Posts filed under 'Ugly Duckling Presse'

What’s New in Translation: March 2022

March 14, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ah-reum Han, Eva Wissting, Ka Man Chung, and Laurel Taylor

New works this week from China, Sweden, Italy, and Argentina!

March feels like a month of renewal, and our selections of translated literatures this week presents a wondrous and wide-ranging array of original thinking, ideations, philosophies, and poetics. From a revelatory collection of Chinese science fiction, to art critic María Gainza’s novel of forgery and authenticity, to Elena Ferrante’s new collection of essays on writing, and a debut collection of poetry from Iranian-Swedish poet Iman Mohammed—there is no shortage of discovery amidst these texts. Read on to find out more!

twsa

The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, edited and collected by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang, Tordotcom Publishing, 2022

 Review by Ah-reum Han

The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories is a trailblazing new anthology of Chinese science fiction and fantasy, created by and featuring the works of an all-female and nonbinary team of writers, editors, and translators. As a lifelong fan of the science fiction and fantasy genre but new to contemporary Chinese literary scene, I found this collection a true gift—warm and generous to the novice like myself, for whom Chinese literature has only ever been accessible through translation. Under the meticulous curatorial vision of Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang, the stories and essays within celebrate decorated and emerging voices alike, indicating at an exciting future of sci-fi and fantasy for digital natives in our culturally porous world.

As you enter the collection, leave everything at the door and hold on tight. This book will whisk you away from one uncanny valley to the next—from a world where children raise baby stars as pets, to a near future where parenting is turned into a computer game, to a fisherman’s village where they practice the art of dragonslaying, to a woman on the road mysteriously burdened with a corpse, and much more. The title story, “The Way Spring Arrives” by Wang Nuonuo (trans. Rebecca F. Kuang), situates itself amidst the babbling creeks where giant fish carry the rhythm of the seasons on its back, delivering spring from year to year. In “A Brief History of Beinakan Disaster as Told in a Sinitic Language” by Nian Yu (trans. Ru-Ping Chen), we are caught in a post-apocalyptic world, where people live under the threat of devastating heat currents and history pervades as literal memory capsules passed down by a select few. Despite the imaginative heights these stories reach, each creates enough space in its strangeness for us to reexamine our assumptions about the world and our place in it. Often, folklore and fantasy crosses into sci-fi and allegory, and readers are left feeling unsettled in even the most familiar landscapes.

Between these stories, you’ll find essays on genre, gender, and translation that enrich the surrounding fictions; these intelligent texts help orient readers in socio-political, historical, and global contexts, while looking to the future of this young genre. In “Net Novels and the She Era,” Xueting Christine Ni discusses the role the internet has played in disrupting gender norms within publishing—particularly in the case of the popular online sci-fi serials. In Jing Tsu’s essay on the collection at hand, she points out: “This volume shows that there is also a difference between science fiction about women and other marginalized genders and the ones written by them.” We also hear from translators, such as Rebecca F. Kuang, who writes about the symbiotic relationship between writer, translator, and reader—the choices implicit in the things left unsaid. “What Does the Fox Say” by Xia Jia is a playful de-reconstruction of the famous English pangram—“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”—as both story and essay, illuminating the act of translation in a modern world of search engines, artificial intelligence, translation software, and media. As the author notes: “intersexuality is the dominant mode to create as well as to read most of the works in our time: quotation, collage, tribute, deconstruction, parody.” This collection pioneers its own conversation around its stories. We are paused at intervals to consider: who are we really, and where do we go from here? READ MORE…

Printed Matter: On Enriqueta Lunez’s New Moon

March 12, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Paul Worley

Ambiguity across the trilingual text is a way of asserting the sovereignty of Indigenous languages in dialogue with English and Spanish.

