Posts featuring Ezra Pound

Towards a Greater Social Consciousness: Persa Koumoutsi on Translating Arabic Literature Into Greek

November 4, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou and Persa Koumoutsi

If a text is written simply to express our personal wants or concerns, it is not literature, in my view, but a form of self-centered expression.

Born and raised in Cairo, Persa Koumoutsi is a literary translator and a writer. Having returned to Greece after completing her studies at the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University, she began focusing solely on translating Arabic literature into Greek in 1993. She has since worked on the works of many distinguished authors, including fourteen novels by the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, as well many Arab poets. Her bibliography includes the first Anthology of Contemporary Arabic Poetry in Greek, for which she received the First Prize of the Hellenic Society of Literary Translators in 2017. Among her other works, the Αnthology of Modern Arabic Female Poetry was also widely lauded in 2022. She has also published the Αnthology of Palestinian Poetry and the Anthology of Egyptian Poetry.

In this interview, originally conducted in Greek, I spoke with Persa about the renewed interest in Palestinian literature in times of genocide, the importance of translation as a means to make struggles known and build solidarities beyond human borders and language barriers, prison literature, as well as the future of Arabic translation in Greece. The latter concerns not solely translation for the sake of itself, but as a powerful tool to bring forth voices of those marginalized.

Christina Chatzitheodoru (CC): Since October 7 and the ongoing genocide, several young Arab writers and poets have been translated into Greek, including your recent translation of Najwan Darwish. There is a renewed interest in Palestinian literature in particular. Can you tell us more about this?

Persa Koumoutsi (PK): Of course there is a renewed interest, not only in Greece but all over the world, especially in Europe. The tragic events in Gaza have brought to the fore an unspeakable tragedy, and thus many of my colleagues and translators around the world—and in Greece—have devoted themselves to translating works that highlight this problem and its dimensions, as well as its impact on our collective and individual consciousnesses—especially those of whom are concerned with contemporary Arabic culture and its literature. One such work is a collection by the renowned Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish entitled, in Greek, I Kourasi ton Kremasmenon (Exhausted on the Cross), which, as the title suggests, alludes to the enduring pains of the Palestinian people, the irredeemable trauma, and the grievous injustice they have been inflicted upon them. Poetry, in my opinion, is the most powerful literary genre in these cases, since everything can be said and highlighted through the condensed word of poetry. . .

CC: The Palestinian writer and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani once stated: “My political position springs from my being a novelist. In so far as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case, and I can categorically state that I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite.” How does this view relate to your own approach to translation? READ MORE…

There Must Be a Poem: A Conversation With Alí Calderón, Founder of Círculo de Poesía

February 1, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by René Esaú Sánchez

. . . this is the best time for poetry: there were never as many readers as there are today. . .

Mexican poet and scholar Alí Calderón is one of the founders of Círculo de Poesía, an online poetry journal that celebrated its fifteenth anniversary in 2023. From the very beginning, the project aimed to diversify the cultural panorama of Mexico and has now established a publishing company that explores world literature. In this interview, I spoke with Calderón about the nature of translation, the importance of dialogue with other cultures, and how publishing can be an alternative to sustain literary projects. 

René Esaú Sánchez (RES): You have mentioned in other interviews that Círculo de Poesía was born as a project to perceive Mexican poetry from other angles. Why was that necessary?

Alí Calderón (AC): When we talk about Mexican poetry, it is a deceiving category; we think of it as something inclusive when it’s not. Just by analyzing the indexes of poetry anthologies or by seeing who receives certain scholarships, we realize that it is more of a cultural elite. 

In 2008, with the birth of the internet and other forms of media, we decided to reinvent culture from other sources. We started working against the tide, promoting poetry from other states of México, like Puebla, Sinaloa or Colima; we decentralized it.

That’s how the journal was born: with the intention of democratizing poetry and making it more visible. But we didn’t do it only with Mexican poetry: we included poetry written in other Spanish-language countries and, out of curiosity, in other world languages.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

September 22, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Heloisa Selles, and MARGENTO

The latest literary news from Canada, Hong Kong, Ireland, and Spain!

This week, our team members bring us news from around the world, from worldbuilding at a conference in Canada to reflections on the ties between Ireland and Spain. Read on for more on a bilingual publication out of Hong Kong, and Irish press publishing literature from the Romanian diaspora, and more!

Heloisa Selles, Executive Assistant, reporting from Toronto, Canada

 It was the last Saturday of August when a crowd of speculative fiction lovers gathered to attend the AugurCon, in Toronto. It was the first in-person event promoted by Augur Magazine, a biannual publication that promotes Canadian and Indigenous voices writing fantasy, science fiction, and other uncommon forms of genre fiction. As a reader and an appreciator of the strange and unusual, I knew I had to be there.

