Posts featuring Emma Ramadan

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #7 An Interview with Emma Ramadan

December 23, 2022  |  in News  |  by Bridget Peak

What I bring to the table as a translator is precisely that I come at books from a place of emotion.

We use our bodies to write, to type, to think, to read aloud, to listen, to gauge by our gut whether or not a sentence is right . . . When a sentence isn’t right, I feel it immediately in my back . . . what I bring to the table as a translator is precisely that I come at books from a place of emotion. That urge to translate a book comes from seeing what it can do for a reader emotionally, what it does to me emotionally, how it can impact the way people feel in the world.

For longtime followers of Asymptote, it will come as no surprise that our seventh most popular article of 2022 was Claire Mullen’s interview with Emma Ramadan from the Fall 2022 issue. An established, sensitive and sought-after translator from the French who not only interned with us way back in 2012, but also appeared in our pages throughout the years thereafter, Ramadan is the recipient of a Fulbright, NEA Translation Fellowship, the 2018 Albertine Prize, and the 2021 PEN Translation Prize.

In this interview, which easily topped our internal survey of favorite articles from the issue, Ramadan shines a spotlight on the lesser known role of the translator—that of the archive researcher, as demonstrated by her work on Marguerite Duras’s The Easy Life and Barbara Molinard’s Panics.

For example, she describes following a “little tingle” into the Providence Public Library where she finally discovered the elusive French manuscript of Panics that she had been looking for, to no avail, in France—no less.

This illuminating interview surely sets her apart as a translator whose practice goes beyond mere questions of language.

After reading what she has to say in our current issue, we invite you to revisit her other appearances throughout the years as well. For just a taste:

Former Blog Editor Allison Braden interviewed Emma Ramadan in October 2020 on her translation of Meryem Alaoui’s Straight From The Horse’s Mouth, in which Ramadan reveals “something that I do with every book, actually—is that I read out loud as I translate.”

In her September 2018 conversation with former intern Mallory Truckenmiller, Ramadan discusses her dual role as character and translator in Brice Matthieussent’s Revenge of the Translator, and the embodiment of the act of “Translation as erotic.” ”Getting inside the author’s psyche, recreating their words,” she says, is “incredibly intimate . . . intellectually stimulating . . . sexy.” 

If you find yourself itching for more insights into translation direct from the horse’s mouth—including the opportunity to pose direct questions to translators during the live Q&A session with the author and/or the translator of the title that we conduct each month—we invite you to join the Asymptote Book Club, for which past members have read Ramadan’s translations of Alaouai and Matthieussent alongside other cutting-edge works of world literature!

REVISIT OUR SEVENTH MOST-READ ARTICLE OF 2022

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Discover more on the Asymptote blog:

Fall 2022: Highlights from the Team

November 2, 2022  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Annilee Newton, Barbara Halla, Bella Creel, Caridad Svich, Heather Green, Ian Ross Singleton, Janet Phillips, Marina Dora Martino, Megan Sungyoon, and Sofija Popovska

Where to start with our glorious Fall 2022 issue? Here are some entry points, courtesy of our global team!

Emma Ramadan’s work as a translator has been so important to me and my literary journey—not least because of the attentiveness she lends to the writers she translates from Francophone North Africa, such as Ahmed Bouanani. I also really admire the way she speaks about her process with Claire Mullen in her interview, the passion and commitment and genuineness that shine through, for instance, in how she discusses her feelings at finally finding a copy of Molinard’s Panics. It reminded me a little of Alice Guthrie’s work with Malika Moustadraf’s Blood Feast, which was also out of print and circulated online as low quality scans.

I really love the slow, meditative writing of Dejan Atanacković’s absent narrator in Lusitania (tr. Rachael Daum). When it ranges with a kind of radical exteriority over the ephemera that remains of Teofilović, and the marginal annotations of Stojimirović that accompany his journals, it reads almost like the prose of Sebald—with the enigma of Teofilović as one such central, inaccessible figure around which the story endlessly circles, never losing sight of the larger political and social context.

