Posts featuring Franz Kafka

What’s New in Translation: December 2023

December 11, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Catherine Xin Xin Yu, Nestor Gomez, and Urooj

New titles from Italy, Hungary, and Cuba!

In our final round-up of the year, we’re presenting a selection of titles that capture the human condition with various, masterful depictions and incisive intelligence. From Italy, the first volume of artist and writer Guido Buzzelli’s collected works present scrupulous and unwavering critiques of society; from Hungary, the master poet Szilárd Borbély writes the life of Kafka in relation to his father’s; from Cuba, a stunning bilingual collection from Oneyda González explores the surreal nature of the mirror.

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Buzzelli Collected Works Vol.1: The Labyrinth by Guido Buzzelli, translated from the Italian by Jamie Richards, Floating World Comics, 2023

 Review by Catherine Xin Xin Yu, Assistant Director of Outreach

What happens if, at the end of a normal workday, a sudden blast razes the world to the ground and you become one of the few survivors? Or if, waking up on an ordinary morning, you find your head and limbs dissociating from your torso and taking off on their own? Setting the scene with these Kafkaesque premises, Italian comic master Guido Buzzelli explores the monstrosity and power of dystopian societies in his graphic novellas, The Labyrinth and Zil Zelub, with a compelling visual language that is dense yet dynamic.

Buzzelli stands apart from his peers in every way—style, form, and theme. Born into a family of artists and trained in figure drawing, he is lauded as both “the Michelangelo of monsters” for his naturalism, and “the Goya of comics” for his chimeric blend of the real and the fantastical (as pictured below). He was also one of the first Italian comic artists to tackle complex literary subjects in uncommissioned, standalone works, counter-current to the Italian comics industry of the 1960–70s that pumped out commercial series with fixed characters and simplistic plots. As a self-proclaimed “man in doubt,” Buzzelli also rebelled against the progressivism of 1960s Italy, satirising the hypocrisy of political discourse and the violence of utopian mirages while alluding to the political upheaval at the time, from terrorist bombings to murky electoral campaigns. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

October 21, 2022  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Areeb Ahmad, Julia Sherwood, and Sofija Popovska

The latest in literary news from Macedonia, India, and the Czech Republic!

This week, our editors from around the world are reporting on trailblazing new releases, award winners, and literary festivals! From the return of the Dhaka Literature Festival after two years on hiatus to Czech comic artists at the International Comic Art Festival, read on to learn more!

Areeb Ahmad, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

Initially announced in July, more information has emerged regarding the Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation in a feature published by World Without Borders. The prize, sponsored by Armory Square Ventures with a jury of acclaimed translation specialists from around the world, aims to “recognize an outstanding translator of South Asian Literature into English.” The winning work will be published by Open Letter Books while excerpts from finalists will appear in WWB. The founders of the prize intend to highlight literatures that are “all but invisible outside South Asia” in the global English-speaking sphere, joining the JCB Prize for Literature in promoting translated Indian literatures both at home and abroad.

The acclaimed Naga writer, Temsula Ao, passed away on October 9 at the age of seventy-six. In her obituary, Chitra Ahanthem explores her legacy and bibliography, highlighting Ao’s focus on the Naga community and her resistance to the homogenizing impulse to club writing from all the Northeast Indian states into a singular literature, which would dismiss the differences across communities and tribes both within and beyond each state. Meanwhile, the 2022-23 cohort of the National Centre for Writing’s Emerging Translator Mentorships was recently announced. Among its recipients, Vaibhav Sharma was awarded the Saroj Lal Mentorship in Hindi and will be mentored by the International Booker Prize winner, Daisy Rockwell.

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Thoroughly Mainstream or Decidedly Alternative: An Interview with František Malík

December 16, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Julia Sherwood

The arts are indispensable as a way of sensitizing people, contributing to equality, pointing out what is truly important, and setting priorities.