As the afternoon went by—a mild, muggy breeze bringing spurts of rain and, consequently, people in and out of the venue—I noticed my perception of neighboring urban outlines changing, shaped by the imaginative perspectives on worldbuilding the conference highlighted. Author Larissa Lai, one of the participants of “The Speculative City” panel, spoke about utopia as more than the capacity to imagine something better (or as a concept on the flip side of pessimism), but as a continuous investigation that honors the function of the dream. What is better in the dream, and for whom? “The dream as we dream it may not come to pass,” she said, “but our dreams impinge on flows.” This lyrical statement about the ethics of creation reminded me of the proverb: “The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second-best time is now.” In SFF, creating new visions of what the world could become is also a way to keep the door open for those who will come after you, writers and readers alike.

Besides the panels, Augur also organized workshop AMAs with leading professionals in the publishing industry. I missed some discussions due to the overlapping agenda—and an enthusiastic, boisterous crowd—but I liked what I saw. I found the deliberate choice of keeping statistics out of discussion rather curious, especially in light of how BookTok helped boost sales in 2022 and fantasy genres went up 26.5% in sales in the first half of 2023, according to Publisher Weekly. Another overlooked but crucial aspect of publishing speculative fiction is the importance of funding for writers. This topic was partially addressed by a workshop about grants, which detailed the eligibility criteria for the Toronto Arts Council (TAC) Writers Program. In the federal sphere, the 2021-26 Strategic Plan created by the Canada Council for the Arts delineates how it is investing $1.6B in grants to authors to support artistic and literary creation.

The day was long and busy. As I packed up my modest book haul at the end of the one-day event, marinating in thoughts about fictional worlds, I noticed an old yearning being rekindled, the promise of being wrapped up in a fantastic story growing inside me. Maybe that is the primordial role of speculative fiction: to help us cope with real life by allowing us to step out of it, even if just for a little bit. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 7, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury and Jiaoyang Li

Literary news from Palestine and China!

This week, our editors are bringing news of exciting readings, groundbreaking publications, and community events. From Palestine, a new poetry publication brings translations to the forefront, and in China, a renowned playwright debuts work and honors her community. Read on to find out more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine

In the month of Ramadan, life in Palestine is relatively quiet, with reduced working hours， afternoons devoted to preparing iftar food, and evenings reserved for prayer or social/familial activities. However, the Ramallah Municipality is making the most of this time; from mid-March to mid-October, the library is holding bi-weekly talks with authors and creative writers to explore and discuss their achievements, enriching the social dialogue on various issues related to the worlds of writers and creators they interact with. The program, titled “The Meaning”, will host sixteen renowned and beloved Palestinian poets and novelists in person. All guests will be speaking in Arabic, though Ramallah Library is considering posting recordings with English subtitles. Keep an eye out for these exciting events!

Just across on the side of the Jordan River, the Palestinian/Jordanian poet Tahseen al-Khateeb surprised everybody this week with publishing the first notebook (daftar) of Dafaater al-Shi‘er (poetry notebooks). Described as “an electronic magazine specialized in poetry and the surrounding arts,” the whole project is the sole effort of al-Khateeb’s. On its Facebook page, he introduces the publication as follows: “Poetic notebooks, made according to the mood of Tahseen al-Khateeb, who translates the notebooks’ pages.” READ MORE…

Ambrosial Wafts: An Interview with A.J. Naddaff

February 10, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Alex Tan

I believe literature is the conduit to the deepest understanding of society.

The first time I corresponded with A.J. Naddaff was after I had read an early issue of his excellent newsletter Untranslatable, devoted to extensive conversations with Arabic-to-English literary translators about their craft. Startled by the sharpness, intimacy, and candour of each interview, I emailed him merely to convey my appreciation for the work he was doing and how fortuitous it seemed to me that he had begun this initiative at the time that I found myself falling in love with the limitless depths of classical Arabic literature. He wrote back, expressing genuine curiosity about my interests, saying: “Connecting with people who share this love makes the world feel a bit smaller and kinder.” That told me all I needed to know about how A.J. makes space for his interlocutors to arrive at such acute insights as “Every poem is a linguistic event which reimagines its entire tradition” (Huda Fakhreddine) and “That joy and pleasure of someone having it on with you is the very pleasure of literature. You know it and yet you still fall for it” (Maurice Pomerantz).

