Posts featuring Rabindranath Tagore

A Country Grey with Sunlight: Samira Negrouche on Francophone and Arabophone Algerian Poetry

October 30, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

We are part of a country, a region, a language, sometimes of a generation or an aesthetic, but as authors we also try to bring a singularity.

Labelled by scholar Ana Paula Coutinho as one of the most gifted writers of the new Maghrebian literary movement, poet and translator Dr. Samira Negrouche sails across Algerian French, Tamazight, and Algerian Arabic languages. She is part of a group of Algerian writers collectively known as The October Generation, and her poetic vision (as sketched by one of her Spanish translators, the Argentine-born French author Carlos Alvarado-Larroucau) is in the same league as Stéphane Mallarmé and Alejandra Pizarnik. Resembling the Mediterranean Sea plainly visible from her Algiers apartment, her artistry and activism are fluid and expansive—crusading for the spirited interchange of literary and cultural thought across languages, artistic mediums, landscapes, and aesthetic style. ‘More literally than many poets, Negrouche has had her fingers on the pulse of Algiers’, Jill Jarvis summarises in Decolonizing Memory: Algeria & the Politics of Testimony (2021).

In this interview, I spoke with Dr. Negrouche on her body of work as a poet and translator; the current Algerian poetry and literary translation scene in the Francophone, Arabophone, and beyond; and the milieu that informs her philosophy and practise as a writer and cultural worker.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): You translate Algerian writers working in Arabic and Tamazight into French, and in turn, your works have been recast into several European languages. I’m interested in the ethnolinguistic milieu you come (and write) from—and write against. 

Samira Negrouche (SN): I was born in Algiers, a city that has always been multilingual. Growing up in this city, I have been surrounded by these three languages that I like to call my mother tongues (although there is a traumatic history behind it). I am lucky to be part of a Berber-speaking family that has kept our ancestral language, and it is a language I keep using every day. There is Kabyle, the local daily language we use in my family, and also is the standard Tamazight, used and taught by a much larger group.

As a citizen of Algiers, I use our common daily Arabic that is often mixed with words from other languages—mainly Berber and French. This language has its own music and images. It has a lot in common with languages used in other parts of Algeria, but retains certain specificities. Finally, the Arabic we use in newspapers and universities is more standard.

French is still the main language for scientific studies in local universities, and it is also used in many other fields. It is a vivid language, especially in urban spaces. Additionally, English is starting to gain more attention among the youngest generations. READ MORE…

Discrete Acts of Love and Protest: On Bibhas Roy Chowdhury’s Poem Continuous

August 5, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Dustin Pickering

In Roy Chowdhury’s writing, one finds many mysteries and thoughtful riddles.

Poem Continuous: Reincarnated Expressions by Bibhas Roy Chowdhury, translated from Bengali by Kiriti Sengupta, Hawakal Publishers, 2024

In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom writes: “Poetic Influence—when it involves two strong, authentic poets—always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation.” According to Bloom’s theory, the authentic poet stands in relation to poets of the past, and this relationship to tradition is a creative force, which Bloom calls “misprision.” In the instance of Bibhas Roy Chowdhury’s Poem Continuous: Reincarnated Expressions, the traditional poet is Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore. 

Both Roy Chowdhury and Tagore suffered from the Partition of Bengal by the British; in 1905, Tagore used Raksha Bandhan to unite Hindus and Muslims against the Partition, whereas Roy Chowdhury’s family lost their wealth, and upon the later division of Bangladesh in 1947, became refugees and common laborers. Throughout many of these poems, translated by Kiriti Sengupta, Roy Chowdhury laments this predicament, coalescing the historic developments with his father’s death. “True and False for My Father” reads:

I’ll say
(if I’m honest):
after my father’s demise
I found myself duty-bound
in the crematorium—
not from being his eldest son,
like an event manager, rather.

I didn’t perform his last rites.
I followed no ritual
nor did I take part in the funeral.

Someone remarked:
You are indeed
an ideal communist.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 2, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, Jacqueline Leung, and Suhasini Patni

Literary news from India, Hong Kong, and Sweden!

In India, the country mourns the loss of Kerala’s groundbreaking tribal novelist. In Hong Kong, a genre-bending poet is being celebrated across the nation. And in Sweden, two talented writers have won the prestigious Klas de Vylder’s Grant Fund for Immigrant Writers. Read on to find out more!

Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

On August 16, India’s first tribal novelist Narayan passed away in Kochi. Born in the Mala Araya tribe in Kerala, Narayan gained nationwide recognition for his book Kocharethi (1998), which won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award. The book was a way to counter the misrepresentations of his community from outsiders, and Narayan struggled for ten years to find a publisher willing to release it; despite critical acclaim, many complained his work lacked literary merit. Translator Catherine Thankamma, who translated the text into English—winning the Crossword Book Award for it—wrote a tribute to him for Scroll.in. Her tribute honors the struggles and biases he faced in the literary world.

