Language: Russian

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 31, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Meghan Racklin, and Thuy Dinh

The latest literary news from the United States, Vietnam and the Vietnamese Diaspora, and the Philippines!

This week’s roundup of literary news from around the world highlights exciting new publications and publishing trends! From a literary marriage in the United States to the return of a beloved author and history titles in the Philippines, read on to find out more!

Meghan Racklin, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting from the United States

Last week, at their annual awards ceremony—in person again for the first time since the onset of the pandemic—the National Book Critics Circle awarded the inaugural Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize to Grey Bees by Andrew Kurkov, translated by Boris Dralyuk. The new award brings attention to books translated into English and published in the United States, where only a small number of books in translation are published each year—Publishers Weekly’s translation database lists only 419 books in translation published in the United States in 2022.

Dralyuk, the award winner, is a poet and critic as well as a translator and until recently was the Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His translation was selected from a competitive group of finalists which, notably, also included the translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob by Jennifer Croft—Dralyuk’s wife. Prior to the announcement of the award winner, the two gave an interview to the L.A. Times about their relationship to translation and to each other. Croft said “Once we started dating, I would find Boris on my steps, where he would tell me about what he had just translated. He gets so emotionally invested. . . . He’s so careful about every word. It was very moving and, I think, a large part of how we came together.”

READ MORE…

Celebrate International Women’s Day with Women’s Writing!

March 8, 2023  |  in News  |  by The Blog Team

Join us as we highlight the vital contributions of women to literature and translation.

March 8th is International Women’s Day, and we wanted to take the opportunity to lift up the work of women in world literature. Below, find a selection of pieces published on the blog in the past year, across essays, reviews, translations, and interviews, curated to represent the breadth and brilliance of women working in writing.

Interviews

A Conversation on Kurdish Translation with Farangis Ghaderi
by Holly Mason Badra

But when you look deeper, when you look at archives, and look at early Kurdish periodicals, you find women. You discover these forgotten voices. An interesting example of that is Zeyneb Xan, who published under the pseudonym of Kiche Kurd (“Kurdish girl”). In 2018, when a publisher was reprinting Galawej (the first Kurdish literary journal published in 1939–1949), they decided to have sections on contributing writers. They came across this name, and one of the researchers working on the project uncovered that the identity of the writer was Zeyneb Xan (1900–1963), the eldest sister of Dildar—a very well-known figure of Kurdish literature who wrote the Kurdish anthem. Although her family was a literary family and at the center of literary attention, her manuscript remained unpublished until 2018. Her truly fascinating poetry collection covers a wide range of themes from patriotism to women’s education and liberation.

Wild Women: An Interview with Aoko Matsuda and Polly Barton
by Sophia Stewart

For me, films and television programs, as well as books and comics, have always been the places where I can meet outsider women, weirdo women, rebel women, sometimes scary women. When I was a child, I didn’t care if these women were human beings or ghosts or monsters, and I didn’t care if they were from Japan or other countries. I was just drawn to them, encouraged by their existence.

To Protect Oneself From Violence: An Interview with Mónica Ojeda
by Rose Bialer

Maybe if I was born in some other place, I would be writing about something else, but I do believe that Latin America is a very violent continent, especially for women, and in all of our traditions of women’s literature, there have always been women writing horror stories in Latin America. . .  I do believe that it’s because you can’t write about anything else. That’s how you live life. You are afraid for your life. You are scared of the violence in your family, the violence between your friends, the violence in the street. You can’t think about anything else except how to protect yourself from violence.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Snowman’s Son” by Aleksandr Kabanov

March 7, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Marina Eskina

I also am a snowman’s son, despoiled of hearing and sight

This Translation Tuesday, we deliver unflinching poetry from Ukraine that sheds cold light on the child victims of the Russian invasion. On translating Aleksandr Kabanov’s pioneering, at-times enigmatic style, translator Marina Eskina writes: “I chose ‘The Snowman’s Son’ for its expressiveness, force, and, last but not least, because it is more translatable. It includes Biblical references with some overtones from the Russian classical poet Aleksandr Pushkin’s famous poem ‘The Prophet’ which in turn is an allusion to the scene from the Book of Isaiah. My goal as a translator was to preserve these references and allusions without ruining author’s stylistics. Such close reading and search for meanings brought me closer to deciphering Kabanov’s metaphorical universe.” 

The Snowman’s Son

The snow of war that flies askew
ignoring all the rules,
it fiercely pierces us through and through
but partly stays the course.

