Language: French

Translation Tuesday: from “My Father’s Cité: An Adolescence in Social Housing” by Mehdi Charef

November 7, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Clayton McKee

My mom, my sister, my brother, and I have waited in France for ten years to get this privilege.

This Translation Tuesday, Mehdi Charef recounts his father’s teenage experiences in a newly-built Parisian banlieue. Social housing holds undreamed of comforts for his migrant family, and apprehension quickly turns to delight. Comfort! Safety! Privacy! Hot water! A new, fuller life beckons in the projects, and it involves quantities of rock ‘n’ roll, girlfriends and Carson McCullers.

It’s the Chinese building manager who told us that we had to move.  The immigrant families who had lived in shacks—think shipping containers turned ruins with wear and tear over the past eight years—in the cité de transit, or transitional social housing, on Rue de Valenciennes in Nanterre would now need to pack their bags. Two feelings arise with the announcement of the news: anxiety and melancholy. This move represents a separation. We know where we came from but not where they are taking us. They didn’t ask us about anything, and they aren’t telling us about anything. We are leaving our most recent safe place.

In the bidonville, I had learned that there were Algerians outside of the ones in the village where I was born. In the cité de transit, I had learned Berber and African expressions as well as all the Portuguese curse words.

It isn’t the shacks that I liked but the people who lived in them. In front of them, I kept my head held high because I was like them. It’s only in front of my French classmates that I was ashamed…

Our housing project is going to be demolished. The construction of a large industrial park is set to take its place:  la Défense.

Our new apartment is in Cité Rouge. The neighborhood is named that because of the brick façades of the buildings. It’s in the city Gennevilliers surrounded by small, old houses. We are no longer the isolated immigrant population. People walk down our alleys, underneath our windows. We are no longer the shame of those who were kind to us. We became visible before we were heard… READ MORE…

Translating the Caribbean

November 1, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Aaron Coleman, C. Francis Fisher, Kaiama Glover, and Urayoán Noel

The translations lead to thinking about what translation makes possible in a critical sense and in a differently shaped and understood archive.

The following conversation took place after a reading as part of “Colloquy: Translators in Conversation,” a series based in New York City and sponsored by World Poetry Books. In April 2023, the Clemente in Manhattan hosted the fifth installment of Colloquy, “Translating the Caribbean” with Aaron Coleman, Urayoán Noel, and Kaiama Glover. After the reading, the curator of the series, C. Francis Fisher, engaged the translators in the following conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length.

C. Francis Fisher (CF): I want to start by asking about the title of this event. I named this evening “Translating the Caribbean” and I’m wondering whether that idea of translating the Caribbean is helpful in terms of the work that you do or whether it glosses over important differences between the cultures, languages, and realities of different islands in the Caribbean. 

Aaron Coleman (AC): I’m glad that you opened with this question because for me “the Caribbean” is just one of the many frames that we can have in mind when translating. I’ll say for me, there are various frames that I try to hold in my mind at the same time. One would obviously be the national, but even within the national, we see the way that blackness sometimes complicates national identities. So, there’s the national and then there’s frames within the national, but then there’s also a regional frame to the Caribbean.

For me, the frame that I’m always searching for and curious about is beyond the national at a diasporic scale. So, we could call this translating the Caribbean, but I was also thinking about translating the African diaspora.

Kaiama Glover (KG): I’m glad you spoke first. I had a hot take. I still have the same take, but now I’ve sat with it for a second [laugh]. I have no problem with that grouping that in some ways elides the borders between the various nation states of the Caribbean because the Balkinization of the islands was based on legacies of colonialism that are still intact and have left us with language that makes it difficult for people who are of the same broad history and related culture to communicate. First, there was the initial break of community, the kidnapping of the middle passage, and then there is the persistence of that breaking through the nation language borders of the Caribbean. So, I love translating the Caribbean outward toward the diaspora. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Olivia Elias

October 31, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Jérémy Victor Robert

tongue like ground/ riddled with holes/ words unwilling to take/ shape

Today is Halloween, so here is a Halloween-related story: eleven years ago, after launching our Halloween-themed Fall 2012 issue, we heard that the cover (by guest artist June Glasson) hadn’t gone over well in some corners of the Internet. Despite their clearly (or so I thought!) childlike proportions, its ghoulish trick-or-treaters reminded some readers of the Ku Klux Klan. We learnt a valuable lesson about spelling out editorial intentions, especially when a lot is at stake. This Translation Tuesday, as we present two heartbreaking poems by past contributor Olivia Elias in Jérémy Victor Robert’s lucid translation—poems that were written before the October 7th attack, but which nevertheless speak to the ongoing humanitarian crisis—I want to make clear that we stand against Hamas’s brutality as well as with innocent civilian Gazans who are now being drawn into the war. We call for a ceasefire—which the U.N. overwhelmingly voted for three days ago—to be enacted immediately. We also chose to publish these poems against the backdrop of Palestinian voices being silenced—such as when the Frankfurt Book Fair recently canceled its prize presentation ceremony honoring Adania Shibli for Minor Detail—incidentally, our May 2020 Book Club pick. It is especially during such fraught times that we should listen to and read one another. 