František Malík is an extremely busy man. Just over the past few months, he has organized several book festivals; the Martinus Literature Tent at Slovakia’s largest music festival, Pohoda; and several episodes of the literature review podcast, LQ (Literárny kvocient)—to name just a few. Editor-at-Large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood has managed to catch him in a rare moment of respite, and in the following interview, they discuss various facets of arts and literature in Slovakia today.

Julia Sherwood (JS): For a country of five million, Slovakia has a quite an astonishing number of literary festivals taking place throughout the year. You have been associated with several of them, most notably the BRaK Literature Festival. How did this festival start, and what makes it different from all the others? 

František Malík (FM): Eight years ago, when we started BRaK, the Slovak literary scene was far less diversified than it is today. While it is true that we now have more literary festivals than we used to, I wouldn’t go as far as to claim that it’s a disproportionate amount for a country of five million. Not long ago, I visited Iceland with a group of Slovak writers; Iceland’s population is less than one-tenth the size of Slovakia’s, and yet its cultural and literature policies are much more advanced and the arts receive far more funding. They also have quite a few literary festivals. This is just one example; a similar trend can be seen in all developed countries.

If I may correct you slightly—what we have emphasized right from the start is that BRaK is a book festival. This is not just a terminological difference, it also has to do with the content. We try to see a book—an aggregate of various artistic approaches—in a holistic way, rather than focusing solely on the literary element. At BRaK, we highlight all the constituent parts of the book—from publishers at the centre of the festival, graphic designers and illustrators who often host workshops, to copyeditors and translators, as well as writers. BRaK has always striven to be international and to showcase the greatest names throughout the book world, not just from Slovakia and the neighbouring countries.

JS: Of the various festivals you have organized, which do you regard as the most successful and which were the most fun?

FM: In the course of eleven years on the scene, I’ve helped to launch several festivals, and I’ve also been fortunate to work with some great teams. I like your question—having fun, and enjoying something in the broadest sense is what really matters, although the COVID-19 pandemic has taken some of the fun out of it.

I enjoy organizing everything I’m involved in. For example, I really enjoyed the first edition of the Slovak/Czech festival Cez prah/Přes práh (Over the Doorstep), an apartment festival now in its fifth year. It’s held in actual homes in the centre of the capital, Bratislava, but also in apartments that have since gained the status of institutions, as there is a growing trend to hold cultural events in flats. In the previous regime, flats played a specific cultural role. They served as educational and cultural institutions, as venues for lectures in philosophy, theatre performances, exhibitions . . . People were driven out of official venues and into their homes. Over the Doorstep aims to commemorate these flats and the role they played.

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Our Word Against Kafka’s

July 14, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Samuel Kahler

Kafka floats, shapeshifts, appears in many places at once; he is not a fixed subject.

Franz Kafka’s gigantic presence in the world of letters is undeniable, yet looking back along the labyrinthine volutes of history, one perceives distinctly the figure of a man who would likely be horrified at the depth and breadth by which we known his work. Having famously insisted that his texts be burned after his death, a betrayal by a close friend led to the remarkable corpus we freely access today. Since then, Kafka’s writings have undergone a dramatic escalade of ownerships, resulting most recently in its comprehensive release by the National Library of Israel. In the following essay, Samuel Kahler traces the events that led to Kafka’s legacy, delineating a writer’s intentions as they come up against the voracious appetites of the world.

 “I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”

—Franz Kafka

Part of the appeal of reading Kafka (or the madness, depending on who you ask) stems from the durability of the stories, parables, and novellas—their infinite resistance to decisive analysis enduring even after multiple readings. The texts evoke the quotidian anxieties of the modern age, achieving their incomparable effect by leaning into varied traditions of folklore, parable, horror, and the absurd, paradoxically balancing the polarities of universal relatability and a resistance against fixed interpretations. Can a body of work so ripe—so bursting with potential meanings—possibly be pigeonholed with a singular definition? To attempt a conclusive, complete answer—something like a grand unified theory of Kafka—would be the errand of a well-meaning but misguided fool.

