Posts filed under 'trauma'

Poetry as a Therapeutic Tool: On the Continual Work of Poets During Wartime

December 11, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Galina Itskovich

History is not somewhere ahead of us—and nor is it far behind. We’re right inside of it, being already chewed on.

Dislocation: An Anthology of Poetic Response to Russia’s War in Ukraine, edited by J. Nemirovskaya & A. Krushelnitskaya, Slavica Publishers, 2024

In the second year of the war in Ukraine, even the title of this bilingual tome confirms my observation that recent anthologies may remind one of diagnostic manuals. Thankfully, there is no need to diagnose a breakage; while Russian aggressors have persisted in their assault, Ukrainian resistance is relentless. Ukrainians are still fighting for their land, and the land is more than territory; it means real people and individual stories. Yet, as such stories demonstrate, dislocations—occurring in the wake of global trauma—take a long time to heal. There is a palpable incompatibility between realities past and present, pain amounting to chronic, and ruptures shaping both local and international discourses into liminalities. Beyond the battlefield, injuries beyond broken bones proliferate in the form of shifted responsibilities, wounded memories, betrayed values, and faulty beliefs; at the end of the day, even the mysterious “Russian soul” has turned out to be an inflamed spirit of contradiction.

Dislocation is edited in a way that critics of different disciplines can equally appreciate its logic, reminding one that when life’s plot betrays us in its twists, we are still left with words. In the last days of February of 2022, the Moscow-born author, director, and Russian culture scholar Julia Nemirovskaya announced through social media that she would be collecting poetic responses to the war in a kopilka—a “piggy bank” in Russian—for safekeeping; this resulting collection has slowly turned into a historical document. Moved by the incessant thought that “the world must be made aware,” volunteer translators began working on poems that they found poignant, and by the end of that year, the first bilingual collection, Disbelief, was published in London. In the nearly two years that followed, the geographies and demographics of contributing authors continued to widen, and two new translators—Yana Kane and Josephine von Zitzewitz—joined the original team of Dmitry Manin, Maria Bloshteyn, Anna Krushelnitskaya, Andrei Burago, and Richard Coombes. Their work proves to be precise and emotionally relevant, and Dislocation houses 117 authors in translation, ranging from Russian citizens and expats to Ukrainian poets who write in Russian (their native albeit traitorous language), featuring a stunning cover with art by Maria Kazanskaya. READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Men in the Sun and The Dupes

October 9, 2024  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou, Junyi Zhou, and Mia Ruf

. . . the film refuses to downplay their suffering and invites us, the spectators, to partake in their anguish as something fundamentally embodied.

1962 saw the publication of Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, a striking novella that depicts the fates of three Palestinian refugees as they seek to make their way out of an Iraqi camp, hoping to find work in Kuwait. From a committed revolutionary and visionary documentarian of liberatory futures, Men in the Sun was one of Kanafani’s most powerful and symbolic tales—a narrative that at once elucidated the precarious liminal position of the exiled, and criticized passivity and silence in the face of injustice. Ten years later, the story would be adapted and released as The Dupes by Egyptian director Tewfik Saleh, who repudiated Arab cinema at the time as being woefully ignorant, stating: “No one ever proposed a serious political analysis of [the Palestinians’] situation as victims of an imperialist machine.”

That same year, in 1972, Kanafani was assassinated by a car bomb placed by the Israeli Mossad; his seventeen-year-old niece died along with him. He would be remembered as a comrade who had never lost faith in the Palestinian cause, continuing to insist that the future, with all its hardships and destructions, was still a site of hope: “I knew, however, that a distant homeland was being born again: hills, olive groves, dead people, torn banners and folded ones, all cutting their way into a future of flesh and blood and being born in the heart of another child. . .” In this vein, him and Saleh were united in the necessity of persistence, with the latter explicating: “. . . I think, even if this isn’t everyone’s opinion, that a film like The Dupes is extremely mobilizing. Under what conditions can we say a film is mobilizing? When it inspires the overthrow of a situation.”

In this edition of Asymptote at the Movies, we take a look at Men in the Sun and The Dupes, the way these two master storytellers intersect, diverge, and speak together of human dignity—how it has been undermined by the world. When Men in the Sun was published, there were 1.1 million refugees registered with UNRWA; today, there are approximately six million. The persistence to live continues, and the resistance along with it.

