Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 26, 2024 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Kathryn Raver, and Wambua Muindi

The latest in literary updates from Kenya, France, and the United States!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us around the world for book launches, book fairs, and literary prizes! From a former Police Commandant’s memoir in Kenya, to a “harrowing” new release in France, to a mobile poetry reading in New York City, read on to learn more!

Wambua Muindi, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Kenya

On Saturday, April 6, Qwani launched Qwani 02 at Alliance Française Nairobi. Qwani, founded by Keith Ang’ana, is a youth initiative meant to promote literature among young writers and readers, and whose main annual event is the book launch. The launch also featured music performances and selected readings from the works that made the second project. The one-of-a-kind anthology is multilingual and features 72 stories from some 60 enthusiastic Kenyan young writers. Ranging from short stories to essays to poetry, the included pieces demonstrated some innovative skills in storytelling and writing. The event culminated in book signings, a cake cutting, and a speech cameo by Lexa Lubanga who highlighted the recent kickoff to the fifth edition of the Kenyan Readathon.

In other news, Omar Abdi Shurie, former Commandant of Administration Police Training College in Kenya, launched his memoir Beyond the Call of Duty at the Embakasi AP Training Centre on Thursday, April 18. His book continues a Kenyan tradition of men in uniform documenting their lives and bequeathing literary history with an archive of service in the disciplined forces. With a 45-year stint in Kenya’s law enforcement, Shurie offers a rare view into matters of security for a police unit that is—to the public mind—known for its corruption and brutality. The former Commandant documents a life that exemplifies the Kenyan dream; hailing from Mandera in marginal North Eastern Kenya, Shurie ultimately rose to head the police service, working to maintain law and order by providing leadership for law enforcement. This is what Shurie’s life story personified, and what his book represents—a Kenya that is still becoming.

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France

Two weeks ago, over 100,000 people flocked to Paris for the third annual Festival du Livre de Paris. The festival hosted these crowds alongside hundreds of authors from around the world for three days of industry discussion and literary celebration. In the spirit of the upcoming Summer Olympics, there was even a “Grande Dictée des Jeux,” where over 2700 “spelling athletes” competed to transcribe a series of spoken texts in exchange for a medal and free entry to the festival.

The Visceraless State: An Interview With Cristina Rivera Garza

October 8, 2020 | in Interviews | by Lindsay Semel

[W]riting is a community-making practice . . . intimately, necessarily connected to the communities in which we live and which, ideally, we serve.

Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza is a foremost voice in contemporary Mexican literature. Known for her frequently dark subject matter and hybrid styles, her work focuses on marginalized people, challenging us to reconsider our preconceptions about boundaries and transgression. She has won major literary awards and is the only author to have twice won the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award (in 2011 and 2009). Her latest work to be translated into English, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, has just been published by Feminist Press and is a hybrid collection of journalism, crónicas, and essays, that explore systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the US-Mexico border. To coincide with its much-anticipated release, Asymptote’s Assistant Managing Editor Lindsay Semel spoke with Cristina Rivera Garza about the ideas behind this compelling work.

“Let me just bring some tea, and I’ll be right back!” Cristina Rivera Garza dashed out of her Zoom screen briefly before settling back into her chair and adjusting her glasses with a warm smile, her air of familiarity challenging the oppressiveness of the geographical and technological distance to which we’ve lately become accustomed. In the following interview, we discuss Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, the striking latest collaboration between Garza and translator Sarah Booker. She reflects upon the demands that she makes of syntax, the enigmatic character of reality, the importance of solidarity and imagination, and how she and Booker coined the term “The Visceraless State.” Very much of the borderland between Mexico and the United States, her work meets the global, contemporary moment not despite its specificity, but because of it.

—Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

Lindsay Semel (LS): You’ve stated in interviews, and it’s apparent in your work, that you intentionally test the limits between what language normally does and what it can do in order to discover new experiential possibilities between writer, text, and reader. I wonder if you could point to places in the text where you tested and stretched the limits of Spanish but were not able to do so the same way in English and vice versa. How do Spanish and English need to be challenged differently?