Inseparable from the question, and equally difficult to answer, is another problem: namely, that of deciding which works belong in his official catalog and which do not. Mostly, we owe this state of affairs to a complex series of events that began with the discovery of Kafka’s will and continued onward through the next nine decades, through the many publications of his works and, later, the battles over his archival materials and the significance of the contents contained therein.

When the National Library of Israel released its newly digitized Franz Kafka collection this spring, it signified the end of a prolonged conflict over its acquisition. Yet, the collection’s publication does not portend a satisfying resolution for any facet of Kafka’s legacy; rather, it throws the spotlight on academia and the public at large, exposing our continued desire to make something concrete out of Kafka, despite his enigmatic condition.

Kafka’s posthumous drama—call it a tragedy, a passion play, a farce, or what you will—remains an unresolved mess, even after the curtain has supposedly come down. READ MORE…

Traversing the Forbidden: A Journey Through Prohibited Literatures

October 7, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Anna Wang

Banned literature offers us the opportunity to gain valuable insight, no matter how controversial.

For literature lovers, it is no secret that a great deal of our favorite titles have been—or still are—banned from the public. In this following essay by Anna Wang, Graphic Designer at Asymptote, she takes us around the multifarious and wide-ranging cartography of vital, yet blacklisted, titles from around the globe, from a novella that metaphorically depicts the persecuted Uyghurs of China, to an infamous work of revolutionary author Boris Pasternak. In realizing the context and culture in which these pertinent titles arose, we may in turn acknowledge both the price, and the power, of the truth.

In a speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson entitled “The American Scholar,” Emerson gave both praise and warning to the power of literature, stating: “Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst.” Emerson was right. Books have the ability to persuade, influence, and inspire—an ability which many have found threatening. Time and time again, figures of authority have attempted to reign in or block out literature that challenges their agenda. In celebration of banned literature in the history of world literature, let’s take a look at some of the most impactful banned texts throughout time, why they were banned, and what we can learn from them. 

Wild Pigeon, by Nurmuhemmet Yasin 

Wild Pigeon is a novella originally published in Uyghur between the pages of the 2004 Kashgar Literature Magazine. Written by a young freelance writer, Nurmuhemmet Yasin, it quickly gained widespread acclaim among the Uyghur people in China. The work, written in Uyghur, is a political allegory that tells the story of a young pigeon who is the son of a dead king. While he is looking for a new home, he is trapped by a group of humans. His struggle for freedom and his eventual shocking decision has been interpreted by many as a criticism of the Chinese government for its treatment of its Uyghur population. 

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

October 4, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Jacqueline Leung, MARGENTO, and Quyen Nguyen

Catch up on this week’s latest news in Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Romanian authors around the world.

This week, our reporters tell us about the literary response to the demonstrations in Hong Kong and the translation of protest poetry by The Bauhinia Project, book fairs in Vietnam, as well as guiding us through the many Romanian writers performing at the largest Central European literary festival, the Author’s Reading Month festival. 

Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

The extradition bill demonstrations in Hong Kong have been ongoing for four months and show no signs of stopping. There has been countless speculation over the city’s standing as a financial and trading center, but what has happened for certain is the plethora of art created in response to the movement. In an interview on the subject of contemporary art, a museum curator placed her bets: “The greatest art is going to be produced in Hong Kong.”

The same could be said for its literature. Since June, Hong Kong’s literary scene has actively documented current happenings through poetry, fiction, and criticism. Numerous local literary magazines, including Fleur des lettres, Voice & Verse, and Formless, are running issues dedicated to the protests, and the activity is not restricted to within the city’s borders. In particular, there is an initiative to translate protest poetry from Hong Kong for an international audience. In July, The Bauhinia Project was launched by an anonymous Hong Kong poet in Berkeley, California. Named after the city’s flower emblem, the project gathers poetry submissions and testimonials in text or audio from anonymous sources. The submissions are then translated into English and made into postcards. So far, the postcards have been displayed in a series of exhibitions held in Germany as well as different cities in California. The Bauhinia Project is also curating events on the extradition bill movement. On September 25, a panel discussion on misinformation and misunderstanding surrounding the protests abroad were held at Moe’s Books in San Francisco and featured six speakers, among them Hong Kong poet Wawa, previously interviewed on Asymptote on her medium-pure poetry, and writer Henry Wei Leung.