Christina Chatzitheodorou (CC): In these two narratives, Tewfik Saleh and Ghassan Kanafani grasp the meaning behind the Nakba as an ongoing event and a transgenerational trauma, focusing on three generations of Palestinians who, after being expelled from their homeland after 1948, find themselves living in temporary shelters. Yet the fact that Kanafani uses three generations of Palestinians to tell the story symbolizes how the temporary experience of exile has been transformed into something permanent, with dispossession being at the heart of the Palestinian experience. The protagonists each have their own flashbacks—living off their memories—and though they are products of different Palestinian experiences, their commonalities are found in betrayal and despair, the material implications related to the loss of the homeland.

Mia Ruf (MR): I was also struck by the frequent use of flashbacks, both in the novel and the film. Each character enters the story with his respective memory burden. I thought that the montage interweaving Abu Quais’s experiences with shots from the broader “historical record” (diplomatic summits, etc.) was particularly impactful—it really gave us a sense of the scope of Abu Quais’ life, in both general and personal terms. Over the course of the narrative, though, as Abu Quais, Abbas, Marwan, and their smuggler Abu Khaizuran make their way toward Kuwait, all these individual memories converge, in a way. There’s a line in the text: “their thoughts seemed to run from one head to the other”—it’s almost like the men have come to share a collective consciousness, the heat melting their minds into one. In Saleh’s film, this is evoked through shots of swirling dust on the barely-perceivable road toward Kuwait—objects in the physical world become less and less individuated.

Screenshot 2024-10-09 at 7.06.06 PM

Although the men share in one another’s misery, they die in utter isolation, in darkness, baking to death inside a sweltering water tank. Though it’s not included in the book, the film has the men banging on the insides of the tank for help in their final moments, unheard by Abu Khaizuran, who has been held up at the customs desk. This is a broader theme in the film and text: the exiles’ repeated pleas for help, the world’s failure to respond, and the crushing sense of isolation and betrayal that results.

READ MORE…

Where the Change Comes From: Saskia Vogel on Translating Balsam Karam

February 22, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

Here are the losses. Just listen this time. That directness is so wonderful.

In The Singularity, Swedish author Balsam Karam instills a startling and deeply profound gravity within the devastating fractures of life—mothers who lose children, migrants who lose countries, and the emotional maelstroms stirring at the precipice of disappearance. With an extraordinary style that exemplifies how poetics can search and unveil the most secret aspects of grief and longing, Karam’s fluid, genre-blurring prose is at once dreamlike and harrowingly vivid, with the remarkable sensitivity of translator Saskia Vogel carrying this richness through to the English translation. We were proud to select this novel as our January Book Club selection, and in this following interview, Vogel speaks to us about how Karam’s writing works to destabilize and shift majority presumptions, as well as how literature can echo, verify, and perhaps change the way we live.

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. 

Rachel Stanyon (RS): How did you come to Balsam Karam’s work?

Saskia Vogel (SV): I first encountered Balsam’s work through Sara Abdollahi, one of my favorite literary critics in Sweden—she’s full of integrity, and really cares about literature and its transformative potential. She had done a podcast with Balsam, and their conversation really struck me, especially Balsam’s extraordinary representation of solidarity. This is exemplified in her first novel, Event Horizon, which, as I understand, is connected to The Singularity like a kind of diptych; they’re of the same world, and written with the same sorts of strategies—for example, a lot of the details of place, location, and identity are unstated. I find this aesthetic really compelling.

Balsam assumes that she’s writing into Sweden and a majority white culture, and she doesn’t want to give people an easy out where they can say, “I’ve been to Beirut. It’s not exactly like that.” She instead strips away detail and, in The Singularity, focuses on loss and the effects of war on individuals, as well as on migration and racism.

Another extraordinary feature of her prose is that the white gaze is decentered, which works to shift how the presumed audience reads and perceives some of the most pressing and potent human experiences of our time. She moves us away from the particularities of politics, and tries to make us understand what it feels like to be in a certain position. In that way, she really encourages and facilitates a deep growth and compassion—if you’re open to it, I guess. READ MORE…

Announcing Our September Book Club Selection: Birth Canal by Dias Novita Wuri

September 28, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Thuy Dinh

To resist, the women in Birth Canal—as object of desire, porn actress, and sex worker—must stare back in their own fashion. . .

In an intricately woven novel of generational legacies, untold inheritances, and our multivalent history, Indonesian author Dias Novita Wuri navigates the matrixes of family and geography with a profound and powerful voice. Tracing a passage of interconnected lives across nations, regimes, territories, and spectacles, Birth Canal is a testament to both the visible and invisible impressions that our bodies make upon the world, a challenge to the archetypal presentations of sexuality that inflict their discreet violences, and a documentation of courage and perseverance.

