Her characters are profoundly human, each wrestling with their own fears, hopes, and desires . . .
Abandonment by Erminia Dell’Oro, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky, Héloïse Press, 2024
Why do we leave behind people and places? Is it painful or bittersweet? Does it indicate bravery or cowardice, altruism or egoism? Do we have complete agency in these decisions or are we instead constrained by necessity, oftentimes masked by the illusion of choice? What kind of person do we become in the aftermath?
Translation can never be just a flat movement between two points, merely returning to its origins.
Japanese poet, critic, and translator Megumi Moriyama has so far worked on metamorphosing Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) into the Japanese and on a ‘back translation’ of Arthur Waley’s poetic rendition of the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, in collaboration with her sister, haiku poet and critic Marie Mariya, published by Sayusha. As a poet, Megumi confesses that even her original poems in Japanese are layered with translation across varying texts within and outside her native language. Of her forthcoming poetry collection, she told me, “Perhaps you might say that through translation, I have made a journey into the depths of Japanese language.”
In this interview, I spoke with Megumi, currently in Tokyo, on rendering Virginia Woolf and Waley’s The Tale of Genji into the Japanese; how spiral translation goes beyond back-translations; and the new-age scene of literary translation in Japan.
Author headshot courtesy of Benjamin Parks.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): You translated Virginia Woolf’s experimental classic The Waves into the Japanese as Nami (2021), published by Hayakawa. Could you speak about your process in rendering a 1931 polyphonic novel set in England by a prose writer known for her stream of consciousness narrative mode with the modern-day Japanophone readership in mind? I heard there was so much hype about it, especially on Japanese book Twitter, as it was the first translation of this novel in almost 50 years.
Megumi Moriyama (MM): The new translation of The Waves was welcomed much more enthusiastically than I had expected. When I posted the announcement on social media, it went viral. And after the publication, the book was immediately put into reprint.
I studied Virginia Woolf as a student, and The Waves was one of my favorites of hers, but I never thought I would have the opportunity to translate it. It was thanks to social media that I got the chance. I tweeted very casually that I was interested in translating The Waves, an editor took notice of it, and the project became a reality.
let us sing together, you can dance if you want to, / so those who are distant can hear us.
This Translation Tuesday, in honor of Mid-autumn Festival, we bring you five poems by the Chinese poet Ling Feng, in an immaculate translation by Jonathan Chen. The Mid-autumn festival, which originated in China and has since spread throughout East Asia, is a time for shared revelry among families—but not everyone can reunite with their families on this occasion, particularly expatriates living far afield. To commemorate the joy and sorrow of personal connections—familial, marital, platonic—across physical divides, we’re honored to present these five poems, which address love and longing with a singular attention to detail. In Ling Feng’s verse, a deep attention to the evanescence of life gives way to passionate descriptions both of the speaker’s beloved and the material world, a desire to cherish what is always passing. But the speaker’s attention to the transience of all things is ultimately a source not of despair, but of a renewed will to human connection in a fragile world: “let us sing together, you can dance if you want to, / so those who are distant can hear us.” Read on!
untitled
soft wind blows in a single direction.
that which must have passed has passed.
at the moment when a place wraps itself around me,
people will be singing the entire afternoon.
that which must have passed, is past.
if there are tears, there is a heart.
if there are wounds, there is enlightenment.
people are as beautiful as the dust.
flowers are more lasting than forests.
if there are ten Hai Zis, then we must be innumerable.
let us sing together, you can dance if you want to,
so those who are distant can hear us.
all that we have missed for so long shall all come back to life.
When we first started the What’s New in Translation column in 2015, it was to offer readers a look at the incredible work done by writers, translators, and publishers all around the world. Gathering some of the most exciting publications coming out each month, the column featured regular reviews from trusted critical voices, giving the spotlight over to this great wealth of literary work. A lot has changed in the last decade; though English still reigns, we’ve seen the advocates of literary translation win a lot of battles as they seek to make our reading landscape a more various, inclusive, and interconnected space. As such, we now feel the need to extend our purview to include more of these brilliant voices, more of this innovative work, more of the insights and wonders that they bring. We are delighted to announce that our monthly column will now feature a greater number of titles —but with the same incisive critical insight that we’ve always aimed to bring.
From Argentinian horror to the latest from a Hungarian master of form, an intergenerational Greek tale to haiku interpretations, read below for a list of the ten most exciting books out in September.
