What’s New in Translation: May 2023

May 15, 2023 | in New in Translation, Reviews | by Daljinder Johal, Matthew Redman, and Rubén López

New translations from the Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese!

This month, our editors feature three titles that showcase what’s possible when a writer fully showcases a firm and brilliant insight into their reality. From a collection of short stories that investigate the violence of Latin American society, to a multifaceted depiction of colonial Mozambique, to essays that focus on the intimate dailyness of human lives in twentieth-century China, these works educate, provoke, and enthrall. Read on to find out more!

ampuero

Human Sacrifices by María Fernanda Ampuero, translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle, The Feminist Press, 2023

Review by Rubén Lopez, Editor-at-Large for Central America

In Human Sacrifices, a collection of short stories, María Fernanda Ampuero traces the deterioration of individuals who have survived an overwhelmingly violent reality. With guts, blood, and a dense anger, she escorts us to a precipice with each story, strips us naked, and delivers us to a place where the wounds of Latin American are made real, and thus can be dissected. Published by Editorial Páginas de Espuma in 2021 and now appearing in English translation by Frances Riddle, the collection contains twelve stories that question our reality as one occasionally resembling more a traitorous deception.

The stories in Human Sacrifices are profoundly Latin American, but more specifically, they describe the experience of vulnerable Latin American women: a unique kind of hell. Gendered violence is present in almost all the narratives—a bone that vertebrates the monster: “Desperate women,” states one of the protagonists, “serve as meat for the grinder. Immigrant women are bones to be pulverized into animal fodder.” The opening story, “Biography,” is perhaps the most intimate, narrating in first person the terror of being a migrant woman in a foreign country. The narrative implants the dehumanizing panic of crossing invisible borders in pursuit of a less harsh horizon, as well as the fear of becoming an anonymous number, a disappeared woman, a name written on a wall. As the narrator states: “I remember someone once told me that the stars we see have been dead for a long time, and I think that maybe the disappeared women might also shine on like that, with that same blinding light, making it easier to find them.”

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

May 12, 2022 | in News | by Eva Wissting and Julia Sherwood

A selection of our latest staff reads

From a newly translated work of Czech dystopian literature to a Swedish nonfiction chronicling the violence of European colonialism, here are our staff’s latest recommended reads. Sign up for our newsletter to get these recommendations delivered right to your inbox.

lak

Since its publication in 2016, The Lake, the multiple award-winning dystopian novel by the Czech writer and translator Bianca Bellová, has been translated into 20 languages and is now finally available in Alex Zucker’s English version. Comprising four chapters whose titles echo the stages of the evolution of an insect, it is a coming-of-age story of Nami, a boy who grows up in a small, Russian-occupied town dominated by the statue of “The Statesman”, situated on the shore of the ever-shrinking and heavily polluted lake. Its dwindling stock of fish provides the locals with their only source of income and is home to a baleful Lake Spirit whom they try to appease with sinister burying rituals. Brought up by his grandma, the teenage Nami sets out for the city in search of his long-lost mother and, after experiencing horrendous exploitation and violence, returns to his home town to find a redemption of sorts by diving into the lake. Clearly inspired by the author’s experience of growing up under Soviet occupation and possibly also by the Russian annexation of the Crimea, this bleakly powerful portrayal of a downtrodden society under Russian occupation has acquired a new resonance in early 2022.

—Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large for Slovakia

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“It is not knowledge that we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions.” In his best-known book, Exterminate All the Brutes (tr. Joan Tate), Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist travels from El Menia in Algeria to Zinder in Niger, constantly struggling with sand that reaches every corner of his eyes, his luggage, and his floppy disks—the original book is from 1992, with many re-prints since. His journey through the Sahara also becomes a journey into Europe’s colonial history, with parallels to the Polish-British writer and seaman Joseph Conrad. As a horrified witness to colonial brutality, Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness as a commentary to an ongoing debate, where European colonial violence almost invariably is excused, glossed over, and even justified. Lindqvist’s book shows how Nazism wasn’t an anomaly in an otherwise peaceful and democratic Europe—all ideas and methods applied by the Nazis had already been developed before them by Europeans of different nationalities. Still as relevant today as when Lindqvist’s book first was published, it inspired Raoul Peck’s HBO documentary of the same name from 2021.

—Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large for Sweden

*****

The Multilingual Carpathians: Weronika Gogola in Conversation

January 30, 2019 | in Interviews | by Julia Sherwood

“Only by picking up a magnifying glass and taking a close look at things can you see the truth about yourself and others.”

Weronika Gogola is a Polish writer and translator from Slovak and Ukrainian. Her first autobiographical book Po trochu (Little by Little, 2017), which depicts her childhood in the small village of Olszyny in the Carpathian mountains, is composed of “stories from real life that are usually told bit by bit, in snippets and fragments.” The book was nominated for several literary prizes and in October 2018 won the Conrad Award for a prose debut. For the past three years, Gogola has been based in Bratislava, where Julia Sherwood, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Slovakia, caught up with her last November.

Julia Sherwood: First of all, congratulations on winning the Conrad Award! I loved your book and think that the prize was more than deserved. What does it mean for you?

Weronika Gogola: This award is incredibly important to me, especially since, in the case of the Conrad Award, it’s not just the judges who decide but, first and foremost, the readers. I’m incredibly grateful to them. Besides, a prize is a kind of validation, as well as a bargaining chip for the future. I know that sounds unfair but that’s how the world works—the more prizes and nominations you have the more seriously you are taken. Unfortunately. But, of course, it’s nice to be appreciated. In addition, the Conrad Award includes a grant, which has allowed me to concentrate on my writing without financial worries.

JS: Your book is very firmly located in the world of your childhood. You grew up in a small village in rural Poland, yet ended up living abroad, and are currently based in Slovakia. Were you already living abroad while working on your book, and did the geographical distance give you a new perspective on the place, or did this make the writing more challenging?

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

December 8, 2017 | in Dispatches | by Cassie Lawrence, Julia Sherwood, and Omar El Adl

This week, our editors bring you the literary news from Egypt, Poland, and the UK.

Solidly into the hustle and bustle of December, we are back with more updates from around the world. Omar El Adl shares the latest in film and academia from Egypt. We learn about the happenings on the Polish literary scene from Julia Sherwood. Finally, Cassie Lawrence updates us on recent literary prizes and a new publisher in the UK.

Omar El Adl, Asymptote Editor-at-Large for Egypt:

The Townhouse Gallery is hosting an event titled Mise.en.scène on the representation of women and the main female characters in author Ehsan Abdel Qudoos’s work, through the screening of films based on his writings. The event took place over two days, December 5 and 6. The first day featured a screening of Henry Barakat’s Thin Thread, followed by a conversation with women’s rights advocate Doaa Abdelaal. On the second day, there was a screening of I Am Free by Salah Abu Seif, followed by a conversation with Arabic literature professor Samia Mehrez, moderated by Nour El Safoury.