Posts filed under 'violence'

Translation as Séance: Saudamini Deo on Forgotten Hindi Authors

June 24, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Tristan Foster

. . . in order to survive, they must get used to the absurd horror of life.

An unfortunate reality is that every language has great writers who have faded from the collective memory; either they fell out of favour, or their writing spoke only to their time, or perhaps they practiced on the margins, and their work never made it beyond a small readership. Difficulties in categorising a writer’s work is especially likely to put them in peril—writing that doesn’t fit neatly into one particular genre or tradition is easier to overlook than to perpetually seek its niche. And when these writings are forgotten, a small miracle needs to occur for them to be rediscovered again.

For the first time, English language readers will have the opportunity to read forgotten Hindi writers thanks to a new and, arguably, miraculous series from Seagull Books, based in Kolkata. First to be published are short story collections by Bhuvaneshwar and Rajkamal Chaudhary, names which may be unfamiliar to readers in their native India, let alone to readers beyond. Wolves and Other Short Stories by Bhuwaneshwar will be released in Fall 2020, and Traces of Boots on Tongue and Other Stories by Rajkamal Chaudhary is due for release in early 2021.

To understand what was lost and what has been gained with these new translations, I asked translator Saudamini Deo why we should refresh the collective memory by reviving the work of Bhuvaneshwar and Rajkamal Chaudhary, and what it means for the English-speaking world to have access to their work for the first time.

—Tristan Foster, June 2020

Tristan Foster (TF): Your translations of short story collections by Bhuwaneshwar and Rajkamal Chaudhary are forthcoming from Seagull Books, with translations of work by other forgotten Hindi writers to follow. How did the series come about?

Saudamini Deo (SD): Last year, I wrote a series of articles published by Scroll.in about forgotten Hindi writers. Naveen Kishore of Seagull Books read those articles, and graciously offered to publish some of these writers as a part of their Hindi series under their India list. Neither Bhuwaneshwar nor Rajkamal Chaudhary has ever been translated into English before, which is indicative of a larger pattern: Hindi literature rarely gets translated.

TF: I want to talk first of Wolves and Other Short Stories by Bhuwaneshwar. His narratives are rhythmic, dreamy, and brutally pessimistic. The story “Wolves” tells of a caravan being chased by a pack of wolves in the night; girls are thrown off to lighten the load and stop the attack. In “Sun worship,” he writes: “This is hell, doctor, hell! A colony of the dead. This bustling city is a colony of the dead . . . Imagine that rain dissolves this place like a load of cow dung. But it will not make any difference in the world.” This harshness is even occasionally acknowledged—in “Alas, Human Heart,” the narrator discusses the carefree life he lived with friends, playing card games and going on hikes, all of them optimistic because “no one had yet had a break to look life in the eye.” The Bhuwaneshwar story looks death square in the eye. What was your experience immersing yourself in his world?

SD: As with most experiences, it was both strange and not strange. It was the first time that I was translating him, but I have been reading him forever—I wrote a paper on him during my master’s degree. So, I knew what I was getting into—I already knew the brutal pessimism and the omnipresent death in his work. What was new to me were the moments of tender insight and human ambivalence. In the story “Wolves,” right before the father is about to jump off of the caravan amidst wolves, he takes off the new shoes he is wearing and instructs his son to sell them (dead men’s shoes are never worn). I thought about this little detail for a long time. A man about to kill himself thinking about his shoes. In the story “Freedom: A Letter,” a single mother describes her life in a hill station hospital (she is a doctor) and the story is not dramatic, nothing happens, and in the end she just writes, “What is this thing called freedom? Nothing can be known about it without acquiring and using it.” It is especially moving because of its simple truth. It also acquires a political meaning considering Bhuwaneshwar was writing in pre-independence India, and he seems ambivalent about the idea of freedom itself, not necessarily politically—the idea of freedom as the ultimate harbinger of hope. Freedom can change everything except human nature. We are witnessing this in India right now. In any case, I can’t think of anything more symbolic of our times than wolves constantly chasing us. I think I emerged out of my immersion in his work with the feeling that perhaps we are all already immersed in Bhuwaneshwar’s world. READ MORE…

Beauty and Violence: Sophie Hughes on Translating Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season

May 13, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Andrew Adair

I belong to the school of whatever produces a text that doesn't sound like it has been squeezed through a mangle to get to where it is.