Snow rested the seventh useless wing
on earth’s frozen spine,
the other luckier six it brought
underground to his son.

There, underground, the rink of ice
glitters and melts with the laughs
of kids killed casually by war:
let’s mold them a dad of snow.

But death is eerily cunning,
it swaps the crown for a pail—
amidst the hasty castling—
a carrot for the cross and nails.

READ MORE…

Winter 2023: Highlights from the Team

February 1, 2023  |  in News  |  by Barbara Halla, Caridad Svich, Ellen Elias-Bursac, Georgina Fooks, Heather Green, Ian Ross Singleton, Janet Phillips, Marina Dora Martino, and Thuy Dinh

Dip your toe into our milestone Winter 2023 issue with these recommendations from our global team!

I found, as I sat down to read this issue, that what I was hungry for was urgency, vitality, wit and I found pieces that gave me what I was looking for. “There’s No Cure for the Dead” by Nazli Karabiyikoglu (tr. Ralph Hubbell) weaves a breathtakingly complex tapestry, rife with competing rhythms and energies. Selim Özdoğan’s “Seven Difficulties and One Ever-Narrowing Path” (tr. Katy Derbyshire) brought exactly the acerbic, incisive voice I needed. The Alfred Döblin story “The Woman Who Walked In Her Sleep” (tr. Joachim Redner) was filled with great verbs, gestures, colors, sounds, taking the reader on a dizzying trajectory, a plummet, really, from the character swanning about Berlin, showing off his colorful fashion ensemble, to a murderous rag doll come to life. Menke Katz’s poems with their structural challenges around diminishing or growing numbers of syllables and the love of Yiddish had me re-reading them and admiring the translation. And Aco Šopov’s deep, painful poems (tr. Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer) after the devastation of the 1963 Skopje earthquake show how despair communicates across decades and has much to say to us about loss and survival now, sixty years later.

—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor

This issue I was particularly blown away by the quality of the interviews published. The César Aira interview conducted by Michal Zechariah is truthfully hilarious, and the line of questioning really allows his trademark wit and absurdism to shine through. I found Geetanjali Shree’s interview with Rose Bialer to be incredibly generous and thoughtful, fascinating and sharp. In both cases, I thought a really strong sense of their writing came through thanks to the interviewers. The visual section brought together two incredible artists—I’m researching the interplay of poetic text and space at the moment, so Lynn Xu’s thinking (teased out by Laura Copelin) really spoke to me, and I appreciated the climate focus of Bahia Shehab’s work, and her interview with Heather Green. Last but certainly not least, I loved Jared Joseph’s review of Johannes Göransson’s Summer. As a researcher, Göransson’s thinking on poetry translation has been incredibly insightful, and I enjoyed the same insights applied to his work, really engaging in depth with poetry as a genre and mode of being. As a bonus, I thought the criticism section was pleasantly varied in terms of geographies and genres!

—Georgina Fooks, Director of Outreach

All the fiction pieces in this issue are truly marvelous, as if they’re in conversation with one another! For example, Kim Cho Yeop’s “Laura” (tr. Sukyoung Sukie Kim) and Dalih Sembiring’s “Floccinaucinihilipilificatius” (tr. Avram Maurits) can be seen as companion pieces, as both stories deal with corporeal limitations and spiritual transcendence. Laura’s sci-fi context, on various conditions related to body dysmorphia, eloquently evokes the plight of non-binary and transgender groups, while Floccinaucinihilipilificatius represents a metaphorical lotus—its trajectory from pain and putrefaction toward the light of maternal love. There’s a sense of metaphysical wonder to both stories—even though one is inspired by science and the other by magical realism. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Grigori Dashevsky

January 17, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Ainsley Morse and Timmy Straw

break, or blunt at least / this needle of mine

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you two poems by Russian literary critic and poet Grigori Dashevsky. In translating Dashevsky’s singular style, translator Timmy Straw writes: “Dashevsky’s poems are difficult to translate, for several reasons: their extreme compression and economy; their knotted, almost secretive syntax; their aslant musicality; the often-outright weirdness of their “aboutness”; and the span of their references, from the familiar (Homer, the Bible) to the less-so (Russian folklore, Orthodoxy, the bodily knowledge of Russian/Soviet apartment blocks). And some of the passages that land in Russian—lines that salt their revelation with sobriety, or ground it in the pleasures of sound, or both—just vibrate at too high a pitch in English.”