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief, Asymptote

floating everywhere, the white shadows

often pain wakes them
in their severed limbxxxa brain area
lights upxxxneurologists say

phantom limb pain (named)

/
likewise on the world map
& in the cortexxxxthe indelible print

as if it could be enough to replace
with a pen stroke plus a few
statements/vetoesxxxa country’s name
to erase it

isn’t there always in our homes
at our tablesxxxa place for ghosts

floating everywhere, the white shadows

Tongue like Ground

tongue like ground
riddled with holes
words unwilling to take
shape
keep escaping through
holes

all I do is repeatxxxrepeat
xxxmy Name
xxxxis not
xxxNo One
xxxxfrom
xxxthe Land
xxxxof
xxxNo One

against burying under screedxxxrepeat
mantra
xxxxam fully alive made of silt & clay from this Mount

overlooking the same seaxxxupon which shines the same sun
as in the early stages

Translated from the French by Jérémy Victor Robert

A poet of the Palestinian diaspora, born in Haifa in 1944, Olivia Elias writes in French. She lived until the age of 16 in Lebanon, where her family took refuge in 1948, then in Montréal, Canada, before moving to France. Characterized by terse language and strong rhythms, her poetry shows a deep sensitivity to the Palestinian cause, the plight of refugees, and human suffering. Her work, translated into English, Arabic, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, appeared in anthologies and numerous journals, including Arablit, Asymptote Journal, Plume Poetry, Poetry Daily, Poetry London, The Barcelona Review, Circulo de Poesía, Nayagua, Arablit, Al Araby-Al- Jedeed and, in France, Apulée, Poezibao, Poésie première, and Phoenix. With Chaos, Crossing, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, she made her English-language debut, probing deeply into the upheavals of the 20th and 21st centuries. Published in November 2022 by World Poetry, the collection was reviewed by Poetry Foundation and figures among World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translations of 2022 and onWords Without Borders’ November Watchlist. In September 2023 appeared, in a limited illustrated edition, Your Name, Palestine, a chapbook translated by Sarah Riggs and Jérémy Victor Robert (World Poetry Books).

Jérémy Robert is a translator between English and French who works and lives in his native Réunion Island. He published French translations of Sarah Riggs’ Murmurations (APIC, 2021, with Marie Borel), Donna Stonecipher’s Model City (joca seria, 2020), and Etel Adnan’s Sea & Fog (L’Attente, 2015). He recently translated Chibuihe Obi Achimba’s poem, “a sonnet: a slaughter field,” which was published on Poezibao’s website, and Michael Palmer’s Little Elegies for Sister Satan, excerpts of which were posted online by Revue Catastrophes. Together with Sarah Riggs, he translated Olivia Elias’ Your Name, Palestine (World Poetry Books, 2023).

***

Read more from Translation Tuesdays on the Asymptote blog:

 

Translation Tuesday: From “A Bathtub in the Desert” by Jadd Hilal

October 10, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Bryan Flavin

His shell was gigantic and green, with glints of bronze, copper, and gold.

This Translation Tuesday, we present a fairy tale encounter amid dark signs of a war’s beginning, elegantly entwined and counterposed by Jadd Hilal. The lonely Adel discovers two improbable creatures in his wardrobe, and they become his first real friends. In the outside world, meanwhile, something horrible is unfolding: school is cancelled, the local protests are turning ugly, shots ring out at night, and militias have begun to roam the streets. 

We reproduce here a note from Hilal’s translator, Bryan Flavin, who tells us more about the author and his work. 

A note from the translator:

L’Orient du Jour described A Bathtub in the Desert, Jadd Hilal’s acclaimed second novel, as “The Other Little Prince…[its] endearing narrator reminiscent of Saint-Exupéry.” Yet while Saint-Exupéry and Hilal both confront the expectations assigned to childhood and adulthood, Hilal does so within a different context, one of war and exile:

When war breaks out, Adel’s life changes forever. Fortunately he still has his two giant imaginary insect friends, Darwin and Tardigrade, to help him escape. Strained to make decisions beyond his maturity, Adel finds himself at a desert outpost where the combatants act like children, and the sheikh, leader of the outpost, forces him to grow up. Throughout, Adel must learn what it means to be an adult, traversing war and exile, friendship and isolation, innocence and identity.

With emotion and stylistic minimalism, the novel challenges the typical Bildungsroman in two ways: 1) it asks readers to re-examine and contextualize the biases surrounding childhood and adulthood; and 2) it subverts the Bildungsroman’s gradual trajectory, instead marked by Adel’s navigation of traumatic experience. The following translation is an excerpt, starting when Adel first meets Darwin and ending right before the start of the war.

A Bathtub in the Desert

When I say I didn’t have any real friends, that’s not entirely true—I did have one friend: my giant beetle. He appeared the night my parents announced their divorce. I still remember that night—I opened the door to my massive wardrobe and found him there, next to the toy plane my father had given me for my third birthday, the dozens of stones I’d collected on the roads, and the cardboard box decorated with lentils I’d made for my mother at school, along with a number of other memories.

I should say, I only ever used my wardrobe for this—for keeping memories. I had convinced my parents to buy me a dresser for my clothes, but in exchange, I had to give up my large jar filled with the Chiclets I used to collect. Not a bad deal. Besides, I ended up needing the space. Without it, I would’ve missed out on my very first friend.

Even though he was definitely a beetle, the thing that made me slam the wardrobe shut and rush back to my bed—the thing I forgot to mention—he was as big and as tall as a grown-up.

“Who are you?”

I remember fumbling back to the wardrobe door and opening it. He was still there.

“What do you want?”