A few months back, I read Fernanda Melchor’s Temporada de huracanes in its original Spanish in only two short sittings. The Mexican author’s breathless prose almost demands this; putting the book down feels like walking away from a friend who is ripping you, between gasps, through one of the most harrowing stories you’ve ever heard. Among the myriad feelings I had on finishing the book was a combination of pity and excitement for the poor but lucky soul that would translate it. Perhaps you’ve already heard the list of Melchor’s stylistic choices: endlessly winding sentences, paragraphs that last chapters, and a slew of slang that even some Mexicans might need to ask their filthiest-mouthed friend to translate from Spanish into Spanish. Happily, in the end, it was Sophie Hughes, Fitzcarraldo Editions, and New Directions who brought this torrential narrative downpour to English readers, giving it the carefully considered translation it deserves.

The following interview with Hughes is as much about the practical element and the psychological toll of translating such a dense work (both in technique and in content) as it is about the field of translation and the modern relationship between the Spanish and English languages. For this reason, my questions are a bit scattered, but fortunately, Hughes’s answers are not!

—Andrew Adair

Andrew Adair (AA): Were you met with claims of “untranslatability” when people heard you were translating this work? Did you have this doubt yourself?

Sophie Hughes (SH): Not untranslatability in so many words. There is a tweet floating around somewhere—written in Spanish and sent to Fernanda and me—that I think sums up the general response to the book’s translation:

“How do you translate Hurricane Season? Incredible job by the translator if she managed to even remotely reproduce the feeling of reading the original, especially when she isn’t jarocha [from Veracruz] or Mexican and doesn’t understand half of it.”

Hurricane Season has been something of a literary sensation in Mexico and Latin America, striking cords and hitting nerves with many readers, so it makes sense that some of them should respond emotionally to its translation, even feel protective over it. It’s a difficult book, but I knew what I was getting myself into, and actually, the way the prose is structured, without paragraph breaks and with very long, circumambulatory sentences, made the translation quite a compulsive activity, even when the content was grueling or the slang particularly thick. It is meticulously written in the original, which usually makes a text supremely translatable.

AA: On the subject of doubt, do you ever question whether you’re the right person for the job? Not as a question of skill but rather, sensibility?

SH: I regularly suffer from crises of confidence. In this case, though, I did and still do feel I had the right sensibility for the job: I finished reading Temporada de huracanes with a head full of beautiful images, not just violent ones. I could not shake, for example, the passage describing a group of young men being admired by a lustful onlooker as they worked the sugar cane fields; an image that seems to slip the bonds of the nightmarish reality of the book’s world (pages 18-19 of the New Directions edition). I also found acute moments of catharsis dotted throughout the book, which add light and shade to its otherwise stubbornly miserable action—something like Mrs. Ramsey’s “matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.” Fernanda’s characters moved as much as they shocked me—I felt tenderly towards her monsters. Maybe subliminally I understood these as signs that I had the right sensibility for the job, so at that point I said to my husband: I’ll translate a sample and be honest with myself about whether I have the skill to pull this off. And I could hear Temporada de huracanes in that sample. I knew I could do it. One day I hope someone retranslates it so that I can read it afresh. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Invisibles” by Eszter T. Molnár

April 21, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Kristen Herbert

One girl started giggling nervously—another buried her face in her hands.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, psychological horror meets scathing social commentary in Eszter T. Molnár’s “Invisibles.” From the first paragraph we’re primed by imagery that’s both mundane and otherworldly—cupcake perfume and short skirts appear alongside a “vibrating blue” sky and decorative figures of preternatural monsters. Our protagonist, an exchange student seeking solace in drinking and hookups, reluctantly attends a Halloween party. But when a horrific discovery is made, the party is split between deniers and . . . deniers? Our protagonist’s indifference (itself demonstrating the benumbing effects of violence), plus the partygoers’ inebriated hostility and homophobia, and the ever-present face of youthful vacuity and diffusion of responsibility, set the stage for a tragedy that reads more like a nightmare. An important voice in contemporary Hungarian literature, Molnár addresses gender violence and domestic abuse in vivid, psychologically nuanced detail. “Invisibles” is one such study on how we interpret and (mis)handle horrific acts of violence.