I will also moderate a discussion on civil society and literature between writer Hon Lai Chu, who spoke about politics and literature at the Frankfurt Book Fair earlier this year, and playwright Yan Pat To, whose latest play, Happily Ever After Nuclear Explosion, premiered in German at Munich’s Residenz Theater and subsequently in Cantonese at Tai Kwun, an arts and heritage site in Hong Kong, and South Korea’s Asia Playwright Festival. The event is part of Goethe-Institut Hong Kong’s wider series on civil society and art, which previously covered independent films, LGBT, and moving images. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 12, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Barbara Halla and Julia Sherwood

Literary updates from our editors on the ground in Albania and Slovakia.

As central Europe heats up this month, so does the literary scene! In Albania, an unprecedented $10,000 prize was awarded, while in Slovakia, readings are taking place everywhere: in gardens, on trams, and at an old mill! Read on for details.

Barbara Halla, Assistant Editor, reporting from Albania

Although it is only in its fifth year, the Kadare Prize is one of the most important prizes in Albanian literature at the moment. Readers might be forgiven for thinking that I use this label because the prize bears Kadare’s name, but I think its importance relies more on a few other elements, the first of which is not strictly literary. First of all, the Kadare Prize proclaims to award its winners the sum of $10,000 (though there has been gossip floating around that the awarding body has not been forthcoming with the cash) that includes financial help to get the book published in the first place. A not insignificant amount of money to consider, especially as in the Albanian publishing world, literary agents don’t exist and new authors have to pay publishing houses to get published in the first place.

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Philosophical Thriller: Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s Chaos: A Fable in Review

May 15, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Alice Horne

Chaos might have the pace of a thriller, but it has the timely relevance and pointed insight of many a great novel.

Chaos: A Fable by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, translated from the Spanish by Jeffrey Gray, AmazonCrossing, 2019.

Imagine finding yourself in an unknown country, with no understanding of how you got there and the taste of dread in your mouth, and you’ll have a good sense of how it feels to read acclaimed Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s novella Chaos: A Fable. According to the publisher’s synopsis, Chaos sets out to be both a “provocative morality tale” and a “high-tech thriller,” and, indeed, it seems to land somewhere between the two: think John le Carré “espionoir” meets Franz Kafka’s The Trial.

Translated from the Spanish by Jeffrey Gray, Chaos is Rey Rosa’s nineteenth novel (the seventh to be translated into English). It follows Mexican writer Rubirosa as he reconnects with an old friend in Morocco and, by agreeing to a seemingly simple favor, finds himself drawn into an international plot to end human suffering by bringing about a technological apocalypse. Chaos indeed.

For a novel titled Chaos, it is perhaps unsurprising that I found the reading experience itself disorientating; so much so, in fact, that as soon as I read the last line, I had to flick back to page one and read it all again to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. (Fortunately, at only 197 pages, you can pretty much do so in one sitting.) Starting—mundanely enough—at a book fair in Tangier, the novella takes the reader on a breath-taking ride via the United States and Greece to Turkey. And I’m sure that, even on a second read, there were allusions and references that went far over my head.

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Section Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2019

April 29, 2019  |  in News  |  by Ah-reum Han, Caridad Svich, Ellen Jones, Eva Heisler, Joshua Craze, Lee Yew Leong, Sam Carter, and Victoria Livingstone

Special selections from our Spring 2019 issue!

