Place: Poland

What’s New in Translation: October 2023

Discover new work from Venezuela, Poland and India!

In this month’s round-up, we present three works in singular styles. From Venezuela, Maria Pérez-Talavera gives us non-linear journal entries composed from a mental hospital. From Poland, modernist master Witold Gombrowicz puts his own spin on the Gothic tale, painting a psychologically sensitive portrait of a shifting society. And from India, some of the bold, experimental short stories of Rajkamal Chaudhary are gathered in a sharp and comic collection of unconventional plotlines and characters. Read on to find out more!

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The Possessed by Witold Gombrowicz, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Fitzcarraldo, 2023

Review by Iona Tait, Executive Assistant

A haunted castle, a mad prince, a pair of doubles, and a clairvoyant who saves the day—Witold Gombrowicz’s The Possessed has all the quintessential trappings of nineteenth-century Gothic fiction. Originally released as a serial in the summer of 1939, The Possessed merges its classic motifs with mystery and a comedy of manners, offering a remarkably profound reflection on authenticity at a time when older Polish divisions of social classes were being transformed.

Neighboring the Gothic castle—that relic of “antiquity breathing its last” where a deranged prince and his cunning secretary reside—lies a manor-turned-boarding house. Mrs. Ocholowska, the landowner and member of a downwardly mobile minor nobility, receives guests across all social classes: the petit-bourgeois Councilor Szymczyk, nosy and bickering middle-class women, a curious academic known as Skolinski, and a working-class tennis coach and parvenu named Marian Leszczuk. The latter proves to be a formidable rival to the tennis superstar and spritely daughter of the landowner, Maja Ocholowska, who is at the novel’s outset engaged to the secretary.

Lesczuk and Maja, however, are not only an equal match on the court; they also exhibit an uncanny similarity in their gestures and ways of speaking. Simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by this similarity, the pair undergo a process of self-discovery together, journeying between the manor and the haunted castle, with intermittent getaways to Warsaw. READ MORE…

Forceful in Fury, Forceful in Beauty: An Interview with Alex Braslavsky on Translating Zuzanna Ginczanka

She is incredibly important to the Polish tradition and, at the same time, I believe she is a world’s poet.

Zuzanna Ginczanka is a name that poetry readers will soon become very familiar with—if she hasn’t enraptured you already. In thrilling, Dionysian verses of musical, mythic, and magical beauty, the young Polish poet astounded her contemporaries during her brief lifetime, and is now being introduced to a new generation of readers with the same powerful lyricism and sensual joy. We were delighted to feature some of Ginczanka’s poems in our Spring 2020 issue through the electric translations of Alex Braslavsky—who has since published a bilingual edition of Ginczanka’s selected poems, On Centaurs & Other Poems, with World Poetry Press.

In the following interview, Piotr Florczyk talks to Braslavsky about how translations can encourage active engagement with the source language; the sensoriums, pyrotechnics, and complex metaphoric mechanisms at work amidst Ginczanka’s words; and what makes this poet a necessary inclusion within the Polish—and the global—canon.

Piotr Florczyk (PF): If I’m not mistaken, On Centaurs & Other Poems is your first book-length translation. Could you talk a little bit about how you got started as a translator and, secondly, how you came to this project?

Alex Braslavsky (AB): As an undergraduate, I took a poetry workshop in which we read Tomas Tranströmer and Wisława Szymborska’s work in translation, and I remember being really struck by the intimacy I felt in Clare Cavanagh’s English versions of Szymborska—that was when I fell in love with Polish poetry. When I went on to pursue my master’s in the United Kingdom, I had the opportunity to start learning Polish. I also started attending Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation seminars run by Kasia Szymańska.

I shared my interest in poetry with Kasia, and she informed me that a full volume of Zuzanna Ginczanka’s poetry had just been released in Poland in the fall of 2019. I had never heard of the author, but I am really indebted to Kasia, because I remember that on the first day she and I sat down to read Ginczanka’s poems, I recognized it as some of the most sophisticated poetry I’d ever laid eyes on, and I also realized that my sensibilities could mesh with Ginczanka’s; I had the urge to translate her work.

PF: Your book is the first of at least two volumes of Ginczanka translations to be released this year. How do you account for this sudden and growing interest in her work?

AB: There has been a lot of push in Poland for Ginczanka to get her due recognition. Over the past decade, she has entered the canon of Polish poetry. Although she was long overlooked by Polish poets and scholars, she is now included in the prominent textbook, the Nasiłowska History of Polish Literature. Several monographs have also been written about her work over the last decade, and in 2020, Izolda Kiec’s biography of Ginczanka, Nie upilnuje mnie nic (Nobody Will Police Me), was published—then adapted into a play. Artists like Krystyna Piotrowska have also exhibited artwork paying homage to her. There is a pressing urge on the part of many to make sure Ginczanka’s life and work is thrown into high relief on the international literary stage. Mine is one of, I believe, four different translations of Ginczanka’s work to be released this year, all by female translators, and it is a special moment because her work is so brilliant. She deserves this array of renderings to her name.