Besides being a gracious person and a master’s student in Arabic Literature at the American University of Beirut, A.J. wears many other hats: he is an award-winning multimedia journalist, translator, and social science researcher. He’s met and reported on people of diverse stripes, from Sufi intellectuals to ISIS extremists, co-translated Hassan Samy Youssef’s Threshold of Pain with Rebecca Joubin and Nick Lobo, and is currently working on a thesis regarding the translation of the pre-Islamic mu’allaqat into English. I was excited to encounter someone with his feelers in so many different worlds and to hear his meditations on the translatability of Arabic literature, the meanings of home, the in-betweenness of negotiating both the journalistic and the literary, and the state of contemporary Lebanese art in the aftermath of trauma.

Alex Tan (AT): In one of the first issues of your Untranslatable newsletter, you quote the brilliant Moroccan literary critic Abdelfattah Kilito, who wrote of how in the classical Arabic literary tradition, the ancients “endeavoured to make their works untranslatable.” What does untranslatability signify in classical Arabic literature? Why did you decide to name your newsletter after a quality that appears to defy the possibility of translation?

A.J. Naddaff (AJN): In my opinion, and this is up for debate, the idea of untranslatability is the wrong framing for understanding tensions that exist when translating Arabic. Alexander Key has proposed that the idea of untranslatability is a modern idea—that the ancients thought mental content (maʿnā) was always transferable between languages, from Persian to Arabic. So untranslatability was birthed out of early modern European notions, and we should push ourselves—as many translators are doing—to reimagine limits when translating Arabic into English.

Shawkat Toorawa takes it even further and believes that it’s possible to translate something sublime, like the Qur’an, into another language and to still convey the cadence, movement, and the beauty of the original, which I’m totally on board with.

AT: Most of the scholars you’ve chosen to interview so far are translators of pre-modern Arabic literature and contributors to the NYU Library of Arabic Literature series. I’d like to ask about your thoughts on the relationship between the pre-modern and the modern in Arabic writing. You work on the Mu’allaqat (hanging odes), but you’re also interested in contemporary Levantine literary production. How do you position yourself between these two worlds? Does your knowledge of pre-modern genres and forms haunt your approach to the modern?

AJN: Coming into my master’s at the American University of Beirut, I carried this notion that bifurcated “old” or classical Arabic literature from “modern.” I remember distinctly telling my teacher Bilal Orfali that I was excited to read old Arabic literature and he politely cut me off and encouraged me to think of literature more as a continuum. I think this is probably how we should think of literature in all traditions, but especially in Arabic.

So now, I position one foot in each world with no problem. I’m not haunted by my knowledge of pre-modern genres and forms besides by how little I know. Salim Barakat, one of the most celebrated modern Arabic authors, claims he only reads pre-modern works. Rachid el Daif’s novels are full of references to “pre-modern” literature: One Thousand and One Nights, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyei, the Kitab al-Aghani, al-Jahiz, Majnun and Layla, and Pre-Islamic (Jahili) poetry all make appearances. Mahmoud Darwish has a famous poem where he draws on elements from the sixth century poet-king Imru’ al-Qays’s final trip to Constantinople to allegorically critique the Oslo Accords. As T.S. Eliot said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did. Precisely, and they are that which we know.”

READ MORE…

Honoring the Art of Translation: Radu Vancu

September 23, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Radu Vancu

It is [the poet’s] task . . . to build an enormous, resonating device which would reverberate with beauty from all times, all spaces, all cultures.

Though Asymptote has made it a point to celebrate literary translation no matter the time of year, we’re still pretty thrilled that there’s a whole month dedicated to the cause. As we draw towards the end of National Translation Month, Asymptote is taking the opportunity to bring together essential components that complete the cycle of literature as it travels from one language to the next, with the intention of recognizing the meticulous, purposeful, and intimate labour invested into a text during this peregrination—from conception to publication. We have asked four valued members of the literary community, spanning the globe, to bring us their take on translation and its gifts. 

With this first feature, we are honoured to introduce an original text by Radu Vancu, a brilliant Romanian writer and translator (and past Asymptote contributor!) who traverses the international literary arena with a virtuoso expertise and a seemingly time-defiant profusion. In the following essay, he discusses his ongoing project to translate the works of Ezra Pound into Romanian, and thus brings to the forefront the great modernist’s defiance of limits. This poetry, which spans time, language, and cultures, is a testament to the sublime nature of translation, and its endless capacity for encapsulation.

Ezra Pound quickly understood that, in the case of poetry, regeneration is actually reinvention—or, more synthetically and apparently more paradoxically, inventing is actually reinventing. Poetry can live only through the graft of all that is alive throughout all ages, all cultures, all languages. Therefore, Pound came to understand that poetry does not mean only regenerated language, as he originally believed; it is instead a translingual, transnational, and even transcultural body, built (or “excerned,” to use his own word) by the addition of all the “living parts” still active in the geological layers of poetic language.