He didn’t speak, but his eyes told me he was scared. Now that I think of it—he didn’t really look like a beetle at all. Instead of tiny little legs, he had two long ones, like us. He wore midnight blue dress pants with white pinstripes and white polished shoes. Above that: nothing. All black with only a pair of eyes at the very top. Blue eyes with wrinkles around the corners. As if he were smiling.

READ MORE…

Four-in-the-Morning Literature: On Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq

September 20, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Meghan Racklin

Insomnia does strange things to time, or time does strange things to insomniacs—it estranges, stretches, slips.

Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq, translated from the French by Penny Hueston, Semiotext(e), 2023

While writing this review, I began making a list of everything I’ve tried in my attempts to fall asleep. The first was reading, which didn’t help me fall asleep at all (though not sleeping has helped immensely with reading). The second, which I tried after the first time I told a doctor about my trouble sleeping at age eleven, was melatonin, and I took it dutifully, in varying doses, until stopping cold a year ago. I sleep no better and no worse since. Over the years, I have also tried: valerian root, passionflower, marijuana, CBD gel, NyQuil, keeping my phone in another room, counting sheep, white noise, earplugs, Xanax, watching the same six television shows over and over again, an eye mask, new sheets, exercise, an early and consistent alarm. I have a prescription for trazadone but don’t take it (the benefits of simply being in possession of sleeping pills are often extolled to insomniacs, though I haven’t noticed any). I often end up listing all the people I love, and this last is perhaps least helpful—I always end up imagining what I would say if asked to give a eulogy, or what they would say if they gave one for me. Sometimes I end up in tears, still sleepless.

This is insomniac thinking: each line on a list bends and branches outwards. Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq, in Penny Hueston’s translation, is written in this “totally insomniac mode.” The book, a meditation on this condition, is comprised of lists, footnoted investigations into the history of sleeping and not sleeping, worries about the meaning and morality of insomnia in the face of genocide and climate catastrophe, and a compendium of quotes and anecdotes about sleepless writers or the characters to whom they’ve lent their insomnia. It includes a two-page spread of photos of hotel rooms Darrieussecq has stayed—though often not slept—in. Researching, worrying, organizing, reading: all insomniac activities, which lead as easily away from sleep as towards it.

She circles around sleep, doubles back, spiraling like a Louise Bourgeois drawing (the artist, a prolific insomniac herself, often drew spiraling shapes when awake late at night, but spiraling which way?). Darrieussecq enacts insomnia in her style; the book is fragmentary, intense, shifting. Her metaphors are hypnagogic, caught between reality and analogy: “we insomniacs plummet into horrendous ravines and the bags under our eyes are bruise colored.” Metaphor, incidentally, is one of the things on Darrieussecq’s list of things she’s tried to help her sleep. “I tell myself that a good sleep would be to sleep like a mountain,” she writes, “Oh, metaphors, metaphors.” This effort, of course, failed.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2023

September 11, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Meghan Racklin and Samantha Siefert

New translations from the Catalan and the French!

This month in newly released translations, we’re featuring two authors of inimitable voice and style. From the Catalan, a surrealist masterpiece by Ventura Ametller sharply blends history with mysticism in an epic retelling of the Spanish Civil War; and from the French, the latest text by Annie Ernaux returns to some of the author’s most central themes—sex and memory—in a poignant examination of corporeal and psychological navigations.

Summa Kaotica by Ventura Ametller (Bonaventura Clavaguera), translated from the Catalan by Douglas Suttle, Fum d’Estampa, 2023

Review by Samantha Siefert, Marketing Manager

A monstrosity of a fish gnashes at a tiger, the tiger leaps towards a gun, the gun is aimed perilously at the prone body of a nude woman. . . It’s all so unexpected and moving, but what do these objects have to do with one another—or with anything at all?

Such is surrealism: the challenge of reconciling the disparity of absurdity. “Everything leads us to believe that there exists a spot in the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the high and the low, the communicable and the incommunicable will cease to appear contradictory,” declared André Breton in his manifesto. Riding on the coattails of Dadaism, surrealism emerged as an impulsive reaction to the tragedy of the First World War: If reason had resulted in such great suffering, then what good was a movement rooted in realism?

The antithesis of reason, then, was the way forward, and the efforts of the avant-garde were so resonant that they continue to exist today as comfortable figures of popular culture, where the discordance of fish, tiger, and gun feel almost familiar in Salvador Dalí’s famous painting, “The Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening.” The surrealist world of letters, however, leave room for discovery.

In Catalonia with Dalí at the beginning of the twentieth century, the writer Ventura Ametller—the pen name of Bonaventura Clavaguera—was hard at work, producing a prolific collection of poetry, essays, and novels that turn the world upside down in raucous prose, described by essayist Lluís Racionero as “Dalí in words.” His work has remained only quietly appreciated, but perhaps the time has come for that to change with the new publication of Ametller’s groundbreaking magnum opus, Summa Kaotica, in a masterful translation from the Catalan by Douglas Suttle. READ MORE…

On Translating Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine: An Interview with Conor Bracken and Jake Syersak

September 7, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Khalid Lyamlahy

Khaïr-Eddine is not ready to be relegated to the annals of history. He still has history to make.