PF: Although born in modern-day Ukraine to a Russian-speaking Jewish family, Ginczanka chose to write in Polish. Can you speak to what might have influenced her decision to do so?

AB: Although Ginczanka was a Nansen passport holder (never being granted Polish citizenship because she was Jewish), she felt throughout her life that she was Polish and was closely connected to the Polish poetic tradition. Her parents left her with her grandmother in Poland when she was still an infant, and she was raised in Równe, Poland (now Rivne, Ukraine). She went to Polish school, attending the prestigious Tadeusz Kościuszko State Gymnasium from the age of ten, and though she spoke Russian at home, she elected Polish as the language of her pen. READ MORE…

The 2023 PEN/Heim Grantees Talk Translation: Part I

Doesn’t the magic of writing happen in those rare bursts where you manage to coax an extra voice out of your mind?

The PEN/Heim Translation Grant is one of the most reliable indicators as to which texts will come to be considered vital in the English-language literary landscape, with past grantees including George Szirtes translating the Hungarian giant of postmodernism, László Krasznahorkai; Daniel Borzutsky translating the Chilean revolutionary poet, Raúl Zurita, Jennifer Croft translating Polish Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk, and Anton Hur translating the celebrated South Korean genre-bender, Bora Chung. The aim of the grant is to support translators during their vital and difficult work of working on a text, and as a result, the texts that come to English-language readers by way of this gift are often exemplary examples of not only the writers’ intelligence, imagination, and effort—but equally importantly, the translator’s.  

In this three-part series, Asymptote has asked the 2023 PEN/Heim grantees to talk about their work in progress; their responses, brimming with excitement, conviction, and connection, are a testament to how much translators put themselves into their labor. Through the varied approaches and languages, they share the important commonality of surety: that the work they’ve been entrusted with has an immense potential to illuminate our reality, enlarge our world, and enrich our experiences of literature.

Here, Mark Tardi ruminates on the importance of discipline; Richard Prins talks about following instinct; and Caroline Froh opens up about the physical effect that reading has on us.  

Mark Tardi on Olga Hund:

In The Poethical Wager, Joan Retallack argues intelligently for the creative embrace of life’s unexpected swerves, the “unsettling transfiguration of once-familiar terrain [which tends] to produce disorientation, even estrangement, by radically altering geometries of attention.” Olga Hund’s remarkable and award-winning debut novel, Psy ras drobnych (Dogs of Smaller Breeds) was such a swerve for me, thanks to James Guerin and Klaudia Cierluk, editors at Berlin Quarterly, who commissioned me to translate an excerpt. Hund’s writing pulled me in immediately, and I felt sure that English-speaking readers would connect with the book much like I had.

Dogs of Smaller Breeds takes place in an in-patient women’s psychiatric ward in southern Poland and via the narrator—who may or may not be the pseudonymous Hund herself—we’re offered short vignettes, unabashed and unapologetic glimpses into the lives of women who would be otherwise largely invisible and neglected. In one poignant and heartbreaking segment, Hund’s narrator observes that:

If it weren’t for papers: documents from orphanages, correctional institutions and prisons, hospital records, blue cards and prescriptions; and if it weren’t for their various small objects: a spoon from the canteen, a prayer book, a photo of two Yorkies torn out of a newspaper, a cassette with the inscription “Mother” and the chaplet of Our Lady recorded on it, a tote bag washed and folded evenly—no one would remember that these women, who are here today, were alive at all.

Hund doesn’t attempt to construct a comprehensive picture, which would reveal some neatly packaged truth. This is one of the most compelling aspects of the book—the devastating intimacy and scaled back narratives propel the story forward, à la Fleur Jaeggy or Jenny Offill. For instance, in one scene, the narrator recounts how the women are not so crazy as to have forgotten the abuses they’ve suffered, most often from family and partners. Hund uses a neologism, “męże-węże,” which literally would be something like “husband-snakes,” but the term rhymes perfectly while simultaneously magnifying menace. I rendered this as “spouse-louse,” which loses some of the historical connotations of snakes and viperous dangers, but the parasitical qualities of lice—surviving on the blood of another—echoes other aspects in the novel. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary news from Poland, Kenya, and North Macedonia!

In this week of updates on world literature, our Editors-at-Large bring news on an upcoming film adaptation of Władysław Reymont’s The Peasants, a monthly calendar highlighting African writers and literatures, and the most recent winner of the esteemed Golden Wreath in North Macedonia! From Asymptote contributors’ recent accolades to a brief look into Vlada Urošević’s poetry, read on to learn more!