Not Self Nor People 

Not self nor people
are here, and never are.
The commandment illuminates
thistle, burdock, mosquito.

A feeble singing whines,
a no-see-um saw:
as if some evil sawed away
and an innocent suffered,
gone paler than white.

But the law without people
in unpeopled spaces shines:
no evil, no forbearance,
no face here—only the flickering
winglet of a mosquito.

Neskuchnyi Garden (3)

1
Let’s go out for some air,
talk a little there.
Air, like another’s heart
you can’t be seen
and til the grave are true.
It pleases you, in any case,
to warm yourself
with my voice. READ MORE…

Texts in Context: José Vergara on the Russian Afterlife of James Joyce

January 9, 2023  |  in Texts in Context  |  by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

[I]t made me slow down to appreciate how that convoluted language makes us understand life and experience anew.

This is the third edition of Texts in Context, a column in which Katarzyna Bartoszyńska seeks out academics who contribute to and elucidate the world of literary translation, revealing their deeper studies into texts both well-known and overlooked.  

Today, we trace the legacy of James Joyce to its significant resonance in Russian literature, which José Vergara examines in his cogent and deeply-researched text, All Future Plunges to the Past. By taking the work of five major Russian writers as example, Vergara illuminates the throughline of Joycean ideas and themes, both in their universality and their recontextualization and transformation amidst Soviet and Russian history. In this following interview, Vergara discusses how these writers used Joyce to make sense of their own realities, Russian-language literature in this present moment, and texts from within the prison.

Katarzyna Bartoszynska (KB): Tell me about All Future Plunges to the Past!  

José Vergara (JV): My book examines James Joyce’s impact on Russian literature from the mid-1920s, when the first Soviet translations started appearing, through 2020. Of course, that basically means I’m looking at his “influence”—but it goes beyond that. I’m more interested in how, on one hand, Joyce became emblematic of larger trends in Russian attitudes toward Modernism, intertextuality, generational conflicts, artistic identity, and other big issues; and, on the other hand, he took on various forms or manifestations based on how certain Russian writers read him—literally and figuratively. Previous scholars had examined the critical response to Joyce in the Soviet Union and émigré communities, but they paid much less attention to his place in Russian literature itself. So, in All Future Plunges to the Past, I present five case studies of major writers who addressed Joyce directly in their fiction: Yury Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin. The book explores how and why they were drawn to Joyce’s novels and ideas, interpreting them as an alternative path in world literature based on their respective biographical, historical, and cultural contexts. In this reading, Joyce becomes a prism through which to interrogate the question of cultural heritage in Russia, and a means for these writers to better understand themselves and their work. That’s at the core of the book: the question of literary lineages and how artists fashion their own histories through their writing.

KB: How artists fashion their own histories in their writing: could you say a little more about that?

JV: The central through line of my book is fathers and children, primarily sons. It struck me that the aforementioned writers were all, in one way or another, engaging with Joyce’s Shakespeare theory, which Stephen Dedalus explains in episode nine of Ulysses. Basically, he argues that creative artists, such as Shakespeare, become fathers to themselves by leaving behind their works, their lineage, a version of themselves for posterity to—hopefully—admire. At the same time, Stephen suggests that you have to select a literary forefather to supplant the biological. Each of the writers I feature consider this theory and respond to it in their idiosyncratic ways. For instance, Nabokov’s protagonist in The Gift pursues this path, but not to replace his biological father, who disappeared on a scientific expedition. Instead, like Nabokov, he wants to unite the cultural heritage that he lost as a result of the 1917 Revolution, and to bridge those gaps in emigration. All their readings of Joyce are operating on this metatextual level, as they come to terms with who they are in the history of Russian literature. READ MORE…

Hate Makes Us Weak

November 19, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Vladimir Vertlib

We should never forget that this war is about defending freedom, democracy and truth against dictatorship, chauvinism and lies.

As Europeans try to make sense of the war on their doorstep, boycotts targeting Russia have reached past the country’s oil exports to its poets, painters and tennis players. The invasion of Ukraine earlier this year set off the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II; it also, according to past contributor Vladimir Vertlib (tr. Julie Winter), inspired a wave of “outright hostility” against Russian literature. This thoughtful essay by the Vienna-based Jewish Russian writer is an argument about the baby and the bathwater—Pushkin and Putin—and a strident call for nuance in wartime.