Documentary Poetry by Heimrad Bäcker, translated from the German by Patrick Greaney, Winter Editions, 2024
Review by Fani Avramopoulou
Documentary Poetry compiles a selection of German poet Heimrad Bäcker’s documentary poems and photographs with his published interviews, lectures, and essays, offering a richly contextualized introduction to his many decades of work documenting and reflecting on the Holocaust. Bäcker does not conceal his relation to the Nazi Party; he was an avid member for about a year, joining at the age of eighteen. He then denounced the Nazi ideology in the wake of the Nuremberg trials, and spent the rest of his life meticulously chronicling the Third Reich’s atrocities through photography and a poetic method he described as his “transcript system.” The collection’s title essay introduces what feels like the conceptual seed of Bäcker’s work: a reflection on the Nazis’ use of ordinary language to conceal, sanitize, enable, and systematize the horrors of the Holocaust. His conceptualization of language as a participatory, covert administrative tool of the Nazi ideological agenda leads to this development of the transcript system as a form of intervention—a way of undressing such language and purging it of its duplicities.
In this edition of our column for global literary news, Arabic titles are celebrated with the National Book Award’s longlist of Translated Literature, a vital literacy program in Kenya travels to a women’s prison, and a new cinematic adaptation of one of Mexico’s most important novels premiers at the Toronto International Film Festival. Read on to find out more!
Ibrahim Fawzy, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Egypt
Against the backdrop of the war in Gaza, literature emerges as a beacon of hope. Now translated into English, three Arabic literary works have been longlisted for the prestigious National Book Award for Translated Literature, standing as testaments to the resilience of the human spirit. Nasser Abu Srour’s The Tale of a Wall: Reflections on the Meaning of Hope and Freedom, translated by Luke Leafgren, is a poignant memoir recounting his decades-long imprisonment in Israeli jails. Through the lens of his imagination, Abu Srour transforms confinement into a realm of boundless possibility, exploring themes of love, justice, and the unwavering power of hope. The book’s evocative prose and its author’s unflinching honesty combine into a compelling narrative that has resonated with readers around the globe; interested readers can also see an excerpt published on Asymptote as a part of our All Eyes on Palestine column.
Additionally, Leri Price, a frequent contender for the National Book Award, has once again made the longlist with her translation of Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home (which Asymptote had selected for the February edition of our Book Club). This haunting novel delves into the complexities of human relationships and the devastating impact of war on individuals and communities. Another longlisted work is Bothayna al-Essa’s The Book Censor’s Library, co-translated by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain. This thought-provoking novel examines the censorship of literature and its profound implications for society. I’m so glad that Arabic literature is shining thanks to the fabulous work of its translators. READ MORE…
The Lockmaster is a chronicle of an imminent future where emotional disorientations encounter environmental turmoil.
The Lockmaster by Christoph Ransmayr, translated from the German by Simon Pare, Seagull Books, 2024
The Lockmaster, the latest novel from Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr, begins with an act of killing in a small European town. The narrator’s father—the titular lockmaster—presides over a series of sluice systems for guiding river traffic around the Great Falls, a cascade over a hundred and twenty feet high on the White River. On a festive day, ironically a day to celebrate the feast of Saint Nepomuk, the patron saint of those in danger of drowning, the lockmaster floods a navigation channel carrying riverboats. Accidental or otherwise, this episode claims five lives. A year later, almost as if in atonement, the lockmaster stages his disappearance into the same foaming roars of the Great Falls.
Tortured by the possibility that his father could be a murderer, the narrator goes on to experience a series of harrowing events as his hydraulic engineering projects carry him from the banks of the Xingu River in South America to the Mekong in Asia. By the time the narrator travels back to Europe and to the coasts of the North Sea, he himself has transformed into a murderer. Throughout, Ransmayr details the narrator’s childhood with gentle premonitions of his transformation, with prose that feels like a moving panorama of the idyllic outdoors, soaked in an aesthetic genre that seems almost “cottagecore”; yet, existing collaterally with the seemingly quaint charm of strawberry-picking and kayak rides, amidst riparian forests and river spirits, there are far more disturbing scenarios. READ MORE…
For [Mari's characters], collecting signifies a dependency on nostalgia and memory, all of which coexist with each individual object.
We all love our books, but at what point does that love become reductive—or even dangerous? Italian writer Michele Mari weaves elements of materialist obsession into his fictions, describing how one’s attachment to literature can create falsifications, egomaniacal delusions, and objectifications of the people around us. In this following essay, Francesca Mancino takes a close look at Mari’s You, Bleeding Childhood and the recently published Verdigris, tracing their narratives in their manifestations of literary greed.