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Poland

A film version of the modern Polish classic, The Peasants by Nobel-prize winning author Władysław Reymont, will hopefully hit the screens later this year, following a lengthy delay caused by COVID and the war in Ukraine. Those familiar with the Gdańsk-based filmmakers Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman will know that this won’t be your run-of-the-mill costume drama; the film uses the same painstaking hand-painted technique that the team pioneered in their earlier acclaimed short film Loving Vincent. Originally scheduled for release in 2022, the production of The Peasants came to a standstill, as twenty-three of the artists working on the film were Ukrainian and based in a studio in Kyiv. Interestingly, it is the film that we have to thank for the new English edition of The Peasants; since the existing translation published in 1924 was rather outdated, Welchman commissioned Anna Zaranko, winner of the 2020 Found in Translation Prize, to translate a couple of chapters for him and subsequently managed to persuade Penguin Classics to publish the complete novel, which is nearly 1000 pages long. 

In 2021, one year after Zaranko won it, the Found In Translation Award went to Ewa Małachowska-Pasek and Megan Thomas for their new English version of Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz’s 1932 satirical novel The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma. They discuss the novel with Daniel Goldfarb in the first episode of his series of Encounters with Polish Literature. Now in its third year, this consistently illuminating series of monthly videos that Goldfarb has been producing for the Polish Institute in New York has clocked up twenty-six episodes so far. In Episode 2, which focuses on Andrzej Sapkowski, Goldfarb is joined by David French, who has translated six out of the fantasy writer’s eight novels in the Witcher series into English, as well as all three parts of his Hussite Trilogy. In the most recent Episode 3, Goldfarb and the scholar and translator Benjamin Paloff introduce Leopold Tyrmand, author of one of the great Warsaw novels and popularizer of jazz in mid-twentieth-century Poland, a transformative figure in Polish culture between the death of Joseph Stalin and the post-Stalin thaw.

There have been nominations and prizes galore for Asymptote contributors: Marta Dziurosz has won the First Translation Prize of the UK Society of Authors 2022 for her ‘truly astounding translation’ from the Polish of Marcin Wicha’s Things I didn’t Throw Out, sharing the prize with editors Željka Marošević and Sophie Missing. Mikołaj Grynberg’s heartbreaking collection of short stories, I’d Like To Say Sorry But There’s No One To Say Sorry To, translated by Sean Gasper Bye, has been named a finalist of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish literature (the winner to be announced on September 12). Olga Tokarczuk’s monumental The Books of Jacob in Jennifer Croft’s translation finds itself on the shortlist of the 2023 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development Literary Prize alongside fellow Polish author Maciej Hen and Anna Blasiak, translator of his book According to Her (see interview). 

And finally, if you are a writer or translator with at least one published book, are currently working on a writing project, are interested in learning more about the Polish literary community, and have a connection with any UNESCO City of Literature outside of Poland, don’t miss the opportunity to apply for a two-month literary residency in Kraków (July 1 to August 31, 2023). The deadline for applications is April 23.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: April 2023

New translations from the French, Swahili, and Polish!

This month, we are taking a look at works from world literature that unveil the universal intersections at the centre of society: an empathetic interrogation into the cross-section of contemporary life in a superstore by the inimitable Annie Ernaux; a brilliantly curated selection of humanist stories from the Swahili; and a subtle, delicate look into the nature of happiness as written into dialogue by lauded Polish author, Marek Bieńczyk. Read on to find out more!

look at lights

Look at the Lights, My Love by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer, Yale University Press, 2023

Review by Laurel Taylor, Assistant Editor

Even at its best, ethnography is an ethically tricky subject; at its worst, it can dehumanize, tokenize, and Other the people who fall under its burning eye—an eye so often situated in wealth, power, whiteness, and patriarchy. Annie Ernaux is all too aware of the treacherous ethnographic ground she walks in Regarde les lumières mon amour, originally published in 2014 and translated now into an incisive and unadorned English by Alison L. Strayer as Look at the Lights, My Love. In this brief but gripping nonfiction entry, Ernaux records her various visits to the French big-box store Auchan from November 2012 to October 2013, a period which happens to coincide with the 2013 Rana Plaza building collapse in the Savar sub-district of Dhaka, Bangladesh. 

For all its drab ubiquity and late-capitalist imbrication, Ernaux treats the site of the superstore not only as a place perpetuating a unilateral and devastating economics (in the broadest sense of the word), but also one which engages humanity in complex ways—affectively, socially, temporally.

. . . when you think of it, there is no other space, public or private, where so many individuals so different in terms of age, income, education, geographic and ethnic background, and personal style, move about and rub shoulders with each other. No enclosed space where people are brought into greater contact with their fellow humans, dozens of times a year, and where each has a chance to catch a glimpse of others’ ways of living and being. Politicians, journalists, “experts,” all those who have never set foot in a superstore, do not know the social reality of France today.