Laksmi Pamuntjak’s “The Tale of Mukaburung” could easily have been written and translated to pander to a white gaze, and it’s really to the credit of both Pamuntjak and her translator Annie Tucker that there is a pervasive self-sufficiency to the story and its world, a refusal to explain itself, a matter-of-fact revelling in the ordinariness of its own magic and ritual. This seems especially commendable when a dominant affect in the story is puzzlement and defensiveness, in confrontation with foreigners whose presence and purpose are unknown, even to the reader, until much later in the story when it is revealed that many among them are political prisoners.

—Alex Tan, Senior Assistant Editor (Fiction)

Olavo Amaral’s “Steppe” (tr. Isobel Foxford) is exquisite in every way: the writing of the translation, the unusual subject matter, the relationship and emerging love between the two main characters and how it is described, the mood created by the atmosphere of snow and remoteness.

I have been following closely the horrors of Putin’s war in Ukraine and though still angry and frustrated by its continuation, I thought I was fairly hardened to the extent of Russian atrocities. But I broke down towards the end of Galina Itskovich’s War Diary (tr. Maria Bloshteyn), where the unspeakable rape and violence against children is put into words.

—Janet Phillips, Assistant Managing Editor

Kudos to Jonathan Chan for beautifully translating such ancient poems of Choe Chi-won, whose characteristic loneliness metaphorized in natural images is successfully rendered in translation.

I think one of the most important missions of Asymptote is to sustain languages under oppression, be that a national language that is close to extinction or the voice of a people amid a political process of erasure. Lauren Bo’s review of The Backstreets by Perhat Tursun undertakes this mission in remarkable earnest and rigor, by not only posing the biopolitical question of survival faced by the Uyghurs but also diligently analyzing the text via a close reading, and ultimately marrying the two to derive a conclusion that engages readers with the enduring challenge of humanity that surpasses the violence that is immediately palpable: “The Backstreets is an account of survival and a reminder that even the cruelest elements of humanity are fabricated out of absurdity and fear of the uncertain.”

The elusive language of Krikor Beledian’s “Unpeopled Language” (tr. Taline Voskeritchian and Christopher Millis) is delicate yet piercing, and while  the history of the Armenian genocide cannot be separated from the poetics of Beledian, its implementation of “the tool against the game of expression“ speaks to the broader context of the survival of a people and their language in and after the era of mass murder.  

—Megan Sungyoon, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

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The Fall 2022 Issue Is Here!

October 20, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Kyung-Sook Shin, Emma Ramadan, Aram Pachyan, and Álvaro Fausto Taruma amid new work from 32 countries and 19 languages

Welcome to “Half-Lives,” our new Fall 2022 issue, where never-before-published work from 32 countries and 19 languages confront life as it shouldn’t be: stunted, degraded, perversely foreshortened—in short, half-lived. Its centerpiece is the Armenian Special Feature, generously sponsored by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, under the aegis of which we are proud to present stunning new translations of emerging authors such as Aram Pachyan, last year’s winner of the EU Prize for Literature—Armenia’s first recipient!—alongside more established voices like Narine Abgaryan, Krikor Beledian, and Hrant Matevossian. Inescapably harrowing because of their historical contexts, many of these works set the tone for the rest of the issue—including a gritty dispatch from Ukraine via Galina Itskovich and a spotlight on Ukraine-born artist Sergey Katran. Elsewhere, Claire Mullen chats to Emma Ramadan about the joy of translating from the archive, past contributor Anton Hur brings us a new short story by 2012 Man Asia Literary Prize recipient Kyung-Sook Shin, and Grant Schutzman delivers our first work from Mozambique in the form of moving poetry by Álvaro Fausto Taruma. All of this is illustrated by our amazingly talented guest artist, the London-born creative Louise Bassou.