The sky was still vibrating blue, but the shadows were preparing themselves along the base of the houses. As he wound his way through leaping skeletons, witches, and vampires, Tamás caught scent of the girls’ cupcake perfume. He stopped in front of a shabby tenement house. Bikes were parked along the sidewalk, in the street, even in the flowerbeds. He pushed open the door, stepped into the inner courtyard, and beside the trash cans, he leaned his bike against the wall, next to Varja’s. Her bike was decorated with plastic flowers. Please don’t leave trash next to the containers, put it in the bins! was written across the crimson sign in white letters.

He rang the bell three times, but the tune of “Für Elise” was lost in the music swelling up from inside. He started shivering. His damp sweater was sticking to his back, underneath his coat. It was a stupid idea to come, he thought, and he turned to leave, when the door burst open, and a sheet swept down over his head. They pulled him into the vestibule, circled around him, pushed him back and forth to each other. They were the spiders, he was the prey. Even though he’d expected something like this, his pulse went into a frenzy. He struggled helplessly, the blood throbbing in his ears stifled out the shrieking and choked laughter. He crashed into the wall, and fell to the ground. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2019

November 11, 2019  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Allison Braden, Alyea Canada, Daljinder Johal, and Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

November’s best new translations, chosen by the Asymptote staff.

November brings plenty of exciting new translations and our writers have chosen four varied, yet equally enriching and timely works: Bohumil Hrabal’s memoir that is at once a detailed study of humans’ relationship with cats and an exploration of dealing with mounting pressures and stress; a debut collection of Chilean short stories which explores social and economic difficulties and sheds light on some of the causes behind Chile’s recent social unrest; Hiromi Kawakami’s follow-up novella to the international bestseller, Strange Weather in Tokyo; and a novel set on the Chagos Archipelago which recounts the expulsion of Chagossians from the island of Diego Garcia and examines cultural identity and exile. Read on to find out more!

hrabal_all_my_cats_jacket

All My Cats by Bohumil Hrabal, translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson, New Directions, 2019

Review by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, Educational Arm Assistant

Bohumil Hrabal’s All My Cats is not for the faint of heart. Though fans of the author will recognize and appreciate the quirky humor and lyrical melancholy, one must also be prepared to take on the harsher aspects of the story, and I suspect that the uninitiated may find the descriptions of cats being murdered a bit much to take. The short memoir documents the author’s relationship to the feral cats living in his country cottage in Kersko, and his anguished labors to brutally limit their number. It is a lovely homage, and a richly evocative account of the pleasures of feline companionship, with lush descriptions of their delicate paws and velvety noses. We become acquainted with each individual kitty and their distinctive markings, habits, and personalities, but these rhapsodic stories are punctuated by episodes of grim slaughter that are depressingly specific—a morose account of an awful deed. And so, gradually, horrifyingly, this becomes a book about guilt and how it shapes one’s worldview, producing a strange reckoning of crime and punishment that reads retribution in the random alignments of events.

Witnessing Hrabal shuttling back and forth between his life in Prague and Kersko, we begin to notice that his concerns about his cats are combined with a steadily accumulating sense of anxiety and torment about his work, neighbors, and life. “What are we going to do with all those cats?” his wife asks, in an echoing refrain, as new litters of kittens, inexorably, arrive. The book is about the cats, but we start to realize that it is also not about the cats, not really, but rather, about how Hrabal struggles to manage the various stresses of his life more generally as he gains success and recognition as a writer. Haunted by his guilt over the murdered creatures, he surveys the world around him, reflecting on the relationship between art and suffering, and increasingly begins to feel that he is a plaything of fate, doomed to unhappiness, with no choice but surrender. READ MORE…

Teeming With Speech: Youssef Fadel’s A Shimmering Red Fish Swims with Me

October 30, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Eric Calderwood

In Fadel’s hands, the entire nonhuman world is brimming with life, and even with volition.