Indeed, it feels almost taboo in the often inward-facing world of Parisian literature to engage with something so blasé as a big-box store. At one point, Ernaux even says in an aside, “I don’t see Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, or Françoise Sagan doing their shopping in a superstore; Georges Perec yes, but I may be wrong about that.” For me, this is what makes Ernaux’s earnest attempt at engagement all the more relevant (and close-to-home, as I grew up in a squarely middle-class family that did most of its shopping at a big-box store). In addition to the unconventional topic, this particular book also feels difficult to classify. Neither journalism nor something so structured as a dialectic, Look at the Lights, My Love is something more akin to mindfulness. It is an attempt to deliberately undo the asynchronous pace of the superstore—a place where flash sales, labyrinthine design, ever-changing displays, and the press of daily chores all collude to entrap and entangle us in the past, present, and future all at once. Ernaux’s thick descriptions, in trying to circumvent these snares, work to better provide us with “[a] free statement of observations and sensations, aimed at capturing something of the life of the place.”

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary news from Armenia, the Philippines, and Kenya!

This week, our editors on the ground are watching out for multilingual poetry events, emerging Armenian writers, solidarity in language and literature, the favourite texts of Filipino readers, translation in Southeast Asia, dialogues between authors in Nairobi, and PEN/HEIM Translation Grants winners. Read on to find out more!

Kristina Tatarian, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Armenia

The beautiful auditorium of the Carfesjian Center for the Arts, located at the Cascade Complex in Yerevan, is a frequent stage for literary readings. On the night of October 8, the center hosted a performance as part of antiBabylon, a multilingual poetry event that brought together literary communities from Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, Moldova and Germany. Organised by PANDA Platforma, an NGO from Berlin, the event took place in Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, and Ukraine, as poets visited each other’s countries for joint workshops and performances to create, translate, and perform. The Project’s aim is to create a “free multilingual poetic space,” and test if poetry can answer the most burning existential questions of today’s troubled world.

On the same day, IALA’s Emerging Writers Showcase took place online. This showcase featured readings from Armenian authors championed by the organisation as mentees or winners of the Young Armenian Poet Award. By supporting emerging literary talent, the organisation adds to the global effort of Armenian artists to accelerate cultural revival in the country.

The Armenian diaspora around the world plays a crucial part of setting the cultural agenda for Armenian literature, and now, the groundbreaking collection We Are All Armenian: Voices from the Diaspora, edited by Aram Mjorian, is available from University of Texas Press. The collection will feature essays from writers and poets of Armenian origin, shedding light on diverse experiences of “Armenianness” and personal perspectives on ethnicity, identity, and the sense of home. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest in literature from Poland, Hong Kong, and Puerto Rico!

This week on Asymptote, we’re your eyes and ears for updates on award seasons, special national literature features, and postcolonial discourse and strategy. Polish literature is soaring at a high after celebrated adaptations and translations are introducing new readers to long-loved works. From Hong Kong, the national security law once again catalyses questions in its suppression of writing, even as local writers are seeing much love abroad. in Puerto Rico, writers are questioning US-backed funding and its entrapments. Read on to find out more.

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Poland

Autumn is Poland’s award season, and this year saw the prizes go to a variety of genres. For the first time since 2009, NIKE, Poland’s most prestigious literary prize, went to a book of poetry: Jerzy Jarniewicz’s “erotically daring” collection Mondo Cane. Edward Pasewicz, whose novel Pulverkopf was also shortlisted, took home the coveted Angelus Prize for literature from Central Europe—only the second Polish book to win the accolade in the award’s twelve-year history. The Readers’ Angelus Prize went to Czech writer Jaroslav Rudiš for his novel Winterbergs letzte Reise, written in German and translated into Polish by Małgorzata Gralińska, and his publisher Książkowe klimaty scored another success with Bartosz Sadulski’s “literary fable and anti-historical reportage” Rzeszot, garnering the Kościelskich Prize.

Polish literature has enjoyed something of a boom in English, placing second in a recent survey conducted by The Bookseller, which is based on Nielsen BookScan data for the fifty-two weeks since April 16, 2022. The results show that in this period, translated fiction accounted for 11.4% of total fiction revenue, proving that we have moved even further from the proverbial 3%. Broken down into languages, 60% of the translations were from Japanese—unsurprising given that 99.7% of the total revenue was generated by manga. The next language, French, trailed at 6.1%, and Polish came in at third with 4.6%, beating translations from Italian, German, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, and Norwegian. Much of this success appears to be linked to Andrzej Sapkowski’s blockbuster fantasy The Witcher, which has filled the Game of Thrones-shaped hole on Netflix; the first two volumes of the eight-part saga were translated by Danusia Stok and the remainder by David French, who went on to translate his Hussite Trilogy. Olga Tokarczuk’s Nobel Prize has also contributed to this success, as has the fact that Polish literature was the market focus at the 2017 London Book Fair.

