Monthly Archives: December 2015

Weekly News Roundup, 11 December 2015: Gift’s No Poison

This week's top literary links from all around the world

Happy Friday, Asymptote pals! Have you had a chance to check out Asymptote‘s year-end fundraiser yet? Our fifth(!) anniversary is just around the corner, and we’ve got fifteen events planned in cities all around the world to celebrate—but we need your help. Take a look at this year’s end-of-year Indiegogo, with all its tantalizing prizes (postcards! bookmarks! anniversary tickets—of the Asymptote sort), and remember the greatest gift is knowing you’re part of an organization doing seriously good work for world literature.  READ MORE…

Tour de Farce: Julian Gough in Vienna

"'Uh, it kind of doesn't matter what it does. Everyone will want one. Look at it.' They looked at it. It was beautiful.”

Julian Gough’s four-day visit to Vienna started on November 12th, with a reading at Lane & Merriman’s Irish Pub. The Pub features pictures of Samuel Beckett and pint glasses with Oscar Wilde on them, as well as the latter’s appropriate quotation for such an establishment: “Everything in moderation, including moderation” on the wall. The Pub also provided the perfect setting for a lively reading and a long and engaging Q & A session that touched on a number of important current issues—ra(n)ging from 21st century technology to the pros and cons of a return to a gift economy.

The reading was co-hosted by write:now, the Association of English-Language Writers in Austria, the Irish Embassy in Vienna and the English Department at the University of Vienna, each of whom managed to blackmail bring a fair amount of people to the event—the room was packed and the “antici… pation” was palpable. After I had introduced Julian, he took the imaginary stage. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation? December 2015

So many new translations this month! Here's what you've got to know—from Asymptote's own.

Mark Kongstad, Am I Cold (Serpent’s Tail, November 2015). Translated by Martin Aitkenreview by Beau Lowenstern, Editor-at-Large Australia

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Am I Cold throws you into a world of hedonism and extravagance. It is Danish author Martin Kongstad’s first novel to appear in English, and his second body of fiction after 2009’s  short story collection Han Danser På Sin Søns Grav (He Dances on his Son’s Grave). The story follows Mikkel Vallin, a recently-divorced, recently-unemployed writer who—toeing the line between unreliable narrator and protagonist—takes the reader through the moonlit halls of Copenhagen’s artistic elite as he attempts to find existential clarity through a lens of sex, alcohol and debauchery. Loosely held together through Mikkel’s polemic, endeavoring to destroy “coupledom” and the trappings of monogamy, the novel endures in a pre-2008 micro bubble of Denmark and seductively draws you into a chilling, often hilarious world that somehow exists in spite of itself.

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Translation Tuesday: On the River Boży Stok by Wioletta Greg

I listened to apocryphal tales, to stories about ghosts, about saints, ghouls and vagabonds coming from the other side of the hill.

“In the beginning there was vast darkness./ Gardens of house mites blossomed within./ A river of light flew through these gardens./ Monsters of hay shifted.// In the beginning there was dense silence/ like inside poppy heads.” [1]

That’s how I imagined my beginnings in the stone house by the pond in Hektary in the village of Rzeniszów upon Boży Stok in the Jurassic Highlands, where I was born in February of nineteen seventy four, when the ice covered nearby ponds and cloth nappies froze stiff in the hall and in the attic. My Grandfather, Władysław Lubasparticipant of the September Campaign, marksman of the 74th Infantry Regiment, stalag prisonerwas given three hectares of land during the Land Reform after the war. That was where he built a house of stone with brick corners, the house which looked a bit like a Polish country house. The right side of itthe dining room and two other rooms divided by a spacious hallwas the residential part, while the left side, with a separate entrance and a small window, was a barn. You could say that we lived together with the animals. In early Spring the rooms were filled with the smell of chopped yarrow for turkeys maturing in a cage under the table. A brooding duck sat under the ladder to the attic. Chickens, rabbits, dogs and cats wandered around the house. Up until the 1980s we used domestic appliances made by Grandfather. These were, amongst others: churns, pastry boards, rolling pins, wooden mixing bowls, pails held together by metal bands, stools and troughs. And since my Father’s hobby was taxidermy, there were stuffed martens, magpies and buzzards on the walls, while a stuffed rabbit in formal wear (in a top hat and with a cane) sat on a birch stump. There were beehives in the meadow by the apple trees. READ MORE…

Channeling The Language (And Spirit) Of Clarice Lispector: An Interview with Katrina Dodson

"I don’t think she wants to be completely understood, and she wouldn’t have understood herself."