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. 

Birth Canal by Dias Novita Wuri, translated from the Indonesian, Scribe, 2023

Birth Canal, Dias Novita Wuri’s provocatively-titled and self-translated debut novel, represents the Indonesian author’s mesmerizing endeavor to make visible both the female body and the structure of storytelling, deftly exposing the tensions between “legible” narrative and “shameful” history. Originally titled Jalan Lahir in its original Indonesian, the text carries multiple thematic and structural possibilities at its outset: jalan means pathway, road, approach, line, lineage, course, passage, while its etymological origins, borrowed from yalan in Ottoman Turkish, suggests deceit, fakery, lie; lahir, from the Arabic zahir, means “emergence / coming into existence” as noun, “to be born” as verb, and “outer,” “physical,” or “overt” as adjective.

Weaving this ambiguity throughout the narrative, Wuri explores the territory between linear storytelling and disputed, fragmented history by shifting gracefully between first-person, second person, and third-person omniscient viewpoints. As such, Birth Canal consists of four densely structured, cinematic chapters, crossing multiple timelines and cities in Indonesia and Japan to slowly reveal the links between its six female protagonists, Nastiti, Rukmini, Arini, Hanako, Dara, and Ayaka.

The novel opens in teeming, present-day Jakarta to trail after Nastiti, a young, sexually liberated office worker about to self-administer her abortion in secret; Indonesia—a Muslim-majority country—outlaws this procedure. The chapter is narrated from the perspective of an unnamed childhood friend who recounts his platonic, unrequited love for Nastiti up until the day after her abortion, upon which she disappears from his life. In his recollections, we see Nastiti refracted as a cypher—similar to how her image is captured on another occasion by a Western street photographer and subsequently enlarged for a gallery exhibition. The young man acknowledges that despite, or precisely due to Nastiti’s hypnotic allure, she is hard to read:

Sometimes Nastiti’s innocence could seem as bare as a peeled fruit, but that was only because she was allowing it. Other times she could close herself off completely.

READ MORE…

Writing from the Ghosthouse: Maria Stepanova on Postmemory and the Russian Skaz

August 16, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Now I understand that catastrophe is never a one-time event; it’s a sort of a pendulum, destined for a comeback.

Maria Stepanova’s award-winning work, In Memory of Memory (2021), translated into English by Sasha Dugdale from the Russian original Pamiati, pamiati (2017), seamlessly blends transnational history, private archives, and memoir-in-essay—an oscillation beyond autofiction that the nonfiction reader in me had previously thought impossible. Also embedded in the novel are texts from various sources—from Phaedrus to Paul Celan, Heraclitus to Thomas Mann’s diaries, Orhan Pamuk to Nikolai Gogol—blended smoothly in Stepanova’s sinuous prose.

Already an author of ten volumes of poetry, Stepanova’s debut was described by Dmitry Kuzmin as a display of “brilliant poetic technique and a purity of style.” Now, known as a chronicler of her Russian-Jewish lineage, Stepanova had written: “I would become a stranger, a teller of tales, a selector and a sifter, the one who decides what part of the huge volume of the unsaid must fit in the spotlight’s circle, and what part will remain outside it in the darkness.” She is now widely regarded as both an important and popular contemporary writer—or in the words of Irina Shevelenko, “one of the most original and complex poets on the literary scene in Russia today.”

In this interview, I asked Maria about the genre-defying In Memory of Memory, political poetry since the Silver Age of Russian literature, and the literary tradition of folktales.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): In a previous interview, you spoke about being an eyewitness to a generation of writers who “were traumatized by the crash of the Soviet system of literary education and literary work,” stating: “You could live for three years after publishing a book, but it had to be a bad book, because it was the result of an inner compromise.”

Can you speak on that moment in time—when literary bureaucracy and censorship was prevalent, when Social Realism and traditional genres and forms were requisite, and at the same time, artists thrived?