When I was a child, other people always knew who I was better than I did. One day my parents told me that I was Jewish. But I wanted to be a Leningradian because I was born in Leningrad, known today as St. Petersburg. My parents laughed. They said that you could be a Jew and someone from Leningrad, that was no problem, even if you lived in Vienna. I didn’t feel Austrian or Viennese at that time, although I was undoubtedly at home in our neighborhood Brigittenau. To this day, parts of this Viennese district, as well as the adjoining Leopoldstadt, have remained the only place in the world where I feel I belong.

This ambivalent identity confusion was soon as much a part of my being as was my accent-free German and everyone’s mispronunciation of my first name, which I accepted and eventually even adopted myself. For my Austrian classmates and teachers, however, the matter was perfectly clear: I was a typical Russian. Why I was “typical” was a mystery to me because whenever my classmates or teachers described something as “typically Russian,” they immediately said that they “of course” didn’t mean me.

Brigittenau, where I went to elementary school and later to high school, had belonged to the Soviet occupied zone in Vienna after the war; the memory of that time was still fresh almost fifty years ago when I started school. The “Russians” were said to be brutal and uncultured. They drank water from toilet bowls, screwed light bulbs into sockets that were disconnected from any source of power and then wondered why they didn’t light up, raped women en masse, stole, robbed, murdered and destroyed senselessly, simply out of anger and revenge. Russians are emotional, it was said. Sometimes they’re like children—warm, naive and helpful—but they could suddenly become brutal and unpredictable like wild animals. They were, after all, a soulful people, in both negative and positive respects. The latter was attributed to me. If my essays or speeches were emotional, it was said to be due to my “Russian soul,” and people thought they were paying me a compliment. I, on the other hand, was always unpleasantly affected by these attributions, because I knew, even in elementary school, that Jews and Russians were not the same thing. No Russian, my parents explained to me, would ever accept me as his equal. In the former Soviet Union, ethnic groups, which included Jews, were clearly distinct. So my supposed “Russian soul” was not only embarrassing, it was also presumptuous. I was assigned something that I was not at all entitled to, based on my ethnicity. READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (Nov 2022)

November 17, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

In addition to editing your favorite literary journal, Asymptote staff have been busy with publications this past quarter!

Philippine Editor-at-Large Alton Melvar M Dapanas’s lyric collage is included in Our Stories To Tell (Texas: Folkways Press, 2022), an anthology of essays on mental health, out now.

Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, has recently contributed, jointly with Raluca Tanasescu, a chapter on “Literary Translation in Electronic Literature and Digital Humanities” to the Bloomsbury anthology Translation Beyond Translation Studies and an article on “#GraphPoem: Holisme analytique-créatif, le genre D(H) et la performance informatique subversive” to the special issue on transmediality and convergence in literature of the journal Recherches & Travaux.

An essay, “Humor in the Dark,” by Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor, was published in the journal Translation Review. It explored some of the strategies Elias-Bursac used when translating Dubravka Ugresic’s counterpoint of humor and trauma in her book of essays The Age of Skin.

Incoming Visual Editor Heather Green moderated a panel on “Word + Image,” featuring translator Alta L. Price and artists Verónica Gerber Bicecci and Abdulrahman Naanseh at the Center for the Art of Translation’s Day of Translation conference. She also recently reviewed poetry titles by Iman Mersal (tr. Robyn Cresswell), Shuri Kido (tr. Tomoyuki Endo and Forrest Gander), and frequent contributor Eugene Ostashevsky for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books.

Ian Ross Singleton, Nonfiction Editor, took part in a two-way interview with writer Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry for Punctured Lines, a blog on Post-Soviet literature. The two writers discussed their respective novels, Two Big Differences and The Orchard.

In September, José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large for the Central American region, published his translation of Solito, a memoir by Salvadoran-American poet Javier Zamora, with Penguin En Español. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Irina Mashinski

November 15, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Maria Bloshteyn

Poetry fills up drums canisters garbage cans / lakes bogs artificial reservoirs

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you two energetic poems from the Russian by Irina Mashinski, author of The Naked World and a prolific writer herself in both English and her native Russian. Harnessing the potential of Irina’s bilingualism and exophony, translator Maria Bloshteyn speaks of her dialogic translation process: “The process of translation with a bilingual poet becomes much less about the translator finding the perfect phrase or equivalent rhythm in the target language, and much more about assisting the poet by providing variations of translations of a single line or stanza for her to choose.” Dive right into this strange, mesmerising wasteland of this poetic collaboration.

In Absentia

1. Twilight 

The tree is dead,
I drag it down the slope,
half-sinking in the snowbanks.

So will my Faustian questers
someday
haul me through the snow,
in just such tin-stiff mittens,
all my odd loops and whorls,
this tangle, knots upon the bark—
a pattern seen but once.

And just as quiet and pale
as these stunned trees,
my brother-poets will
escort me:
the icy beech, the hemlock, the black walnut,
the birch, the hornbeam, the bird cherry,
the sugar maple, the plantain, the other maple—
that for a long time will burn
scarlet.

When I’ll be dragged
blinded over the stumps—
through the gully,
over remnants of fencing,
the forked road, the post,
the plaster fountain—
the birdbath overturned,
the empty birdhouse, rot and moss,
the gulley, and the rot and moss,

when I’ll be dragged
down for the extraction
of the golden root—

a ragged trench will stretch across the deep snow,
stippled like a greyhound,
as if the angels wrestled on it,

they’ll stand there scattered in farewell,
the slope as deep as a fresh rough-draft,
not noticing how their legs are whipped
awkwardly by my dead branches,
by the trailing
still unyielding roots.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2022

November 14, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Chinmay Rastogi, Laurel Taylor, and Samantha Siefert

New work from Danish, Chinese, and Russian!

In this month’s of newly released translations, we are featuring works that traverse across landscapes of psychology, politics, perspectives, and coastal enclaves. From a travelogue that corporealizes a vision into reality, a fragmented ghost story that equally interrogates readership with writership, and a psychically dense political fiction that follows the twists of truths into fictions, these works are full of metamorphoses, imaginations, and materializations—all that possible within the realm of the text.

alitw

A Line in the World, A Year on the North Sea Coast by Dorthe Nors, translated from the Danish by Caroline Waight, Graywolf Press, 2022

Review by Samantha Siefert, Marketing Manager

A line extends from Skagen, Denmark to Den Helder, Holland—a complex, jagged, six hundred mile stretch of coast. On a map, it is a fixed mark, something definite and present, representing a real place that exists today: the division between land and sea, a place of dunes and marshes, sweeping tides, surging storms, wind farms, gulls, and people. In A Line in the World, A Year on the North Sea Coast, celebrated Danish author Dorthe Nors asserts her dream for this line to be less static and more flexible, persistently animated, always moving, ever changing, evolving with its points marked in time just as much in time as they are in space. Her line reverberates heritage and memory, holidays, tragedy, Vikings, shipwrecks, disco ferries, and local gossip. In this first work of nonfiction, Nors brings Denmark’s western coast to life in fourteen essays, now available in a beautiful translation by Caroline Waight.

Each essay offers an exquisite, layered exploration of a different stretch of that wild North Sea coast, and the first one begins at the top. Nors is from west Jutland, but she has found herself living in Copenhagen, with a noisy neighbor next door and a hash dealer below, and she comforts herself there with sounds of the sea played through an app on her phone. She did not plan to write a book of essays (she was supposed to be working on a novel), but her publisher was insistent. They asked, and then they asked again.

I said, ‘I’ll have to think it over,’ and I did. Or I dreamt. In the dream, I was setting off across the landscape in my little Toyota. I saw myself escaping several years of pressure from the media by driving up and down the coast. Me, my notebook and my love of the wild and desolate. I wanted to do the opposite of what was expected of me. It’s a recurring pattern in my life. An instinct.

READ MORE…

Fall 2022: Highlights from the Team

November 2, 2022  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Annilee Newton, Barbara Halla, Bella Creel, Caridad Svich, Heather Green, Ian Ross Singleton, Janet Phillips, Marina Dora Martino, Megan Sungyoon, and Sofija Popovska

Where to start with our glorious Fall 2022 issue? Here are some entry points, courtesy of our global team!

Emma Ramadan’s work as a translator has been so important to me and my literary journey—not least because of the attentiveness she lends to the writers she translates from Francophone North Africa, such as Ahmed Bouanani. I also really admire the way she speaks about her process with Claire Mullen in her interview, the passion and commitment and genuineness that shine through, for instance, in how she discusses her feelings at finally finding a copy of Molinard’s Panics. It reminded me a little of Alice Guthrie’s work with Malika Moustadraf’s Blood Feast, which was also out of print and circulated online as low quality scans.

I really love the slow, meditative writing of Dejan Atanacković’s absent narrator in Lusitania (tr. Rachael Daum). When it ranges with a kind of radical exteriority over the ephemera that remains of Teofilović, and the marginal annotations of Stojimirović that accompany his journals, it reads almost like the prose of Sebald—with the enigma of Teofilović as one such central, inaccessible figure around which the story endlessly circles, never losing sight of the larger political and social context.

Laksmi Pamuntjak’s “The Tale of Mukaburung” could easily have been written and translated to pander to a white gaze, and it’s really to the credit of both Pamuntjak and her translator Annie Tucker that there is a pervasive self-sufficiency to the story and its world, a refusal to explain itself, a matter-of-fact revelling in the ordinariness of its own magic and ritual. This seems especially commendable when a dominant affect in the story is puzzlement and defensiveness, in confrontation with foreigners whose presence and purpose are unknown, even to the reader, until much later in the story when it is revealed that many among them are political prisoners.

—Alex Tan, Senior Assistant Editor (Fiction)

Olavo Amaral’s “Steppe” (tr. Isobel Foxford) is exquisite in every way: the writing of the translation, the unusual subject matter, the relationship and emerging love between the two main characters and how it is described, the mood created by the atmosphere of snow and remoteness.

I have been following closely the horrors of Putin’s war in Ukraine and though still angry and frustrated by its continuation, I thought I was fairly hardened to the extent of Russian atrocities. But I broke down towards the end of Galina Itskovich’s War Diary (tr. Maria Bloshteyn), where the unspeakable rape and violence against children is put into words.

—Janet Phillips, Assistant Managing Editor

Kudos to Jonathan Chan for beautifully translating such ancient poems of Choe Chi-won, whose characteristic loneliness metaphorized in natural images is successfully rendered in translation.

I think one of the most important missions of Asymptote is to sustain languages under oppression, be that a national language that is close to extinction or the voice of a people amid a political process of erasure. Lauren Bo’s review of The Backstreets by Perhat Tursun undertakes this mission in remarkable earnest and rigor, by not only posing the biopolitical question of survival faced by the Uyghurs but also diligently analyzing the text via a close reading, and ultimately marrying the two to derive a conclusion that engages readers with the enduring challenge of humanity that surpasses the violence that is immediately palpable: “The Backstreets is an account of survival and a reminder that even the cruelest elements of humanity are fabricated out of absurdity and fear of the uncertain.”

The elusive language of Krikor Beledian’s “Unpeopled Language” (tr. Taline Voskeritchian and Christopher Millis) is delicate yet piercing, and while  the history of the Armenian genocide cannot be separated from the poetics of Beledian, its implementation of “the tool against the game of expression“ speaks to the broader context of the survival of a people and their language in and after the era of mass murder.  

—Megan Sungyoon, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

READ MORE…

The World in Transformation, The Poem in Translation

August 11, 2022  |  in News  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

A guide to translated poetry through our archives!

If you happen to be participating in The Sealey Challenge, wherein the literary community is encouraged to read a book of poetry everyday for the month of August, then the following is a guide to translated collections that might help you meet your mark, curated through Asymptote‘s annals of world literature. And if not—consider picking up one of these authors or text anyway, for within these works are brightnesses of spirit and sensuality, ranging journeys through landscapes and psychologies, and the courage of witness and words. These bold and wondrous works show that if you want to know a language, you should seek the knowledge of its poets.

We read widely to nurture our wonders—this much is true for all of literature, but is underlined especially when reading poetry. As the particular challenge of translating this tempestuous and evasive craft continues to unfold across the pages of poets and translators around the world, the growing numbers of collections that come to meet our shelves and hands are a testament to an endless dialectic of what Kenneth Rexroth called “imaginative identification”. The translation of a poem starts with wonder, with the identification of a gleam at the centre of the words, and a fierce urge to protect it. When this intensity then survives the removal of its own language and finds an exacting home in another, the result is just as wondrous. So much is left behind in translation, this much is true and shall always be true, but what remains constant is this sense—of awe, of the sense of something having opened up, of breathlessness in front of beauty, in front of truth. It arrives with a different music, in a different voice, but it was struck with the same spirit.

In the many poets and collections that we’ve covered at Asymptote, the work always identifies with the precise tenet of poetry to be close to its language. In German poet Kathrin Schimdt’s Twenty Poems, translated by Sue Vickerman, reviewer Andreea Scridon describes how “the two poets meet in their exigency and perspicacity, their quintessentially European writing towards a determined and defined idea.” Similarly, in Chinese poet Yi Lei’s collection, My Name Will Grow Wide Like A Tree, reviewer Marina Dora Martino notes translators Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi’s efforts to “open Yi Lei’s private world to the possibility of dialogue.”

Some translators work closely with their poets, in constant exchange and negotiation. Filip Noubel notes how in Taiwanese poet Amang’s Raised by Wolves, translator Steve Brandbury was careful to consult the author, ensuring that she “understands the various options I have for representing that in English.” Their collaboration defied limits, resulting in “a humorous approach to these seemingly insurmountable obstacles.” Other translators do not possess such luxuries. Alexander Dickow and Sean T. Reynolds, the translators of Swiss poet Gustave Roud’s Air of Solitude and Requiem, had to work without insight from the originating mind, the poet having passed in 1976. Nevertheless, reviewer Sarah Moore exalts the work as a “powerful, superb translation from one of Switzerland’s greatest poets of the twentieth century.”

So much of the importance in these texts lies in introducing the works of vital figures in movements that changed the world. In Alice Paalen Rahon’s Shapeshifter, translated by Mary Ann Caws, we see a collection that sheds light on a multi-faceted Surrealist, whose literary output had previously been overshadowed by her achievements in visual art. As reviewer Georgina Fooks states: “. . . with the arrival of Shapeshifter, we can gain valuable insight into this remarkable poet who was one of the best of the Surrealists, despite the lack of wider recognition.” Another Surrealist giant, Giorgio di Chirico, is revived in poetry by way of translator Stefania Heim; in his collection, Geometry of Shadows, reviewer Garrett Phelps identifies “a visual mind orienting itself toward the written word: a promiscuous use of strong imagery, and waves upon waves of metaphors at the expense of a more nimble and protean style.” Also defying any singular definition is Russian sculptor and founder of Russian Conceptualism, Dmitri Prigov, whose defiant and liberated poetics have reached the Anglophone by way of Simon Schuchat and Ainsley Morse in Soviet Texts. READ MORE…

Summer 2022: Highlights from the Team

August 8, 2022  |  in News  |  by Andriana Hamas, Caridad Svich, Daniel Naman, Ellen Elias-Bursac, Liam Sprod, M.K. Harb, M.L. Martin, Meghan Racklin, and Thuy Dinh

Don’t know where to begin with our latest issue? We’re here to help!

The most striking piece in this issue was Abdelfattah Kilito’s “Borges and the Blind” (tr. Ghazouane Arslane) for informing me of Borges’ deep affiliation with Arabic literature (something I wasn’t aware of before)—it opened my eyes to another dimension of Borges’ works as well as highlighted the blind spot of critics and readers of translation who might not be privy to the multifaceted aspects of the text behind the text. Cao Kou’s “The Wall Builder” (tr. Chen Zeping and Karen Gernant) is a truly wonderful and chilling fable on the idea of border, i.e., a porous wall between insider and outsider, individual and the collective in a repressive society. Anna Felder’s “Unstill Life with Cat” (tr. Brian Robert Moore) is a lovely, fully immersive tale from a cat’s point-of-view. The translation is magical, wondrously immediate. I love Rose Bialer’s perceptive questions and the resulting interview with Maureen Freely for revealing how Turkey’s political situation might affect the relationship between an author and his translator, and how there are so many layers of “the other” in Turkish society.

—Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora

Kelsi Vanada’s translation is itself a reflection of Andrea Chapela’s long meditation on the meaning and mechanics of mirrors, with all the inevitable subtle distortions and complex reconfigurations that Chapela elaborates on. This extended reflection employs myriad angles of vision‚ philosophy, science, toys, personal narrative, literature, and history, from which to view the significance of mirrors, the act of looking at oneself, and the act of constructing a self-image, with and without the fragmented and inevitably distorted images that mirrors provide. Juan Calzadilla’s poems from Dictated by the Pack (tr. Katherine Hedeen and Olivia Lott) are virtuosic translations—the complexity of the diction and rhythms as well as the subtlety of how the language accretes are very challenging to carry over into English without disrupting the balance between sense-making and surprises in the language. The lines shift across the page, like waves lapping onto the shore, as if the rhythms of thought have been recorded faithfully in their syncopated arrivals, gaps, and runnings-over. Almog Behar’s long poem “First We’ll Speak Many Words About God” (tr. Shoshana Olidort) is a meditation on religion and god, but also an interrogation of our conception of god, an interrogation of the faithful as well as the faithless. It’s subversive and yet hopeful. Sa’eed Tavana’ee Marvi’s ”The Open Tome” (tr. Khashayar Kess Mohammadi) is set in a post-apocalyptic, interplanetary, post-Earth world. The voice of the poem shifts‚ from an unnamed speaker, to a television set, to an ”Oceandweller,” to an unnamed speaker again. The experimental formatting of the poem allows the reader to shift between these different lens ratios. As such, the reader experiences a telescoping which perhaps informs the experience alluded to in the poem‚ by a visionary which either documents the future, or foretells the otherworldliness of the present moment. I really enjoyed Rose Bialer’s interview with Maureen Freely, which touches on the craft of translation, the challenges and the advantages of translating through the prism of race, gender, sexuality, etc., and what it’s like to navigate a translator-author relationship that spans two very different cultures, especially when the author in question is famous, and at certain points even infamous.

—M. L. Martin, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

I have a distinct affinity for Mitteleuropa miserablism, and this edition contains two quintessential instances of this literary tendency: Elfriede Jelinek (tr. Aaron Sayne) and Thomas Bernhard (tr. Charlie N. Zaharoff). It does not get much more central European than Austria, and the Austrians seem to have an affinity for misanthropy, self-loathing, destruction, perversity, and psychosis, but all expressed in the most perfect prose, poetry, painting, and music. Part of my love for these two writers in particular, however, is their pushing, bending, and breaking of the formal rules of language. Perhaps this formalism is my own perversity, since, as a copy-editor, I should be forcing such language back into its grammatical and syntactical straightjacket; but as much as I know and can enforce such rules in a professional manner, I thrive and find a thrill in breaking them. READ MORE…

Her Turn: The English and Russian Stories of Olga Zilberbourg, AKA Olga Grenets

August 3, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Ian Ross Singleton

The Russian language, here, gifts its writer a context. . .

When a writer earns a second language, what does it mean to write in the distinct spaces within and between the two? In this essay on Russian writer Olga Zilberbourg, who also goes by Olga Grenets, nonfiction editor Ian Ross Singleton explores the various ways that language can reveal, point to, and emphasize in both originals and translations.

What does another language afford an exophonic writer—one writing in a language other than her native tongue? Olga Zilberbourg, also known as Olga Grenets in her Russian publications, is both translingual and exophonic. The English-language collection, Like Water and Other Stories, was published in 2019 after a trio of Russian books; then, in 2021, many of the stories from Like Water appeared in Russian as Задержи дыхание (Hold Your Breath). The stories of Like Water and its edited, translated successor open up the span of Zilberbourg’s/Grenets’ linguistic experience. The Russian iteration of the tales are not word-for-word translations, and, as with any translation, they present a reflection of the English-language original—no matter how close, even the strictest of translations alters a story. So, while Hold Your Breath may be a closely related work, it nonetheless stands as its own expression of (in this case) Grenets’ work.

Many of the stories in both collections present reflections on an immigrant’s experience. “Plastic Film With a Magnetic Coating” is about mixtapes, and the part they played in childhood romances and gender roles during the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet nineties. It is almost identical in both the English original and Russian translation, but in the English, the last sentence makes a disclaimer: “I’m speaking, of course, of a very different time and place.” What is significant about Zilberbourg’s work is that the two versions of this story span those two different times and places. In the Anglophone literary world, Zilberbourg is allocated under the umbrella of writers born in the Soviet Union, a clear mark of difference; to the audience of Like Water, then, this sentence is clear, intended to describe the exotic content of the story.

However, what might sound foreign to a reader of Like Water may, of course, be more commonplace to a reader of Hold Your Breath. The Russian translation of the story has a completely different ending, omitting this sentence entirely. Such a drastic change make sense; presumably, for the majority of those reading Hold Your Breath, the setting would not be a completely different place, and the narrative time is simply the not-so-distant past. In the English version, Zilberbourg’s narrator belongs to a generation that would recognize the romantic exchange of mixtapes in that time and place, and in the Russian version, the narrator adds a more specific, personal passage to their story, and it’s this reveal that concludes the Russian version of “Plastic Film . . .”

This passage in question specifies the narrator’s sexuality as one not necessarily falling within heterosexual norms: “Разумеется, когда через кассету я получила признание от девочки, я решила, что сообщение предназначено не мне, и ничего не ответила.” (“Of course, when, by cassette, I received a confession from a girl, I decided that the message wasn’t meant for me and didn’t answer.”) In English, the story can be intuited as relating to heterosexual relationships; in the Russian, there is a potential lesbian romance. In this case, the question of what an attained language can offer might be inverted to ask what a return to one’s primary language can afford. READ MORE…