it. You need a willingness if you want to belong to a place—with courage, with humour, with lots of passion. Today, I think, “Everywhere I go can be my place.” That is what I wanted to communicate in this book.

Ros Schwartz (RS): I think this idea of belonging both in this book and in other books written by migrants, is that being granted citizenship does not automatically create a sense of belonging. Mwana, the narrator, is constantly reminded that he’s an outsider—through the Black Sheep anti-immigrant campaign. At first, he doesn’t even realize it’s directed against him, and then his lover—Ruedi—goes with his family to the famous Grütli Meadow, which the book describes as: “the very one where the Swiss Oath had been signed at the end of the thirteenth century, while we Bantus were still walking barefoot in the forest among the animals.” So, there is this continual reminder of being other.

I think in books that speak of migration, it’s a thread that runs through generations. The children of migrants are continually looking at both countries through a lens of otherness; they don’t feel completely at home in their parents’ country of origin, or they don’t feel completely at home in the adoptive country. People are expected to come down on one side or the other.

READ MORE…

Announcing Our December Book Club Title: Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? by Max Lobe

December 30, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

To open up poverty is to open up migration is to open up blackness is to open up the love between two men.

For our final Book Club selection of the year, Asymptote is proud to present a work emblematic of how writing can transform, subvert, and negate borders. In Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside?, Swiss author Max Lobe traces how the complex factors of race, class, sexuality, and migration can cohere in a single life, and how nationhood can be refracted and reinterpreted by those who refuse to be defined by the standard. Speaking in the extraordinarily vivid voice of his protagonist, Mwana, Lobe balances tragedy with joy, freedom with entrapment, and home with home.

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.  

Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? by Max Lobe, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, Hope Road Publishing, 2022

As in love, mystery, and metamorphosis, the name of country draws a long throughline in our world of stories. Add to it a possessive—my country, your country—and the resulting narratives are instantly elaborated with the ontological intersections, demarcations, and dialogues that enmesh our landscape. Through this simple addition, a life is juxtaposed with a society, a single act comes to emblematise a culture, and an experience constitutes an identity—not necessarily out of any active political consciousness, but simply from having left, at some point, that arbitrary and mutable shape of one’s birthplace. Paul Gilroy, in conceptualising diaspora, described it as positing “important tensions between here and there, then and now, between seed in the bag, the packet or the pocket and seed in the ground, the fruit or the body.” To move across our jigsaw world is to know the fluid weight of difference and sameness—that they can be at once interchangeable and oppositional. These shifts from strangeness to familiarity do not begin with the boarding of a plane or a boat, but occur in minute swatches of conversation, in the passing from one minute to the next, between two people looking out at the same scene, not knowing what the other sees.

In Max Lobe’s Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside?, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, country is introduced by the most immediate and intimate of desires—food. Our narrator, Mwana, is lugging “two huge sugar-cane bags” across Switzerland, with all the provisions and gifts of another nation inside: “Fumbwa, saka-saka, makayabu, okra and dried impwa.” The list goes on, rich with sugars and starches and svelte oils. Wrapped meticulously by his mother, the treasured packages have been carried by his sister Kosambela, across the continental divide from what Mwana calls Bantuland, to the nation where they both now reside: Switzerland of the Grütli Meadow and the Rütli Oath, of white-out peaks and lakeshore villas.

A recent graduate of the University of Geneva and a settled Swiss resident, Mwana is black, queer, and unemployed; it is this lattermost factor that rules his life, his daily preoccupations, and his physical and mental wanderings. With repeated trips to the unemployment office, small yellow coins dug out of household crevices, kindly deceptive calls to his mother—this scarcity is the precipice that Mwana dangles from, and as such it is the swinging, breakneck angle by which he interprets everything. The two bags he drags onto the bus from Lugano to Geneva contain emblems of home, of care, and of a beautiful eradication of distance, but most importantly, they are an antidote to hunger. Amidst Lobe’s warm, loquacious prose, we first see the dissipation of difference into sameness, the shift from displacement in country to immediacy in the body. In all the discursive paths the mind takes to arrive at a single place, we see the need to live. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from “Feel Free” by Dagmar Schifferli

August 23, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Rachel Farmer

Do you have a tape running? I can’t see one. How will you remember what I say?