In the threaded lines that clutter all but the gutters of his works, Michele Mari comes close to Becca Rothfeld’s fantasy of excess, as detailed in her essay, “More Is More.” There, she writes, “I dream of a house stuffed floor to ceiling; rooms so overfull they prevent entry; too many books for the shelves; fictions brimming with facts but, more importantly, flush with form; long tomes in too many volumes; sentences that swerve on for pages; clauses like jewels strung onto necklaces. . .” In both the collection You, Bleeding Childhood (2023) and the novel Verdigris (2024), translated into English by Brian Robert Moore, there is a feeling that the text cannot contain the objects described. It is as if the words command a vaster space than a page can allow for.
Mari’s work toes the line between the wonder and the obscenity of excess; in both You, Bleeding Childhood and Verdigris, the author presses his readers to think about its many forms and their respective limits. Reflected in his writing style, one could almost say that there is too much in Mari’s books—too many literary objects, household items, convoluted adjectives, coveted authors, and blended dialects. In Verdigris, the walls of a home have almost no free space because “everywhere has gradually been overrun by objects and signs drawn on paper, when not by symbols traced directly onto the plaster. Anyone walking into that room would have the impression of a random and compulsive clutter, as though owing to a kind of horror vacui.” The narrator, Michelino, reminds the reader that the objects are not arbitrary, since he and Felice, the house’s owner, share an intimate knowledge of “every single element” tacked onto its surfaces. READ MORE…
in the garlic crushed / into my mother's beans / the form of the verb that names me / was
This Translation Tuesday, we present three meditations from Brazil on the fluid qualities of the words that describe and “name” us. Floresta’s first poem rankles at the tyranny of the verb “to be” at its categorical, othering, murdering worst. In his second, the verb approaches us far more softly and trepidatiously; it’s domesticated and unthreatening now—a balm, even. The forth swings us back and forth across the tenses, exploring the miraculous potential of the word to both travel into a minutely specific past, and telescope forwards ad infinitum.
Translators Jamille Pinheiro Dias and Alex Brostoff were drawn to Floresta’s poems for their evocative treatment of the contradictions of grammar. They explain in their note:
“Paradoxically, while “the form of the verb” is murderous, it also summons a matrilineal bond that recalls rice and beans, the lack and excesses of gendered evocation. That language others us by naming who we are not, “pressed in a time / that is not mine,” recalls the very forms through which translation at once opens up and shuts down possibilities of naming. The form of the verb genders us, and through the violence of nomination, it precedes and exceeds us: across time, bodies, languages. Such forms constrict and proliferate in translation.”
Through interconnected stories, Alharthi masterfully weaves a network of characters in a narrative inhabited by lively, magnificent women.
Silken Gazelles by Jokha Alharthi, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth, Catapult, 2024
The acclaimed Omani writer and academic Jokha Alharthi has emerged as an increasingly significant voice on the international literary landscape since her novel, Celestial Bodies (translated by Marilyn Booth), was awarded the International Booker Prize in 2019. Now, once again, Catapult Press has opened the floodgates to another tentacle of the Omani society in the form of Alharthi’s fragmented worlds. In her latest novel Silken Gazelles, also gracefully translated by Booth, a wide net reins in the past to the present, the village to the city, sisterhood to motherhood, and love to loss. The dreamy and nonlinear narrative moves forward and backward in time, treating generations as flexible containers and relying on polyphony to create a poetic geometry of voices.
Tellingly, the intertwined threads of the narrative are captivating from the very beginning; extremely concise hints are made in the early chapters towards the throughline, but the hints are almost complete in themselves. At the end of the first chapter, for instance, Ghazaala’s life is wrapped up in a few sentences. “Within five years [she] had given birth to twins,” writes Alharthi, “finished her secondary education, and entered the university. In her final year of study in the College of Economics, the Violin Player ran away from the house of marriage.” In a similar vein, in the second chapter, when talking about Ghazaala’s foster mother, Saada, Alharthi writes:
It would have seemed so ordinary, so natural, for Saada to live to be a hundred years old. For Saada to always be there, preparing maghbara for the cow and coconut sweets for the children, drawing milk and cream, feeding Ghazaala and Asiya and Mahbuba and the goats, undoing her hair and baking as she sang, exuding a fragrance of incense and fresh dough, laughing her ringing laugh, and forever gathering the plants that could treat poisons and fevers from the high slopes surrounding Sharaat Bat. . . But Saada never made it, not even to thirty.