In recent years, the work of Moroccan poet and writer Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine (1941–1995) has received increasing attention, both in Morocco and abroad. One of the cofounders of Souffles/Anfas, the influential journal of culture and politics established in 1966, Khaïr-Eddine played a major role in the renewal of Moroccan and North African literature. His practice of what he called “linguistic guerrilla warfare” is based on the distortion of French language and the use of unconventional and subversive imagery. Some major features of Khaïr-Eddine’s unruly prose and poetry are generic hybridity, acerbic political critique, anti-authoritarian spirit, and the celebration of his native Amazigh (or Berber) land and culture. Most of his works, published with Editions du Seuil in Paris in the 1960s and 1970s, have long been out of print.

The recent (and long-awaited) surge of interest in Khaïr-Eddine’s oeuvre is due in large part to the work of dedicated and passionate translators, including Conor Bracken and Jake Syersak. The former translated Khaïr-Eddine’s first poetry collection Scorpionic Sun (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2019). The latter co-translated with Pierre Joris Khaïr-Eddine’s masterpiece Agadir (Lavender Ink / Diálogos, 2020) and translated three of his other works: I, Caustic (Litmus Press, 2022), Resurrection of Wild Flowers (OOMPH! Press, 2022) and Proximal Morocco—  (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023). The following interview explores their relationship with Khaïr-Eddine’s work and illuminates the context, process, and challenges of their translations. It also addresses their most recent and future translation projects. 

Khalid Lyamlahy (KL): What was your first exposure to Khaïr-Eddine’s work and why did you decide to translate it?

Conor Bracken (CB): I first encountered Khaïr-Eddine’s work in 2015, in Poems for the New Millenium IV: The University of California Book of North African Literature (2013). Pierre Joris recommended I look through it when I asked him where I might find francophone poetry to translate, and when I read the poems of Khaïr-Eddine’s in there, I felt an unmistakable urgency, a fierce need not just to get out whatever was inside the mind behind these poems but to communicate with someone. It was like I’d been grabbed and shaken. Up to that moment I hadn’t found that in francophone or French poetry, which felt stately or methodical or cerebral, but this struck me. Not like an idea flashing in the mind’s sky, but like I was a door that needed to be opened. I wanted to translate that sensation.

Jake Syersak (JS): I first discovered Khaïr-Eddine’s work through the few translations that Pierre Joris had included in the same volume. At the time, I was a PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. It was 2016 and looking more and more likely that the extreme right was going to successfully worm its way into the United States presidency. It was distressing, to say the least. I remember sitting in the library there, thumbing through volumes of contemporary French poetry, searching for a translation project that I could make part of my exams. All of them seemed to me like such white noise in the current political climate. I wanted to find a meaningful project—one that might, in whatever meager way, contribute to the struggle against the rising tide of GOP-fueled populist xenophobia.

Khaïr-Eddine’s poems were exactly what I needed in that moment: laced with vitriol, unwilling to compromise, fiercely anti-authoritarian, and stretching the utopian limits of imagination. Everything clicked into place from there. I had spent the bulk of my academic career up to that point studying avant garde and experimental poetics, with an emphasis on Surrealism and its revolutionary potential. Khaïr-Eddine’s work opened me up to a whole new class of writers who saw that potential and applied it with all their strength.

KL: What was your level of familiarity with Moroccan/Maghrebi literature and politics before embarking on the translation? Did you use any resources to help you prepare the translation?

JS: Very close to zero. I think I had read some Abdellatif Laâbi here and there. And of course I knew of the Négritude poets, to whom Khaïr-Eddine and others of his ilk are indebted. Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio’s Souffles-Anfas anthology (Stanford University Press, 2016) was essential to a speedy contextual education.

CB: My level of familiarity with the literature at that point was low, though I had some familiarity with the political and cultural history of Morocco and the Maghreb writ large—my family lived in Rabat for a few years, and I visited and traveled several times, so had some experience with Moroccan places, landscapes, people, and culture. While I worked on Khaïr-Eddine’s book Scorpionic Sun, I read up on him as much as possible. I also delved more deeply into “les années de plomb”/King Hassan II’s rule, and read a lot about Souffles/Anfas, the journal founded by Abdellatif Laâbi that, coupled with various political actions and protests, led to the exile of Khaïr-Eddine, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and others, as well as to Laâbi’s long imprisonment. An invaluable resource was the critical anthology, edited by Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio, on Souffles/Anfas.

KL: Conor, what was the translation process of Khaïr-Eddine’s 1969 poetry collection Soleil arachnide like? Did you work on each poem separately and/or move back and forth between the poems?

CB: Though the poems in Soleil arachnide aren’t what anyone would call straightforward, the process of translating it generally was. First I transcribed it into a Word doc, in part to be able to ctrl-F my way through it, but also to get a feel for the poems themselves—how they moved on their own, how they gained power and definition when placed side by side. Once I finished that, I translated linearly, working until a poem felt like it was in a good place before moving to the next. I repeated this process five more times, going front to back each time, over three years. Doing it this way gave me clear boundaries about where to start and where to stop, though translating longer poems like “Le roi” (“The King”) or “Soleil arachnide” (“Scorpionic Sun”) was challenging. If we think of translating as a kind of reconstruction, dismantling a building to rebuild it on different land, then doing that for these poems was like rebuilding a whole town. But it was valuable, as a translator, to feel the poems’ relentlessness, the incredible ferocious vigor that erected them and somehow had them balancing in the precarious air through sheer force. READ MORE…

Louisiana Literature Festival: Portraits of Language in the Flux of Loss

August 28, 2023  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

Just beyond the white backdrop of the stage, a multiplicity of silent, unspoken languages lingers.