Maria Stepanova (MS): Well, it was not exactly a good time from an artist’s point of view, as practically all the significant writers—not even mentioning the really big names—were pushed into the margins by this system. Some of them were killed, some jailed, some scared into silencing themselves, some forced to start writing in a “normal” realistic mode. And there are a couple of individuals who were appreciated by the Soviet system; though heavily censored, they were published after a lifetime of fear and loss, like Akhmatova—whose first husband was killed, third husband died in jail, and only son spent years and years in the concentration camps. It was long before the 1990s, but the Soviet utopia of Writer’s Unions, those big honorariums and that enormous audience, was actually shaped in the 1930s, over the backdrop of so many deaths, and it never transformed into anything that would allow arts or artists to thrive. Even later on, when the times became more or less vegetarian, there was an enormous split between independent culture and the official, “publishable” one that appeared in state-funded exhibition spaces or in bookshops. If you were willing to make an official career out of writing, you had to prepare yourself for the lifetime of compromises—to agree that your writing would get cropped and reshaped according to the Party line. But, of course, the benefits were significant, and the life of an underground author was not the easiest—still, the most interesting poetry and prose being written in Russia in the twentieth century were produced by the authors who had chosen such a life, who were writing “v stol”: unpublishable books that were kept in the desk.

It’s important for me to say it, banal as it is, because lately, one might hear people referring to the Soviet times with some weird sort of nostalgia; as if the books we are able to read and quote now were a result of that system, and not a desperate attempt to resist it. The very names of the writers who had perished or were silenced in the 1930s (or remained in danger and unpublished in the 70s and 80s, until the Soviet empire crashed) are used as showcases for how an oppressive society might produce great works of literature. It somehow reminds me of the way ducks are tortured to produce foie gras: the amount of pain involved in the process is unjustifiable, whatever the results are. READ MORE…

Agitations on Fragmented Terrain: On Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny’s Trash

May 10, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Fairuza Hanun

“Trash” is not necessarily just the waste we can no longer consume or make use of; its entanglements prove to be far more complex.

Trash by Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny, translated from the Spanish by JD Pluecker, Deep Vellum, 2023

There’s trash in there, said the man who was cleaning our shower drain. He pulled out a rope of hair—in our household of mostly women, it collects. I thought of the specific word he used to describe our hair, that of a tangle of broken, dead, fallen hair: trash. No one in my circle, also mostly people with uteruses, has ever referred to hair as “trash.” To us, hair is hair, and we grieve its damaged pieces. It seems peculiar and disheartening that our being women (as a social construct) and people with uteruses (as an overlapping, but not coextensive, biological reality), have always been intimately associated to and related with trash. Our relationship with trash is indicative of our whole body and mind’s vicissitudes. In Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny’s recent novel, Trash, the fact that her three narrators all identify as women demonstrates a radical intention, revealing how certain sexual identities and wants are constructed as “bad” in order to maintain the patriarchal and ableist social order, where particular bodies and desires are rendered incapable of performing normative moral order, and are therefore unacceptable in society. When we reframe it that way, “trash” is not necessarily just the waste we can no longer consume or make use of; its entanglements prove to be far more complex, much deeper than that. The identities we align with, the politics we embody, the bodyminds we are, our presence unwanted and disturbing to the ruler’s home—when they stir up a stench which discomforts cisheterosexual (mostly) male desires, we become trash to their senses. 

In this stunning debut novel, we encounter biopolitical debilities — such as hormones for transitions, the toxins from medication, blood from menstruation — through which Zéleny wades to render the limitations of our social and biopolitical mobility. Trash, set in a municipal garbage dump, starts by familiarising us with its cycle of narrators, taking turns like a roundtable with each part written in distinct voices, pulling us into the lucid experiential timelines of each narrator’s embodied memory.  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…

Finding Salvation: An Interview with Najwa Barakat

June 27, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Reem Joudi

I was among the first authors to tackle the theme of cruelty and violence, long before the Arab world witnessed its various collapses.

In turns spellbinding and labyrinthine, psychological and philosophical, tragic and bright, Najwa Barakat’s Mister N marks the triumphant return of the Lebanese author to writing. Through the story of an aging author who wanders the streets in shifting boundaries and realms, Barakat paints a painful, fearless portrait of contemporary Beirut. We were honored to present this powerful novel as our Book Club selection for May, and in the following interview, Reem Joudi speaks with Barakat about her fifteen-year hiatus, the ghosts and pariahs of Lebanon, and the “beautiful dream” of Beirut.

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.

Reem Joudi (RJ): You wrote Mister N following a fifteen-year break from writing. Could you describe your journey back, and why you chose to return with the story of Mister N?