August has seen many new releases in translation. A significant one is Satya Vyas’s Banaras Talkies, translated from Hindi by Himadri Agarwal. A campus novel, the book is centered around three law students from Banaras Hindu University. The translation was facilitated by Ashoka Centre for Translation from Ashoka University, where Agarwal graduated from. According to Mohini Gupta’s review, “The Hindi novel seamlessly accesses Bhojpuri and English words and phrases and the translation captures these linguistic variations beautifully.”

Many translators in India are also turning to writing fiction. Aruna Chakravarti, winner of the Sahitya Akademi award for her translation of Sarat Chandra’s Srikanta, is known for her dedication to Bengali literature. Her first translation, Tagore: Songs Rendered into English, came out in 1984, and her critically acclaimed novels explore the lives of women in the household of Rabindranath Tagore. Her latest book, The Mendicant Prince, explores the Bhawal case—an extended court case from 1920-46 about a man claiming to be the prince of Bhawal. An excerpt of the book can be read here. READ MORE…

Our Fall 2020 Issue Is Here!

October 15, 2020  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Feat. Andrés Neuman, Ariana Harwicz, and Rabindranath Tagore amid new work from 32 countries, including a Dutch Special Feature

We are proud to present the Fall 2020 issue of Asymptote, debuting new work from 32 countries:.  

This cornucopia of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, reviews, and more includes such treats as a sparkling new translation of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s century-old fiction, an exclusive interview with rising star Andrés Neuman, and Elisabeth S. Clark’s polyphonic book concertos. 

Perfectly timed to coincide with Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and Michele Hutchison winning the 2020 International Booker Prize, our Dutch Literature Feature, guest curated by Hutchison, zooms in on the emerging and established voices of a small but mighty country. Here you can sample the English debuts of Curaçao-born Radna Fabias, whose first collection swept up an unprecedented number of major poetry prizes, and of Sinan Çankaya, whose best-selling memoir My Innumerable Identities recounts his efforts to combat racism in the Dutch police from the inside—only to be othered for his Turkish origins. 

Elsewhere, Ali Lateef’s bittersweet “The Belle and Gazelle Statue” uses a public monument to illustrate the changing face of Tripoli after the 2011 Libyan Civil War. The unease of our current moment is captured in Ariana Harwicz’s “Longevity,” a cathartic tale about the effects of a pandemic-caused lockdown on a small rural community in France. Somewhere between nature writing and memoir stands Itō Hiromi’s essay on migratory plants and how the concept of “the Other” manifests in different cultures. The lure of the foreign propels both Vadim Muratkhanov’s dispatch from Tashkent’s labyrinthine Tezikova market and Hungarian essayist Noémi Kiss’s travel into the remote wonders of Azerbaijan.

Wherever we are, we find comfort in the global literary voices of our time, for even when they reveal harsh truths about our world, they give us hope, inspire mutual understanding and heal divisions. Please help us spread the word about Asymptote’s latest issue by downloading and distributing our Fall 2020 flyer/postcard, or by posting about it on Facebook or Twitter. 

To promote this brand-new issue, we’re holding another giveaway contest: Share any of our #Fall2020 posts on social media to stand a chance of winning an Asymptote Book Club subscription. Every retweet or share will be counted, and there’s no limit to the number of entries you can enter. We’ll announce the lucky winner on Monday, November 2!

How Should We Review Translations? Part II

September 25, 2019  |  in Essays, Reviews  |  by Lauren Albin, Matt Reeck, and Sue Hyon Bae

Above all, the translated poem allows us into its world—which exists somewhere between a language we don’t know and a language that we do.

In this second installment of our forum on reviewing translations, Lauren Albin and Sue Hyon Bae, two of the translators of Kim Hyesoon’s A Drink of Red Mirror, reflect on their engagements with both the poet’s work and the culture in which it was produced. They highlight the dangers of adopting the role of an interrogator and emphasize the need for good faith in any encounter with a translated work. Today we also feature a contribution from Matt Reeck, who takes the opportunity to reflect on the ways that reviews might take into account contexts of reception and underscores how the idea of world literature can restrict our ability to understand local specificity as it attempts to develop a global framework. If you missed the first installment of this forum, be sure to check it out here, and stay tuned for tomorrow’s contributions from Katherine Hedeen and Johannes Göransson.

I want to point out this sentence in Matt Reeck’s review of Kim Hyesoon’s A Drink of Red Mirror, which becomes the foregrounding reason for his question of whether Korean poetry should be made more Korean in translation: “Kim’s poems are not confessional (which might make them indicative of the writer’s life and culture), nor are they written in a style that’s reflective of a social reality.” The reviewer’s desire for the poet’s confession quickly brings to mind one of the seminal poems of Kim’s collection—“Cultural Revolution in My Dream”—where Ms. Photon, a symbol of the bright light used by an interrogator to extract confessions, uploads a confessional software to the poet’s body. What I mean to say in drawing this comparison is that, Reeck got it wrong. Kim’s poems are confessional, but perhaps, they are not the confession that the reviewer wishes to hear—a situation that recalls Ms. Photon, who keeps on interrogating the poet even after there are no real crimes left but only a continuously generated confession. Therefore, the reviewer rejects Kim’s poems and along with them he rejects Kim’s social reality and Kim’s Korea, asking for translations that are more Korean than the originals and pressing for a false confession. 

Moving away from Reeck’s review, when the reviewer of translated work plays at interrogator, the perspective of the translated poet is immediately endangered. The interrogator is a figure employed by repressive regimes to reconstruct narratives, to revise the truth, to rewrite what actually happened, and to reconstruct history. Interrogators often already know what story they wish to tell and work to illuminate only that reality. An interrogator is also someone who has inherent power over another. While Ms. Photon extracts false confessions, the sun, in Kim’s “Lady Yuhwa,” “streaming like a searchlight / pursues and violates the woman” of the poem. A reviewer who steps into the role of interrogator assumes power over the poem and violates it intentionally or unintentionally by forcing it to conform to their own ideas about what it should be; silencing the poem, instead of allowing the work to speak in its own language of idea, even when that language seems to push at the boundaries of our minds.  READ MORE…

In Conversation: Hamid Ismailov

July 12, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by Filip Noubel

I wish that different literatures were mutually translated, bypassing English or other dominant global languages.

Very rarely does contemporary Uzbek prose get translated directly into English. Yet English readers have just been given a rare chance to discover the novel The Devils’ Dance (Tilted Axis Press, trans. by Donald Rayfield), by the prominent Uzbek writer and journalist Hamid Ismailov. In it, Ismailov introduces the curious reader to perhaps the most famous modern Uzbek writer, Abdulla Qodiriy. The novel tells the story of Qodiriy, who, like many intellectuals in the Soviet Union in the late 30s, was imprisoned and eventually shot dead. While in jail, Qodiriy attempts to recreate the unfinished novel the KGB has just confiscated, which portrays Oyhon, a poet-queen who lived in the last, grand days of nineteenth-century Turkestan when London and Saint Petersburg were fighting over Central Asia in the Great Game. I interviewed Ismailov about his diverse identities and the place of Uzbek literature in today’s global writing. 

Filip Noubel (FN): You are a global writer: you were born in what is today Kyrgyzstan, studied and worked in Uzbekistan, and now live in London. You write in both Uzbek and Russian, and appear in translation in a number of languages ranging from English to Chinese. In your books and interviews, you often refer to the plurality of cultures but also to their clashes. How is this multiple identity shaping your writing?

Hamid Ismailov (HI): Recently I did a DNA test, and aside from the obvious, I discovered that 4% of my genes are of South Asian origin and 2% are Irish, not to mention 1% Native American. So if my genes are telling me that I’m related to people like Rabindranath Tagore and James Joyce even on a genetic level, so be it! But, generally, the people of Central Asia, which is an area historically placed in the middle of the Silk Road, should be blessed to be born into multiculturalism, multi-lingualism and multi-identity. If you read my book The Railway you can see how many nationalities, traditions, and ways of life I have been exposed to in my childhood, so no wonder that I love to write in different languages, and to put myself into different shoes. In fact, exploring “otherness” both as a subject and an object is the most interesting part of literature.

READ MORE…

The Nobel’s Faulty Compass

November 20, 2017  |  in Essays  |  by Sam Carter

After all, it seems hard to believe that the magnetic north of the literary lies in Europe or in the languages that have emerged from it. 

In the will he signed in Paris on November 27, 1895, Alfred Nobel established five prizes in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and the promotion of peace. In the sciences, the key characteristic of a laureate’s contribution to the larger field was that it should be the “most important” discovery or improvement, while the peace prize was intended to recognize “the most or the best work” performed in pursuit of fostering what he called the “fraternity between nations.” Yet when turning to the award for careful work with language, Nobel would distinctly modify his own: he specified that the literary prize should go to whichever writer had produced “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.”

From 1901 to 2017, women have exemplified that ideal direction a mere fourteen times. Although that dismal distribution has somewhat improved in recent years, it is nothing to brag about: only five women have won since 2004, and only six in the past twenty-one years. Such disappointing diversity continues when we turn to languages: of the 113 laureates in that same period, twenty-nine have written in English. That number does not even include three laureates who each wrote in two languages, one of which was English: Rabindranath Tagore, the songwriter who won a century before Bob Dylan and who also wrote in Bengali; Samuel Beckett, whose most famous work is titled En attendant Godot in the original French; and Joseph Brodsky, whose poems appeared in Russian and whose prose was written in the same language as the documents certifying the American citizenship he had acquired a decade before winning.

READ MORE…