From August 17 to 20, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Zealand, Denmark, hosted the twelfth edition of the annual Louisiana Literature Festival. Since 2010, on the lawns parenthesized between Louisiana’s wings and the Øresund Strait, authors from around the world—including Adonis, César Aira, Olga Tokarczuk, László Krasznahorkai, Mariana Enríquez, and Itō Hiromi—have participated in readings, interviews, and conversations. The festival has also regularly hosted the most exciting names in Danish literature, such as Naja Marie Aidt, Dorthe Nors, and Signe Gjessing. This year, Asymptote’s Assistant Editor Michelle Chan Schmidt was in attendance, and reports now on the festival’s fascinating intersections, discussions, and performances. 

The Louisiana Literature Festival has no theme, and as such, widely varying discussions of language and writing recur across the four days. In this year’s line-up of forty authors, sixteen write in languages other than Danish. Most of them are authors of English or Swedish, and thus there are only a few individuals representing other languages: Haruki Murakami in Japanese, Constance Debré in French, Claudia Durastanti in Italian, Eva Menasse in German, Camila Sosa Villada in Spanish, and Fríða Ísberg and Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir in Icelandic. Despite the limitations of this Euro-heavy selection, the festival’s vibrant dialogues present studies across language—including that of signs, of family, and of binaries in societies marked by syntaxes that divide rather than combine. In an interview, the Irish English-language writer Claire Keegan says that “narrative feeds on loss,” and this idea of loss feeds back across the festival’s symphony of languages in conversation.

Icelandic:

During an interview with her Danish translator, Erik Skyum-Nielsen, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir states that her favorite childhood books were dictionaries. Each letter was a new chapter in a book of thirty-two chapters—a history of a language “in the margins” of global literature. Writers like Ólafsdóttir and Fríða Ísberg, as well as their translators across most European languages (with the addition of Arabic and Turkish in the case of Ísberg’s novel, The Mark), are instrumental in not only the continuance of Icelandic literature, but also in diversifying Icelandic modes of expression in a language anchored in the legacy of the sagas.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “She Sits Beneath Her Father’s Olive Tree” by Audefroi Le Bastart

August 22, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Timothy Perry

Whoever has love’s grief and pain / Should also have love’s joy.

This Translation Tuesday, a melodic love story for the ages floats in the air, transporting us to a time of dueling knights and castle towers. Hear from Timothy Perry, translator of “She Sits Beneath Her Father’s Olive Tree” by Audefroi Le Bastart, on appropriation in the layered histories of France’s medieval weaving songs: an oral tradition of working women recorded in writing by men:

“The weaving songs of medieval France do not survive. Which is to say, the traditional songs of women engaged in textile work—a largely oral tradition—do not survive. In their place, we have approximations to this genre written by men in a purely literary context. These literary weaving songs, with their themes of courtly love, (artfully) simple language, and repetitive rhythms, attempt to preserve the ‘feel’ of the oral tradition, but their appropriation of it results in a problematic shift in perspective—narratives involving the objectification and abuse of women take on an entirely different tenor when taken from a context of women’s work and transformed into a male literary exercise. The resulting poems have been considered among the finest lyrical creations of medieval French literature, but their casual misogyny raises timely (and timeless) questions about how we should read aesthetically accomplished but morally tarnished works, and how we should translate them.

The ‘weaving song’ translated here tells the story of Idoine and the obstacles to her love. The poem upends the conventions of courtly love by presenting everything—even martial pursuits—though Idoine’s eyes, resulting in a complex layering of gender: a male poet writing in a female genre presents male activities through the eyes of a female character. Despite this complexity, the misogyny outlined above remains very much present and I have tried both to draw attention to and undercut it. For example, the French text mentions the aesthetic qualities of Idoine’s hair even as she is being dragged by it, but in an unemphatic way: ‘[the queen] takes her by the hair, which she has blonde like wool’. I have heightened this aestheticization of Idoine’s suffering by overtranslating the prosaic ‘takes’ as ‘grasps’ and by expanding the description of the hair from half a line to a whole line and setting it off between dashes. Elsewhere, however, I employ vocabulary not found in the French to undercut the poem’s ‘happy’ ending. Twice my translation describes Idoine as the ‘captive’ of her love Garsiles. On the first occasion, the French simply says that her love for him ‘preoccupies’ her; on the second, which occurs at a point in the poem when her father is literally holding her captive in a tower, the French simply says that she is still ‘taken with’ Garsiles. And when Garsiles fights to rescue Idoine, after which they will marry, I describe him as ‘an iron tower of strength’, though the French says merely that he has ‘prowess and strength’. By presenting Garsiles as a tower and Idoine as his captive, I try to suggest that Idoine’s plight as a wife may not be so different from what it was as a daughter.

Despite these changes in emphasis, my translation attempts to preserve the straightforward vocabulary and syntax of the original; to reflect the importance of rhythm in weaving songs, I have employed a fairly strict iambic pentameter.”