Najwa Barakat (NB): I cannot say that I was completely cut off from writing during these fifteen years, but my literary activity was suspended for a short while of my own volition—and not because I was struggling with writer’s block. I had reached a certain juncture in my narrative journey and in my writings, which had materialized in the publication of three novels (The Bus, Oh Salaam!, and The Secret Language). These works addressed themes of violence, cruelty, and the ordinary human being’s capacity to commit evil in specific moments or contexts. I wanted to take a “break” to think about my next steps, what the title of my forthcoming literary chapter should be, as well as to focus on my permanent writing workshop, which is dedicated to helping young Arab writers develop their storytelling projects. Thanks to the workshop, twenty-three novels have been published thus far by renowned Arab publishing houses, and some of these works have received distinguished literary awards.

To tell you the truth, I felt an aversion to what was being published, consumed, and promoted as literary works of a high caliber—works which, in reality, are lacking the minimum standards for quality writing. Add to that the horrific changes that my home country, Lebanon, was experiencing, as well as the many wars, tragedies, and revolutions that countries of the Arab region were facing, all of it produced and propagated a dreadful cosmic chaos. Together, these factors presented silence as the best option during turbulent times: choosing silence, observing [what is around me], and attempting to find the meaning and purpose of literature amid all this destruction. Mister N encapsulates this experience in all its dimensions. It describes the labor of writing and the difficulty of belonging to a reality that resembles quicksand, capable of swallowing you whole at any moment. The novel also mends my relationship with Beirut, a city I returned to in 2010 following a long absence in Paris. Since then, I’ve witnessed the transformations and defeats that foreshadowed the city’s current state of collapse and decay.

RJ: There are many ghosts that haunt Mister N’s memory—Luqman, the former warlord and protagonist from one of your earlier novels Oh Salaam!; his mother and father. . . What do these multiple, multifaceted ghosts signify, and which of them do you think has the strongest pull on Mister N’s mind and spirit?

NB: Mister N is a writer with a heavy past and a troubled present. He is battling the ghosts of his childhood and the ghosts of his current tragic reality, where parts of Beirut—namely the neighborhoods he stumbles upon and begins exploring by chance—have transformed into the gutters of society. Luqman’s ghost, as you mentioned, is a person who committed atrocities during the Lebanese civil war; Oh Salaam! takes places in Beirut, in the wake of the war and at the beginning of the so-called transition to peace, and Luqman is killed by his friend’s mother after she discovers the horrors that both men committed against innocent lives. The same Luqman will reappear twenty years after the events of Oh Salaam!, very much alive and running an Internet cafe in one of Beirut’s working-class neighborhoods. A manhunt thereby ensues between him and Mister N, who, while he fears Luqman and seeks to escape him, is also drawn to him by a mysterious and obscure thread.

All this is to say that the people who committed the horrors of war are not dead, but living peacefully among us, a situation that Mister N—a writer who treads the thin line separating reality from fiction and truth from illusion—can neither tolerate nor comprehend. For Mister N, reality turned out to be more tragic than he could have ever imagined—harsher, darker, and more cruel. What could literature do in circumstances such as these, and where does a writer, worn down and defeated by reality, find their salvation? In fact, Mister N’s suffering captures my own struggle vis-à-vis all that was unfolding around me. I was among the first authors to tackle the theme of cruelty and violence [in my novels], long before the Arab world witnessed its various collapses. I intuited them, so to speak, then was terrified to face a reality which shook me to the core—one that heralded even harsher, darker, and more violent truths.  READ MORE…

Towards Empathy: Meg Matich on Translating Auður Jónsdóttir’s Quake

March 24, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Barbara Halla

It's important to try to read without an agenda.

Auður Jónsdóttir’s critically acclaimed Quake is a novel of a woman in fragments. Recovering from an amnesia-inducing seizure, Saga is made to walk through her life based on hints, illusions, and the capricious words of others. Translated into a haunting, lyrical English by Meg Matich, Quake traverses and trespasses across the demarcations of a single life to mark the entrancing dialogues between the self and other, fact and fiction, and a woman and her selves. In the following interview, Barbara Halla speaks to Matich about the trauma within the text, Icelandic women writers, and the interrogations of motherhood.

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.   

Barbara Halla (BH): Before we do a deep dive on the actual themes of the book and the story, I like to get a sense of how translators work and how they find their projects. How did you get interested in Iceland, in Icelandic, and how did you come across the book? And perhaps, why did you choose to translate it?

Meg Matich (MM): I had gotten a fellowship from Columbia to go to Slovakia for a tandem translation and along the way, I had to stop off in Berlin to visit a German poet I had been translating for class. The classmates suggested to me I do a layover in Iceland; flights were inexpensive, the hotels were relatively inexpensive. This was 2012, I believe.