A Shimmering Red Fish Swims with Me by Youssef Fadel, translated from the Arabic by Alexander E. Elinson, Hoopoe, 2019

A massive construction project looms in the background of Moroccan author Youssef Fadel’s novel Farah (2016), beautifully translated from the Arabic by Alexander E. Elinson and published under the title A Shimmering Red Fish Swims with Me (Hoopoe 2019). The project in question is the building of Casablanca’s Hassan II Mosque, named after the Moroccan ruler who commissioned it. As Elinson explains in a concise and illuminating foreword to his translation, King Hassan II (r. 1962-1999) announced his plan to build a grand mosque on Casablanca’s Atlantic shoreline during his 1980 birthday celebrations. The mosque was inaugurated in 1993, on the eve of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday. Designed by a French architect and built by a French firm, the mosque project required the labor of over thirty thousand workers, including thousands of master craftsmen who carved, chiseled, sculpted, and formed its dazzling array of tile mosaics, stucco moldings, and decorative woodwork. The structure that emerged from this massive effort accommodates up to one hundred and five thousand worshippers, making it the largest mosque in Africa and one of the largest mosques in the world—but such grandeur comes at a huge cost, both financial and human. The mosque came with a whopping price tag of over half a billion US dollars, and much of the financial burden fell on Moroccan citizens, who were required to help pay for the mosque through a public subscription program. The project also upended life in Casablanca, particularly for the people who lived in the densely populated neighborhood that was razed to create room for the new mosque.

These upheavals are at the heart of Fadel’s novel, which explores the experiences of the Moroccans who both lived in the shadows of, and contributed to, the construction project, and who were eventually displaced to make room for the massive mosque that they had helped build. A Shimmering Red Fish Swims with Me is Fadel’s tenth novel and the final book in a trilogy about contemporary Morocco. The novel centers on an ill-fated love story between two young Moroccans: Farah, who escapes her hometown of Azemmour and comes to Casablanca to pursue her dream of becoming a singer, and Outhman, who works with his father as a carpenter at the mosque. The lovers’ fate is sealed in the novel’s first chapter, where we learn that Farah is the victim of a brutal acid attack, witnessed by Outhman. The rest of the novel is devoted to unpacking the events leading up to the acid attack on Farah. The story is told through an intricate narrative structure that unfolds along multiple timelines and from multiple perspectives, meting out information in suspenseful portions whose full meanings do not become clear until the last page. Each of the novel’s seven sections opens with a chapter narrated from the perspective of a third-person omniscient narrator located in the present, some twenty-three years after Farah’s death. The internal chapters of each section are narrated in the first person from Outhman’s perspective, beginning at the time he met and fell in love with Farah while working at the mosque’s construction site. The last chapter of each section is narrated in the first person from the perspective of another character in the novel, such as Farah or Outhman’s mother. The result is a kaleidoscopic view of working-class life in Casablanca, one that uses the tragic love story between Farah and Outhman as a launch pad for exploring the tensions running through Moroccan society in the 1980s and ’90s and, in particular, for laying bare the tremendous costs that the Hassan II Mosque inflicted on the people living around it.

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2019

October 21, 2019  |  in News  |  by Andrea Blatz, Rachel Allen, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Our blog editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2019 issue!

Another issue, another record broken: Asymptote’s Fall 2019 issue features work from an unprecedented thirty-six countries. Looking for a point of entry? Consider our blog editors your guides. Their selections here, which range from Korean poetry to Russian drama, will set you off on the right foot. 

“Why do I think October is beautiful? / It is not, is not beautiful.” So goes a poem by the late Bill Berkson. It is not—as we know when the grey settles and looks to stay—a particularly delightful month, but if all the poems featuring October attests to something, it is that this time, its late and sedate arrival, is one that enamors poets. So it is that a vein of poetics runs through our Fall 2019 issue, and the poetry section itself is one of tremendous artistry and vitality. From the stoic and enduring lines of Osip Mandelstam to a brilliant translation of Sun Tzu-Ping’s strikingly visual language, Asymptote has once again gathered the great poets from far reaches. 

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 27, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Anna Aresi, Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernberg, and José García Escobar

Our wide-ranging literary dispatches this week cover protests, translations, and debuts.

This week’s dispatches report on a four-day literature festival in Italian-speaking Bellinzona in Switzerland, a new podcast dedicated exclusively to Guatemalan and Central American literature, as well as news of the arrest of journalist Hajar Raissouni in Morocco and a theatre group resisting such censorship and freedom of the press violation with a performance of Don Quixote.

