Place: Germany

What’s New in Translation: March 2024

New works from Alexander Kluge, Marjane Satrapi, and Jón Kalman Stefánsson!

The latest text from one of German New Wave’s founding members and all around heavy-hitter; a wide-ranging compilation of art and testimony championing the Iranian feminist movement from Marjane Satrapi; and a moving, braided narrative of grief and recovery from a lauded Icelandic author. Our editors review some of the most exciting works in translation coming to the Anglophone this month. 

kluge

The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul by Alexander Kluge, translated from the German by Alexander Booth, Seagull Books, 2024

Review by Bella Creel, Blog Editor

Filmmaker, author, and philosopher Alexander Kluge’s most recent oeuvre, The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul, is an act of rethinking. Born in Germany in 1932, Kluge blurs the edges of the many years of his life in this ambitious work, expanding beyond the first-hand, beyond generations, drawing connections between now and before, all in order to fully describe the experience of a single life. Alexander Booth offers a wonderfully dense and witty translation from the German, with no aversion to a confusing syntax that demands rereading and rethinking.

Kluge is trying to find the right words throughout this collection, which, in the process of its creation, must have been turned over and inside out, stretched to snapping and magnified to the molecular; reading it, in turn, requires a certain liquifying of the brain. This giving-in allows one to absorb the words, which only then can be reformed into some sort of meaning. Kluge himself seems to follow a similar process:

Where does all my ‘fluent speech’, my rabid desire to write, come from? I listen to others. And carefully! A word that flies towards me, an observation that charms me into conversation, a quotation that I read: all of this gets stored inside me for the long-term.

I usually tear books to shreds, marking any places that captivate me in colour pencil before ripping the page out. These I attach to other findings of mine with a paper clip. They’re often annotated. My flat is full of these piles of paper. My personal bastion against the ‘ignorance that shakes the world’.

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Translation Tuesday: “Parwana” by Lida Amiri

One glance at the sky finally connects her with infinity, where she belongs.

This Translation Tuesday—three days before International Women’s Day—we bring you a tragic story self-translated by former Afghan refugee Lida Amiri—centering on the plight of a woman who is not free to pursue love. In her language, parwana refers to a creature that has wings but cannot fly. It is a fitting name for our despairing protagonist, who, up against forces larger than her, stages her escape. 

The night is her sole protector, her only companion. It represents shelter from the stares and noiseless chatter of passersby on the streets. People who recognize her whisper, “That’s the general’s daughter that I saw with another young man! How dare she stain the impeccable reputation of a national hero?”

To Parwana[1], her father’s military background has become a curse. With a swift and vigorous hand motion, she desperately tries to delete each of these stinging judgments from her mind.

Suddenly, Parwana stops her agonizing train of thought and notices her immediate surroundings. She sighs and has a last look around her lovingly furnished room. She is just one step away from a pile of mattresses without a bedframe, which she sometimes fell off of when the nightmares reminded her of her wrongdoings. The only piece of furniture in her room is the wooden chest of drawers next to her bed, which is decorated with her perfume bottle and her Surmi—a Kohl used daily to protect her from evil looks because, according to her neighbors, she has all a young woman could wish for: a loving family, a room in her parents’ house, a job as a midwife. Is she actually willing to risk it all? While her heart races as she reminisces, she looks in the small mirror on the chest of drawers before taking a deep breath addressing herself. “The situation can’t continue like this, and you know it. He will be the right one,” she says softly while sighing heavily.

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Between Languages: The Politics of Class, Race, and Translation in the Novels of B. Traven

Such is how the frontier in Traven functions: an arena of capital that both equalizes and reproduces extant racial hierarchies.

The identity of novelist B. Traven has spawned a delightfully layered and debated array of theories, stipulations, and investigations. Best known as the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, later adopted into a well-loved film by John Huston, Traven was the pseudonym of a German- and English-language writer who, in various hypotheses, has been the collaborative result of several individuals, an imprisoned actor, an enthusiastic explorer of Mexico, and a translator from Acapulco and San Antonio. The most fascinating aspect of this mysterious identity, however, lies not solely in the individual’s life, but also in the entangled multiculturalism and various iterations of his works, which render American landscapes in German language, examine the intersection of class and race politics, and create narratives in which complexities of social agency are examined in both local and international contexts.

If you’re reading B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in its English translation, it would be be hard to guess that it was written by a German author, let alone intended for German-speaking leftists, living in German-speaking countries in the interwar period. Even in the original German, the book bears no obvious trace of Europe or European culture—aside from the language, of course. It feels, on the contrary, quintessentially American, falling easily into the category of the western and full of the genre’s tropes and generic dictates. At least for this reader, it felt odd to be reading one’s way through many of the familiar elements of the western, in a language not commonly associated with it.

The novel takes place in a post-revolutionary Mexico during the interwar years, and its protagonists are white American vagabonds, property-less and looking for work. There are oilmen, Mexican “Indians” and Mexican ladinos, or mestizos. There are bandits, train heists, and Federales. There is gunplay. And there is gold. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was originally written and published in German as Der Schatz der Sierran Madre by Büchergilde Gutenberg in 1927, and was part of Büchergilde Gutenberg’s mission to provide impoverished workers with access to cheap entertainment and Bildung. The current Büchergilde Gutenberg website tells us, for example, that the publisher was founded in 1924 to facilitate easier access to Bildung for members of the working class, doing so by means of affordable but well-crafted, premium books. Bruno Dreßler, Büchergilde’s first chairman, had in mind the idea of a proletarian cultural community, a “proletarische Kulturgemeinschaft”; the publisher saw itself as part of proletarian literature and culture at a time when such a thing perhaps still existed, though its contours and possibility—or impossibility—were, even then, debated by Marxist critics and thinkers of every stripe. Even Diego Rivera, a card-carrying communist, argued that, properly speaking, there could be no such thing as proletarian art within capitalism. Only after the dictatorship of the proletariat has “fulfilled its mission,” Rivera writes, after it has “liquidated all class differences and produced a classless society,” can there be a proletarian art. READ MORE…

A Year of Reading the World

Sometimes reality would seem unbearable if literature were not there to decipher it, to give it heart.

Every month, the Asymptote Book Club shares a newly published, translated title with readers and subscribers. From Nobel laureates to electrifying debuts, this selection features some of the most powerful voices writing in any language, opening up an entry into the immense archives of  wold literature. In this essay, we look back on the books of 2023 thus far. 

Sign up for the Asymptote Book Club here and have our curated titles sent to your door!

Whenever a major event transpires, anywhere in the world, the instinct of many is to reach into the annals of writing—for explanation, ruminations, solace, transcriptions of history, glimmers of what’s to come, stories of people and their ordinary or extraordinary lives. . . On January 1 of this year, Croatia officially joined the Schengen Area, making it the twenty-seventh member to benefit from the region’s removal of border controls—and the search for Croatian books and literature went up 30%. During the surprising and intermittently absurd “Chinese balloon incident” in early February, searches for books on Chinese espionage went up a full 100%. Interest for Ukrainian literature stayed at a high amidst the ongoing conflict, and peaked when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin for committing war crimes regarding the illegal deportation of children. As a devastating civil war broke out in Sudan in mid-April, the world immediately sought out writing from and about the region, and when Niger’s government was overthrown in a military coup on July 26, searches for Nigerien books and authors also saw a significant surge. And as writers from Palestine and Israel continued, over the decades, to release texts around nation, land, exile, occupation, humanity, and violence both physical and psychological, we all watched in horror as the devastation grew almost unimaginably—and we looked for those books.

Books and the world they’re written in, books and the worlds they give us—sometimes reality would seem unbearable if literature were not there to decipher it, to give it heart. As the poet Adonis said, “My homeland is this spark this lightning in the darkness of the time remaining. . .” (translated by S.M. Toorawa); with language, such texts lend us that brightness, and we are rendered able to discover the many narratives and landscapes of our long, shadowy era.

In this year’s Book Club, we’ve thus far featured eleven titles: eleven authors, eleven countries, eleven languages, and eleven translators. Each brought their own entrancing energy of storytelling, whether taking history or the human psyche as material, building on myth or fearlessly experimental. There were titles that sought to give us a vivid portrait of a certain neighbourhood, a certain period. Others dove into the intricate channels of thinking to paint a picture of the mind. READ MORE…

Truths in Ambiguity: On Uljana Wolf’s kochanie, today i bought bread

Nissan’s expert translations, in turn, are contemporary in the sense that they are unapologetically “unfaithful”.

kochanie, today i bought bread by Uljana Wolf, translated from the German by Greg Nissan, World Poetry Books, 2023

In German, Uljana Wolf’s work inhabits the liminal spaces between the German and Polish languages, with all the fraught history that this double heritage involves. Now, in an English translation by Greg Nissan, this palimpsest of linguistic plurality has received another layer. Born in the German/Polish borderlands, Wolf has rapidly become a voice for a globalised, post-GDR generation, her life and work echoing the political and social upheaval of the twentieth century. In compact scenes of personal and shared experience, both dreamlike and jarring, she weaves together metaphoric word-sounds, juxtaposed imagery, and multilingualism. Nissan’s expert translations, in turn, are contemporary in the sense that they are unapologetically “unfaithful”. He has incorporated new imagery into the retold poems, such as the echoes of mink fur in “mornmink”, reiterating that his translated poems should not be seen as reproductions or ‘shadows’ of the original, but rather as a “jealous lover, eager to retort”.

Wolf’s verse is extremely dense and laden with historical and cultural references, making both the foreword by Valzhyna Mort and the afterword by Greg Nissan crucial pieces of the puzzle in beginning to decode Wolf’s poetry. This being said, such ambiguous verse is also a joy for the reader or reviewer; there are as many interpretations as there are eyes to read. The poetry benefits from its bilingual presentation, with the German on the left and the English on the right as equal partners that reflect one another without simply replicating the other. This allows readers to appreciate the form and page-feel of both languages, even if they are not bilingual.

Something that struck me initially in Wolf’s German was the formatting: a reader of German would expect the nouns to be capitalised, but here they are not. This only adds to the possibilities of their ambiguity, as words which could be both nouns and adjectives, or nouns and verbs, are no longer distinct from each other; the line einen gehorsam verzeichnen could mean, as Nissan has translated it, “to register an obedience”, but equally could have been translated as “to register (somebody/something) obediently”. The German prose is made ever denser by this use of the language, as the nouns no longer jump out on the page. While reading the German poems, I realised with a start that this is what reading English may have felt like to my German-speaking students, learning to read a language in which the nouns blend in with everything else. READ MORE…

Summer 2023: Highlights from the Team

Still looking for entry points into our brand-new Summer issue? Members of our multi-continental team offer you several!

From the Indonesian Feature in the Summer edition, I was intrigued by the poems of Nirwan Dewanto, in vivid translations by John H. McGlynn, including “The Way to the Museum,” which begins with “All eyeballs dipped in the vinegar of the bourgeoisie will become pickled eyeballs” and continues, in long lines, to contemplate class, blindness, and revolution. It resonated against the pathos and absurdity in excerpts from Ulrike Draesner’s Schwitters, translated by Sharon Howe, and Tatiana Niculescu’s play Brancusi v. United States, fresh portraits of European Modernist artists Kurt Schwitters and Constantin Brâncuși, respectively. In each case, as the exile of the artist comes to the fore, the language of their place of origin is woven into the text, along with glimmers of humor. I particularly appreciated the note from Niculescu’s translator Amanda L. Andrei, which describes the process of working, as a heritage speaker, with her father Codin Andrei: “The emotional challenge [of translating this work] lies in my own hang-ups of being a non-native speaker due to political and historical forces beyond my control. When we co-translate, my father and I converse about Romanian culture from a perspective free of Western stereotypes of communism, vampires, and oppression, and we are delighted.” Finally, I was swept up in the atmospheric excerpt from Habib Tengour’s Women of the Odyssey (tr. Teresa Villa-Ignacio) while listening to Tengour’s mellifluous reading of the subtle text in French, describing those who console themselves by “sticking ear in seashell” or the “Unfinished / Wave bringing you to the threshold.”

—Heather Green, Visual Editor

I adore the rush of the speaker’s voice in Enrico Remmert’s The War of the Murazzi (tr. Antonella Lettieri), and its syntactical verbality, meandering but never losing control, digressing into tightness, into an accumulation of narrative stress. I love as well the narrator’s contextualisations of the backdrop of Turin and its historico-social problems with violence, particularly in a refugee context: Turin feels masterfully integrated into the plotline, like a combattant in the Murazzi war itself, and the vivacity of its violence continues running, naturalistic, organic, as the “river never stops running.”

The textuality of Mateo Díaz Choza’s Precipitations (tr. Lowry Pressly) is staggering: the dual columns that inform multiple methods of reading the poem, as well as the materiality of the poem, almost transforming it into an object itself. The way the words waterfall down the screen mimic the “drop,” a kind of fall from heaven, in a mode that lends itself to the digital form undoubtedly better than it would a magazine or a standard-format book, in the “depths of the page” that ultimately do not supercede the infinite scroll of the screen. When the poem’s substance and words meet and meld into each other, the poem’s two columns also merge into one, into the “weather,” “snow-mute” but “beautiful” in the void of its meaning. Choza creates an aesthetics of decay, of death, of abandonment, but of regeneration as well. The drop recurs again and again; the speaker will continue to recognise his lover, again and again.

I love the adventure of Amyr Klink’s One Hundred Days Between Sky and Sea (tr. Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren), the sense of movement through space and time that underpins the narrator’s paradoxical stillness, immobility. It is remininescent of Jules Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires, venturing beneath the sea or into the heart of volcanoes, on a journey pushing against the boundaries of human capacity. Klink melds the joy and exuberance of a child discovering the world with a practical, didactical style of writing that underpins the veracity of his voyage. I find this piece particularly apt for Asymptote as a vessel in the sea of understanding, a buoy of translation in the archipelago of languages.

I appreciate Asymptote‘s continued dedication to featuring Ukrainian writing in each issue, particularly Ukrainian writing about the Russian invasion. In my view, this is one of the most essential tasks of literature in translation: to continually draw attention to the diversity of global experiences; to remind us that our lives are not insular, that we are not islands. To that end, I found Anton Filatov’s Finding Myself at War (tr. Patricia Dubrava) both heart-wrenching and vital. As his “eyes bleed” before the cruelty of false news stories, so do readers’ eyes before the horrors of Ukrainian soldiers’ war experiences. They are given voice not in those news stories, but in literature. Sharing their stories—and I love the detail of the abandoned cat, ironically (or not?) named Death, as well as the final section on cinema—is an act of taken care.

I find Nicole Wong’s discussion of translation theory in The Terroir of a Single Work: Redefining Scope in Approaches to Translation incredibly pertinent and eloquent, and I particularly enjoy the ‘close reading’ section where she dissects her own translation of Proust. It’s a priviledge to experience the clarity and sharpness of such a mind through this piece. Her style is reminescent of Kundera’s narrator in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: playful, heavy on metaphor without falling into abstraction, clear, enlightening (and bearably so!). Since reading this piece, I’ve found myself returning to it as I internalise and integrate her analysis into my own understanding of translation.

 —Michelle Chan Schmidt, Assistant Editor (Fiction)

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Any Single Thing: On Dorothee Elmiger’s Out of the Sugar Factory

Instead, “love” seems to be closely associated with research; with storytelling and the (im)possibility of comprehensive communication.

Out of the Sugar Factory by Dorothee Elmiger, translated from the German by Megan Ewing, Two Lines Press, 2023

How do you write about a book that is itself concerned with what it is about; that covers a vast array of seemingly disparate but fundamentally deeply interconnected topics in a fragmentary, multi-genre, looping montage; that is both tentative and unashamedly demanding; that is hyper-meta yet written in language that is refreshingly unselfconscious; that is so preoccupied with form and origins that it defiantly eludes attempts at endings? What can you say a book that has already said so much about itself?

You could say that, fundamentally, Out of the Sugar Factory is about exactly what its title suggests: sugar and production. In thinking and trying to write about this book, though, such a statement seems entirely insufficient—for this text, with tales spanning from the 16th century to the present day, is equally about love, desire, slavery, capitalism, the art of writing, artifice, self-representation, subjection, the Haitian revolution, religion, anorexia and mania—and utterly exhaustive, since all these parenthetical topics are ultimately also symbolised by sugar and its production. In this kaleidoscope of ever separating and reconnecting topics, full of “objects [that seem] to enter into new relationships, new constellations with each other”, Dorothee Elmiger—or rather, the narrator she pens—is perhaps suggesting that any single thing, if examined both broadly and closely enough, can lead us to everything else (are we singing along with Lauryn Hill that ‘Everything is everything’?); or perhaps she is suggesting that, haunted as the early twenty-first century is by the spectre of colonialism and its aftermath, we are saturated in sugar (some things are more omnipresent than others). Then again, maybe she is implying both or neither of these things, or even that the search for a metanarrative is futile: as Elmiger writes, “I thought I had to somehow gather everything together . . . but now things are imposing themselves on me virtually—I see signs and connections everywhere, as if I had found a theory of everything, which is of course utter nonsense.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest from Germany, Bulgaria, and China!

This week, our team members report on poetry and performance art, multilingual panel discussions, and inventive book events. From a cinematic book launch in Bulgaria to a night of diasporic literature in Berlin and a poetry installation in Shanghai read on to find out more!

Michal Zechariah, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from Berlin

I have moved countries twice—once when I moved from Tel Aviv to Chicago for my graduate studies in English literature, and the second time when I moved from Chicago to Berlin for a postdoctoral fellowship. One thing I hadn’t anticipated about that second move was how it would affect my relationship not with my first language, Hebrew, but with English, my second. I started questioning the place of the language that has become so important to me, even though it wasn’t my mother tongue, in my new life.

For this reason, I was immediately drawn to an event titled Literature in Diaspora hosted by the Berlin Center for Intellectual Diaspora at the Katholische Akademie Berlin last week (the choice of location is interesting; perhaps for those of us who look forward to the afterlife, the earthly world presents a diasporic experience of sorts). READ MORE…

Great Material for a Novel: Lucy Jones on Translating Brigitte Reimann

The translation is always another chance to improve a piece of writing stylistically, ‎to make it really sing.

In our March Book Club selection, the sharp and passionate voice of German writer Brigitte Reimann paints a tender portrait of post-war Berlin, when the Wall has yet to go up, but lines have already been drawn, and devotions already divided. In an unflinching autofiction that finally sees an English debut after being long-adored in its original language, Reimann uses the materials from her own life to elucidate the deep ruptures carved into family by politics, the bright, early idealism of socialism in East Germany, and the hope that people hold to amidst the most tumultuous times. In this interview with the translator of Siblings, Lucy Jones, we discuss the storied history of Siblings, the political context necessary to this text, and the meeting-place between art and idealism.

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.    

Samantha Siefert (SS): Lucy, Thank you so much for being here to talk with us about Siblings. Can you tell us a little bit more about the road that led you to translation?

Lucy Jones (LJ): It’s probably not a very conventional one. I graduated in German and in German language and literature, and then I actually didn’t do anything with it for a while; I became a photographer. I did photography for about twelve years, and then I came back to translation just after my daughter was born. This is when I went back to the roots of what I started out doing at university.

I started by pairing up with a good friend who translates in the other direction; together, we’re Transfiction. She translates from English to German, and I translate from German to English, and we’ve been going since about 2008.

SS: You’re known for being a huge advocate for Brigitte Reimann’s work. Can you tell us a little bit about your background with her work in particular, how you came to advocate for her, and eventually translate her?

LJ: Translators often do work as literary scouts or something in-between, and I came across Reimann because I was in a seminar for translators in Berlin. There is quite a good infrastructure here, and in that seminar we were visiting different publishing houses. During one visit, I was given a pile of her work, and it was really warmly recommended to me. When I started reading, I realized—especially when I came across her fiction—that it could have been written now as an historical novel. You didn’t have that kind of patina from, you know, a novel from the past. It was more modern, as though it just happened to be set in the past. I found that really striking. READ MORE…

Announcing Our March Book Club Selection: Siblings by Brigitte Reimann

Siblings transports us to post-war Berlin, when the lines were still being drawn around the nascent socialist dream.

In a time of deepening divisions, when the bipartisan nature of contemporary politics feels increasingly intimate and personal, Brigitte Reimann’s lauded autobiographical novel, Siblings, hits close to home. In a vivid and passionate depiction of a family torn apart in the division of 1960s Germany, Reimann writes with profound emotion about the brutal lines drawn by ideology, the inner turmoil of living under orthodoxy, and still—the bright ideals of socialism’s promises. As our Book Club selection for March, Siblings is a bold assertion of unities and divisions from one of East Germany’s best writers—a boundless voice speaking to the limits of individual perspective. 

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.    

Siblings by Brigitte Reimann, translated from the German by Lucy Jones, Transit Books, 2023

Much of translated literature focuses on fresh, contemporary voices, but projects that arrive after a long simmer hold the special promise of an enduring story, one that has earned its place in the cultural conversation; the work of Brigitte Reimann triumphantly takes this route towards English-language readers. Prolific and storied in the German sphere—where her work has never gone out of print, Reimann is a cornerstone writer of social realism and the German Democratic Republic. Born in 1933, she wrote prolifically from a young age, racking up literary awards from her school days until her untimely death from cancer in 1973, with her 1976 posthumous novel going on to become a bestseller and new, uncensored versions of her work continuing to attract new readerships. Siblings, winner of the 1965 Heinrich Mann Prize, is her first novel to be translated into English, following the 2019 publication of her diaries under the title I Have No Regrets—both translated by her persistent advocate, Lucy Jones.

Siblings transports us to post-war Berlin, when the lines were still being drawn around the nascent socialist dream. Formulated as an impassioned political debate, the novel follows young artist Elisabeth Arendt’s pro-socialist bent in a familial battle of virtues—East versus West—with her titular siblings. Her older brother, Konrad, has already defected. A former member of the Hitler Youth and an “elbow-man” who is used to getting his way, Konrad’s fate is of little consequence to Elisabeth: “I had nothing else to do than come to terms with the idea that I’d lost my brother (and lost meant permanently, for ever); a brother who was alive and well, sitting at a table with a white tablecloth a few streets from where I was, who would fly back to Hamburg the following morning, build tankers, save up for a Mercedes, sleep with his beautiful wife, go to the cinema, and carry on with his life.” Instead, her passion is directed towards her other brother, Uli, closer to her in both age and ideology, who has announced that he too will defect the following day: “I can’t stay here, I can’t breathe . . . I feel like a prisoner trapped behind bars, just stupidity and bureaucracy everywhere.” Set in 1960 before the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, defecting was not the daring escape it later became: at the time, when a person could simply walk from one side of the city to the other, weight of this journey fell firmly on moralistic grounds.

Elisabeth spares no conviction in arguing for the socialist dream. She is young and idealistic and works as a painter, charged with documenting the spirit of the factory worker through art. She herself lives and works at the factory, as was customary through a program known as the “Bitterfelder Weg,” designed to foster relationships between artists and workers and foment equality. The program’s ambition offers some of the most compelling writing in the novel, as Elisabeth shares her own revelation that the “production plant like any other, barren, flat land, milling with a few thousand workers building chimneys, halls and roofs, functional buildings made of glass or cold, dead concrete” may indeed be worth loving and fighting for.  READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: February 2023

New translations from Hungarian, German, and Spanish!

This month, we are excited to present new works in translation that consider survival and coexistence in many forms. From the Hungarian, renowned author Magda Szabó delves into the embittering effects of poverty and hardship. From the Spanish, Pilar Quintana creates a riveting familial portrait of vulnerable parents and too-wise children. From the German, Dr. Ludger Wess leads us on a journey to discover the smallest lifeforms amongst us. Read on to find out more!

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The Fawn by Magda Szabó, translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix, New York Review Books, 2023

Review by Meghan Racklin, Blog Editor

In The Fawn, the latest of Magda Szabó’s novels to be translated into English, it is 1954 in Budapest. For Eszter, the novel’s main character (it is difficult to call her a protagonist), it is 1954—but it is also the interwar years and the years of the war, and it is also, disastrously, almost the future. “The Future . . .’” she thinks, “[t]hat was something I had no desire to build. I had enough of the past about me already for the thought to do anything but horrify me.”

The novel is Eszter’s account of her life and her surroundings, told in a monologue directed at the man she loves, and the language is as beautiful as Eszter is bitter. In Len Rix’s translation, Eszter’s sentences are full of clauses; she’s in a rush, trying to get out everything she wishes she had already said. She recalls, of the evening when her childhood home was hit by a bomb, “Mother neither wept nor blanched; we slept the sleep of the contented in the main hall of a school, along with everyone else who had lost their homes; I felt like the nation’s favourite child, everyone seemed to want to look after us, and the whole city shared our grief.” As her outpouring continues, details pile up like debris. 

READ MORE…

Winter 2023: Highlights from the Team

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…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2023

. . . di Giorgio, standing in front of the rosebush, flicks the switch on, invites us to see.

Asymptote’s Winter 2023 Edition is out, showcasing literature from thirty-four countries and fifteen languages! Marking our twelfth year in world literature, this issue is headlined by César Aira, Geetanjali Shree, and César Vallejo. Here, blog editors Xiao Yue Shan, Meghan Racklin, and Bella Creel introduce their highlights from the issue, from an explosive, violent garden, to a perverse love story and vengeful doll, to a piece of criticism that reads more as art than review. 

In a short eulogy for the brilliant, transportive Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda, Gabriel García Márquez recounts a brief visit he once paid her in Barcelona, around a decade before her death. Slightly taken aback by her impeccable resemblance to her characters, namely in what she had described as her “innocence,” the García Márquez intuited that Rodoreda, like the people she had raised to such stark emotional reality, had a penchant for growing flowers. “We spoke about [gardening], which I consider another form of writing,” he recounts, “and between our discussion of roses . . . I tried to talk to her about her books.”

The botanic, as both these great writers knew, is transportive. There is nothing so beguiling as the language of flowers—their ancient names, colour, perfume, their mystic properties and secret variety; we know this, because the writers before us had long known it, just as the writers before them had known it, and on and on backwards, ever since the first poets looked at the world in bloom, and saw in it an opening to the sublime. Over and over, we’ve harvested from the natural world to give our poems tint and fragrance, to purple our prose and frame our visions, and in the same way that soil can be exhausted, the power of this invocation has since waned through countless verses. The challenge to the text now, when evoking landscape, is what García Márquez knew: the writer cannot simply pick the flowers—she must grow them herself.

In Marosa di Giorgio’s excerpt from The Moth, the garden is explosive. Translated with a musical ear by Sarah María Medina, the prose poems luxuriate in their sheer volume of lush imagery, of ripe fruit and their rainbow palette, bacchanalian sweetness and insatiable appetite. Di Giorgio has always been an exceptionally visual writer, with her prodigious use of images inspiring comparison to the works of Bosch and Dalí—and here her painterly instincts are once again ravishing. In broad strokes a feast is spread before us, peaches and dates and syrup, as her image-language fills the lines with taste and spectacle. She once said that “only the poet knows what colour to give each word . . . In The Moth, I paint myself as a reciter who interprets in front of the rosebush.” 

READ MORE…

The Winter 2023 Edition Has Landed

Helping us celebrate our milestone 12th anniversary issue are César Aira, Geetanjali Shree, Alfred Döblin, and Choi Jeongrye in our Korean Feature!

Earthquake, war, disease, unrequited love, even a man-made hell conjured through scents—what haven’t the protagonists in our Winter 2023 edition been through? Tagged #TheReturn, this issue is not only a celebration of human resilience but also of our twelve years in world literature. Helping us mark this milestone are César Aira, one of the most beloved names in the canon, and Geetanjali Shree, 2022 International Booker Prizewinner—both give us exclusive wide-ranging interviews. Amid new work from 34 countries, we also have stunning short stories from Alfred Döblin and Dalih Sembiring, powerful drama by Anna Gmeyner, a brilliant review of past contributor Johannes Göransson’s latest publication, and a Special Feature sampling the best in contemporary letters from a world literature hotspot sponsored by LTI Korea. All of this is illustrated by our talented guest artist Weims.

In Emmelie Prophète’s slow-burning fiction, “The Return” is a dramatic answering of prayers when a former Olympic athlete turns up unannounced before his mother a lifetime after his escape from Port-au-Prince. That same longed-for return is impossible for poet Fadi Azzam—“a Syrian / who had to flee his homeland / to countries that wish to flee from him.” In Juana Peñate Montejo’s poems of exile—our first work from the Mayan language of Ch’ol—on the other hand, it’s the self that requires summoning and remembering: “Bring the scent of amber, / return me to myself.” Re-membering, in the most literal sense, is foregrounded in Kim Cho Yeop’s macabre but fascinating story, one work in a sci-fi-tinged Korean Feature of startling breadth, wherein we are initiated into a community of amputees-by-choice, since “the body is hardly capacious enough to contain the human soul, which is so full of potential.” So full of potential, perhaps, that even a lover’s reincarnation on the 49th day of his death in the womb of a stranger seems possible in a transcendent story by the Mongolian writer Bayasgalan Batsuuri.

“Six months before his death in 1991, Menke Katz had a dream. In it, his long-dead mother admonished him to return to writing in his native language, Yiddish.” This dream resulted in the Oulipian poems that Jacob Romm has beautifully translated for this issue. Proving an exception to Shree’s claim that “the creative writer is instinctively drawn to her mother tongue,” Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine describes an opposite impulse in his essay: writing in French—a second language—is his deliberate choice, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. Anyway, isn’t the true writer one who is “always a stranger in the language he expresses himself in”? In any case, even if the process of writing is estranging, the outcome when a piece of writing finds its intended reader can be sublime. For Lynn Xu, “the act of reading is the act of making kin . . . For example, when I read [César] Vallejo, I recognize that he is my mother . . .” By utter coincidence or divine fate, César Vallejo is also featured in these very pages, translated by another César, the intrepid César Jumpa Sánchez, who is determined to project Vallejo’s breakthrough collection, Trilce, to, in his own words, “a network of planetary outreach.”

Just as “encyclopedism has been the permanent horizon of [César Aira’s] work,“ the asymptotic impulse to realize a world literature that truly reflects the world has been our north star from the get-go. If our very existence has connected you with your kindred authors, help us get to our big 5 0 (in issues, not years!), just around the corner. The best way to support us is to sign up as a sustaining or masthead member—the New Year brings new perks and we’ll even put together a care package (rabbit theme optional) for supporters at the USD500-a-year tier and above. Thank you for being with us all these years!

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