On the heels of Roe being overturned, our editors have also responded by centering one half of the human condition in this issue. Pregnancy is the subject of Lusine Kharatyan’s keenly observed #America_place Pregnant and S. Vijayalakshmi’s intimately recounted Just Like a Womb. Growing up (a “difficult art” according to a very wise Montserrat Roig in this issue’s inspiring Brave New World Literature Feature), the women in these pieces are made to feel less than human in contradictory ways, shamed for the developing bodies in which they are trapped (Rosabetty Muñoz) while becoming objects of unwanted desire at the same time (Eszter T. Molnár). In Mexico, Karen Villeda reminds us that the consequences of being a woman can be fatal, writing that women are not alive, but only “still alive” until they are not. How do women counteract the stunting forces of a hostile world? From the ventriloquism of an Abuela who talks to herself to ensure that no one else speaks for her in Alejandra Eme Vázquez’s You’ll Leave Your Body Behind to the adoption of a third language by Jhumpa Lahiri to develop her own linguaggio, as revealed in Translating Myself and Others reviewed by Caterina Domeneghini, giving voice to female experience, as we endeavor to do in this issue, is one shared mode of resistance.

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No matter your taste, there’s something for everyone in this edition, so circulate this glorious new issue by printing our Fall 2022 flyer (downloadable here); like and share our issue announcement and article plugs on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

To read the world and read it more fully is itself a recipe for a fuller existence. If we’ve made a difference in that regard to your lives, please consider celebrating our full twelve years of publishing the best in world literature by joining us a masthead or sustaining member from as little as $5 a month—for a limited period only, we’ll even throw in a bonus 2023 digital Asymptote calendar!

READ THE NEW ISSUE

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

May 21, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Kwan Ann Tan, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest news from China, the USA, and Malaysia!

In China, the literary establishment celebrated “China’s Thoreau” on the twenty-second anniversary of his death. In the USA, virtual events raised issues in the field and craft of literary translation, and in Malaysia, an upcoming poetry contest promises to shed light on the country’s multilingual literary landscape. Dive in!

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting from China

“One day, mankind shall look back on the origins of his failure to survive on earth. He will find that, in 1712, an Englishman named Thomas Newcomen—a predecessor of James Watt—tried to create for this world the very first steam engine.”

The above words, taken from the Chinese writer 伟岸 Wei An’s essay, “大地上的事情” (The Earth’s Happenings), indicate towards how the late essayist, thinker, and diarist came to be known as “China’s Thoreau.” In characteristically attentive, ruminative, and exacting prose, Wei An’s moralist sensitivity to humanity’s presence and existence on earth sought to honor and preserve the organic nature of life, leading his contemporaries to believe, as writer Lin Xianzhi said: “The life of Wei An has given Chinese literature a direct and elucidating fact: that the writer must first and foremost be a person of excellent virtue.” On May 19, the twenty-second anniversary of his death, an event entitled “The Philosophy of Earth” was held in Wei An’s honor, with discussions revolving around the posthumous collection of the author’s diaries from 1986 to 1999, entitled 泥土就在我身旁 (The Dirt Is Beside Me), as well as the revised edition of his total collected works, edited by Feng Qiuzi and published last year.

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Shunning Stereotypes: Emma Ramadan on Translating Meryem Alaoui’s Straight From the Horse’s Mouth

October 22, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Allison Braden

It’s about Morocco, but not the cliched version . . . It’s a wild Morocco that is both more devastating and more fun than anyone might expect.

In her recent review of our fabulous September Book Club selection, Editor-at-Large Allison Braden praised the book’s candor, humor, and heart, as well as its fresh take on Moroccan culture. Below, she revisits these and other topics in conversation with award-winning translator and former Asymptote member Emma Ramadan. Straight From The Horse’s Mouth, they agree, defies our preconceptions of Morocco, its women, and the makings of great literature in translation.

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!

Allison Braden: I want to start by asking how you found this book. What attracted you to the story?

Emma Ramadan: Other Press came to me and asked if I wanted to translate the book, and I read it through and loved it. What I really like about it, and what I have tried to look for in other translation projects I’ve pitched, is that it’s by a Moroccan writer and it’s about Morocco, but not the cliched version of Morocco that can get neatly packaged to American readers. This happens with a lot of countries where there aren’t that many English translations already in existence: there’s an expectation that they will read a certain way, or that they will educate us about a certain aspect of that country or culture, as if that were the only thing those literatures were supposed to do. I like that this book doesn’t really provide the view of Morocco that English-language readers might have in mind, or that publishers might want to sell to them. It’s a wild Morocco that is both more devastating and more fun than anyone might expect. I love Jmiaa’s story, and I love her voice, and I love that she’s allowed to have a painful existence as a sex worker but also a radical transformation into a famous movie star. It’s a really fun book, and we don’t get a lot of those from certain countries.