He says this in more contracted and memorable form in a 1930 Credo: “I believe that a light from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the song of Provence and Italy.” J.J. Wilhelm also observes, in Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years, that this proposition is in full consonance with a small text by Pound, Religio, from 1910—forming thus, in my opinion, an approximate backbone of Pound’s poetics, otherwise so branched and polymorphous.

The poet must coagulate in their work this migrant light which iridesces simultaneously the Eleusine texts, the Provençal ballads, the Italian sonnets, in addition to the ancient Chinese, Greek, and Latin poetry, and so on. It is their task, therefore, to not only regenerate the poetic language—this enormous burden is still too simple—but to build an enormous, resonating device which would reverberate with beauty from all times, all spaces, all cultures. This is why it is hard to capture in translation the beauty of an Ezra Pound poem: because some poems substantiate the ancient Greek beauty, harsh and dangerous (“seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoclean light / And take your wounds from it gladly,” a poem says); some others take the form of Medieval villanelles, ballads, or shapes invented by Pound himself (the villonaud, for example), coalescing in another kind of beauty—seductive, chanting, feminine, sweet; some others reinvent a traditional Chinese aesthetic in the English language of the twentieth century; and so on. What is remarkable and astounding is that you, a twenty-first-century reader of English, can resonate with all these varying types of beauty. Pound’s genius is precisely that he succeeded in making new and alive the beauty of all great poetic languages, including the old or “dead” ones.

His achievement is that he can adapt his resonating apparatus to all the diachronic wavelengths of beauty. The construction of the poem—his physis—also varies according to the oscillation of this wavelength; when “making new” the ancient Greek epigrams, the poem has two or three lines, quite rarely more, and the Idealtypus of the beauty targeted is that of an intense and sarcastic, sometimes quasi-licentious lapidarity. In other instances, when he pretends to be translating from the ancient Chinese, the poems become long, winding, archaic in lexis, but the intricacies of the lines are in actuality an ekphrasis of the Chinese ideograms. In the Cantos, this mechanism builds an enormous vortex-poem, or, more preferably, a poem whose vortex is that of History itself—infinitely commingling fragments of poems, fragments of languages, fragments of historical, economic, biological, political information, and so on. And the beauty of these demented, illegible, and hypnotic Cantos is the very demented, illegible, and hypnotic beauty of our times. READ MORE…

On the Road of the Beats in Japan

January 9, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Taylor Mignon

Who will carry on the Rexrothian torch to penetrate the nucleus of Japanese poetry and art in Japan?

The recognition of Japanese poetry is too often superficially doomed to the annals of tradition—and it’s understandable: what satisfies the Western fascination with the land of zen better than a haiku? But for those of us in search for something wilder, one only has to look back a few decades. Maddened and dazed, when the Beats exploded onto the global arts and literature scene, a new, ecstatic, insurrectionary poetry redefined the text, and poets from across the Pacific responded. Now, below is your crash course on the multitudinous and creatively proliferating intersection between Japan and Beat Poetry, by an expert at the scene of the beautiful crime, Taylor Mignon (with editorial assistance from translator and poet Jordan A. Y. Smith and Simon Scott).

This essay was originally published as the introduction to Tokyo Poetry Journal 5: Japan and the Beats.

It is the early 1990s, past midnight, and I am on a couch in a house in Yoyogi. The doorbell rings, and there’s knocking at the door. Shrugging off my slight inebriation, I scamper down the stairs to find cops who are enquiring about the loud TV, as the host had passed out, sound still blaring. I explain that the owner of the house made the disturbance, turn down the volume, and the cops leave.

The passed-out proprietor is Nishida Shunji, publisher of The Plaza: A Space for Global Human Relations, a bilingual journal of poetry, art, and prose. This was sometime after I had answered an ad in The Japan Times calling for a rewriter for Hitachi Review, a journal of technical articles written by Japanese engineers. With little idea of what I was rewriting, that production led us to what we really wanted to do, which was edit The Plaza. Mr. Nishida—a brilliant character, who liked to be called Leo—was a disheveled Japanese gentleman who could play a mean game of chess, liked to cycle, and often went around with his fly (social window) open. The connections made here at this job contributed to facilitating the meeting of several heavyweight Objectivist, Beat, and avant-garde poets.