Here’s hoping that this interest will extend to a slew of recent translations from the Polish. According to Her, “a book-length interview with the Mother of God” by Maciej Hen (recently interviewed on the Asymptote blog by fellow writer Wioletta Greg), was published by Holland House in Anna Blasiak’s translation on November 3. On the same day, Penguin Books released Anna Zaranko’s long-awaited translation of The Peasants, one of Poland’s most famous twentieth-century epics by the 1924 Nobel Prize winner Władysław Reymont. In What We Leave Behind: A Birdwatcher’s Dispatches from the Waste Catastrophe, translated by Zosia Krasodomska-Jones and published by MacLehose Press on October 13, ornithologist and writer Stanisław Łubieński shows how consumer society has spun out of control, leading to the point of environmental catastrophe. Finally, Vine Editions, a new non-profit publisher based in Detroit with a focus on world literature, is about to bring out its first title, Piotr Paziński’s Bird Streets (Ptasie ulice) translated by Ursula Phillips. READ MORE…

How a Polish Writer Created His Own Apocrypha: An Interview with Maciej Hen

Either we shall fight until we wipe each other out, or we shall talk and build mutual understanding.

Maciej Hen is a well-known writer in Poland, awarded the Gombrowicz Literary Prize and shortlisted for the prestigious Angelus Central European Literature Award. Perhaps because the twentieth century was cruel to his Jewish family—himself being persecuted as a child in 1968 when the Polish government launched a campaign against the Jews—the writer writes primarily historical novels, describing the world at the precipice of immense change. In his debut work, According to Her, readers observe the birth of Christianity; in the following Solfatara, he describes ten days of revolution in mid-seventeenth-century Naples; in the third, a lonely, older hero from Warsaw goes on an unplanned journey amidst a change in regime, and discovers that his ancestor was at the head of a bloody people’s rebellion. Hen told me that in a new work—one which is not yet published—Doctor Faustus will be written as a woman. It seems to me that if the books of Maciej Hen were to be widely translated into other languages, he would become a contender for the Nobel Prize; his writing is visionary. With According to Her to be published soon in English translation by Holland House Books, readers in the Anglophone will now be introduced to this beautifully written book about the alternative life of Jesus Christ, told from the perspective of his old Jewish mother. I was moved and delighted by it; someone finally gave the voice to the Virgin Mary. 

Wioletta Greg (WG): In According to Her, the story of a son is told by nearly a woman named Mariamne, who is almost a hundred years old, and uncannily resembles Mary of Galilea. A bold idea for an author who lives in a Catholic country.

Maciej Hen (MH): Not only do I live in a Catholic country, but worse still, I’m a Jew living in a Catholic country. And, to top it all, I’m a Jewish atheist. Actually, I grew up separated from the basics of Judaism, because my parents belonged to the first generation of Jews who felt that religion was not so important for their children.

WG: I’m curious why you published your book under the pen name Maciej Nawariak. Were you afraid of being attacked for re-describing the life of Jesus from a Jewish perspective? 

MH: I took the pen name from pure vanity. My father is a writer who had earned himself a reputation long before I came up with my debut book, and I was so sure my publication would be a success, that, in order to fully enjoy it, I would have to disqualify in advance any suggestions people might put forward about my father’s name helping me enter the literary world.

WG: Your parents survived the Holocaust as refugees in Central Asia, and they met in Uzbekistan.

MH: Yes, they met in Samarkand in 1943. My mother was twenty-one at the time, and my father just under twenty. He was from Warsaw, and she was from a village outside Lwów. After the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union, they both evacuated eastwards and finally settled for a while in Samarkand, the former capital of Tamerlane. After the war, they returned to Warsaw. Out of their families—both once very large, as per custom—only five people survived, including themselves. My father changed his surname from Cukier to Hen, in time becoming a highly regarded writer in Poland, and my mother took care of the household, raising my sister and me—for a few years she was also a Russian language teacher. READ MORE…

Breaking Down the 2022 National Book Award Longlist

A selection to whet your appetite for translated literature!

Now in its fifth year, this rebooted annual award for translated literature deserves a serious look. How does its newly released longlist compare to the Booker International counterpart?

Unlike its Booker International counterpart, works from European languages dominated, continuing the trend from previous years. Previous winner (and frequent Asymptote contributor) Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth was one of the only two titles from Asia.

Order a copy of Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani.

As with the 2020 selections, only one title appeared in both the Booker International and the National Book Award longlists, and it was an Olga Tokarczuk novel translated by Jennifer Croft. We hope it will be third-time lucky for this illustrious duo!

Order a copy of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft.

New Directions is the only publisher to have two titles on the longlist. Aside from Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth, Olga Ravn’s The Employees, which our Criticism Editor Barbara Halla chose as her clear winner from last year’s Booker International longlist, is also nominated.