Did you enjoy Rachel Farmer’s translation of francophone Swiss writer Catherine Safonoff in our most recent issue? If so, you’d be excited to learn that we are bringing you another of Farmer’s work in this week’s Translation Tuesdays showcase. Dagmar Schifferli, a writer who is also trained in psychology and social pedagogy, maps the shape-shifting and exacting interiority of an adolescent protagonist who speaks to her psychiatrist. In between fiction and dramatic monologue, here is a narrator’s voice that is unforgettable in her ability to speak plainly and potently. 

“Translating Dagmar Schifferli’s enigmatic novella Meinetwegen certainly came with its own set of challenges. For starters, how should I choose just a short extract of a work whose unique genius comes from the way it gradually, insidiously makes you question its narrator, then fall for her, then question her all over again? The novella, set in the early 1970s, consists entirely of a series of one-sided conversations between the 17-year-old protagonist and her psychiatrist. At several points, the young girl hints at her own untrustworthiness, insisting she would not tell a “deliberate lie”, challenging her psychiatrist to decide whether or not to believe her, and alluding to a lack of free will. The duplicity of her narration is reflected in the language, where dual meanings abound: for example, a clock “strikes” and another is “beating time”, a reference to the beatings she allegedly received. 

Even the German title, Meinetwegen, has a double meaning (and translating it was a bit of a head-scratcher). On the one hand, it can mean something like “I don’t care”—an attitude expressed about the narrator’s actions by an adult in her life. But later, another meaning is unveiled. The protagonist realises she can do things meinetwegen: “on my own account”, “for my own benefit”, “for my sake”. Finally, she allows herself to think about the future and takes back her own agency. This is why, after much deliberation, I chose Feel Free as the novella’s English title, as it captures this double meaning and also weaves in a reference to the protagonist’s enforced state of captivity. These layers of meaning mirror the narrator herself, and her singular ability to inspire both sympathy and distrust.” 

—Rachel Farmer

I like to talk.

But don’t expect too much. Once a week, they said. Or rather, ordered. Because nowhere is less free than here. Once a week—at least. I’ll make notes in between. I want you to hear everything. You will have to decide for yourself whether it’s true or not. If I were to tell you a story that wasn’t exactly how I really experienced it or that someone else told me, it would not be a deliberate lie. Having your ears boxed hard enough can damage the brain. And mine were boxed hard.

That’s why I’m not sure whether I’m remembering everything correctly. Even though I want to.

But there is one thing you should know: you must never interrupt me, never ever. And don’t ask any questions either—don’t make a sound, not a peep. Don’t go hm or clear your throat. That would get my thoughts all jumbled. It would immediately lead me astray; make me refer to you and phrase things for your benefit. To make you understand, above all else. It would take me away from myself and perhaps from the truth too, a truth I want to get to the bottom of at all costs. It’s not because I’m hoping to lessen my punishment. No, I’m ready for anything. Braced for anything.

I will accept any judgement.

A judgement would create clarity, would be a direct response to what I did.

Had to do.

I’m sure you know that humans don’t really possess free will. In school, I learnt that some people don’t even commit suicide of their own free will. Because, my teacher told me, their thoughts grow increasingly narrow, focusing more and more on what they intend to do. Until, in the end, all other alternatives dwindle to nothing, drift away, can no longer be imagined, the teacher explained. Despite the billions of brain cells ticking away inside the skull of every human being, connected to one another in I-don’t-know-how-many ways.