She sits beneath her father’s olive tree
And carries on a quarrel with her love.
Her sighing heart complains: ‘Such suffering!
No song, no flute, no music moves me now:
Without you here I have no will to live.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

How long must I endure this misery?
How long, my love, tormented by your love?
I am your captive, Count Garsiles, and I
Will waste my youth on weeping and on tears,
With no escape unless I feel your touch.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

I curse the hour in which my father called
For war, a war that brought your army to
This place, a war that you, by strength of arms,
Soon turned to peace—but not before it took
The lives of many knights. I curse the hour!
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

But all this country would have been laid waste
And all the common people left to die
If you had not brought peace—if you had not
With reckless charges, wild assaults, brought peace.
And now, in love, I lie awake at night.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

War at an end, peace in the land, and you,
Your army waiting, ready to depart,
Offered yourself, a blameless man, to me—
A blameless man, the robber of my heart.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

To trace your beauty is my greatest joy:
So elegant, so noble and refined—
You never seek to do me any harm.
Such is my love that I could never be
Distressed, or wish my heart my own again.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

What can I do, my love? I am in such
Distress! Your beauty, strength—your gentleness—
Have lodged love’s wounding arrow in my heart;
No one but you can cut it out again,
For both the arrow and the heart are yours.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

While beautiful Idoine weeps and laments
The man she loves, the man she would consume…
But look! Her servant, searching anxiously,
Comes running down the grassy path and finds
Her lady, overcome by misery.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

‘My lady, please, you must rein in your heart—
You have indulged your anger and your pain
Too much today. The king and queen have seen
How you behave. They say it lacks good sense.’
Too late! Now all is lost—her mother comes.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

The queen now grasps her hair—she has blonde hair,
Pale as a fleece—and makes her stand before
The king; she lists her faults—she knows them well—
And he replies: ‘Take her at once and lock
Her in the highest tower. But beat her first.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

He has the girl ungirdled and undressed
And any part of her his rein can reach
He strikes; he turns her flesh from white to red.
At last, believing that her punishment
Is just, he has her locked in a high tower.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

Now beautiful Idoine is left alone,
Locked in the tower; but even there her heart
Remains unchanged—such is her love for Count
Garsiles that she holds nothing dearer in
The world. He holds her captive and she weeps.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

Three years Idoine is kept locked in the tower,
Three years, three mournful, tearful, rueful years.
‘My love,’ she says, ‘how long I wait for you!
Such is my love—such is my rage—they hold
Me in this tower, where I will die for you.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

She cries aloud again; she weeps; she says:
‘Locked in this tower, my love, I have endured
For you so many weeks of pain-filled love…
I’m overcome by weakness…cannot stand…’
She speaks; she faints; she—voiceless, breathless—falls.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

The king now hears the cries and stands amazed—
He wonders that they do not die away.
Quick as a deer he comes, runs to the tower,
And finds Idoine, his daughter, in her faint.
He takes her in his arms, no longer glad.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

The king is speechless in his grief; the queen
Approaches, anguished, overcome. At last,
When beautiful Idoine, sighing, revives,
He says: ‘This love, Idoine, it sickens you.’
And when she can reply: ‘I know, my king,
That I must die, and die in misery.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

‘Daughter, how pale you have become, how changed—
This is no feigned, no counterfeited love!
A love so true that it will be your death.’
‘Without Garsiles I am already dead.
There is no need for this imprisonment.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

‘But if you wish to marry I could find
Some royal son, some proud and powerful prince.’
‘I will not marry any man but him,
The count Garsiles—so wise, so beautiful,
And (but for you) as brave as any knight.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

At last he understands—she will not look
Elsewhere. The king declares a tournament—
Why wait?—to be held there in the broad space
Beneath the tower. He offers as a prize
Idoine, refined, beyond the least reproach.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

Word of the trial—word of the prize—soon spreads,
More pleasing to the ear than harp or viol.
All say that they will go to win the girl,
To shatter lances in the name of love.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

The knights arrive from many far off lands—
Driven by love, not one remains behind.
Their gorgeous banners crowd around the tower—
Garsiles is there, and all his company.
The tournament begins and all fight hard.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

Idoine—is there a purer name in France?—
Now watches from her window as the knights
Advance and, out of love, she gives her love
Her sleeve; he throws himself into the fight—
No purer knight has ever held a lance.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

The Tournament beneath the Ancient Tower—
A noble tournament. Each does his best
To win Idoine, but she cries out for help:
‘Garsiles, you must not hesitate to fight
With any knight and throw him from his mount.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

An iron tower of strength, Garsiles fights well;
He breaks the shield of every knight he meets—
Breaks it like bark—and with the shield the man;
All this for love of beautiful Idoine.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

Garsiles has won the tournament; the king
Gives him the prize; the prize becomes his wife.
He takes her back in honour to his lands.
Their love is faithful, sweet, and true—at last
Idoine has won all that her heart desires.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

Translated from the French by Timothy Perry

Audefroi le Bastart was from Arras in Northern France and was active in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, but beyond that little is known of his life. Of the twenty or so poems identified as belonging to the genre of weaving song, five have been securely attributed to him, more than to any other poet. Arras was an important literary centre during Audefroi’s life and he may have had ties with other well-known poets from the town, including Jean Bodel, Conon de Béthune, and Adam de la Halle.

Timothy Perry is the Medieval Manuscript and Early Book Librarian at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. He holds a PhD in Classics and has published on ancient and medieval Greek literature and the history of the book. His current project is a translation of the complete surviving corpus of Old French weaving songs.

***

Read more from Translation Tuesdays on the Asymptote blog:

Translation Tuesday: “to make a world habitable” by Mireille Gansel

August 1, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Joan Seliger Sidney

A Heimat-country. Where to put your cries without words emotions memories traumas beyond all languages.