Click here to order a copy of Olga Ravn’s The Employees, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken.

Incidentally, Aitken, who is the only longlisted translator to ever be nominated for his work on different authors, was interviewed in our pages last year. This year, we sat down with Mónica Ojeda, whom interviewer Rose Bialer calls “one of the most powerful and provocative voices in Latin American literature today.” Her Jawbone made the cut:


Order a copy of Mónica Ojeda’s Jawbone, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker.

We hope we’ve whetted your appetite with these selections. Take a look at the full longlist here! Oh, and by the way, we may receive a small commission for your purchase(s), which will go toward supporting our advocacy for a more inclusive world literature. Other ways to sustain our mission include signing up as a masthead member, or joining our Book Club!

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary news from Thailand, Poland, and the Philippines!

In this week’s collection of literary news from around the world, our editors report on political dissident writers in Thailand, a literary festival in Poland, and prizes for writers in the Philippines. Read on to find out more!

Peera Songkünnatham, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Thailand

Activists critical of the Thai establishment have to contend with not only the threat of royal defamation laws but also charges of mental illness. No one knows this more intimately than writer, translator, and bookseller Small Bandhit Aniya: in 1965, he was thrown in a psychiatric hospital by police after he camped outside the Russian Embassy in Bangkok and wrote “It is better to die in Moscow than to stay in Thailand” on the embassy walls in chalk. In 1975, he was charged with lèse-majesté for a booklet lambasting Haile Selassie I, the emperor of Ethiopia, but escaped imprisonment due to being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. This professional-opinion-turned-legal-fact would become the saving strategy for his lawyers in subsequent decades, most recently in 2014—to the dismay of the man himself, who insists he’s perfectly sane.

Starting this week, a literary translation initiative is putting a spotlight on Bandhit’s work along with the voices of other allegedly insane subjects in the kingdom. Under the theme “Madman, Madwoman, Madhuman,” the website Sanam Ratsadon released an excerpt from Bandhit’s autobiographical novel, in which he plays with the idea that he may indeed be insane. Rather than rejecting the diagnosis outright, as he has in his public statements, Bandhit takes the strange route of fictionalizing madness. “There is no doubt that I am mentally ill,” he writes. “Many things I have done in the past and will do in the future clearly signal that I am a psycho, the kind with paranoid schizophrenia.” Is this satire? In any case, this is a literary experiment that has yet to be fully appreciated and properly interpreted in Thailand. May the world be introduced to him, then.

Meanwhile, the short story “Sound of Laughter” by Mutita Ubekka, published as part of the same initiative, questions the self-help, positive-thinking mindset of the Thai public health sector and its allies through the perspective of a woman who is pushed to the brink of suicide by the country’s sociopolitical conditions, like many others in the “Sufferers Association of Thailand.” The story was originally written for a 2020 creative writing contest under the sunny theme of “Day of Suffering That Passed” as part of the project “Read to Heal the Heart.” Seeing through it all, the madwoman discovers her own way of overcoming suffering—through the Jokeresque laughter in a therapist’s office.

READ MORE…

On Women Who Refuse to Die: Who Will Win the 2022 Booker International?

What worlds have we been missing in prohibiting or dismissing women’s writing?

As we countdown to the 2022 Booker International Prize announcement on May 26, the contenders for the award offer new indications and perspectives by which to think about the world of literature and translation. In the following essay, our resident Booker expert Barbara Halla considers the digressive and variegated realm of “women’s writing”—that five out of the six titles on the shortlist were works by women authors is both evidence of the work’s scope and diversity, and also an overwhelming rejection of that old and tired idea: that women’s writing is simply of any gender-specific experience.

Since 2019, I have been relentlessly punished by the memory of this essay by an Albanian critic who argued in favor of the inherent superiority of men’s writing. His reasoning went like this: men write to triumph over life, whereas women write to survive. And for that very reason, the author claimed, men’s literature has universal appeal, as men are able to overcome the limitations of their own lived experiences and perspectives, while women’s writing focuses only on their painfully limited (i.e., domestic) existence.

My frustration with this article was compounded by finding its logic replicated elsewhere, in other books about the history of women in literature, and even during a conversation with another Albanian male writer a few months after reading that article. In the ensuing Q&A, the writer in question issued a complacent mea culpa about his lack of interest in women writers—he simply found their writing too limited and introspective. Of course, this is understandable. After all, it is easier to relate to Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei or Goethe’s Faust when one spends their days in the battlefield before making a deal with the devil and are whisked away for a night of debauchery with witches. After all, this is what “real” life is actually about, and it’s not like men ever write about minor concerns like marriage or childcare.