You just coughed. You shouldn’t do that.
Now I need to have a short break. Don’t say anything; just wait.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Extract from August is an Autumn Month by Bruno Pellegrino

August 16, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Elodie Olson-Coons

He is keeping an urgent record of the names of things coming to an end

Can’t get enough of our Swiss Literature Feature in Asymptote’s Summer 2022 issue? This Translation Tuesday, travel with French-speaking Swiss writer Bruno Pellegrino into the garden of Gustave Roud’s. Lose yourself in a giddying array of flowers and names in this extract from the opening of the Prix Alice Rivaz-winning novel, an evocative passage that demonstrates a poet and a botanist’s keen vision of the natural world. Translator and former contributor Elodie Olson-Coons walks us through the novel’s rhythms in a beautiful introduction to a fascinating book. 

“Shaped around the life of Swiss poet and photographer Gustave Roud and his sister Madeleine, Bruno Pellegrino’s August is an Autumn Month (Editions Zoé, 2018) is a tender, intimate opus: half lyrical biography, half archival fiction, intermittently illuminated by the author’s gentle, wry perspective (“If you want to get anywhere, Gus, you’ll have to pull yourself together,” he tells his character at one point). The book’s delicate framework—brother and sister, rural house and garden, 1962 to 1972 —is brought to life by the ebb and flow of the seasons, a Woolfian texture that gives its undivided attention to the botanical and the domestic. Moving like ghosts through their old family home, surrounded by traces of dreams long-abandoned and tender words unspoken, Gustave and Madeleine’s days are given life by the simplest details: a shift in morning light, a cup of linden flower tea going cold.”

—Elodie Olson-Coons

The time of foxgloves is over. As soon as Gustave touches the petals, even with his usual gentleness, the flowers crumple or come apart, soft as tissue paper, rolling paper. Foxgloves, that’s what they called them on their childhood farm; he doesn’t remember when he started thinking of them as digitalis. The courtyard is scattered with them, as if a storm has been and gone. It’ll need sweeping. But first, a more pressing concern: the inventory must be performed. 

He goes through the gate and, notebook in hand, moves into the gardens exuding metallic odours—unless they are his own, his breath, his combed-back hair, effluvia caught in his shirt collar or the impeccable folds of his trousers, who knows. Since passing sixty (and that was a while ago now), he isn’t sure of anything anymore. He straightens his long, bent figure. 

Ordered according to the demands of the varietals and the texture of the soil, the garden obeys a precise architecture: vegetables alternate with lilies, verbena, poppies; climbing plants shelter the more fragile elements; the perfume of the marigolds frightens away vermin. But the lushness of this jungle is sometimes difficult to contemplate. The glance hesitates in the face of such abundance—long gourds unrolling across the lawn of wild reseda and Japanese anemones—and this morning, something else means that, for the space of a few seconds, Gustave is overcome by the scale of the task. No storm after all, the night was a calm one; it’s only that, at dawn, dew settled delicately across the estate, crystallising into a white frost. It doesn’t seem particularly significant and yet, three days before the September equinox, everything is already condemned.  READ MORE…

Spring News: A new educational guide, two paid Special Features, and a final call to join our team!

May 5, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Whether you are an educator, a translator, or a potential volunteer, check out the following opportunities to be a part of our mission!

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Calling all teachers: the Spring 2022 Educator’s Guide is now available for download here! Whether your purview is high school or university students, we invite you to visit the Asymptote for Educators web page to discover new ways to bring translation into your classroom. With writing prompts and reading suggestions galore, this free resource based on articles from the Spring 2022 issue will be sure to spice up any literary discussion. Share the wealth with all your educator friends and be sure to fill out this survey to give us feedback. In this age of division, we can all play a part, however small, to foster empathy across cultures. Grab a copy of the new Educator’s Guide now.

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Considering a career in world literature? Then you should know that Asymptote provides the perfect training ground! (Former team members have gone on to take up positions at Penguin Books, Dalkey Archive, and Words Without Borders.) And now is the perfect time to apply! We’ve just entered Phase II of our mid-year recruitment drive—concentrating on editorial and marketing roles this time. Among the newly available openings are Visual Editor, Nonfiction Editor, Social Media Manager, and Assistant Director of Outreach. If you’d like to join us behind the scenes, check out the newly available positions and apply today. READ MORE…