The latest literary news from Mexico and the Philippines!
This week, our editors-at-large share reflections on prose from Mexico and an event on women in translation in New York. From the wise words of a beloved centenarian writer to a reading celebrating ‘minority’ languages, read on to find out more!
René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Mexico
“Prose is everything,” said Uruguayan poet Ida Vitale with cheeky irony. “I have a so-so relationship with poetry, but prose… it presents more challenges to me. Poetry is a matter of rhythm, of good or bad taste. But prose… prose is everything.”
Last year, Vitale reached the modest age of 100, and last week, with unparalleled lucidity, she inaugurated the Feria Internacional del Libro de las Universitarias y los Universitarios (Filuni), a book fair organized by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) for students, academics, publishers, and writers. READ MORE…
I’m interested in how the layering of text and image can create or disrupt tension, structure, rhythm, perception, and interpretation.
In Kevin Claiborne’s multimedia work, he sources from personal archives, landscape, and anthropological studies to coalesce a vision of Black American history into its contemporary variations, spanning the realms of collective and private histories. “Starting with the gaps in my own family history, and the space between ‘what I know vs. what I should know,’ the missing information between where my ancestors come from and where I am today, I am digging and mining the sediment of histories, passed down, erased, and avoided,” he writes. In “BLACK ENOUGH,” his 2020 exhibition at Thierry Goldberg, he poses a series of questions against the landscapes of Joshua Tree. Some of his questions, such as “Is Black enough?” and “When is Black enough?,” are clipped in the frame, leaving the sentences unfinished, like the Black lives that are prematurely cut short. Extending his reflections on Black identity and memory, Claiborne’s 2023 exhibition, “Family Business,” took a slightly different turn. Drawing from a box of family photographs, he applied green and blue pigments to the images, condensed moments in which his mother, beaming with a radiant smile, once gazes affectionately at his father. The result is a heightened revision of his family archive, a rediscovery of the ties that bind him to his kinsfolk: their shared passions, dreams, and tears. In this following interview, he speaks on materiality, capturing Black lives in Black contexts, and embedded dialogues within his visuality.
Junyi Zhou (JZ): From the beginning of your career, you’ve combined written texts with visual materials. How did this idea come to you initially?
Kevin Claiborne (KC): For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an interest in the power of words—their potential, their malleability, their limitations, and their ability to shape meaning. I’ve always been impressed with people who have mastered their expression of the written word, and who understand how to literally and metaphorically paint with text. My earliest inspirations were graffiti artists, poets, and rappers, all of whom understood the nuances of language, how the weight of words changes with scale, and how to use text as a material.
When I first started using photography and archival images in a conceptual manner, incorporating text seemed like a logical next step. Words change meaning depending on present context, and context can change depending on the words that are present.
JZ: I know that you started out as a photographer. How do you see your multimedia/cross-media approach? Does it impose certain limitations on your objective (if there is one) as an artist, or is it the ultimate means for you to channel your message?
KC: Sometimes my mixed-media or multimedia approach offers the ability to enhance and increase the complexity of my work, and other times, it shifts the focus from the material composition of the work to the ideas embedded within. Every material has a story, a purpose, a history, and a language or logic to its usage. Sometimes, the material becomes the focus, and sometimes certain material combinations allow the viewer to have more entry points into appreciating, understanding, or engaging with the work. It depends on the context. READ MORE…
They had stumbled upon a fundamental question that interested them more than Benjamin: what does it mean to produce something original?
Where did you first encounter translation—at home, in a classroom, online? In the following essay, Kena Chavva reflects on her experience prompting high school students to consider their own interactions with language and translation, and the ways both shape their lives and the world around them. Throughout the course, she and her students delved into questions of authenticity and identity, of faithfulness and creativity, seeming always to come back to concerns of originality: translation or not, how can we make something that is truly our own?
It’s not uncommon to hear teachers speak of the joy in teaching something that they, as individuals, love. I had experienced something akin to this in my first year of teaching high school English—I adore Frankenstein and have an abiding affection for Macbeth, and when I taught those texts, it was clear to both me and my students that we were having a better experience of the literature and one another than we’d had with The Canterbury Tales some several months earlier. But what I’ve always found less commonly discussed is how soul-crushing it is to teach something you deeply love when your students aren’t responding to it the way you hope they will.