“Clarice inspires big feelings. As with the ‘rare thing herself’ from ‘The Smallest Woman in the World,’ those who love her want her for their very own. But no one can claim the key to her entirely, not even in Portuguese. She haunts us each in different ways. I have presented you the Clarice that I hear best.”

By spending the last two years translating nearly four decades of Clarice Lispector’s work in what she calls “a one-woman vaudeville act,” Katrina Dodson has joined a club of translators (trumpeted by Lispector’s biographer and de facto proselytizer, Benjamin Moser), whose interpretations of the Brazilian writer have now generated a skyscraping tidal wave. Though recognized by Brazilians as their greatest modern writer, Lispector was little-known among English-speaking readers until the beginning of this decade. Today, she is the first Brazilian writer to appear on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Book Review (July 2015). For the first time in English, Complete Stories brings together all the short stories that established her legacy in Portuguese.

Lispector gives the impression of a woman looking from the outside in, always taking notes. Like Borges, she expects you to follow her fantastic trains of thought, but she is unconcerned as to whether you enjoy the ride or not. In Complete Stories, eggs become infinite metaphoric permutations (interestingly, Lispector would die of ovarian cancer, on the eve of her 57th birthday), a lonely, red-headed girl and a red-headed basset hound discover they are soulmates, but destined never to be together, and a woman has a face.

Because in Lispector’s world—and Dodson’s translation—it must be asserted that a woman has a face, as if such a characteristic is not naturally of this world. These familiar details, made new —especially during fevered sequences when geography reflects a character’s unraveling—are what end up grinding our faces into the pavement as Lispector gazes on, coolly, but not unkindly, with great curiosity from above.

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MB: When did you first encounter Clarice Lispector, and did you have a form of epiphany moment when you discovered her?

KD: I first started reading her in 2003. I was living in Rio de Janeiro and teaching English at a private English school called Britannia, and I had moved to Brazil that year speaking some Portuguese but, but it was—I spoke French, and then I was listening to these cassette tapes. That’s how long ago it was [laughs]. I would listen to cassette tapes that they would use to teach the Foreign Service how to learn a foreign language. I would listen to these Portuguese tapes before going.  READ MORE…

Close Approximations—Deadline Extended!

Six more weeks to polish that translation you've been meaning to share with the world!

Good news! Our judges have agreed to an extension of deadline for Close Approximations, our international contest for emerging translators. Yes, you now have six more weeks (until 1 Feb 2016) to polish that translation in your drawer you’ve been meaning to share with the world. This is to allow as many emerging translators as possible to vie for a total of $4,500 in prize money awarded for fiction, poetry and—a new category this year—nonfiction submissions. Winning entries will still be published in our April 2016 issue, according to the original schedule. Don’t miss this opportunity to have your work read by acclaimed translators Michael Hofmann, Ottilie Mulzet and Margaret Jull Costa!

As a result of this extension, we will be pushing back our spotlight on our first contest’s winners (and spreading it out over four weekends in January instead). Get working now on your contest application! (Guidelines can be found here.)

 

Weekly News Roundup, 4 December 2015: Best-Of Lists Of Best Lists

This week's (and year's!) literary highlights from across the world

Happy Friday, Asymptote friends! The end of the calendar year is nigh, and that means one thing: there are no more new releases (or—there are less of them, as you’ll see in next week’s New in Translation post), and there are a whole lot of year-end lists. Impressively, the New York Times’ famous top 10 includes three whole books (!) in translation (Magda Szabo’s The Door, translated by Len Rix, Elena FerranteThe Story of the Lost Child, translated by Ann Goldstein, and Asne Seierstad’s One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre of Norway, translated by Sarah Death). If you’d like the scope to zoom out a bit, look at the Times’ notable 100 in 2015, thirteen percent of which is composed of literature in translation (given sad stats of the past, this is actually pretty darn good!—though the translation statistics of the past two years, available at Three Percent, make us less giddily optimistic). Finally, take a look at another English-language publication across the pond: the Guardian asks famous writers what their favorite reads of the year proved to beREAD MORE…

Spectacle Shopping

"They will wear the product and talk about it (and to it) incessantly. They will buy another one next year."

Black Friday is not only a chaotic holiday for shoppers, but it is also an extremely exciting time for those in the media to represent the spectacle of this chaos to the public. The public then consumes this content at face-value, continuing the chaos online and in their homes. In light of Black Friday’s “festivities,” Guy Debord’s Society of Spectacle shone out to me as a great way to explain it. It’s not really a phenomenon, but an obsession in a society that perhaps values the commodity more than other areas. This personal essay explores the parallels I have seen between Black Friday and Guy Debord’s writing.