New Moon/Luna Nueva/Yuninal Jme’tik by Enriqueta Lunez, translated from the Tsotsil by Clare Sullivan, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019

Although there is an increasingly large corpus of Latin American Indigenous literature in translation, these translations seldom make it into print. While the digital medium offers advantages—global circulation, the ability to include audio and video of spoken word performances, the capacity to cheaply reproduce multilingual volumes—print remains a vital avenue for the publication of these works as in many circles it still possesses a prestige that digital lacks. Within Indigenous literary movements themselves, authors tend to set print publication of their works as an important goal, even as they clearly value digital publication as an important and effective tool that facilitates their ability to reach a global audience. Most Indigenous literatures that do make it into printed translations do so in anthologies such as Miguel León-Portilla and Earl Shorris’s In the Language of Kings (2002), Allison Hedge Coke’s Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, or Nicolás Huet Bautista and Sean Sell’s Chiapas Maya Awakening: Contemporary Poems and Short Stories (2017).

Published in December 2019, Clare Sullivan’s translation of Tsotsil Enriqueta Lunez’s work in New Moon/Luna Nueva/Yuninal Jme’tik, is perhaps only the third single-author volume of an Indigenous writer from Latin American to be published in English translation, the other two being Sullivan’s translation of Zapotec poet Natalia Toledo, The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems (2015), and Nathan C. Henne’s rendering of the Kaqchikel writer Luis de Lión’s Time Commences in Xibalbá (2012). Although the publication of these works over the last decade demonstrates how little Indigenous literature has been translated and how much more work there is to be done in the area, it also shows that interest in reading these authors in translation is slowly gathering steam, as Wendy Call’s translation of selected poems by the Zapotec poet Irma Pineda, In the Belly of the Night and other Poems, is due out later this year from Pluralia. In other words, New Moon speaks to the increasing prominence of these voices in the global literary market.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: February 2020

February 17, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andreea Scridon, Barbara Halla, and Daniel Persia

Staffers survey new releases from around the world.

Decisions about the books we read are more important than ever in the outpouring of the Information Age, so for this month, we bring you three texts of learning, authenticity, and artistry. An Argentine novel that rescues silence, a Hungarian volume that engages the incomprehensible, and a collection of Russian poetics from a master of Moscow Conceptualism—these works accentuate the diverse revelations and immense endeavours of world literature. 

include

Include Me Out by María Sonia Cristoff, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver, Transit Books, 2020

Reviewed by Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large for Brazil 

A mishap at an international conference prompts simultaneous interpreter Mara to change course in Include Me Out, by María Sonia Cristoff, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver. Mara, tired of the monotony of her everyday interpreting, designs an experiment: she will spend one year in silence, as a guard at a small provincial museum outside of Buenos Aires. It is a job that will allow her to interact with nothing but her chair, she thinks. A job that will allow for stillness, for time to plant in her garden, she hopes. But when an unwanted promotion forces Mara to assist the museum’s gregarious taxidermist as he restores two of Argentina’s heroic horses, Gato and Mancha, an experiment in silence quickly transforms into frustration over static noise. A careful and deliberate portrait, pointedly translated, Include Me Out paints a memorable, authentic cast that stays with us long after we have finished reading. 

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2019

December 16, 2019  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel, Georgina Fooks, and Jacqueline Leung

Our selected works of translation this month touch on the eternal themes of narrative, identity, and the poet's voice.

It has been a wonderful year of covering, dear reader, the most fascinating translated works of world literature. Today, we are back with three more varied and exceptional books. Below, find reviews of a discursive and genre-bending Korean work, a powerful Uzbek novel that traverses existential questions of migration and hybridity, and the intimately potent lines of a young Argentine poetess. 

seven-samurai-swept-away-in-a-river.w300

Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River by Jung Young Moon, translated from the Korean by Yewon Jung, Deep Vellum Publishing, 2019

Review by Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large for Hong Kong

To Jung Young Moon, the author of Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River, meaninglessness is a more accurate portrayal of reality than contrived narratives. Continuing the fascination of Vaseline Buddha, one of his earlier novels which delves into the mind of an insomniac writer, Moon experiments with how the novel as a genre may go beyond the typical constituents of character, plot, and structure, and whether or not readers are able to find enjoyment in navigating largely banal thoughts and experiences. 

