Place: Sudan

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Bulgaria and Egypt!

This week, our editors-at-large report from Bulgaria and Egypt, taking us to book fairs and prize ceremonies. From the passing of a giant of Egyptian children’s literature to the arrival of literary stars in Bulgaria, read on to find out more!

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Bulgaria

The fiftieth anniversary edition of the Sofia International Book Fair graced the beginning of December. It took place over five days in the National Palace of Culture and saw the participation of approximately 160 publishing houses. Its motto was, quite fittingly, “We create stories. We create history.”

In an interview for the Nova News channel, Veselin Todorov, former longtime chairman of the Bulgarian Book Association revealed some intriguing details about the fair’s conception: “We began this tradition fifty-five years ago. However, we are celebrating our golden jubilee only now because on several occasions during socialist times, it was decided for the fair to be held every other year instead of every year. It all started back in 1968, in the Universiada Hall. Todor Zhivkov [former de facto leader of Bulgaria] inaugurated the event—a pompous and noisy affair. He even claimed it was one of the biggest such fairs in Eastern Europe.”

Literary critic Amelia Licheva also commented on the festival in her opening-day interview for the independent media platform Toest: “The boldest ambition of the team in charge of the cultural program (both Daria Karapetkova and I are part of it this year) is to attract real stars. Bulgaria is a small market with a bad image abroad and it is rather difficult, but we do not give up easily. Actually, our efforts finally paid off. The Bulgarian public will be able to meet with Franco Moretti, Leïla Slimani, Dacia Maraini, Stefan Hertmans, Ia Genberg, and Agustina Bazterrica. We are hoping to cultivate a taste in the audience for the issues of global importance and get more people to attend these discussions. This would mean a success not only for the festival but also for the role of literature in the present day.”

What better way to end 2023 than with hope for the literary future of 2024?

Ibrahim Fawzy, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Egypt READ MORE…

The Emerging, Unwieldy Past: On Rania Mamoun’s Something Evergreen Called Life

By exposing her soul with admirable honesty, Mamoun paves the way for readers fighting their own battles.

Something Evergreen Called Life by Rania Mamoun, translated from the Arabic by Yasmine Seale, Action Books, 2023

An outspoken activist against the regime of Omar al-Bashir, Rania Mamoun was forced to flee her homeland of Sudan in 2020 and seek asylum in the United States with her two small children. As a cloud of fear and uncertainty cloaked the globe, asylum turned to exile; COVID-19 rendered everywhere unsafe. Written against this backdrop of extraordinary circumstances, Something Evergreen Called Life is Mamoun’s first collection of poetry. The result of a hundred-day commitment between the artist and her friend as they sought direction and companionship during the most isolated phase of the pandemic, she credits her daily practice of putting verse to feeling for her survival and restoration. Mamoun is the author of two novels in Arabic, Green Flash (2006) and Son of the Sun (2013), as well as Thirteen Months of Sunrise (2019), a collection of short stories translated into the English by Elisabeth Jaquette and shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation in 2020. Her contribution to Banthology: Stories from Unwanted Nations (2018), was formerly reviewed in Asymptote.

Something Evergreen Called Life is a collection of free verse. While organized chronologically, with a day or two passing in between each poem, there is no illusion of exposition. Like innermost thoughts, the poems interject themselves, exemplifying the lack of introduction or transition in our most private ponderings. As a result, we read Mamoun’s poems like the revelations of a close confidant; because she writes without shame, there can be no judgment. It is in this unrelenting vulnerability that Something Evergreen Called Life finds its power.

At its core, Something Evergreen Called Life reflects the ebbs and flows of Mamoun’s deep depression:

the water goes over me
I am drowning
without getting wet
grasping the hem of survival
struggling for breath

READ MORE…

In Review: Banthology, edited by Sarah Cleave

Good stories help us to make sense of the world.

In January 2017, independent British publisher Comma Press announced that in 2018 they would only be publishing authors from ‘banned nations’. This was a response to President Trump’s directive to block entry to citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries for ninety days. Whilst continuing to generate hate and divide people, Trump’s announcement did give rise to some positive news. Organisations around the world stood up to fight for the rights of the citizens of these countries. In a show of solidarity, Asymptote’s Spring 2017 issue featured writing from authors in many of the countries affected. And now, a new title from Comma Press, Banthology: Stories from Unwanted Nations, has just been published in this spirit.

READ MORE…

Spotlight on Banned Countries Feature

A Q&A with ALTA director Aron Aji and co-translator Bakhit Bakhit

After our Blog Editors’ and Section Editors’ Highlights, we turn our attention to our Banned Countries Special Feature, put together by founding editor Lee Yew Leong. These Q&As by new Assistant Interviews Editor Claire Jacobson shed further light on the creative process of translation. First up, we are thrilled to be joined today by Dr. Aron Aji and Bakhit Bakhit, who collaborated on a translation of Mohamed Abd-Alhai’s poem “Al-Salmandel at the Edge of Absence”. Bakhit, originally hailing from Sudan, is an MFA candidate in literary translation at the University of Iowa, where Dr. Aji is his advisor. 

Beyond the obvious differences between the Arabic and English grammar, Abd-Alhai’s syntax presents particular challenges to the translator. Often adverbs and adjectives are placed to accentuate sound and rhythm, more than sense. To ‘correct’ their placement in order to conform to the English usage would hurt the sound structures in the poem. Likewise, each stanza presents a single thought unit through the network of linked images and ideas developed across the four or more more lines. It is not unusual for particles or pronouns to simultaneously refer both to a preceding verb, noun, or image and to one that might follow. The translation, therefore, has to reflect these simultaneous links, working against a conventional linear reading. The actual process involves breaking down the original stanzas into phrasal units and to reconstruct them with these links in mind. A good example are the lines:

She on her loom waiting
driving time, onward once, then back

that should capture the movement of the loom back and forth and the workings of her mind between memory of loss and the longing for return.