I felt this very strong and immediate pull, especially because I was surrounded by ocean and a cold coast, both things that I like. I found out about Icelandic grammar just by asking about it in bookshops and it fascinated me—I like complex grammars as well. And I like strange things. Icelandic, I still think it sounds like cicadas, so I became very attached to it immediately. And soon I found my voice in someone else’s, which is something I hadn’t felt before— translation had always been a very sort of practical exercise to me, or a way to think about language. And it certainly caused me to write poetry differently than I had previously.

I came across Quake by invitation. Jennifer Baumgardner of Dottir Press had done some research on me, and we just started a relationship from there. I found Auður strange and chaotic and fascinating. And she is spellbinding when she talks. You don’t want to do anything else but listen to her. I guess that’s kind of what happened to the book. I was more engaged with her as a person than with the text at first, but that’s how I understood why it was meandering, and tangential.

BH: You also recently translated Magma by Þóra Hjörleifsdóttir and I find it a fascinating text to compare Quake to. In the English-speaking market, there’s been a push to hear more stories from women; do you find that something similar is happening in Iceland? What would you say the place that women’s writing takes in Icelandic literature?

MM: I can’t make general sweeping statements—that it has always been one way or another. In Icelandic sagas, and they’re always troublemakers, seekers, they cause misfortune. But in recent history, I would say yes, there has been a continued trend that more women’s stories are being told. And I want to pin this to one author: a woman called Ásta Sigurðardóttir. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: January 2022

January 17, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Barbara Halla, and Charlie Ng

Featuring newly released titles from France, Spain, and Japan!

Though this new year comes with its own shares of doubts and questions, what remains certain is  that new titles and texts from around the world hold their own promises of enthrallment, knowledge, and beauty. This month, we present three works of fiction that traverse the realms of history, politics, and family. From a new collection of stories from Japanese master Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, to a novel interrogating the psychologies surrounding sexual predation by the award-winning Lola Lafon, to an imaginative journey into turn-of-the-century Barcelona with Eduardo Mendoza—these writings are sure to keep you thinking and dreaming.

reeling

Reeling by Lola Lafon, translated from the French by Hildegarde Serle, Europa Editions, 2022

Review by Barbara Halla, Assistant Editor

What we may reflexively call the “#MeToo era” has served as a cataclysm for the publication of several books of fiction and memoirs centered around women’s experiences with sexual violence. Far from being an Anglo-centric phenomenon, French works such as Vanessa Springora’s Consent (translated by Natasha Lehrer) and Camille Kouchner’s La Familia Grande (translated by Adriana Hunter) have garnered great acclaim for their unflinching and complicated portrayal of childhood sexual abuse. Lola Lafon’s Reeling, as well, lends itself easily to this movement, seeming particularly prescient considering the recent conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell for her role in the trafficking of underaged girls. The novel’s direct protagonists, Cléo and Betty, are two women whose lives are derailed by the Maxwell-like figure of Cathy—a stylish older woman who approaches young girls between thirteen and fourteen, offering them prestigious scholarships through the fictive Galatea foundation.

As Cathy prepares the girls for their “interviews,” she plies them with cares and attention, clothing and expensive perfumes; she makes them feel special, or rather that they are destined for something special. Yet, it is clear that something far more sinister hides behind the promises of scholarship. By the time the girls are to “interview” with the older male jurors, Cathy has earned their trust and affection; they would do anything to please her, to deserve her trust, to fulfill her expectations as she emphasizes the need for maturity and openness, the main criteria these “jurors” are looking for in the candidates.

Two important elements come to the fore in the figure of Cathy and her relationship to the young girls she grooms, and also in the encounters of girls like Cléo, Betty, and dozens of others with these older men. On the one hand, it is important to unpack the way Cathy manufactures consent through manipulation: although these girls do not want to do anything of a sexual nature during their “interviews,” many decide to go forward with it—not solely because of their own ambitions, but also to please a figure they have come to trust and revere. Secondly, the “jurors” themselves prey on the girls’ desire to appear mature, to show they are not “frigid” and thus somehow inadequate. This particular mind-game speaks also to the way sexual liberation—the result of the social and political movements that swept France during the 1960s and 1970s—often framed physical freedoms in ways that prioritized women’s and girls’ availability to men. As a thirteen-year-old Cléo thinks after her assault, “Cléo, thirteen years, five months, and however many days, had consented. To say no was to be frigid.” READ MORE…

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

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

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

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

Note: the following piece includes discussion of sexual violence.