Set in Texas, where Moon did a residency in 2017 (specifically, in Corsicana, which he refers to as “C, a small town near Dallas”), Seven Samurai culminated from his desire to write about the state. But Moon does not know much about Texas, nor does he pretend to do so. Meandering through a list of stereotypes, from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to cowboys to the disdain for adding beans to chilli, Moon does not so much feature Texas as a place of interest, but rather as a springboard for his endless ruminations that find beginnings in almost anything, but that ultimately lead nowhere. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

March 16, 2018  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Hodna Nuernberg, Jacqueline Leung, and Noah Ross

Our weekly roundup of literary news brings us to Morocco, Hong Kong, and the United States.

We are back with the latest from around the world! This week we hear about Morocco, Hong Kong, and the United States. Enjoy!

Hodna Nuernberg, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Morocco

Some seven hundred exhibitors from Morocco and around the world descended on Casablanca for the Salon international de l’edition et du livre, which took place from February 9-18. Half open-air souk (rumor had it that one of the ambulatory vendors went so far as to offer women’s panties for sale!), half oasis of high culture, the book fair counted over 125,000 titles from forty-five different countries. Egypt, this year’s guest of honor, accounted for nearly fifteen percent of the titles on offer alone, and managed to ruffle more than a few feathers when an Egyptian publisher was allegedly caught displaying a book (A Brief History of Africa) whose cover featured a map of the continent depicting a “mutilated” Morocco—the disputed territory of the Western Sahara appearing as an independent nation under the Polisario flag. The presence of the book was firmly denied by the Ministry of Culture.

READ MORE…

In Review: The Blind Man

February 15, 2018  |  in Reviews  |  by Paul Worley

That is, beyond the words themselves, the textuality of the work does justice to the playfully serious attitude of the original.

The Blind Man: 100th Anniversary Facsimile Edition edited by Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, and Beatrice Wood (Ugly Duckling Press, 2017). Translated from the French by Elizabeth Zuba. 

With all of the uncertainties of the current geopolitical climate, it is fitting that in the beginning of 2018 we turn our attention to the past for historical context and a better sense of the wider context of recent events. In Sophie Seita’s insightful essay that accompanies Ugly Duckling Presse’s one hundredth anniversary facsimile collection of Dadaist zines and ephemera associated with The Blind Man (referred to in Hyperallergic as “a trove of Dadaist fun”), the critic encourages readers to understand Ugly Duckling’s reissue of these magazines precisely within their broader context, with “a facsimile reprint like ours attempt[ing] to recreate the original print context and…forg[ing] new dialogues with contemporary literary and artistic communities today.” Of course, in 1917, Europe was in the throes of World War I, and the artistic movement which the The Blind Man is most closely associated, Dada, is frequently held up as “an artistic revolt and protest against traditional beliefs of a pro-war society.” Rather than simply the considerable achievement of reproducing a one hundred-year-old, self-consciously cheeky avant-garde magazine in a beautiful collector’s edition, I’m keenly interested in the dialogues Seita claims the re-edition seeks to cultivate, meditating as much on what The Blind Man tells us about the present as it tells us about the past. In my view, Ugly Duckling more than delivers.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation? August 2017

August 7, 2017  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Catherine Belshaw, Paul Worley, and Sohini Basak

Not sure what to read next? Here are three of the most thrilling new releases from around the world.

With Asymptote you can be sure to have the latest reading recommendations. True to form, we bring you a selection of the exciting new books this month. Which one is going to claim a place in your bookshelf?

Kholin Front Cover Promo 72dpi at 1000 pixels_3

Kholin 66: Diaries and Poems by Igor Kholin, translated from the Russian by Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich, Ugly Duckling Presse.