For me, that text was an excerpt from Pascale Casanova’s 1999 book The World Republic of Letters. The first chapter, titled “Principles of a World History of Literature”, outlines some of the hidden rules that govern the world’s literary economy:
In thrall to the notion of literature as something pure, free, and universal, the contestants of literary space refuse to acknowledge the actual functioning of its peculiar economy, the “unequal trade” (to quote Braudel once more) that takes place within it.
Casanova goes on to explain how “Literary value therefore attaches to certain languages” and that “…literature is so closely linked to language that there is a tendency to identify the “language of literature”—the “language of Racine” or the “language of Shakespeare”—with literature itself”. When I first read this very same chapter as a junior in college, it felt the way that education should feel: like you were presented with a framework through which to understand your lived experiences.
A sudden thought struck me—could my brother have been in love with Ms. Yukie?
This Translation Tuesday, we bring you an intricate puzzle by master mystery-writer Edogawa Ranpo, translated from the Japanese by Erin Vastola. An admirer of Edgar Allan Poe (to whom his pen name was an homage), Edogawa is celebrated both in Japan and abroad for incorporating Japanese cultural elements into suspenseful narratives driven by rigorous logic, and “The Diary” is no exception. Following the death of his younger brother, the unnamed narrator of this peculiar short story mourns the fact that his sibling died too young to experience romantic love. But as he inspects his brother’s diary and letters, he begins to doubt his assumptions. What follows is an elaborate psychodrama of code-cracking, thwarted courtship, and the correspondence culture of early twentieth-century Japan. Read on!
It was the evening of my younger brother’s memorial service, exactly seven days after his passing. I entered his study and picked up the writings he had left behind. Alone with my thoughts, I sank into deep contemplation.
Though it was not particularly late, the household—still damp with tears—had fallen into complete silence. From afar came the plaintive echoes of street vendors’ cries, somehow imbuing the scene with the flavor of a modern play. Touched by the gravity of long-forgotten childhood emotions, I unconsciously opened the diary on my brother’s desk.
Gazing at the diary, I mournfully thought of my twenty-year-old brother, who, I feared, had left this world without ever knowing love or romance.
Llansol is a generous and poetic writer, sensual in her descriptions and intensely attuned to the metaphysical and the otherworldly. . .
A Thousand Thoughts in Flight by Maria Gabriela Llansol, translated from the Portuguese by Audrey Young, Deep Vellum, 2024
A Thousand Thoughts in Flight, the diaries of Portuguese writer Maria Gabriela Llansol, is divided into three sections: “Finita”, “A Falcon in My Wrist”, and “Inquiry into the Four Confidences”. Comprised of three books from the seventies that Llansol left behind when she passed away in 2008, these volumes were the only ones to be published in Portuguese during the writer’s life, and are also the first of her non-fiction writings to appear in English, thanks to the work of translator Audrey Young. In his introduction, the critic João Barrento describes these private texts as “osmotic diaries: their genesis, their development, and their final form are inseparable from Llansol’s other books, which always accompany them and are interwoven with them”. This is true not only in the conceptual but also the literal sense; the first diary begins the day she finishes The Book of Communities—the first volume in her acclaimed trilogy Geography of Rebels—and ends the day she finishes The Remaining Life, the second volume, in 1977. The second diary picks up when she is finishing In the House of July and August, the final volume, and beginning to write her second trilogy, while also providing glimpses at the author brainstorming her duology, Lisbonleipzig.
Llansol is a generous and poetic writer, sensual in her descriptions and intensely attuned to the metaphysical and the otherworldly, coalescing history, philosophy, and physical experience; these qualities are boldly apparent in her fiction, but appear with an experimental and kinetic mode in these diaries. A common thread across the volumes is silence: everything that remains in the journal is a “draft”, consisting of left-out pieces and vacant spaces for contemplation, and this attention and appreciation reserved for emptiness becomes integral to the diaries’ form. Silence manifests in the common use of gaps in the text, indicated in certain places by a horizontal line (________), and more compellingly in other places as unannounced fragments of poetry. And in between these fragments is life. She moves all around Belgium, from Louvain to Jodoigne and finally to Herbais, where she and her husband Augusto Joaquim run an experimental school as part of a cooperative—which also makes and sells furniture and food. There, Llansol cultivates her own garden, which provides a bouquet of scenes and observations for her diaries, and immerses herself in music. Still, she never pauses in her pursuit of literature, of writing and reading about theology, philosophy, the lives of poets and mystics. It is only in the final diary that she moves back to Portugal’s Sintra, sometime in 1983, remaining there until her death. READ MORE…