Anna Aresi, Copy Editor, reporting from Switzerland

An interest in mapping (often the result of conquests and colonization) and remapping—rethinking what was erased and systematically left out in the mapping process—is at the core of Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli’s latest novel. In Lost Children Archive, mapping is related to sound: “Focusing on sound forced me to hear as opposed to seeing, it forced me into a different rhythm. You cannot consume sound immediately,” she explains, “when focusing on sound, you have to sit with it, let it unfold.” It is within this rhythm, she adds, that English emerged as the language that was conducive to the writing of this novel, which she had begun writing in both English and Spanish simultaneously.

Luiselli reflects on this and other aspects of her writing in an intense conversation with Italian writer Claudia Durastanti, in the intimate setting of Bellinzona’s social theater. 

Every year, Bellinzona—the capital of Swiss Italophone Canton Ticino—hosts Babel Festival, a four-day event entirely dedicated to literature and translation. This year’s fourteenth edition, entitled “You will not speak my language,” explored the limits and boundaries of language and literature, as well as languages that are “imagined, invented, despised, censored, regional, silent, visual, and enigmatic.”

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Announcing our April Book Club Selection: The Storyteller by Pierre Jarawan

April 25, 2019  |  in Book Club, News, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

The characters search for a sort of Holy Grail, a mystical solution to complicated problems, and they don’t find it.

The April Asymptote Book Club selection sends us to Lebanon for the first time, trailing the footsteps of protagonist Samir as he searches for his father and “struggles to resolve the contradictions and scars of his upbringing into a cohesive identity.”

Pierre Jarawan’s debut novel, The Storyteller, “does for Lebanon what Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner did for Afghanistan, [pulling] away the curtain of grim facts and figures to reveal the intimate story of an exiled family torn apart by civil war and guilt.” The English version of the novel, co-translated by Sinéad Crowe and Rachel McNicholl, is available thanks to World Editions.

Our Book Club, catering to subscribers across North America and the EU (still including the UK!), has now published titles from seventeen different countries and thirteen different languages, and there’s still an opportunity to sign up for next month’s title via our website. If you’re already a member, join our online discussion here.

The Storyteller by Pierre Jarawan, translated from the German by Sinéad Crowe and Rachel McNicholl, World Editions, 2019

Reviewed by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Editor

The protagonist of The Storyteller, Samir, is born in Germany to Lebanese parents who fled their country’s civil war in the 1980s. Like many of his real-life contemporaries, he struggles to resolve the contradictions and scars of his upbringing into a cohesive identity. Grazing liberally from various cultures for its influences and allusions, Pierre Jarawan’s debut novel weaves between a past that feels too recent to be considered one, a present that feels too immediate to be already written about, and a future too intangible to trust.

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Translation Tuesday: “The Fox-Terrier” by Mempo Giardinelli

February 26, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Cameron Baumgartner

An even greater silence fell, as if all the sound and noise of the world had died in that plaza.

An impactful feature of “The Fox-Terrier” is the way in which the opening paragraph throws the boundary between fiction and nonfiction into doubt as the narrator mentions a personal detail which is also true of the author: that he has written a book called La revolución en bicicleta, which the real-life Mr. Giardinelli published in 1980. Although Mr. Giardinelli asserts that “The Fox-Terrier” is purely fictional, the use of this true detail as a framing device for the untrue narrative which follows lends the story’s climax a chilling believability. The reader is left wondering, Could it be that this terrible thing really happened? This question leads, in turn, to a larger consideration of human nature and its capacity for cruelty, and the way human evil returns again and again throughout history “like a neverending Piazzolla tango.”

—Translator Cameron Baumgartner

 

In This is Not the End of the Book, a conversation about books and reading by Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière, the authors mention a story by Restif de la Bretonne, a French novelist from the eighteenth century whom I haven’t read, that is similar to a story my father used to tell, and which in 1980 I almost included in my book La revolución en bicicleta.

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Announcing our December Book Club Selection: The Barefoot Woman by Scholastique Mukasonga

December 27, 2018  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada

In telling her mother’s story, Mukasonga returns agency to Stefania and the other women of her village.