If you have yet to read our spectacular Spring 2019 issue, what are you waiting for? Maybe for our Section Editors to give you their favourites so you can get off of the right foot—well, we’ve delivered. From the poetry by the hand of acclaimed fiction writers, to century-traversing tales, to contemporary criticism on the role of the translator, here are the highlights, straight from those who have devoted themselves to perfecting this issue.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction and Poetry Section Editor:

This issue’s fiction lineup is bookended by two Argentine authors (born in 1956) who grapple with Jewish identity in their work. With The Planets shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award in 2013, Sergio Chejfec is much better known to Anglophone readers, but Daniel Guebel is not exactly an unknown entity—recently the publisher Beatriz Viterbo released an anthology of essays contributed by such writers as César Aira celebrating Guebel’s work. Via “Jewish Son,” Jessica Sequeira’s perfectly pitched translation, English readers are introduced to bits of a weltanschauung that include pilpul (aka spicy thought, a method of interpreting the Talmud), tango singers, readings of Kafka and The Aeneid, all taking place in the last act of a father-son relationship. Yet, it is also very emotional—despite, or perhaps all the more so because of, the philosophical exposition. As with the best fictions, Guebel gestures toward a gestalt beyond the text. I can’t wait for more of this heavyweight to appear in English.

In the poetry section, which I also assembled, two highlights (also bookending the section) are Raymond Queneau, co-founder of the now-international formalist Oulipo movement, and Georgi Gospodinov, acclaimed for The Physics of Sorrow, showing that they have as much talent as poets as they do as fiction writers. An especially exciting discovery is Gertrud Kolmar, nom de plume of Gertrud Käthe Chodziesner, advocated by cousin Walter Benjamin, but only now celebrated as one of the great forgotten poets. Characterized by mystery, the taut but dreamlike poems channeled with elan by Anna Henke and Julia Gutterman are fueled by an “ache unnamed”; “a glimmer burning out its flame.” 

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2019

April 22, 2019  |  in News  |  by Jonathan Egid, Nina Perrotta, and Xiao Yue Shan

Join our blog editors as they explore everything the Spring 2019 issue has to offer!

The Spring 2019 issue of Asymptote, “Cosmic Connections,” features work from 27 countries and 17 different languages. If you’re not sure where to begin, our blog editors have you covered with recommendations for some of their favorite pieces, including an essay about an adventure in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, a story that jumps from medieval Jewish theology to the relationship between an Argentine father and son, and poems that offer us a glimpse into intimate moments in the city of Shanghai.

Asymptote’s newest issue is one of the journal’s best to date, meaning that it was nearly impossible to choose just one piece to highlight. In the interviews section, I found Dubravka Ugrešić’s comments on literary activism and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s discussion of the role of Marxism in his work particularly illuminating, while, in the special feature, Nancy Kline’s essay stood out for its focus on the often-overlooked role of the writer’s (and the translator’s) accent and spoken voice in the translation process. But I’d like to devote my highlight to an essay by a somewhat lesser-known writer, one who might otherwise get lost among the many big names that appear in this issue.

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A Conversation with Norwegian-to-Azerbaijani Translator Anar Rahimov

December 4, 2017  |  in Interviews  |  by David Smith

There was not a single moment when I said to myself, “Stop”—even when I spent 10 to 15 minutes on one sentence!

As a translator of Norwegian, I travelled to the Gothenburg Book Fair in September to meet with Scandinavian authors, publishers, and fellow translators. One of the translators I met there was Anar Rahimov, a translator of contemporary Norwegian prose into Azerbaijani.

I was intrigued by Anar’s story as one of only two translators of Norwegian in Azerbaijan. I translate into English, probably the world’s most dominant language, and I was curious about the exchange between two relatively small languages, Norwegian and Azerbaijani. I wanted to ask Anar a little more about his work as a translator and how it fits into the literary culture of Azerbaijan. 

David Smith (DS): How did you come to learn Norwegian and what inspired you to translate literature?

Anar Rahimov (AR): Well . . . it was quite accidental, I have to admit. I was working at the University of Languages in Baku as an English language teacher. Then an event took place that changed my whole career, priorities, and future standing in life. In 2010, I heard about an interview that included financing two and half years’ study in Oslo. Ever since childhood, Norway has appealed to me as a northern, far away, and very cold land. Besides, studying in the prestigious universities of Europe was tempting in itself. After a little hesitation, I applied and was selected.