Cristina Rivera Garza (CRG): Every single project has to challenge language in specific ways. It always depends on the materials that I’m exploring, affecting, and letting myself be affected by, and there are specific ways that you can do that both in English and in Spanish. I tend to write longer sentences in Spanish and more fragmentarily in English, for example. When I am getting too long-winded in Spanish, I try to convey that thought with the directness and economy I associate with my relationship with English. At times, I try to use the semicolon in English, just because it is more common in Spanish and I want to see what happens to both sentence and sense. Constantly borrowing from English and borrowing from Spanish and taking traces and echoes from one language into the other, trying to honor and replicate the tension and friction that maintains them together where I live and how I think, has been almost a natural way of continuing to challenge both.

Sarah [Booker, translator of Grieving] is such a deft translator and we now know each other quite well. She’s been translating my work for a number of years and we have a very open, fluid conversation as she goes into the translation process: less a process of moving language from one context to a another, and more a search for similar effects based on the affective capacities of host and receiving languages. I work closely with syntax, especially if I’m exploring issues such as violence and suffering. Pause, breathlessness, all those aspects of a body going through tremendous pressure or pain inflicted—in terms of keeping both form and content responding to the same challenges, it is important that syntax and semantics are somehow reflecting and embodying that experience. That’s when writing occurs.

I think of translation as a creative process too. I see Sarah as my co-author and her work as a way through which I receive my book back anew. I think she’s a poet at heart. I don’t know if she knows that, but all those experiments with language, that’s something she’s very deft at. READ MORE…

Contributor:

Lindsay Semel

Languages:

English
Spanish

Place:

Mexico

Writers:

Cristina Rivera Garza
Sarah Booker

Tags:

Translation Tuesday: “English Lessons” by Mónica Lavín

April 24, 2018 | in Translations | by Mónica Lavín and Patricia Dubrava

"Stepping into the United States was stepping into order and cleanliness, Patricia always thought."

This Tuesday brings us a story that straddles the US-Mexico border. In Mónica Lavín’s “English Lessons,” a Mexican woman travels to San Diego for an all-too-brief reunion with her brother. Her notions of America, a “better world” glimpsed in the Dick and Jane stories from her childhood, are upended in an unexpected, heartrending manner.

For more great short works like this, check out the fiction section and special Korean literature feature in the Spring 2018 issue of Asymptote.

English Lessons

Stepping into the United States was stepping into order and cleanliness, Patricia always thought. A sense of well-being settled in her chest when she crossed the border. It was like entering a story, a fiction, proof that a better world existed. Like the world her first grade English books had shown: the house with a garden, the family with a dog named Spot and a cat called Puff. Sally, Dick and Jane played with a “red wagon.” “Red” was rojo, “wagon” carretilla? She’d never seen one except in the color illustrations of those books. The mother called them in to dinner, with her styled hair, her big smile and an apron over her full-skirted dress. Not that Patricia wasn’t critical of many things about the gringo lifestyle—their detachment from family life and excessive practicality, their sense of being the center of the world. But in her experience, U.S. highways had no potholes, there were fewer rattletrap cars, and San Diego’s landscaped roundabouts were a pleasure to see. She suspected her idea was childish, so it was a conception she didn’t dare confess. Certainly, after standing in the tedious line, and feeling like a convict when the guard took her papers and examined her, knowing she was safely “on the other side” made her breathe more calmly. She anticipated enjoying this trip especially because she’d visit her friend Laura in California, and her brother Daniel was also coming to San Diego for two days. They hadn’t planned it, but it was a happy coincidence. He lived in Guadalajara, further from the border, loved and knew San Diego. He’d promised to take her for a drink at the Hyatt at sundown to see the bay. And she would accompany him on his mission to buy household goods: sheets, towels, kitchen things, placemats for his bachelor breakfast table. She liked his attitude, how he was determined to make a pleasant abode for himself, treating it as a new project to be enthusiastic about, instead of being depressed by his divorce.