AB: I noticed on Twitter that you said you often wish for more fun and funny books in translation. I’m curious about why you think there aren’t as many of those.

ER: I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I’ll sum them up by saying that I think there’s a certain pressure when you’re pitching a translation, or when publishers are acquiring a translation, for it to be a big, important, prize-worthy book; it’s very expensive to do translations, and there’s this idea that they don’t sell very well, so to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth, there needs to be some important hook or payoff in the form of big reviews or awards. These more fun, funny, light books that have a lot to say—that definitely have their readers and an importance of their own—may not seem as appealing or worthy in that way, but I would really disagree. Sometimes you just want to translate a book because it’s really good, and good doesn’t necessarily mean heavy and political and invested with all this cultural capital about what it means to live in a specific place. Sometimes it can just be a great book. And that should be, and is, enough.

AB: You’ve also translated some very serious Moroccan literature—I’m thinking of Ahmed Bouanani’s The Shutters. Did translating that inform your translation of Straight From the Horse’s Mouth, even though it’s such a different tone and genre?

ER: It did inform my translation insomuch as I got to know Morocco very well through that project, living there as I was working on it. So then, in translating this other book that’s very much set there, I was able to say, “Okay, they’re going to this town, I know what that town looks like.” It was deeply informative in that way, even if it’s a very different kind of book. There are other comparisons to be made, too: Bouanani uses some language that resists being translated, and in Straight From the Horse’s Mouth, Meryem Alaoui uses Arabic words in her French text that I left in Arabic, so both authors are writing from a culture that uses multiple languages. The challenge for me there was letting all those voices come through and not forcing them into some kind of neat English. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

January 11, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Barbara Halla, Nina Perrotta, and Rachael Pennington

Find the latest in world literature here!

This week, join our wonderful Asymptote staff members, Barbara, Rachael, and Nina, as they bring you literary updates from Albania, Spain, and the United States. From prestigious national literary awards to new and noteworthy titles and translations, there is plenty to discover in this week’s dispatches. 

Barbara Halla, Editor-at-Large for Albania, reporting from Albania:

December was a productive month for Albanian publishers, a natural result of the conclusion of the Tirana Book Fair and the expected increase in book sales that marks the holiday period. On December 18, 2018, the Albanian Ministry of Culture conferred the National Award for Literature for the best books published in 2017. Henrik Spiro Gjoka won the “Best Novel” award for his work Sonatë për gruan e një tjetri (A Sonnet for Another Man’s Wife), which details the life of a psychiatrist who falls in love with one of his patients. Translator Aida Baro won the “Best Translated Novel” award for her rendition into Albanian of Primo Levi’s The Truce (translated into English by Stuart J. Woolf), the continuation of Levi’s autobiography, If This is a Man.

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In Conversation: Emma Ramadan

September 19, 2018  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Mallory Truckenmiller

I had to insert myself literally as a character, and be creative as a translator.

Our latest Asymptote Book Club selection, Brice Matthieussent’s Revenge of the Translator, depicts a terrifying scenario for many authors. According to its translator, the main character is “an author’s worst nightmare”: a translator with their own ulterior motives.

In the latest installment of the Book Club interview series, Emma Ramadan (herself one of numerous characters in the multi-layered English translation of Matthieussent’s novel) speaks to Mallory Truckenmiller. Read on to find out more Ramadan’s unique experience translating Revenge of the Translator — a text that offers us a glimpse into “some of our darkest fantasies as translators.”

Follow up this conversation’s insights into the art of translation with our #30issues30days program, celebrating 7 years of Asymptote.

Mallory Truckenmiller (MT): One defining quality of Revenge of the Translator is its translation within a translation structure, with the translator actually entering the plot of the novel. As the English translator, your role adds yet another layer to the work. How did you approach this position? Did you find ways to insert yourself as a new voice or character within your translation?