Bakhit Bakhit’s collaboration with Aron Aji, too, involves the weaving together of two discrete translation processes that yield or resist to each other—now interrogating now complementing—hopefully moving toward an English version remains sensitive to the Arabic cadences—in sound, sense, or imagery.

—Bakhit Bakhit and Aron Aji

In your translators’ note above, you mention your “two discrete translation processes” that work together to produce a single translation. Can you describe the different approaches you take to the text, and how you were able work together to produce this translation?

Bakhit is the one who knows the poet, the poem, its aesthetic and socio-cultural context. Our collaboration begins after Bakhit completes a relatively advanced draft; then Aron enters into the process, silently reading the poem while listening to Bakhit read the original in Arabic; Aron marks the translation according to the rhythms and sounds he hears in Bakhit’s reading, in places where the Arabic feels more resonant, more charged. What follows is a rich conversation about individual words, lines, etc., in order to tease out this “charge.” Some inevitable semantic revisions notwithstanding, our conversation is about carrying into English the subtler, less intellectual, more intuitive aspects of the original, what belongs not so much to the body of the poem, but maybe to its soul.

Can you talk about your decision to leave the words al-samandel and hijra wal awda in Arabic?

We preferred keeping the Arabic phrase hijra wal awda to counteract the negative reception of the words, immigration and immigrant, nowadays. In Abd Alhai’s poem, immigration as hijra is always attached with return as al-awda. It is a journey where the immigrant always comes back after attaining self-knowledge and knowledge of his/her roots. Coming back may not always mean physical return to the homeland. But it always means growth, recognition, wisdom that has to do with a reconciliation with, a consummation of the past.  He may be welcome with songs and celebrations or he may die with honor, “if lost in his inclination to the sea ….”

As for al-samandel, the English translation is “salamander” but does not necessarily carry the mythic resonance that Al-Samandel does.

In these instances, we were not deliberately trying to be foreignizing or to provide a cultural flavoring. Rather, both hijra wal awada and al-samandel are meant to function like windows through which the sincerely curious reader will look and find out much that would have otherwise seemed lost.

What do you see as Abd-Alhai’s contribution to the conversation on banned countries, given that he wrote in a different time and context? 

The “Inclination to the sea” is about the nomad condition—whether of the hero, the immigrant, or the refuge—which lies at the heart of Homer’s The Odyssey as it does of Abdl-Alhai’s poem, which, in fact, directly engages the classical epic. The woman at the loom may be Penelope or Fatima, but also represent homeland, a place of real or imaginary return.

Find Mohamed Abd Alhai’s poem “Al-Salmandel at the Edge of Absence” in Bakhit Bakhit and Aron Aji’s translation here, where you can also listen to Bakhit Bakhit’s reading of the poem in the original Arabic.

Read More:

Announcing Our Call for Literature from Banned Countries

Spread the word!

Thanks to the 77 backers of our Indiegogo campaign who’ve contributed $12,736 so far, there’s already enough for us to launch a call for a Feature on Literature from Banned Countries. As new work from these affected countries will have to be specially commissioned as well as promoted, we will be directly constrained by what we manage to raise. If you’d like to see a huuge showcase to answer Trump’s new travel ban, due to be released any day now, please pitch in with a donation of whatever amount you can afford or help us spread the word about our fundraiser!

Here is the official call, taken from our submissions page:

Asymptote seeks hitherto unpublished literary fiction, literary nonfiction and poetry from the seven countries on Trump’s banned list (i.e. from authors who identify as being from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen) that have been created in response to Trump’s travel ban, or can be interpreted as such. If selected for publication, the work will run either in our Translation Tuesday showcase at The Guardian or in our Spring 2017 quarterly edition (or both). Submissions of original English-language work will only be considered for publication in our Spring 2017 edition. For works in English translation, the decision as to where the work will be placed rests entirely at the discretion of our editor-in-chief, who curates Translation Tuesdays at The Guardian and who will be assembling this Special Feature.

While other guidelines from our submissions page apply, contributors to this Feature only will be paid at least USD200 per article.

To make sure that the articles from this Feature are circulated widely, we will leverage on our eight social media platforms in three languages, and, depending on whether our crowdfunding campaign meets its target, paid ads in high-profile media outlets to promote them for maximum impact.

Submissions can be sent directly to editors@asymptotejournal.com with the subject header: SUBMISSION: BANNEDLIT (Country/Language/Genre). Queries, which can be directed to the same email address, should carry the subject header: QUERY: BANNEDLIT

Deadline: 15 Mar 2017 

Our Fundraiser Is Now Live!

Help us bring you literature from the seven countries Trump intends to ban!

Johnny Depp was reported to have spent three million dollars firing Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes out of a canon; our endeavour is modest by comparison: we are aiming to raise at least $30,000 for an urgent showcase of marginalised voices to happen both in our Spring 2017 edition and at The Guardian (here’s an example of what you can look forward to). 20% of all proceeds will be donated directly to ACLU or Refugees Welcome. The more we raise the more we can do: e.g. a printed anthology of the work, a large-scale free event featuring these authors.

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But wait, there’s more: support our campaign and you’ll receive specially autographed books by Junot Díaz, Yann Martel and George Szirtes, among others! Apart from the wide selection of books below, we’ll also give away, among our wide range of Asymptote memorabilia, a newly designed AsympTOTE—featuring artwork by the guest artist of our current issue, Dianna Xu. If you’re a loyal Asymptote supporter, you’ll certainly want to add this AsympTOTE to your collection. Don’t wait—donate to our fundraiser today!

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