This Translation Tuesday, we present Mireille Gansel’s account of a visit to a “Heimatmuseum” in Montafon, Austria, whose purpose it is to change what we mean by “Heimat”—a charged, tainted word—and to demonstrate its kinder, hearth-like, more inclusive connotations. We present also a note from the translator, Joan Seliger Sidney:

After reading several of Mireille Gansel’s poems about the Holocaust—we are both second generation survivors—I chose to translate them. The more I read, the more I saw how broad her scope, including translating all of Nelly Sachs’ poems, as well as the correspondence between Sachs and Celan; also translating and anthologizing Vietnamese poets; in addition, writing her own poems about refugees, and about their migrations as well as bird migrations, and our everyday environment. Gansel is a much-awarded poet, translator, and memoirist. Her Traduire Comme Transhumer (translated by Ros Schwartz) has contributed significantly to the field of translation studies. Translating her poems is an honor.

to make a word habitable focuses on centuries of “migrations of misery and survival,” and how this Heimatmuseum—once taken over by the Nazis but since restored by its director and the community—with its “humble objects” bears witness to these migrations. This poem also shows us how these “asylum seekers” were welcomed by their neighbors and have become contributing partners to their new village. This poem makes us question, why, in our country, founded by both indigenous peoples and immigrants, refugee populations are being randomly picked up coming home from doing jobs Americans refuse to do, and being deported.

We have much to learn from this Heimat country and from Mireille Gansel’s poems and memoir.

— Joan Seliger Sidney

to make a word habitable

                                                                                                     a thousand times more native…
              the earth where all is free and fraternal
my earth
—Aimé Césaire

like a letter to Bruno Winkler
historian and educator at Montafon in the Vorarlberg

this winter morning. The village of Schruns of the municipality of Montafon. Mountains around and narrow streets all buried in the snow. And up to the small square where one finds the museum. Heimatmuseum: how to translate this word? and then Heimat? The native country and the house, home, the home. A word where there is intimacy: perhaps because in the Middle Ages the strong accent was put on the vowel that preceded the “t,” and was pronounced “o,” thus creating a misunderstanding with Mut. A word that speaks of qualms.

Heimat oscillates between the intimate and the collective, between the spiritual and the terrestrial. A “sensitive” word of the sort that exists in every language, marked with the stamp of a History. So the German language forged in the spiritual, moral, political hearth of the translation Luther made of the Bible.

Yes, how to translate today: Heimatmuseum? And first, how to understand it? Doubtless by taking into account the layers of history deposited in the word Heimat and this museum subjugated by Nazism. Perhaps also by on-the-spot visits. Taking the pulse. In the field.

READ MORE…

States of Alienation: Dana Shem-Ur and Yardenne Greenspan on Where I Am

July 19, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

That’s a major part of translation: to make sure that it’s still the original book.

Our June Book Club selection, Dana Shem-Ur’s Where I Am, is a novel that looks intensely at the dissonances of daily life in the aftermath of migrancy, profoundly reaching below the surface of superficial comfort to read the disassociations and discontents that stem from being not quite in-place. Reaching into the mind of an Israeli translator named Reut who has settled in France, Shem-Ur constructs a map of navigations amidst cultural codes, languages, and physical agitations, drawing out the anxiety of belonging. In this interview, we speak to Shem-Ur and translator Yardenne Greenspan about this novel’s simmering frustrations and the new Israeli diaspora, and how they have both used language to reflect the confounding boundaries of our social fabric.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Laurel Taylor (LT): Dana, I’d like to ask you about what sparked the creation of this novel—particularly as you’re already a translator and scholar. How did Where I Am come about?

Dana Shem-Ur (DS): I come from a family of a female authors. My mom is a poet, and my grandma wrote over thirty books, so I always was involved in this world. In fact, when I was little, I didn’t even read a lot. I just wrote fiction, and even published a small novella of one hundred pages when I was about twelve.

Then I dropped it because I was engaged in studying history, and I channeled my life of writing into other domains. It was only later on, when I was in Paris for three years for my master’s degree in philosophy, that I just came home one summer and wrote the first few pages.

I think what generated this novel was my certainty that I would remain in France, and I would have a life there. I began writing this story about a woman who is twenty years older than me and lives in Paris, but she’s unhappy, and I think part of it was just a reflection of my fears. What will become of me? Will I become Reut?

LT: It’s almost like speculative autofiction?

DS: Yeah. I didn’t even notice it when I wrote it, but it was also inspired by a lot of characters that I met. No character in Where I Am is a real person, but the salon of people at the Jean-Claude household are all inspired by people I met and by these talks and these Parisian intellects, who I always found very fascinating; they are my friends, but throughout the period I lived there, I felt there was a barrier between us. I was always the observer who was looking at this spectacle, not completely present, like Reut. I’m very fascinated by foreign cultures, so it felt like something I needed to write about. READ MORE…

Announcing Our June Book Club Selection: Where I Am by Dana Shem-Ur

June 29, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

Reut senses more and more how even common tongues can quickly become incommensurable walls, especially within the confines of her family.