Emma Ramadan (ER): Because the French novel Vengeance du traducteur is framed as a French translation of a (non-existent) English original titled Translator’s Revenge, creating my own English translation got a bit complicated. I couldn’t use Translator’s Revenge as the title of my translation, and at the end, when the narrator mentions a supposed “American translator” of Vengeance du traducteur currently undertaking the translation of the book into English in their city, that translator had to be me, that city had to be Providence. It had to come full circle and the reader of the English translation had to understand that this was an explicit reference to the book they were currently holding in their hands, a reference to my work, otherwise, the whole conceit falls apart. Which, in turn, adds extra layers: how faithful is this translation I’ve been reading? How much has this book I’m currently holding in my hands about a rogue translator been messed with in turn by its own translator? I had to insert myself literally as a character, and be creative as a translator, to do justice to Matthieussent’s multi-layered work and keep it from veering into total insanity.

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A*** And I: In Conversation With Emma Ramadan

February 15, 2016  |  in Interviews  |  by Megan Bradshaw

"...it shouldn’t be that hard to write a genderless novel in English in the first person, but it’s really hard to translate one from French."

“If Garréta’s composition of Sphinx was a high-wire act, then Emma Ramadan’s task in carrying it over into a language with at least one crucially important constitutional difference is, near as I can figure it, akin to one tightrope walker mimicking the high-wire act of a second walker on a steeply diverging tightrope, while also doing a handstand.” —Daniel Levin Becker

If DJs are “the new rock stars” (Forbes, 2012), and if Emma Ramadan is correct—there did not exist, until now (2015), a genderless love story written in English—how can we trust in our vision as a supposedly contemporary, world-changing literary public after discovering that Anne Garréta’s debut novel was published thirty years ago?

Sphinx (1986) is a love story that is simultaneously hijacked and elevated by its own language. Originally guided by a Jesuit priest cloaked as Dante’s Virgil, the novel’s nameless and genderless narrator descends from the aristocratic literati into Paris’s crepuscular underworld, arriving at the gates of the discothèque Apocryphe to become DJ royale and a devotee of the beautiful, also genderless, A*** (in whose tragic character we may find our Beatrice). The Apocryphe is the abyssal incubator of their folie à deux. To say that Sphinx is “ahead of its time” sounds stale, but stale-sounding things are often true. (In 2002, Garréta won France’s prestigious Prix Médicis, which is awarded each year to an author whose “fame does not yet match their talent.”)

Garréta’s method and style allow her to pillage the French language generously, often playfully, and she makes it clear that society, self-prescriptive by nature, is begging to see itself outside of binary gender distinctions. Ramadan’s translation has also given us the first full-length work by a female member of the Oulipo. The experimental French literary group is renowned for its exclusions—whole novels don’t include the letter “e,” extended texts employ only one vowel, poetry is written to be sliced up and reshuffled. It must be remembered, however, that Sphinx’s publication preceded Garréta’s invitation to join the Oulipo by more than a decade. Now, what does it mean to read the first English translation of such a novel, which teases out all our assumptions about identity, love, desire, relationships, with almost sacramental intensity?

We can, at least, trust in the simple counsel of the novel’s translator, who (after Garréta) made our reading possible in the first place: “If our pre-conceived notions about all of these things are defied by this text, what does that say about our pre-conceived notions? Reading Sphinx is one way to think about these questions, to question our ways of thinking.” Whether in spite of or due to its preciousness, Sphinx serves to remind us that it is us who are still woefully behind the times.

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MB: First, I want to enquire about the context that instigated an English translation of Garréta’s novel now. Sphinx was published in 1986—when Garréta was only 23 years old. What made the impetus for this translation—nearly thirty years later—so urgent?

ER: Well, when I first found out about Sphinx, I heard about it in the context of Daniel Levin Becker. He wrote a book about Oulipians, and he briefly mentions Sphinx, and I assumed that it had already been translated. And then I went looking for the translation and I couldn’t find it, and when I realised it hadn’t been translated yet it just sort of seemed wild to me, you know, that no one had tried to translate this book. It was pretty wild to me that, despite the past, however many years going by since this book was published, it still feels very relevant, maybe more so now than then, because people are more interested in talking about gender and the way gender influences our lives, and influences our identities, the ways it kind of constricts us, and I feel now more so than in 1984—at least in the States.

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