The Asymptote Book Club enters its second year with a first African title: Scholastique Mukasonga’s The Barefoot Woman, translated by Jordan Stump and published by Archipelago, is a moving tribute to the author’s mother, one of the victims of the Rwandan Genocide.

After visits to Turkey and Croatia in the previous two months, we again find ourselves confronting “the dark and bloody face of history” through the mirror of prose. Mukasonga’s homage to her mother, though, “radiates . . . with warmth and affection,” in the words of our reviewer. “This slim memoir,” says Alyea Canada, “is a haunted and haunting love letter.”

Head to our online discussion page to add your voice to the discussion on The Barefoot Woman. All the information you need to subscribe for future Book Club selections is available on our Asymptote Book Club site, together with a full overview of our first twelve months.

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Cracks in the Ordinary: Yasmina Reza’s Babylon in Review

August 30, 2018  |  in Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla

How are ordinary people pushed to inconceivable acts of violence and stupidity?

Babylon by Yasmina Reza, translated from the French by Linda Asher, Seven Stories Press, 2018

The “soirée entre amis” (literally an evening among friends) is one the most quintessential of French clichés. Quintessential not only for its pervasiveness in art centred in Paris, but also because it is ridiculously pervasive in real life, too. A staple, even, of life in France. And, if like Yasmina Reza, you believe that “you can’t understand who people are outside [their] landscape,” what better setting for the exploration of the pressures and absurdities of daily existence than precisely a dinner party between friends, a space that demands constant performance due to its many spoken and unspoken social rules?

In a fictional suburb of Paris, Elisabeth and her husband, Pierre, are throwing a party for their friends and family. Invited, at the very last minute, are their neighbours the Manoscrivis, Jean Lino, and Lydie. The party goes well, but tragedy strikes shortly after: Elisabeth and Pierre are woken in the middle of the night by Jean Lino, who has killed his wife after a banal domestic dispute. Even more inexplicable is what follows as Elisabeth, a sensible and rather ordinary woman, decides to help Jean Lino get away with the crime, despite sharing nothing more than a tentative friendship.

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Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Darkness and Company by Sigitas Parulskis

April 17, 2018  |  in Translations  |  by Karla Gruodis

Photography can do that—it can show us what an object really is. Photography is not just the object itself; it is always above it, beyond it.

This week we bring you a final installation of our series featuring Lithuanian writers inspired not only by these excellent writers, but because the Baltic countries are is this year’s Market Focus at the London Book Fair.

This excerpt of Darkness and Company is by the prolific Sigitas Parulskis. With a healthy sampling of Plato, this piece explores questions of photography, truth, and beauty as a young photographer goes in search of the perfect light to capture a horrific scene of violence and death during the Holocaust. The jarring and unsettling nature of this piece gives us a taste for the rest of Darkness and Company and reveals an incredibly talented writer. 

This showcase is made possible by Lithuanian Culture Institute.

The word ‘angel’ was scrawled on the blackboard in chalk. The rest of the sentence had been erased. Angel of vengeance, angel of redemption—it could have been either one.

He got up quietly so as not to awaken the other men and went out into the yard. He couldn’t see the guard, who was probably off dozing somewhere. The Germans were staying at the local police station; the brigade was sleeping in the town’s school. After a night of festivities at a local restaurant, most of the men were indistinguishable from the mattresses spread on the floor.

Vincentas stuffed his camera into his coat and headed off in the direction of the forest. He looked at his watch and saw that it was five in the morning. The sun was just coming up—the best time of the day if you wanted to catch the light. To capture the idea of light, as Gasparas would say. Where could he be now? Underground, probably; still wearing his thick-lensed glasses. Lying in the dark, trying to see the essence of things with his myopic eyes. His grey beard sticking up, his thin hair pressed to his forehead in a black band. Although short-sighted and ailing, he had been a strange and interesting person. His photography students called him by his first name, Gasparas. The photographer Gasparas. It was from Juozapas that Vincentas had first heard about photography, that miracle of light. While still a teenager he had read a few articles and a small book called The Amateur Photographer, and then, when he turned eighteen, he had bought his first camera, a used Kodak retina. But it didn’t go well, so he had found Gasparas. Without his thick-lensed glasses Gasparas couldn’t see a thing. He would take them off, look straight ahead with his strange, empty eyes and say, ‘Now I can see the real world.’