All citations are from Guy Debord in his work La Société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967). Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994).

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“The world the spectacle holds up to view is at once here and elsewhere; it is the world of the commodity ruling over all lived experience. The commodity world is thus shown as it really is, for its logic is one with men’s estrangement from one another and from the sum total of what they produce.”

I’m a Search Engine Optimization Specialist in French and in English for a marketing company in Detroit. I like to say that I fix the Internet for a living, while getting to implement my French Literature degree. The reality is that I put the right words in the right places, and if the search engine algorithms take kindly to them, these words will rank better on Google. I describe it to my college advisor as, “writing French and English prose poems about the Chevrolet Silverado.”

I celebrate my anniversary at the company in November. My manager congratulates me. She was worried I wouldn’t make it this long, away from my family and friends in New York, in a field that isn’t as creative as one might hope. (Conversations with my manager include, “No Allegra, you can’t say that the Chevrolet Malibu is ‘making waves in Ottawa.’ I don’t think Canadians even know what Malibu Beach is.”) READ MORE…

What’s New with the Asymptote Team

We've been keeping busy!

Hungary editor-at-large Ágnes Orzóy wrote a review on János Térey’s book Átkelés Budapesten for World Literature Today. She also wrote two blog entries for Literaturhaus Europa on migrants in Hungarian literature, emigrants and immigrants. Ágnes was recently a guest at the Balassi Institute in Bucharest where she talked about the reception of Eastern European literature in English.

Assistant editor Alexis Almeida‘s chapbook, Half-Shine, was accepted for publication at Dancing Girl Press. It will be out in the fall/winter of 2016. Also, her translation of Florencia Castellano’s Propiedades vigiladas / Monitored Properties will be out with Ugly Duckling Presse around the same time.

Brazil editor-at-large Bruna Lobato‘s essay of Juan Goytisolo’s Count Julian appeared in The Millions and her translations into Portuguese of two poems by Pulitzer winner Tracy K. Smith is forthcoming in the next issue of Jornal Rascunho, the literary supplement of Brazilian daily newspaper Gazeta do Povo.

Assistant editor Chris Schaefer had his essay “Who Killed Matoub Lounes?” published in the November 2015 issue of World Literature Today. The essay is about the controversial Kabyle singer who was assassinated in 1998.

Assistant editor Julia Leverone‘s translation of the poem “Body of Crime,” originally by the Argentine Paco Urondo, was recently nominated for The Pushcart Prize by The Brooklyn Rail, which published seven of her translations in May this year.

This week, editor-in-chief Lee Yew Leong introduced Frances Riddle’s translation of Mario Levrero’s “The Abandoned House” for Electric Literature‘s Recommended Reading.

Iran editor-at-large, Poupeh Missaghi, published a piece entitled, “Insects Are Food for Thought,” in Issue 59 of Volta.

Translation Tuesday: “Okinawa, Mon Amour” by Betina González

In Japan everything always happened in reverse: wolves did not eat people, kamikazes were not afraid of death, grumpy people smiled.

It’s #Giving Tuesday! If you’ve enjoyed our Translation Tuesday posts, please consider a $25 donation to our newly launched fundraising drive today! Every little will help us bring you more of what you love.

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In Japan everything always happened in reverse: wolves did not eat people, kamikazes were not afraid of death, grumpy people smiled, and Cinderella was a stoker’s son named Mamichigane.

Every day, Miriam thought about that typhoon-exhausted island she had never seen: Shuri Castle cloaked in flames, the drowned children of the Tsushima Maru, and the woman who came down from Heaven and had to stay on Earth because some man stole her magic kimono.

Every day, Miriam fed her fish, dusted off the glass cases of her tragic geishas, and cursed, with much gentility, her destiny as a South American. Her big brother’s explanations didn’t help much. As Kazuo so often reminded her, the Ryukyu Kingdom had little to do with Japanese traditions, and the people of Okinawa ever fled their island. Okinawa had to be the one place in the world with a commemorative statue of the Father of Immigration: Kyuzo Toyama, the hero who arranged the flight of the first Okinawan-Hawaiian citizens in 1899. For Kazuo, the argument reinforced a historical truth: their ancestors were in fact the first settlers of the Americas and, according to him, merely completing their millennia-long task. The Indian-American was practically Japanese; if Kazuo had any talent, he would draw a manga of the second wave of continental population, destined to perfect a race of supermen through dry-cleaning and karate. READ MORE…