I’m being facetious, but this understanding of literature is pernicious—this desire to determine artistic value along essentialist gender lines. It also seeks to explain the existence of global and local literary canons as meritocratic, rather than the result of conscious policy decisions that have contributed to the erasure and devaluing of women’s writing. I was wondering about this argument as I made my way through the six books shortlisted for the Booker International 2022—five of which were written by women and published in the past fifteen years in South Korea, India, Poland, and Argentina. To be straightforward to the point of being trite: these five books undermine the notion that there is anything akin to a universal “women’s writing.” READ MORE…

Spring 2022: Highlights from the Team

Still don’t know where to start with our latest edition? Here are some more entry points, courtesy of our generous multicontinental team!

I felt that the Spring Asymptote was an incredibly timely and unsettling issue and I hope that broader readers can use it as a lens to think about ongoing dynamics of imperialism, capitalism, and more. I was drawn immediately to Kim Hyesoon’s poems from The Hell of That Star (tr. Cindy Juyoung Ok), with its overwhelming and abundant female presence that kept mutating. In Signe Gjessing’s poems from Tractatus (tr. Denise Newman), I really enjoyed the tension between the abstract and the material—for example, the fact that shampoo is able to exist alongside transcendence. The voice of Nina Yargekov’s “The Obedient Little Girl” (tr. Charles Lee) was immediately disarming! I was delighted by the emphasis on disobedience at the end. Last but not least, I enjoyed reading Agnieszka Taborska’s The World Has Gone Mad: A Surrealist Handbook How to Survive (tr. Soren Gauger). Leonora Carrington is my favorite artist and writer (I actually have a tattoo of one of her paintings); it was exciting to see her mentioned at the conclusion. I also enjoyed the automatic writing components. This is a text I do need to spend more time with and I am so glad that it was included in this issue.

—AM Ringwalt, Educational Arm Assistant

I have a love for Nordic literature in general, there is something about its directness and its simplicity, and yet at the same time its ability to confront existential issues through the details of the everyday. As I live in Sweden and yet am not Swedish, I see literature as a way into understanding the place and society where I am. I was struck by how so many of the pieces in the Swedish special feature confronted the deep hypocrisy that is there in Sweden’s self-presentation as a tolerant, progressive, consensual, and equal society: The uncovering of misogyny and violence against women in the Kristina Lugn (tr. Zach Maher), Lina Hagelbäck (tr. Freke Räihä) and Hanna Nordenhök (tr. Saskia Vogel) (there is a reason that the original Swedish title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was Män som hatar kvinnor [Men Who Hate Women]); or history of institutionalized homophobia in the Jonas Gardell (tr. Elizabeth Clark Wessel); and racism in the Majgull Axelsson (tr. Kathy Saranpa). These all show that there is something deeply troubling in the supposedly comfortable Swedish society that people here live in. And yet, for all this social awareness, these texts are not themselves sanctimonious or worthy. There is a distinct existential edge in each of them, they show how these social issues penetrate deep down into the world of the characters affected by them. Oppression is not an accident or mistake that can be simply rectified or remedied, it is a constitutive fact of the world as it exists and is revealed and experienced: violence, oppression, and torment penetrate and persist right through the world, into each blade of grass, bunch of flowers, childhood memory, or everyday action, and all this writing captures something of that pain and its penetration. This is the world. And it needs to be shown and seen again, recognized for what it is, as it is in this writing; and through the seeing again that this writing provides, it can also be recreated as other than it is.

—Liam Sprod, Copy Editor

Andrii Krasnyashchikh’s As Bombs Fall (tr. Matthew Hyde) made me cry. This account of daily life in Kharkiv made me think of my grandmother living in Rome under Nazi occupation—the immediacy of daily life while the world crumbles around you. Accounts such as this allow us a window into the individual human impact of war that newspaper reportage does not. Johannes Lilleøre’s My Sick Friend (tr. Sharon E. Rhodes) read like prose poetry. I love the way it plays with time: we move through a life, and then once illness strikes, time slows down. The taut, matter-of-fact sentences, with their seemingly throwaway observations and details, evoke not just the immediacy created by bodily illness and suffering, but also convey the pain and helplessness of the narrator. Kate Tsurkan’s interview with Zenia Tompkins discusses so many vital questions, for example: what responsibility do we children of the diaspora have to our homelands? How much is our image of homeland shaped by the trauma of our parents and grandparents?

—Amaryllis Gacioppo, Newsletter Editor

READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2022

Introducing our favorites from the latest issue!

Featuring work from thirty-four countries, the Spring 2022 issue is once again charting new territory across the landscape of world literature. From Hermann Hesse to Kim Hyesoon, as well as coverage of Ukrainian poetry and exceptional Swedish works in our Special Feature, these wonderful inductions into the English language are full of discoveries. Not sure where to begin? Read on for our blog editors’ curated selections!

