Posts featuring Roberto Bolaño

To Follow the Poet Into the Tunnels: On the American Translation of Carlos Soto Román’s 11

July 4, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Sarug Sarano

By discourse I mean a poem, a textual device that runs through a particular set of psycho-historical contingencies.

The following essay investigates the indelible wounds of the 1973 Chilean coup—which brought to end the democratic socialist government of elected president Salvador Allende and marked the beginning of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial regime. Seen through the fragmentary, poetic method of poet Carlos Soto Román’s collection, 11, Sarug Sarano examines the public role of the text as reflection, bringing pieces of recollection, ghostly testimonies, and sustaining structures to their archival and political context, ensuring that one does not forget about the terrors and erasure that continue to infiltrate the present.

I searched for you among the ruined, I spoke with you. What was left of you saw me and I held you.

—Raúl Zurita, “Song For His Disappeared Love” (tr. Anna Deeny Morales)

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 21, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Jiaoyang Li, Kathryn Raver, and Rubén López

The latest from Guatemala, Taiwan, China, and France!

This week, our editors take us through Central America, France, and China to explore the reaches of literature, from a transcendent event honouring the poems of Robert Bolaño, to the new World Book Capital in France, and works featuring vital new voices from the Chinese language. Read on to find out more!

Rubén López, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America

When I entered the room, it looked like a coven: a group of people gathered around an edition of Roberto Bolaño’s Complete Poetry. Each member of the group would take turns to step into the centre, leaf through the text for a moment, and then recite one of the Chilean author’s poems at random, like a poetic Russian roulette. As I took my seat, one of the young men was reading the final verses of “The Romantic Dogs”. I had arrived at the event without much certainty about what it would be like; the poster from Perjura Proyecto, a cultural and artistic dissemination space, only said “The Poetry Came” and had a sketch of Bolaño’s silhouette. And, of course, it also mentioned the date and time—May 23, 17:00.

When it was my turn, I decided I wanted to read “Godzilla in Mexico”, my favorite poem by Bolaño. I clumsily flipped through the text while trying to make conversation with the rest of the participants, but I couldn’t find it. I apologised to the group because I would break the Russian roulette and put the bullet in the centre; I searched for it on my phone. As I recited “Yo leía en la habitación de al lado cuando supe que íbamos a morir”, I was overcome with a deep tenderness. I saw us, in the midst of a vertiginous and infamous city—a group of no more than ten people gathered to read Bolaño’s poems to each other. I thought about the infinite forms of cultural resistance in which we exist, all self-managed, all on the margins, all filled with beauty. READ MORE…

Death, Hope, and Humor: David Unger on Translating Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Mr. President

July 14, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

Translation is often an act of revelation—of revealing what is hidden.

In 1946, Nobel Prize laureate and Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias published his magnum opus, El señor presidente, which would become one of the boldest and most inventive works of Latin American literature, an important predecessor for literary giants including Gabriel García Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende, and Roberto Bolaño. However, the text remains relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. In this intimate and revelatory interview, Editor-at-Large José Garcia Escobar speaks with Guatemalan American author and translator David Unger on the complexities of translating Asturias’s great work into English, balancing authenticity and readability, and its political and artistic legacy.

In 2015, I was living in New York and often got together with the Guatemalan-American writer David Unger. A year prior, he had won the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize (Guatemala’s highest literary honor), and his novel The Mastermind (Akashic Books) had just come out.

We met every other month, more or less.

We would go to Home Sweet Harlem, on the corner of Amsterdam and 136th, or Chinelos, a Mexican restaurant just around the corner, and talk about books, translation, and life.

He told me he was flattered that Cristina García had agreed to blurb The Mastermind. He told me of the time he met and had a strong disagreement with Nicanor Parra. When Parra died in 2018, David wrote a piece for The Paris Review. He told me to go see Andrés Neuman at McNally Jackson and read more of his work. Then one day, as we walked back to his office at City College, he said, “I’m translating El señor presidente.”

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Translating Contemporary Tibet: In Conversation with Christopher Peacock

July 8, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Max Berwald

We could say that there isn’t a demand to undermine or challenge our preconceptions of Tibet.

Publishing since the 1980s, Tsering Döndrup’s novels and short stories have been honored with Tibetan, Mongolian, and Chinese literary prizes. He’s among the most prominent Tibetan writers working today, but as with the great majority of Tibetan fiction, translations of his work remain scarce. This winter, Columbia University Press released the first collection of Döndrup’s work in English, with a suite of stories selected and translated by Christopher Peacock. 

Populated by a dizzying cast of characters—from corrupt lamas and venal deities to the incorrigible Ralo and the souls of the recently deceased—the collection The Handsome Monk and Other Stories presents us with both the diversity of subject matter that only decades of craft and experience can bring, and the discernible unity of vision we expect of a great artist. Peacock’s translation lucidly animates the stories, even as their author arranges separate realities for the action of each to unfold inside. Also preserved is the author’s humor: at times profoundly bleak, but always incisive. In this conversation, we discuss the challenges of translating Tsering Döndrup’s fiction, as well as the position of Tibetan fiction outside Tibet.

Max Berwald (MB): How did you first come to the work of Tsering Döndrup?

Christopher Peacock (CP): I first came to Döndrup through my academic work on contemporary Tibetan literature. I specialize in modern Chinese literature, and I am interested in the ways in which Tibetan writing does and doesn’t fit into the context of literature in modern China as a whole. Tibetan critics have interpreted Tsering Döndrup’s story “Ralo” as an equivalent of Lu Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q, one of the most famous works of modern Chinese fiction. I went to interview the author to get his thoughts on the matter (he doesn’t exactly agree), and while I was writing on the subject I decided to translate “Ralo” for my own use.

I kept on reading his work, and the more I read the more I felt it was essential that such a unique and fascinating writer should be accessible to English readers, especially given the extreme scarcity of modern Tibetan literature available in English. I kept on translating, choosing some stories that I liked personally and some that the author recommended, and eventually we had a collection.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

May 17, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar and Layla Benitez-James

From literary festivals to prize winners, this is the week in world literature.

This week, dispatches from Spain and Central America witness the rise of Spanish-language writers and events that support and promote the literatures of up-and-comers alongside established stars of the field. To celebrate the community of world literature is a necessary joy, and our editors are here with the revelry. 

Layla Benitez-James, Podcast Editor, reporting from Spain  

It was time for big celebrations in a tiny, trilingual bookshop located in the centre of Madrid on the night of May 10. Francesca Reece had been named winner of the second ever Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize, and ten other writers were being honoured alongside her in the publication of Eleven Stories 2019, the shortlist for the competition which follows after the sold out original Eleven Stories from their inaugural 2018 contest.

The event celebrated the launch of the mini collection with readings from ten of the eleven shortlisted authors. The project is an international prize based out of the bookshop Desperate Literature in Madrid, but with partners in London, Paris, and New York, it has drastically evolved over just its first year. After feedback from the inaugural winner and shortlist, the founders decided to add a one week stay as the artist-in-residence at the Civitella Ranieri in Italy, and a consultation with a New York literary agent who works for Foundry Literary + Media. With the aim of giving as much support to emerging and non-traditional writers as possible, they sought to develop additional assistance alongside a cash prize and are looking to continue this line of development for next year’s iteration. This year they partnered with five literary journals: 3:AM, Structo Magazine, Helter Skelter, The London Magazine, and The Second Shelf (women only), who will publish stories from the shortlist throughout the year. They also added a collaboration with the Casa Ana in Andalucia, who selected Jay G Ying from the shortlist for another residency.

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Jumping Between the Urban and the Rural: An Interview with Rodrigo Fuentes

March 18, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

Characters can take on a life of their own as you write them, and that can hold a great amount of interest and suspense for me.

In late 2016, the Guatemalan publishing house SOPHOS put out Rodrigo Fuentes’s literary debut, entitled Trucha panza arriba. The book follows, sometimes closely and at other times tangentially, Don Henrik, a white landowner living in Guatemala, and the way his decisions and economic and emotional downfall affect those around him. The book includes intense dramas like “Dive”—available in Asymptote’s Winter 2019 Issue—and “Ubaldo’s Island”; vibrating suspense stories like “Whisky”; and profound character explorations like “Henrik.” And all of them are wrapped in exquisite dialogue, like “Terrace,” my favorite story. I told Rodrigo it was my favorite.

“Really?” Rodrigo said, somehow confused.

“Sí,” I told him, and said it was a tight story. “Apretada,” I said, “elegantly condensed, effective, quick as a flash.” READ MORE…

In Conversation: Natasha Wimmer on Teaching Translation

October 30, 2017  |  in Asymptote for Educators, Interviews, Profile, Translator's Profile  |  by Lara Norgaard and Natasha Wimmer

Teaching translation feels like I’ve been lifting weights, and then I go to my own translation and it's like, whoa, these weights are so light!

What does it mean to teach translation? Many translators are self-taught, having honed their skills in careers as writers or editors, academics or language experts. But some universities in the United States also offer seminars in the craft of translation. The teacher-translator, then, takes on the unique challenge of developing new pedagogy for a field in flux, one that exists at the intersection of language study, theory, and the instructor’s own experiences in the creative practice of translation.

Today, translator Natasha Wimmer sits down with her former student and Asymptote Editor-at-Large in Brazil, Lara Norgaard, to discuss her approach to teaching translation. 

Lara Norgaard (LN): How did you begin teaching translation? What made you interested in education?

Natasha Wimmer (NW): Princeton approached me, actually. I had never taught a class. Not only that, but I also only have an undergraduate degree, so I had never even taken a graduate class. I was a little bit nervous about taking the job. A few years later I started at Columbia. In that case, I did a panel discussion with the other Bolaño translator, Chris Andrews, and the department heads enjoyed the discussion, so they asked me to teach.

LN: Was there a particular class you took or text you read that influenced the way you approached teaching for the first time?

NW: I actually imagined the course as the class I wish I’d taken before I became a translator. I had no formal education in translation at all. I had never taken a translation class and, in fact, I hadn’t even read anything about translation until about eight years into my translation career. When I was asked to give a talk about translation, I realized I had avoided reading about translation because I was afraid that I would discover that I had been doing it wrong, or that maybe I would mess with the instinctive approach that had somehow been successful so far. But then I found reading about translation really stimulating. I discovered that, not surprisingly, there was a conversation about the questions I had and about the things that I hadn’t articulated but had been working through as a translator.

I worked really hard the first year I taught the Princeton class. I spent a few months just reading translation theory and translation essays for material that I thought was interesting and put together a reading list. The first semester I taught at Princeton was very experimental. In retrospect, I’m surprised I survived. The format of the class changed a lot from the first year to the second.

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