Posts featuring Jacques Roubaud

What’s New in Translation: March 2020

March 16, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal, Georgina Fooks, Josefina Massot, and Rachel Allen

We're feeling the need for great literature in these strange times.

These last few weeks of winter will be known as the time of stockpiling, and as countries around the world are shutting doors in response to COVID-19, stores are being cleared out and preserved goods and household necessities are piled up in cupboards. But just as it is vital to care for your body in these perplexing times, it is equally important to nurture your mind. So it is with that in mind that we present the newest and brightest in translated literature from around the world, in hopes that what is available to us remains our compassion, our desire to understand one another, and the privilege to travel amidst isolation. Below, our editors present a book of poetry written in a defiant border-language, a poignant Turkish critique of human cruelty, a Colombian novel depicting a young girl’s inner wildness, and the latest translated poems of Jacques Roubaud, written in the Oulipo tradition of valuing absence as equally as presence. 

night in the north

Night in the North by Fabián Severo, translated from the Portuñol by Laura Cesaro Eglin and Jesse Lee Kercheval, Eulalia Books, 2020

Review by Georgina Fooks, Communications Manager

How do we choose which language to write in?

For some of us, that choice can be fraught. Whether you’re a child of immigrants (as I am), or from a contested border region (as Fabián Severo is), there is a great deal at stake when making that choice. It impacts your identity, it shapes your politics. There’s no doubt that when reading this collection, Severo’s decision to write in Portuñol is a political act. READ MORE…

New Year, New Horizons!

January 1, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Rachel Allen, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Reading resolutions for 2020—brought to you by the blog team.

Happy New Year, reader! To ring in the ’20s, we are getting personal and sharing our own reading resolutions. From literature engaged with the effects of climate change to classic theological texts, here are the reads we have on the radar for 2020. Maybe our titles overlap with some of yours? If you’re inspired, share your resolutions with us in the comments below.

Xiao Yue Shan, Assistant Blog Editor:

We are becoming ever more impelled by the worst-case scenarios, the ultimate consequences of our carelessness. Climate change is cemented at the pinnacle of every engaged mind, consuming the concerns of those on the forefront of human progress—the writers. December is a month of returns, and a trip across the Pacific on my part meant a reabsorption into the beloved stacks of books left behind by a past self who had endlessly imagined the present. I found in those volumes an incredible vitality—it takes considerably more courage to speculate on the future now, yet in our infinitely ideating language, we can’t help it, we imagine naturally, as we have always done.

Usually my reading directives are predictable, by which I mean they’re somewhat “in accordance” with my being a female Chinese poet—the tendency veers towards a healthy majority of women writers, plenty of Chinese literature, and as much poetry as possible. As we approach the new decade, however, I’ve turned my attention to literature more specifically in dialogue with our planet. In Amitav Ghosh’s beautifully urgent book-length essay, The Great Derangement, he convincingly argues for an overhaul of the fiction genre so that it may better address and reflect upon our contemporary precarity. Though the best of our stories are inevitably engaged with our environment, I found Ghosh’s take riveting in its insistence that we continue to build and invent language that is ever more precise, alert, and curious. READ MORE…

Translating Grief and Silence: Denise Newman on the Work of Naja Marie Aidt

December 18, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Nataliya Deleva

Translation is for me both stripping down and holding open to possibility.

Denise Newman is a poet and translator based in San Francisco. She has published four collections of poetry, and translated two novels by Inger Christensen from the Danish—The Painted Room and Azorno—as well as the short story collection, Baboon, by Naja Marie Aidt, which won the 2015 PEN Translation Prize, and most recently, Aidt’s memoir, When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back: Carl’s Book. The memoir, a semi-finalist for the National Book Awards and a finalist for the 2019 Kirkus Prize, is saturated with the trauma experienced by a mother grieving her son. Nataliya Deleva recently spoke with Newman about her approach to translating this deeply personal narrative across various cultural contexts, her proximity to the text and its author, and the role of rhythm in conveying silence on the page. 

Nataliya Deleva (ND): Translating is often co-creating, as it is not only the words and sentences of a text being translated, but also their meaning in a different cultural context. How did you find this process, considering this book is so painfully personal? Is grief universal?

Denise Newman (DN): Yes, the translation process touches on the mystery of language. I’ve often marveled at how translations of Bashō’s haikus seem to connect me directly to the moment of his observation. It doesn’t matter that the poem has traveled centuries, oceans, and languages. Maybe this is mostly possible when something is experienced and communicated directly, without any interference—then the original energy, which is outside the conditions of ordinary time and space, stays vital. I think this is what makes translating compelling; you have to go so deeply into a text that you depart from linear time and space. Working on Aidt’s book was hard, though, because of my own interference. She’s my friend, and my sorrow and concern for her sometimes got in the way, particularly while working on the passages that describe the last hours of Carl’s life. Her writing in this part is so direct, I felt as though I were actually present in the nightmare, and often needed to take breaks to clear my head. To get back to your question, I think all emotions are universal; we sense this when they are expressed directly, without any interference, as Aidt is able to do. Translating requires the ability to access those original emotions; they are what electrifies the language.

READ MORE…