Through the brutal scorchings and flighty erasures of passed time, Greek tragedies have endured—as though stone, and not words, were their material. Near as our own stories, ancient as storytelling itself, and inextricable from the passions they depict, the characters that had suffused the fifth-century Athenian air with their spectacle defy temporality, continuing to walk and rage within the immediate theatre of our world. In the betrayal of fathers and the names of flowers, in funerals and weddings, in any force that could be mistaken for fate. By the logic of the tragic’s pervasive mutability, their untimely timeliness, one is made to think of the ways cycles are kept and broken, if whether the knowledge of something coming has ever been enough to stop it.

On the mitigative potential of the tragedies, Brian Doerries (the founder of Theatre of War, a production company which stages performances for communities confronting urgent social issues) had posed a question: “What if tragedy is a form of storytelling that was designed . . . to wake us up to the slim possibility of human agency, of making a choice that averts imminent disaster before it’s too late? What if tragedy is as refined of an advancement as architecture or the sculpture, law, government of 5th century BCE . . . a form of storytelling that arose out of a necessity of nearly eighty years of war, to communalise trauma, give citizens permission to access and express their emotions, and help heal the city?” To conceive the life of these plays as not to instruct but to change, what emerges is how the devastation of tragedy offers us, by way of its lapidary endings, the opportunity for transcendence. In José Watanabe’s Antígona, translated with an impeccable ear by Cristina Pérez Díaz, Sophocles’ Antigone is given fluid, elemental form, a series of poetic rooms built for one actress to walk through, inhabiting their rhythm as she inhabits time. Written beneath the dense terror of civil conflict in Peru, Watanabe’s distilling of chorus into a single rivulet of speaking is to run a thin-wire sieve through the voracious appetite of mass violence and statistic, provoking the wide overarch of trauma into open intimacy, into something that is suffered individually, in bodies united by the likeness of experience but ruthlessly alone in bearing it. The voice is torn with the tension between thinking and knowing, between feeling and narration, spreading itself amidst the leaves of time:

The sacred eye of daylight does not penetrate that far
nor the cries of friends and relatives. In that silence,
death, laborious, enfolds the girl
in a dense cocoon of shadows.

READ MORE…

Our Spring 2022 Issue Has Landed!

Individuals of the woodland canine persuasion run amok in our Spring 2022 issue, thanks to Theis Ørntoft and Nina Yargekov!

Welcome to our Spring 2022 edition, released just as Russia’s invasion enters a brutal new phase. We’ve been curating a space for writers in support of Ukraine in a new Saturday column. Now, we proudly bring you Andrii Krasnyashchikh’s letters from Kharkiv, Kate Tsurkan’s interview with Zenia Tompkins, and Ian Ross Singleton’s review of Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine. Complemented by guest artist Shuxian Lee’s poignant cover, these pieces and the new issue remind us that if “humans are destructive”—as frequent contributor Theis Ørntoft puts it across so powerfully in his essay “Our Days in Paradise are Over”—“we are also an organising phenomenon in the cosmos.”

An absolute highlight amid new work from thirty-four countries, Ørntoft’s essay is itself an organizing phenomenon that deserves to be dwelt on. According to him, civilization “began with the delineation of a garden,” but capitalism has taken it to the point where every inch of planet Earth has been altered and nature no longer exists “out there”—no wonder, then, that his expedition to the West of Jutland yields zero sightings of wolves. Heavily mythologized across cultures, wolves most often represent danger, chaos, the unknown—yet, in the author’s telling, they also stand for the primeval and, therefore, a certain elusive real, in stark contrast to the various symbolisms thrust upon them. Ørntoft then inverts the anthropocentric paradigm that humans are used to—with them at the top of the food chain, even though they do not necessarily self-identify as animals—and asks us to consider what message wolves might hold for us instead.

Apart from Nina Yargekov’s uproarious adaptation of “Little Red Riding Wolf” for the age of the #MeToo movement—the obvious story with which Ørntoft’s nonfiction might be paired—“Our Days in Paradise are Over” echoes Nobel laureate Hermann Karl Hesse’s empathetic Weltanschauung in two new translations of his poems by Wally Swist; it also asks us to pay attention to the various animals conjured in this edition: from the suffering, captive bat in Bosnian author Aljoša Ljubojević’s “How We Started the War” to the suffering, liberated “Fish” in Georgian writer Goderdzi Chokheli’s story about a man who jumps into a lake and renounces his very own humanity along with the social contract it entails. Then there is the elusive boar in Pedro de Jesús’s slippery poem, in which various hunters discuss the “art of the hunt” only to miss the point; the cats with beautiful eyes in Agnieszka Taborska’s fascinating piece on surrealists vis-à-vis their chosen suicides, “yawn[ing] and stretch[ing] in all their dignity, distance, and above all their enormous indifference to the person standing there on the chair with her head in a noose.” READ MORE…