Reviewed by Paul Worley, Editor-at-Large, Mexico

English language readers already enamored of poets such as the Roman Catullus or the more recent Charles Bukowski will find a similarly humorous, difficult, and enthralling companion in the pages of Russian Igor Kholin’s (1920-1999) recently translated Kholin 66: Diaries and Poems from Ugly Duckling Presse. An autodidact whose experiences in the military included a near-death experience in World War II, Kholin in many ways perhaps serves as a vital counterpoint to the American Bukowski insofar as both writers, despite the fact that they are writing throughout the Cold War between their respective countries, cast an unrelentingly critical gaze on the societies they inhabit, bearing witness to abuse, the dirty, and the neglected, and rendering these as poetry. The translators note that although Kholin’s “occasionally unrestrained misogyny” may rankle the sensibilities of many readers, they nonetheless felt compelled to leave his attitude in their translation as “it seems to constitute part and parcel of his self-positioning and character” (9). Along those lines and, in tandem with Bukowski, one also wonders about the extent to which the writer’s misogyny is not a gendered version of a broader misanthropy from which the poet does not even exclude himself. After all, the poetic Kholin muses on the possibility that thinking he is “a creep…It’s not such a leap” (80), as well as understanding he is one for whom wine is “made” and shit is “laid” (85). As he criticizes his social circle for their faults and flaws in his diary, a passage written in a friend’s handwriting takes on the subject of Kholin himself, claiming the poet is “intellectually limited” (46) and that his “advice on writing is naive” (48). Perhaps unsurprisingly, marginal notes in the poet’s own hand describe these as “the best thing Yodkovsky [the friend] has ever written” (49).

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation? June 2016

June 23, 2016  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alexis Almeida, Hannah Berk, and Poupeh Missaghi

This month's hottest titles—in translation

The Clouds by Juan José Saer, tr. Hillary Vaughn Dobel, Open Letter Books. Review: Hannah Berk, Digital Editor

Clouds-front-frame_large

The Clouds begins with the destruction of a mental asylum and ends with an arrival at its threshold. Its central journey takes place across a vast expanse of flatlands, every horizon so much the same that progressing and doubling back lose their distinction. This is a novel of contingent geometries. In some respects, it is linear: there is a journey in which a doctor leads a crew of five mental patients, two escort soldiers, and a guide across a desert to a mental hospital. At the same time, it carves layer upon layer into itself. The manuscript we read is a file on a floppy disk being read by one Pinchón Garay in a Paris apartment, haphazardly annotated by the man into whose hands the thing haphazardly fell.

Our narrator is Dr. Real, who works under a psychologist renowned for experimental treatment methods that mostly seem to entail allowing the mad live their lives just like anyone else. He is tasked with leading a group of patients on a long journey to a mental health facility in 1804 Argentina. His charges include a delusional narcissist, a nun convinced that the only way to approach consummate divinity is by consummating as many earthly relationships as possible, two brothers as incapable of communication as they are of silence, and a distraught philosophy student unable to unfurl his fists. Dr. Real promises a scientific account of their ailments at the outset, but the moment their journey begins, we are forced to question whether their responses are so outlandish for their circumstances, or, at their core, much different from our own.

READ MORE…

Publisher Profile: Ugly Duckling Presse

August 27, 2015  |  in Interviews, Publisher Profile  |  by Alexis Almeida

"I think there’s an interest among the editors in finding new translators, allowing the work of new translators to shine."

Ugly Duckling Presse is a nonprofit publisher for poetry, translation, experimental nonfiction, performance texts, and books by artists. Matvei Yankelevich is the co-founder and co-executive director of the press, and Rebekah Smith is an associate editor who spent the summer in Buenos Aires. We chatted over Skype about the press’s origins, as well as two of its translation series: EEPS (the Eastern European Poets Series) and Señal, which Rebekah and Matvei both curate. 

Alexis Almeida (AA): I want to first ask about Ugly Duckling’s origins. I read recently that you started as a zine and over time evolved into a small press. Can you highlight a few major transformations that the press went through during in this time? What were you goals for the press initially, and how have they changed over the years, especially as you expand to include more collective members and publish new kinds of books?

Matvei Yankelevich (MY): Well, it’s important to say first that the press has very little to do with what the zine was, although the name stuck. When I moved to New York, I kept using the name for new collaborative projects with people I met. When we decided to actually do something more substantial, in the late 90s, we were just a group of writers, artists, and theater people. It wasn’t necessarily going to be a publishing house, but we decided to keep the name, Ugly Duckling Presse. What united us, or gave us the idea of working together, was that we were making books with each other, or for each other, so books were a common language. And the original idea was that we would publish things, maybe have a space, have performances and shows, but that was very difficult in late 90s New York. READ MORE…