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2017

October 23, 2017  |  in Dispatches  |  by David Smith, Sarah Booker, and Stefan Kielbasiewicz

Our blog editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2017 issue!

Each issue, our blog editors choose some of their favorite pieces to showcase. The Fall 2017 issue is extra special for us, since we get to introduce two new assistant blog editors: Sarah Booker, who translates from Spanish, and David Smith, who works with Norwegian. Together with Stefan Kielbasiewicz, they make up the Asymptote blog team. Enjoy these highlights! 

Ricardo Piglia’s piece, “On the Threshold,” is a philosophical, melancholic meditation on the art of reading and the construction of the autobiography. Composed of a series of diary entries in which the narrator muses on his grandfather’s life and on the practice of writing, this text poses fundamental questions about the practice of writing: How do you write an autobiography? What moments really matter when considering a lifetime of memories? How do you begin to write? The realization that experience “is a microscopic profusion of events that repeat and expand, disjointed, disparate, in flight” is what finally allows the narrative to unfold and the pieces of these two men’s lives to come together.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

May 12, 2017  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Jessie Stoolman, Omar El Adl, and Reverie Powell

Presenting literary news from Egypt, USA, Morocco, and Qatar!

We are back with your weekly dose of literary news from around the world. Our very own Jessie Stoolman takes you on a journey through the cultural landscape of Morocco and Qatar. Following, our editor-at-large on the ground Omar El Adl writes about the latest goings-on in Egypt, and last but not least, Reverie Powell brings you the latest from the buzzing literary scene in Texas.

Jessie Stoolman, Editor-at-Large from Morocco, reports from Morocco and Qatar:

The 21st Annual Salon International de Tanger des Livres et des Arts just wrapped up on May 7 after four days of roundtables, workshops, concerts (including the iconic Moroccan rock band, Hoba Hoba Spirit), and appearances from world-renowned authors like Mohamed Kacimi (featured in our latest issue), Sapho, and Tahar Ben Jelloun (Prix Goncourt winner).  In conjunction with the book fair, Darna Theater’s Dakirat al Mostakbal – Memoires d’Avenir presented “Nous Sommes”, a piece outlining the lives of two young Moroccans that asks “[s]ommes-nous condamnés à n’être que ce que l’on nous sommes d’être?” Darna Theater is a local non-profit situated outside Tangier’s old city that provides community members opportunities in drama education. “Nous Sommes” was presented in both French and Darija (Moroccan Arabic.)

Don’t fret if you weren’t able to attend the book fair because there is still a chance to see Abdellah Taïa at the Librairie des Colonnes in Tangier on May 9, where he will present a brand-new translation of his novel, Un pays pour mourir, into Arabic (بلد للموت).  At the book fair, Taïa gave a conference about his writing and the difficulties facing society today which was structured as a conversation between him and young Tangerines. Taïa’s letter “Homosexuality Explained to My Mother” and an interview with the author appeared in Asymptote’s July 2012 issue.

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What’s New in Translation? April 2016

April 28, 2016  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Nozomi Saito, Poupeh Missaghi, Theophilus Kwek, and Will Rees

This month's hottest new releases in translation—reviewed by Asymptote's own

Night Sky Checkerboard by Oh Sae-young (Phoneme Media), translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé. Review: Theophilus Kwek, Executive Assistant

checkerboard

More than three decades after arriving in Korea, and two decades into a rewarding career in translation, Brother Anthony has crafted yet another elegant and necessary rendition of contemporary Korean verse: his first collaboration with Oh Sae-young, and only the second full-length volume of the latter’s poetry in English translation. This book provides timely insight to a prolific artist whose work, in the words of fellow poet Ko Un, is suffused with a “thirst for the universe beyond the generations.” READ MORE…