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

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

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

vengeance a at the movies 2 READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2021

October 11, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel, Kent Kosack, and Thuy Dinh

New works in translation from Poland, Croatia, and the Netherlands!

This month, our selections of the best in world literature are unified by their writers’ undeniable strength of voice and masterful control of the narrative form. From the Netherlands, a collection of A.L. Snijder’s very short stories—a genre invented by their author—revels in the unreal natures of our reality. From Croatia, the dark humorist stylings of Robert Perišić masterfully delineate the unrealiable boundaries of nations and psychologies. And from Poland, reporter and writer Margo Rejmer brings us a rare and intimate glimpse at Communist Albania under the fractious rule of Enver Hoxha, from the people who lived through it. 

night train

Night Train by A.L. Snijders, translated from the Dutch by Lydia Davis, New Directions, 2021

Review by Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora

            “For more than fifty years I have cherished one wish: to travel. This wish is part of another wish: for reality without reality—stories that are indistinguishable from the truth.”

—A.L. Snijders, “Baalbek” from Night Train

The key to understanding A.L. Snijders’s very short stories (dubbed zkv—zeer korte verhalen) lies inside “Baalbek,” where the Dutch author connects his desire to visit Lebanon’s ancient Roman outpost with creating stories that depict “reality without reality.” The Stone of the Pregnant Woman, a megalith found in Baalbek and enshrouded with otherworldly presence, represents the perfectly magnified symbol for Snijders’s miniature approach. His Night Train—a collection of ninety-one zkv translated by Lydia Davis—is a shapeshifting amalgam of fable, zen koan, commentary, lyrical essay, and autobiography. As an immersive foray into the unknown, the instability of Snijders’s narrative form produces a trompe-l’oeil effect “indistinguishable from the truth,” giving the reader a sensation of being at once disoriented and illuminated.

Born Peter Cornelis Müller in 1937 in Amsterdam, Snijders came from a large, bourgeois Catholic family. The dual forces of freedom and order constitute the main themes of his life and work. Artistic and cosmopolitan, Snijders nevertheless chose a stable career teaching at a police academy and led a placid life as a gentleman farmer in rural Achterhoek, Holland’s eastern region. Even after being awarded the Constantijn Huygens Prize in 2010—one of the three most prestigious literary honors in Holland—Snijders did not, for years, deviate from the low-key routine of reading his work on an early morning radio show and circulating his steady flow of zkv among an email list of loyal readers. Ever industrious, he passed away this past June while working on new material.

The commonplace in Snijders’s oeuvre is imbued with mystery. In “Minor Characters,” Snijders’s alter-ego wonders if his compressed fiction may actually be “unpsychological novel[s] for people who understand nothing about psychology.” If reality resembles an unseen but anarchic mole emerging each night to turn Snijders’s garden into a surrealist landscape (“Mole”), then the author’s aesthetic philosophy suggests holistic means to affirm “what can never be understood.” This notion of reality as unknowable, or “unpsychological,” represents the trademark of Snijders’s fiction, allowing his narrative—as both burrowing animal and spy—to elude conventional expectations and assume an enigmatic depth, despite its compact form. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2021

August 16, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan and Fairuza Hanun

New work this month from Lebanon and India!

The speed by which text travels is both a great fortune and a conundrum of our present days. As information and knowledge are transmitted in unthinkable immediacy, our capacity for receiving and comprehending worldly events is continuously challenged and reconstituted. It is, then, a great privilege to be able to sit down with a book that coherently and absorbingly sorts through the things that have happened. This month, we bring you two works that deal with the events of history with both clarity and intimacy. One a compelling, diaristic account of the devastating Beirut explosion of last year, and one a sensitive, sensual novel that delves into a woman’s life as she carries the trauma of Indian Partition. Read on to find out more.

beirut

Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse by Charif Majdalani, translated from French by Ruth Diver, Other Press, 2021

Review by Alex Tan, Assistant Editor

There’s a peculiar whiplash that comes from seeing the words “social distancing” in a newly published book, even if—as in the case of Charif Majdalani’s Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse—the reader is primed from the outset to anticipate an account of the pandemic’s devastations. For anyone to claim the discernment of hindsight feels all too premature—wrong, even, when there isn’t yet an aftermath to speak from.

But Majdalani’s testimony of disintegration, a compelling mélange of memoir and historical reckoning in Ruth Diver’s clear-eyed English translation, contains no such pretension. In the collective memory of 2020 as experienced by those in Beirut, Lebanon, the COVID-19 pandemic serves merely as stage lighting. It casts its eerie glow on the far deeper fractures within a country riven by “untrammelled liberalism” and “the endemic corruption of the ruling classes.”