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In Conversation: Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky on Words for War

February 22, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by Diána Vonnák

There’s a way in which great poetry goes beyond the specifics of language, time, and place, illuminating patterns.

Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky are award-winning poets from opposite ends of Ukraine, writing in Ukrainian and Russian, respectively. They work together as translators from Russian and Ukrainian to English, having lived in the US for over a decade. When Crimea, where Max is from, was annexed by Russia, and the war started in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, the geographic and linguistic differences they embody became markers of a conflict they were detached from, yet that was intimately close. The war gave Ukrainian poetry an impetus they could not ignore as translators, prompting them to assemble a collection that documents the war in its multiplicity, from various positions, modes of involvement, across languages. Words for War (Academic Studies Press, 2017), the resulting anthology, replants poetic testimonies of the war away from the local ground—there, the war loses some of its singularity—at once a document of this particular conflict and poems that speak of loss, pain and anger across borders. Today, Asymptote‘s Editor-at-Large for Hungary, Diána Vonnák, discusses this groundbreaking project with Oksana and Max.

Diána Vonnák (DV): When I read the title of your collection, Wilfred Owen came to my mind as one of those poets who became iconic for English war poetry. He wrote this in 1918, just before he died: “This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War.” These claims are strong and for me they resonated with what you wrote in the preface: “Like broken furniture and mutilated bodies, these poems are traces of what had happened, as well as evidence that it did really happen.” What do you think about the relationship between poetry and war, the aesthetic and the political?

Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky (OM/MR): Words for War is a provocative title. It’s also a difficult title to pull off, in that it can appear glib, easily interpreted in a hortative aspect: “Let’s get ready for war, sing some war songs, and say some war words!” For better or for worse, it’s not that kind of book. Our starting point was a series of observations: there’s a war in Ukraine, and people there think about it and talk about it. Politicians and administrators make speeches about it. Journalists and reporters cover it. It fills news channels and newspapers. Youtube users upload amateur videos from cities affected by war, and your own Facebook friends take different sides. In the streets, you see people in military uniforms; and you see civilians reacting to them, expressing a range of responses from gratitude to overt hostility. You see young men with missing limbs, with deformed faces. And then there are the endless witness reports. Because many people have been to war, and still more have been to the war zone, and they have stories to tell, and stories they prefer to be silent about. In short, war is ever-present, and it uses up a lot of words.

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In Review: The Restless by Gerty Dambury

January 25, 2018  |  in Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

Those who speak out against oppression, especially women, form the foundation of a better future.

The Restless by Gerty Dambury (The Feminist Press, 2018). Translated by Judith G. Miller  

Gerty Dambury’s The Restless, translated from the French by Judith G. Miller, takes place in her native Guadeloupe, a Caribbean island that has been an overseas department of France since just after the second World War. Guadeloupeans of different ages, genders, and social statuses narrate the events surrounding the violent confrontation between the construction workers’ union and the French prefecture that took place on May 26th, 1967. On this day, as workers gathered outside the building where the union negotiated wage raises with business owners, the French prefect ordered troops to fire on the crowd, and the situation degenerated from there. The lynchpin of the novel is a little girl, Émilienne, who’s waiting for her father to come home so he can explain to her why her teacher has disappeared. While she waits in the courtyard of her home, a chorus of her family members and neighbors (both living and dead) contextualize the two absences and how they relate to the broader experiences of the island.

Though Émilienne acts as the focalizer, the chief narrators are her eight brothers and sisters, who speak with a more-or-less undifferentiated voice. They proclaim themselves the “callers” of the story, which they structure after the Caribbean quadrille, a sort of creolized version of a French square-dance. The caller of the quadrille is conventionally singular and male, but Émilienne’s siblings are happy to innovate. They often hand over the reins to guest narrators, who act as temporary callers. Each section of the narrative has a primary caller, though others often chime in, and corresponds to one of the four quadrille figures in rhythm and mood. Émilienne’s siblings helpfully guide the unfamiliar reader’s expectations of the musical conventions at the beginning of each figure/chapter. The multivocality and musicality of the text, two of its most distinguishing features, could have posed a challenge to Miller’s translation. The differences between the figures and the characters’ voices are discussed more than demonstrated.

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