One of the submitters to The Plaza was poet and editor Sherry Reniker, who had a knack for writing colorful correspondence and an experimental edge. At around that time, she was editing broadsides for the imprint published by Karl Young from Wisconsin, Light and Dust Books, whose authors included Morgan Gibson and a number of Japanese visual poets. Through her generous lead, I would correspond and eventually meet both Morgan and Objectivist poet Cid Corman, the latter based in Kyoto and the poet who first published Gary Snyder (Riprap, 1959) through his Origin press. (Cid told me he had met William Burroughs at the Beat Hotel in Paris, at about the same time he was putting Naked Lunch together, and thought that he was very disarming and quite approachable, not at all acting in a manner of affected notoriety as one could expect from someone of Burroughs’ reputation.) The Plaza would prove to be fertile ground to publish the koan-like poetry of Morgan, the nature poetry of Antler (who goes by that name only), Jeff Poniewaz, and Sherry and Cid, much with a Beat bent. READ MORE…

Our Shared World of Language: Reflections on “US” Poets Foreign Poets

May 30, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Alan Sondheim, Brian Kim Stefans, Johanna Drucker, John Cayley, and MARGENTO

If I am a person, I make things with language. If I am a poet, I make art with language.

Today, as a sequel to this previous post, we are continuing to feature reflections on the computationally assembled poetry anthology “US” Poets Foreign Poets (ed. MARGENTO, frACTalia 2018) from some of the most outstanding contributors to the collection.

 “US” Poets Foreign Poets was launched in 2018 at the Electronic Literature Organization Conference and at Bookfest by the collective editor MARGENTO, featuring a line-up of Chris Tănăsescu, Diana Inkpen, Raluca Tănăsescu, Vaibhav Kesarwani, and Marius Surleac. The book won accolades from major theorists and practitioners in the genre such as Christopher Funkhouser, Maria Mencia, and David Jhave Johnston. It features both digital and page-based poets, represents and analyzes the resulting corpus as network graphs, and also includes an algorithm that expands the initial corpus by identifying poems that would “fit in,” that is, display certain stylistic features tracked down by computational analysis.

Regarding the previously mentioned way in which the anthology analyzes and expands its own contents, digital poet and critic Christopher Funkhouser has commented that, “I have never, in three decades of study, seen a literary anthology so determined to generate something out of itself, something beyond a 1:1 conversion, and then successfully do so. What an interesting idea, to both transcreate and more literally translate the contents of a collection of writing. Algorithmic, linguistic, and graphical expansion here grabs and holds onto my attention every time I delve into the book.”

In today’s feature, we choose to illustrate this “transcreation” Funkhouser speaks about as it goes even beyond the covers of the anthology, and continues in the digital or digitally inflected creative and/or critical work of four major names in contemporary electronic literature and digital humanities: John Cayley, Johanna Drucker, Alan Sondheim, and Brian Kim Stefans.

READ MORE…

In Conversation: Ghayath Almadhoun

March 19, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by Ghayath Almadhoun and Sohini Basak

My poems are full of death, but that’s because they are also full of life.

Describing Ghayath Almadhoun’s poetry in Adrenalin is anything but easy. The blurbs on the book call the collection ‘crucial political poetry’, ‘urgent and necessary’, ‘passionate and acerbic’, and ‘our wake-up call’, although we find out that Almadhoun’s own views on his poetry are slightly different. Written in the wake of the Syrian war, the refugee crisis, and a personal loss of his homeland, the poems in Adrenaline are formally experimentally and emotionally explosive. In a voice that is, in equal measure, full of wonder and irreverence for the turn the world has taken, Adrenalin dwells on war, empathy, displacement, suffering, love, and hatred unapologetically. Translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham, and released by Action Books last November, this is the poet’s first selection of poems to be published in English.

The collection starts with the poem ‘Massacre’ (which can be read at our Guardian Translation Tuesday showcase), with the unforgettable lines: “Massacre is a dead metaphor that is eating my friends, eating them without salt. They were poets and have become Reporters With Borders; they were already tired and now they’re even more tired.”

Born in Damascus, the Palestinian poet Almadhoun has been living in Stockholm since 2008. The following interview was conducted over email and has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Sohini Basak (SB): As a point of departure, could you tell us which writers you have been reading these days? And are you working on something new?

Ghayath Almadhoun (GB): I am now re-reading Tarafah ibn al-Abd. He was so young when he died, in the sixth century (around twenty-six years old). He is a great poet and could be described as pre-postmodern as he was ahead of his times. I’m also reading Closely Watched Trains by Bohumil Hrabal.

About my work, I have begun a new project—my fifth poetry book. I find myself in front of the question that I faced when I started writing more than twenty years ago: will I survive this time? Will I be able to write something new? And, like always, I punch the world in the face and continue writing.

READ MORE…