Majdalani is great at conjuring an atmosphere of unease, the sense that something is about to give. And something, indeed, does; on August 4, 2020, a massive explosion of ammonium nitrate at the Port of Beirut shattered the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. A whole city collapsed, Majdalani repeatedly emphasises, in all of five seconds.

That cataclysmic event structures the diary’s chronology. Regardless of how much one knows of Lebanon’s troubled past, the succession of dates gathers an ominous velocity, hurtling toward its doomed end. Yet the text’s desultory form, delivering in poignant fragments day by elastic day, hour by ordinary hour, preserves an essential uncertainty—perhaps even a hope that the future might yet be otherwise.

Like the diary-writer, we intimate that the centre cannot hold, but cannot pinpoint exactly where or how. It is customary, in Lebanon, for things to be falling apart. Majdalani directs paranoia at opaque machinations first designated as mechanisms of “chance,” and later diagnosed as the “excessive factionalism” of a “caste of oligarchs in power.” Elsewhere, he christens them “warlords.” The two are practically synonymous in the book’s moral universe. Indeed, Beirut 2020’s lexicon frequently relies, for figures of powerlessness and governmental conspiracy, on a pantheon of supernatural beings. Soothsayers, Homeric gods, djinn, and ghosts make cameos in its metaphorical phantasmagoria. In the face of the indifferent quasi-divine, Lebanon’s lesser inhabitants can only speculate endlessly about the “shameless lies and pantomimes” produced with impunity. READ MORE…

To Channel a Voice: Adam Morris on Translating Beatriz Bracher’s Antonio

April 22, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Nicole Bilan

[T]he concept of mediumship resonated with me as a metaphor for what it was that I was trying to do as a translator.

In Antonio, our Book Club selection for March, acclaimed Brazilian writer Beatriz Bracher uses the mystifying, sustaining story of one family’s tragedy to paint a larger portrait of a tumultuous nation’s political and sociological landscape, reverberating through the discrete lives of its citizens. Constructed in a triad of narratives and rich with the fullness of voices in distinct oration, Antonio is both an electrifying mystery and a carefully constructed study of inheritance. In the following interview, Assistant Editor Nicole Bilan discusses with translator Adam Morris about the rigors and pleasures of translating this multifarious, scrupulously woven text.

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!

Nicole Bilan (NB): I’m going to be really reductive with my first question and say that Antonio is like a book of stories—or various perspectives of the same story—and this makes it quite difficult to kind of pin down its continuity. How did you navigate this ambiguity, that dynamic of mystery?

Adam Morris (AM): Well, one thing that helped was that I actually decided not to read the novel the whole way through before translating it. When New Directions accepted my initial proposal to translate I Didn’t Talk, they wanted to make sure that they had a follow-up. I recommended Anatomy of Paradise (2015), the author’s most recent novel, but the editors decided on Antonio, which I had only sampled for the purposes of writing the proposal. After reading about four or five chapters, I decided that if there was a chance I going translate Antonio, I wouldn’t want to know the explanations behind the novel’s central family secret as I worked; I wanted to find out as I was translating, to see if I could replicate that sense of not-knowing the reader is supposed to experience. So that’s what I did.

NB: That is an absolutely incredible thing to do, because even encountering it as a reader, you’re just constantly thinking: Wait, hold on, hold on, I’m lost. And then it hits you all at once. So how did you find it looking back in retrospect, trying to untangle those pieces of information—how did you refine something that’s so messily constructed in a way?

AM: I think “tangle” and “untangle” are the right verbs to use here; that was what it felt like to be working with the three narrators of Antonio. The way this novel is constructed, the voices aren’t interwoven. They’re tangled. It feels deliberately very messy, as you said; there’s conflicting information disclosed by the three voices as they evolve throughout, each becoming more familiar with their silent interlocutor, Benjamim. And one of the ways that I handled the untangling of these competing strands was to look at the novel in continuity, with each voice isolated, to see how they individually evolved without interference from the others—it’s almost impossible, of course, because their interlocutor transmits portions of each of their stories to the others, and they respond accordingly. So I tried to look at the story as a whole, and then as discrete narrative lines, and then finally reconstructed a synthesis with my revisions. But for the first draft, I just went straight through; I wanted the conversational approach that Bracher adopts to feel as natural as possible. That’s why, when I’d first started reading the novel, I knew I needed to stop. I wanted to preserve and capture the narrative effects. READ MORE…