In our global village, a great many of us have found ourselves in liminal states between cultures, countries, languages, and selves—whether in travel or in daily life. As the world becomes seemingly smaller, however, our internal universes have continued to expand and multiply, as demonstrated in Dana Shem-Ur’s penetrating and incisive novel, Where I Am—our Book Club selection for the month of June. Portraying the conflicts and multitudes of a woman inhabiting the very definition of a cosmopolitan life, Shem-Ur brilliantly encapsulates the alienations that pervade contemporary existence, tracing all the detritus of when an individual collides with place.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

Where I Am by Dana Shem-Ur, translated from the Hebrew by Yardenne Greenspan, New Vessel, 2023

In the world of literature, the question of one’s own “where” takes on new dimensions. “Where” dances sinuously with class, language, education, climate, religion, politics, and more, each amorphous construct reinforcing and transforming the others, driving back the question of origin into the unknowable. The concept of “where I am” is dictated not only by the objective latitudes and longitudes of geography, but also by the subjective constructs that layer over each other—over “me” and “you.” Reut, the protagonist of Dana Shem-Ur’s Where I Am, translated from the Hebrew by Yardenne Greenspan, embodies this dance even more strongly in her position as a foreign resident and translator, amidst the confusingly cosmopolitan yet prescriptive Paris literary scene.

READ MORE…

The Vertigo of Blue: On Mariette Navarro’s Ultramarine

June 15, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Annilee Newton

With Ultramarine, Mariette Navarro gives us an eerily beautiful portal into the submerged depths of our own interior worlds. . .

Ultramarine, by Mariette Navarro, translated from the French by Cory Stockwell, Héloïse Press, 2023

“There are the living, the dead, and the sailors.”

From the very first words of her short, poetic novel Ultramarine, Mariette Navarro restructures our expectations. We are entering another place where the rules of existence have changed. By challenging one of the most ingrained dichotomies of perception that we have—a person is alive or a person is dead—she begins to weave the shroud of mystery that is cast over the entirety of Ultramarine. The introduction of the sailor sketches out a third liminal space between our assumptions, destabilizing us and setting a tone of wonder and dread that will carry throughout the text. What could it possibly mean to be a sailor?

Our main character is an unnamed female captain of a cargo ship crossing the Atlantic, her life fractured into two pieces. In one part, she lives on solid land, waiting uneasily for the moment when she will be reunited with crew and ship. The second part of her life is spent traversing the water, navigating the places between chunks of earth. Strict adherence to protocol has brought her success in a male-dominated career. She now manages a crew of twenty men and the portable world of her metal ship. 

Then, one day, she briefly abandons her own protocol. The crew asks her to stop the ship for a few moments in the middle of the crossing so that they can swim naked in the deepest blue of the ocean. She doesn’t know why she agrees, but she agrees, and this one strange acquiescence sets off a chain of inexplicable events. 

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “To Invite All Creatures to Praise God” by Anne de Marquets

June 13, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Annick MacAskill

Would I not be incredibly ungrateful, / If I didn’t treasure him above all others— / Such a lover, a master, and father?

This Translation Tuesday, we present a devotional sonnet of striking intimacy and palpable gratitude in praise of “this great God who fashioned me so well.” The brilliantly “fashioned” author in question is the 16th century French sonnetist, translator and nun, Anne de Marquets, whose own craftsmanship has been brought into a vivid and forceful English by Annick MacAskill. Her translation sees the very fibers of creation exhorted to sing the praises of their creator, and gives the ardor of de Marquet’s “amour divin” a strange intensity.

O sky and earth, and you, furious seas,
O fields and meadows adorned with blooms and trees,
In short, all things in this great universe,
Praise him, the one whom I love—

He who defeated inglorious Death,
Destroyed sin, and toppled Satan,
Who died through so many martyrs,
To grant me most fortunate redemption.

O such a singular and perfect reward
From this great God who fashioned me so well,
And who will make me as I wish it!

Would I not be incredibly ungrateful,
If I didn’t treasure him above all others—
Such a lover, a master, and father?

Translated from the French by Annick MacAskill

Anne de Marquets (1533?-1588) was a French poet, translator, and Dominican nun. Originally from Normandy, she spent most of her life in the priory of Poissy, where she produced translations of Latin poetry, as well as her own poems on spiritual themes. During her lifetime, several notable French authors, including Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), wrote poems praising her literary talents. Today, she is most famous for her posthumously published Sonets spirituels (Paris, Claude Morel, 1605), a suite of 480 sonnets organized around the liturgical year.

In 1568, Anne de Marquets published her Divines Poesies de Marc Antoine Flaminius (Paris, Nicolas Chesneau; reissued in a slightly expanded edition in 1569), a collection that presents not only her translations of verse by the Neo-Latin writer Flaminio (1498-1550), but original compositions by Marquets. These include her Sonets de l’amour divin, forty devotional sonnets that adapt the language and forms of Renaissance love poetry.

Annick MacAskill is a poet and translator living in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada), on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq. She is the author of three full-length poetry collections, the most recent of which, Shadow Blight (Gaspereau Press, 2022), won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for English-Language Poetry. Her poems have appeared in journals across Canada and in the USA, the Netherlands, and Ireland, as well as in the Best Canadian Poetry anthology series.

MacAskill holds a PhD in French Literature from Western University, where she completed a thesis on the poet and translator Anne de Marquets, and has published several peer-reviewed articles on Marquets and other sixteenth-century French poets. She is currently translating Anne de Marquets’ Sonets de l’amour divin into English and teaching in the Department of Languages and Cultures at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.

***

Read more from Translation Tuesdays on the Asymptote blog: