Posts filed under 'autofiction'

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Greece and France!

This week, our editors take us to Greece and France, where they find exciting projects at the National Library, urgent new poetry in translation, and theater adaptations. From the Afro Greek experience to new takes on the work of Annie Ernaux, read on to find out more!

Christina Chatzitheodorou, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Greece

The National Library of Greece (NLG) is currently displaying the fruits of their project “We, the Afro-Greeks: black literature as a cultural bridge.” Until the end of April, the Library will be displaying new books by authors of African origin that focus on themes of immigration and racism—additions enabled by this project. This comes after a few initiatives by and for Afro-Greeks that engage with the lived experience of Black people in Greece. The term “Afro-Greek” itself, as Adéọlá Naomi Adérè̩mí explains, is relatively new: “We started using it around 2015 to 2017 as a term to express the experience of being Black and raised or born in Greece, of having our formative years in Greece and identifying as Greek citizens legally and culturally. We are Greek and African.” READ MORE…

The Richness of the Fragment: An Interview with Oksana Vasyakina and Elina Alter

I don’t believe in wholeness and I don’t believe in Chekhov’s gun. Language . . . isn't enough to reflect the fullness of the world.

What does it mean to hold grief—to physically carry your mother’s death with you in daily life? 

Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound documents the journey of a queer poet as she delivers her mother’s ashes from Moscow to Siberia. Translated from Russian by Elina Alter, the novel is an auto-fictional exploration of processing grief through language, and also a meditation on the Russian lesbian lyric—a polyphonic conversation with feminist thinkers across time and space. While making her way across Russia, the narrator weaves together a cycle of poetry, composed of recollections of her past sexual experiences and fragmented essays. Wound then began as a few pages typed alone in the dark, when Vasyakina was writing during the pandemic, and this sense—of both intimacy and intensity—persists throughout the book. Vasyakina writes, as Alter puts it, with a brutality and directness that feels “exceptionally clear-sighted.”

Wound is Vasyakina’s first novel and the winner of the 2021 NOS Prize. Since then, she has published Steppe and Rose, books that also center on family figures. In addition, her works include two collections of poetry: Женская проза (Women’s Prose) and a cycle of poetic texts titled Ветер ярости (The Wind of Fury). 

Alter is the editor-in-chief of Circumference, a journal of international culture and poetry, and has also translated It’s the End of the World, My Love by Alla Gorbunova. Her translation of Wound has been listed as one of Nylon’s Must-Reads of the Month and LGBTQ Read’s Most Anticipated Titles of the Year. 

This interview, conducted with Oksana and Elina separately, has been edited for clarity.

Jaeyeon Yoo (JY): How did Wound begin? 

Oksana Vasyakina (OV): As I rode a bus through Volgograd while carrying the urn [containing my mother’s ashes], it occurred to me that I would never be able to describe this experience. It wasn’t because the situation was tragic; I just saw how complicated it was, and I felt that I wasn’t equal to the material. This was in early 2019. 

A bit later, in the summer, I wrote a cycle of poems—which are included in the book—called “Ode to Death.” I had the desire to write, but I understood that poetry wasn’t sufficient for the challenge I saw before me. And then the pandemic began. I was shut up in my apartment, all events were canceled, all work went on Zoom. One night, I opened up my laptop and wrote the first few pages of Wound. I was writing in the dark, because it wasn’t clear to me how to write long prose, and before this I’d only written short poems, I didn’t know how to put together a novel. A week later I pulled up my draft, reread it, and understood that this was what I wanted to do, that I had to continue. 

I’m superstitious, so when I start writing a text, I name the file with a random combination of letters, just in case I never finish. But as I continued writing, I thought that the novel needed a simple name. The simplest word. The first word a child utters when it learns to speak is mama, and that was the original title of the manuscript. But some time later, I thought that mama rhymes with the word rana [“wound” in Russian]. It’s just as simple, and contains many meanings. After I wrote the scene in which the mother is lying in her coffin, I renamed the file. Since then, the book has been called Rana: Wound

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Uncertainty, Improbability, and Hope: An Interview with Ariel Dorfman

. . . how can we tell the truth about the terrors and oppression we are witnessing, and not become agents of despair?

In September, Argentine-Chilean novelist Ariel Dorfman released his latest novel, The Suicide Museum (Other Press)—one that has been fifty years in the making. In the narrative, we follow the author’s eponymous alter ego, who is sent by a man named Joseph Hortha to uncover the truth behind the death of socialist president Salvador Allende. Was it murder or suicide?

Fifty years ago, on September 11, 1973, the Chilean Armed Forces, led by Augusto Pinochet and with the support of Richard Nixon, the US government, and the CIA, launched a military coup against the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. The coup targeted Palacio La Moneda, resulting in the death of President Allende and the dawn of a military dictatorship led by Pinochet, which lasted until 1990; during Pinochet’s rule, approximately three thousand people were killed, and one thousand more are still missing. Dorfman offers a unique perspective to these events; in 1973, he (and “Ariel”) served as cultural advisor to Allende. He was supposed to be with Allende in La Moneda on September 11, 1973, but switched places with a colleague at the last minute. So, the author survived—unlike many of his friends and colleagues.

Set in 1990, “Ariel’s” search occurs twenty-one years before Allende’s body was exhumed a second time, and a judge “with impeccable credentials,” according to Dorfman, finally determined his cause of death. Juxtaposed by this reality, The Suicide Museum is a political thriller, a historical fiction novel, and a murder mystery.

In the fallout of this turmoil, Dorfman has spent most of his life living in exile. Even after democracy returned to Chile, he’s remained abroad, returning only occasionally. We see and feel that distance and familiarity in The Suicide Museum; we feel “Ariel’s” nostalgia and survivor’s guilt, his shame and regrets, his courage and his dreams, and through that emotional journey, we also see Allende’s first exhumation, we feel the effects of the dictatorship, we see the end of that dictatorship, we get a glimpse of “Ariel’s” creative process, and we see how life rapidly changed for Chileans after the coup, through flashbacks.

“Ariel” and Joseph Hortha ruminate on life, death, suicide, socialism, capitalism, climate change, Latin America. Like a pair of boxers, these two friends, allies, adversaries, confidants, challenge each other, interject each other, insult, comfort, and—sometimes—agree. After claiming that Allende saved his life, Hortha now wants to know if Allende committed suicide. “Ariel,” then, must go to New York, London, Chile.  He must talk to the people, to Allende’s gravedigger, to rivals and sympathizers. He must talk to Patricio Guijón, Allende’s doctor, who was next door at the time of Allende’s death. He must talk to Adrián Balmaceda, Allende’s bodyguard, and the last person to see him alive, to determine the presidente’s cause of death.

Ariel Dorfman remains a towering figure in Latin American and World literature. He’s the author of books such as How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, Death and The Maiden, and Heading South, Looking North. In this interview, we talked about his latest novel, but also about autofiction, inspiration, survivor’s guilt, his relationship with English and Spanish, living in exile, how Latin America is brothered through exile, the future of Chile, and what he remembers of that September 11, fifty years ago.  

José García Escobar (JGE): I wanted to talk first about the blend between fact and fiction in The Suicide Museum. In Michael Chabon’s Moonglow, we can find a type of disclaimer at the beginning of the novel: “In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it.” The book is marketed as a “novel,” and that word appears on the cover, but much like Chabon, the characters in this “novel”—particularly Ariel—call it a “memoir.” How did you handle this distinction?

Ariel Dorfman (AD): When I first realized that the only way—at least for me—to narrate this quest (the search for the truth about Salvador Allende’s death on September 11, 1973), was to send my own self—really, an alter ego—to Chile, I did so with both joy and trepidation. Trepidation, because it was risky to use my own life, sticking to as many details of that life as possible (my wife, my children, my friends, my return to my country in 1990), and to simultaneously treat all of it fictionally and invent many scenes and characters (including how I present myself) within the straitjacket of a pre-existent chronological order. And joy because I was able to explode the limits of the genre, particularly what is called “autofiction.”

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2023

New translations from the Catalan and the French!

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

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

Review by Samantha Siefert, Marketing Manager

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

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

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

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

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: March 2023

New translations from the Yiddish, Japanese, and Esperanto!

In this month’s round up of the latest releases, we’re thrilled to introduce three singular works from rulebreakers, free thinkers, and true originals. From Japan, an early novella from the nation’s renowned enfant terrible, Osamu Dazai, gives a telling look at the writer’s internal monologue. From the Nobel laureate Issac Bashevis Singer, a bilingual edition of the Yiddish author’s story—in multiple translations—opens up an inquest into the translator’s pivotal role. And from the Ukrainian émigré Vasili Eroshenko, a collection of the author’s fairy tales, translated from the Japanese and Esperanto, presents a well-rounded selection of the transnational author’s politically charged work. Read on to find out more!

gimpl

Simple Gimpl by Isaac Bashevis Singer, a definitive bilingual edition with translations from the Yiddish by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, and David Stromberg, and Illustrations by Liana Finck, Restless Books, 2023

Review by Rachel Landau, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

Whether you choose to know him as “Simple Gimpl” or “Gimpel the Fool,” the main character of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novella is a likable, rambling man who finds himself in an unfortunate situation. His wife, Elka, is frequently using their shared home for affairs with other men, and all of Gimpl’s attempts to come to terms with the situation are complicated by his deep love for her. Even when the pair are forbidden by the town rabbi from seeing each other, Gimpl works tirelessly to provide for the children and for Elka. He feels betrayed to learn, at the end of Elka’s life, that the children were not really his—and his reaction to this deception is a surprising one.

The narrative in Simple Gimpl is slow-moving, reflective, and witty. It is an undeniable pleasure to read—and certainly not difficult to read multiple times in a row, as this edition of the book incites the reader to do. This “definitive bilingual edition,” released by Restless Books, includes back-to-back translations of the Yiddish work; first is Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Simple Gimpl,” which is followed immediately by Saul Bellow’s “Gimpel the Fool,” and this compendium of translations is decidedly about translation itself. Over the course of more than one hundred pages, one must realize that this is not a book about Gimpl, and not even about the differences between Saul Bellow’s Gimpel and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Gimpl. It is about the role of the translator; it is about the strange impossibility of rendering a story. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2022

New work from the Philippines and Palestine!

This week, we’re proud to present two brilliant publications from authors Hussein Barghouthi and Rogelio Braga. From the former comes a wondrous autofiction that uses the vehicle of a companionship to explore philosophies of life, memories, country, and conversation. From the latter,  a vivid collection that examines the various intersections and conflicts between life and work, concentrated in the electrifying, volatile urbanity of rush hour. Read on to find out more!

barghouthi

The Blue Light by Hussein Barghouthi, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah, Seagull Books, 2023 

Review by José García Escoba, EaL for Central America

Hussein Barghouthi’s The Blue Light is the story of a Palestinian writer also named Hussein, as told through his relationship with Bari, a Turkish American Sufi. Though their lives come to be somehow intertwined, one can hardly think of Hussein and Bari as friends. They’re acquaintances. They may, objectively, care for each other. There are signs of concern, empathy, and camaraderie. Solidarity, even. Pity. The connection between them is not a simple development of shared experience or mutual interest, but forms from the fleeting yet memorable encounters between the two, wherein our protagonist learns about life, the meaning of life, life after death, addiction, the mind being “an expansive entity,” and other philosophies.

—What’s the mind? I asked.
—The mind? Oh, man, it’s horrifying. See. . .
He gestured to the neon light, asphalt, skyscrapers, the pier, the closed supermarket, the university library, and said, “That’s the mind.”

Hussein, the protagonist, is a Palestinian writer who grew up in Lebanon, and goes on to study Comparative Literature at the University of Washington in Seattle. Bari, on the other hand, is an elusive figure, introduced as “that Sufi from Konya.” His theories and messages are cryptic and mysterious at best, often escalating into the contradictory and nonsensical. “He wants to control my mind. He might even be a secret agent,” Hussein writes. Nevertheless, their interactions are always memorable, filled with tension, sarcasm, empathy, and dry humor—somewhat reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. Within the novel’s dialogues, its characters discuss philosophical issues such as death and reincarnation, lucid dreams, the meaning of life, the meaning dreams, religion, and so on; not in an academic way, but in the discursive, organic way of friends.

On one occasion, Hussein and Sufi play chess, and their conversation veers from the meaning of Bari’s name, to the duality of bodies (mental and physical), to Arabic poetry, to Palestinian culture, and on. Eventually, however, Bari’s critical theories and aimless monologues veer into the territory of indoctrination. At one point, he asks Hussein to watch the water fall from his shower. Hussein does as he’s told, and additionally writes a poem about the experience of watching the water. “To hell with poetry,” says Bari. “Watch the water.” READ MORE…

Memory as Terrain, Museum, Dictionary: On Kirmen Uribe’s Bilbao—New York—Bilbao

The mythologization of one’s personal repertoire begs the question of significance: what makes something worth telling?

Bilbao—New York—Bilbao by Kirmen Uribe, translated from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin, Coffee House Press, 2022

“I realized that our dad’s whole family history was made up of round trips, flights, and returnings,” reflects author Kirmen Uribe. Bilbao–New York–Bilbao, a novel which won Uribe the 2009 National Prize for Literature in Spain, stems from the family history in question. Translated from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin, it is a sort of metanovel that straddles fact and fiction, laying its mechanisms bare. Within the brackets of his own travel—a flight from Bilbao to New York—the narrator’s mind rambles through various elements he would like to weave into his hypothetical novel: interviews, folklore, philosophical reflections, images, and anecdotes. He meditates on structure and process, always on the precipice of making decisions, giving the whole novel the impression that it’s just about to start.

Uribe is from the Basque fishing town of Ondarroa, where the men have historically spent large parts of the year on the water. Urbanization, industrialization, and the mechanization of the fishing industry have by now, however, made the traditional way of life nearly obsolete. As a member of the intermediary generation, the rhythm of this extended round-trip journey is still familiar to Uribe; movement is not a means to an end, but a comfortable and creative mode of being that always ends in a provisional homecoming.

Throughout, the reader senses that his search for the novel’s structure is a search for meaning. Uribe’s desire for the moments that make up his personal, family, and national history to coalesce into narrative is tangible, though he struggles to make them conform. Details, encounters, images—he feels their weight and wants a story to give them coherence. But they resist, and his resulting frustration is echoed by the reader. When a new anecdote begins, we wonder: where does this fit in? Why should I immerse myself in this moment? Is this character major or minor?

Memory has always been the terrain that grounds seemingly disparate moments, and Uribe’s memory is like the ocean maps that his ancestors drew for their fishing journeys; the features depicted are those most salient to the cartographer. Before the time of GPS, Uribe recalls his father drafting a map of his habitual fishing ground off the coast of an uninhabited Scottish island called Rockall. It was a personal map, jealously guarded, that showed the significant underwater features and the migratory patterns of the fish. Rockall echoes through the novel, looming large like a landmark, as it would have been for Uribe in his youth—the place where his father was when he wasn’t home. I looked it up on Google Maps, but as I zoomed out to see where it was in relation to the United Kingdom, it quickly disappeared. READ MORE…

“Literature is not about answers. But questions”: An Interview with Eduardo Halfon, Author of Canción

The trick is knowing what not to say, then being able to honor the decision to leave it unsaid.

By 2004, Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon had published three books: one about the life and death of Guatemalan painter Carlos Valenti; one about Miguel de Cervantes; one about how writers become writers. Four years later, he released a book of short stories called El boxeador polaco (The Polish Boxer, Editorial Pre-Textos), which inaugurated a new era for him as a writer. The book became an earthquake, and its ripples can still be felt today—nearly ten books later. Its stories went on to expand into novels, their themes and ideas forming a continual thread through the author’s prolific oeuvre, acknowledging the truth that stories, just like life, must be built on what came before. Canción, his latest book to be translated into English (Bellevue Press), borrows characters, plot lines, and entire sections from Signor Hoffman and Mañana nunca lo hablamos, books he published seven and eleven years ago respectively.

Because of this continuity and rehashing of stories, Eduardo’s body of work has often been referred to as a novela en marcha—an ongoing novel. It’s important to note that all of these stories share the same narrator: a Guatemalan author, former engineer, and chain-smoker named Eduardo Halfon, who shares many of the same experiences of real-life Eduardo. It seems all part of an intricate plan—though it’s everything but. Doubt, silence, contradiction, el no sé—not knowing— improvisation, and uncertainty: those are the many hands that pile one on top of another “to dominate” Eduardo’s writing.

In Canción, out last month and masterfully translated from Spanish by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn, Eduardo tells the story of his Lebanese grandfather, also named Eduardo Halfon, and the time the Guatemalan guerrillas kidnapped him in 1967. In this impactful and luminous novel, we read about the Guatemalan Civil War—its violence, fear, and, again, the uncertainty. We get glimpses, and nothing else, of the actual kidnapping. We get glimpses, and nothing else, of the time Eduardo’s grandfather was in captivity. Because that’s also part of Halfon’s remarkable style: silence, mystery, darkness.

Recently I spoke with Eduardo about all of that. About Canción, about his novela en marcha, about some of his most memorable characters. We talked about writing in the dark. About the engineering behind a story. We talked about what’s real and the truth. About memory, childhood, silences, and, again—and as always—about not knowing and how important it’s for him to blur the lines between himself and his narrator. We talked, we exchanged emails, voice notes, and messages, and he replied from Guatemala City, Mexico City, Spain, and Germany. As anticipated, after reading Canción and yet again talking to Eduardo about his book, I have more questions than answers.

José García Escobar (JGE): With Canción, it’s the first time I’ve seen you address Guatemalan history so thoroughly in a book. Naturally, you had to mention some events and people because they were relevant to your grandfather’s kidnapping; others, however, seem to be part of the story’s background (Jacobo Árbenz, the 1954 CIA-backed coup, the rise of the guerrilla movement in the 1960s, Julio Ramírez Arteaga). How did that weaving come to be—between foregrounding or backgrounding history?

Eduardo Halfon (EH): When you’re writing a story that’s part of a historical account, that history has to be believable. In the case of Canción, that means its historical background, the Guatemalan Civil War, and the country’s recent history. I needed to investigate all of that, and I felt like I had to include it more for the feeling than for the facts. Some details are in the background—they’re props, so to speak—and some details are part of the story. That weaving is very organic, though. There’s no premeditation. It’s just a feeling of what should be where on the stage. What should be in the foreground. What should be in the background. It’s a very natural process of selection and placing. READ MORE…

In Good Company: Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall on Translating The Left Parenthesis

[B]eing able to share genius in whatever way or form is the most beautiful thing there is.

Muriel Villaneuva’s The Left Parenthesis takes place by the sea, a fitting setting for a story that weaves in-between motherhood and mourning, loss and reinvention, the mind and the body. In the stunning autofictional tale of a recently widowed mother attempting to piece together her shifting roles in the world, Villaneuva merges the surreal and the intimately physical to chart the mystifying journey one takes back to get to oneself. In the following interview, Rachel Farmer talks to the co-translators of The Left Parenthesis, Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall, about the book’s feminism, Catalan specificity, and its “uncomplicated” representation of motherhood.

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 USD15 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.

Rachel Farmer (RF): First of all, before we dive into The Left Parenthesis, I’d be really interested to hear about your process as co-translators. In the brilliant conversation recently published in the Oxonian Review, the pair of you talked about working together on another co-translation of Montserrat Roig. Can you tell us just a little bit about this relationship?

Megan Berkobien (MB): Well, my dissertation is about co-translation, especially as a socialist and ecological phenomenon; it really came from the fact that basically all my translation experiences have been collaborative. I went to school at the University of Michigan for both my PhD and undergrad, and in the translation workshop there, everything was done together. So, it came naturally when I met María Cristina. The first thing we worked on as a team was a little anthology on women writers in Catalan—that’s when I realised we were really on the same page. We wrote the opening essay together, and it just really worked. We just feed off one another’s poetic creativities, I guess.

María Cristina Hall (MCH): For us, having the interaction of editing together was a way to build trust, to understand that our voices were similar enough to co-translate. Our process involved dividing the book up, each doing fifteen pages, then looking at each other’s version and editing it as if it were our own piece—so there’s never that feeling of holding back. It seems very natural to edit, sometimes heavily and sometimes not. If ever a word comes up where we think, “how should we translate that?”, we have a back-and-forth, and it goes smoothly from there. It’s very enriching, and I think something Megan touched on in her dissertation was the importance of working in a community and having company. Translation is usually very solitary work, so it’s very different to have this practice.

MB: In a lot of ways, the fact that translators are artists insinuates at the worst part about being an artist: that you have to work by yourself, and that you have this “grand genius” inside you. I just don’t think genius is never located in one person, and being able to share genius in whatever way or form is the most beautiful thing there is.

RF: Was there anything in particular about The Left Parenthesis that needed a different approach?

MCH: Well, it was our first project together, and then we did Goodbye Ramona by Montserrat Roig. In that book, the voices are so distinct that we divided it by character, so I worked on the one from the 1900s and Meg did the one from the 1960s—and the one from the 30s, we shared between the two of us. Because Meg is more active in the Socialist party, she could be the character who was politically involved, while I took on the conservative one since I live in Mexico and I have more of a background in Catholicism. But The Left Parenthesis is just one character talking about herself.

MB: We did have to attend to making sure it was all one unified voice, and as such it made a lovely first project because it’s almost as if our voices were weaving together. If we take a cue from the book to describe this, it’s kind of like waves were flowing over us, and each new wave made us come together a little bit more. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2021

Czech women's writing, German autofiction, and Japanese mystery!

This month, our selections of the best in global literature present a bevy of questions to be answeredrectifying the neglect of Czech women’s writing at the end of the twentieth century, solving murders, and chasing that ever-wandering place of home. Read on for these pivotal texts that are taking place amidst the most sustaining inquiries of our time: of secrets, of memory, and of desire.

a world apart

A World Apart and Other Stories by Various Authors, translated from the Czech by Kathleen Hayes, University of Chicago Press, 2021 

Review by Maddy Robinson, Social Media Manager

Kathleen Hayes’s collection of fin-de-siècle Czech women’s writing, A World Apart and Other Stories, is to be granted a second edition—twenty years after its initial publication, and around a century after the heyday of its writers. As Hayes informs us in her introduction, despite the proliferation of women’s writing in Czech literary magazines and anthologies at the time, or the academic attention the period has received, there continues to be a distinct lack of English translations for feminine texts from the turn of the century. In an effort to combat this dearth of material, Hayes carefully selected and translated eight short stories written before the First World War, to offer English language readers entry into a literary movement that might otherwise have remained solely within the domain of Central European Studies academics. We are presented with invaluable insight into the societal and individual concerns which accompanied this turbulent period in history, especially viewed in the context of a people struggling with “the woman question.”

The book opens with Božena Benešová’s “Friends,” an evocative tale of childhood sensitivity to perceived social hierarchies, and a frank condemnation of anti-Semitism. Hayes remarks that this is rather unusual, given that “at the time it was written, negative references to the Jews were still the norm in Czech literature.” The story also constitutes an anomaly in this anthology, as from this point on, there is but one central theme around which each story revolves: passion, forbidden or otherwise.

She was a strange woman, but perhaps, after all, strange only from my point of view. I was totally incapable of getting close to her soul.

The titular story, “A World Apart,” was published in an anthology of the same name in 1909 by Růžena Jesenská and is perhaps the most striking and complex of the collection. Travelling by train, the protagonist Marta recounts the story of a friendship she once had with a Miss Teresa Elinson, an intense woman whom she also met on a train, and who convinces her to visit her manor house “A World Apart.” Miss Elinson’s attempts to seduce Marta are not initally met with outright rejection—however, there is a foreboding, Du Maurier-like sense that if she were to remain at A World Apart, she might suffer the same fate as her deceased predecessor, Berta. Though Hayes puts the unlikely subject matter of lesbian desire more down to “literary convention than psychological realism,” Jesenská’s depiction of the risks of breaking worldly norms, as well as her portrait of the passionate, Dandy-esque figure of Teresa Elinson, make for a fascinating contribution to any study of turn-of-the-century queer desire and its manifestations. READ MORE…

An Occupied Literature: On Julián Fuks’s Occupation

Fuks has “put something more than pain, something more than misfortune” in his novel, making “something worth writing.”

Occupation by Julián Fuks, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn, Charco Press, 2021

I’m writing a book about fatherhood without being able to become a father—and probing motherhood as if I didn’t know that I will never learn it. I’m writing a book about death without ever having felt it switch off a body, in a speculation of feelings that one day will seem laughable, when I do encounter the pain. I’m writing a book about the pain of the world, the poverty, exile, despair, rage, tragedy, ludicrousness, a book about this interminable ruin surrounding us, which so often goes unnoticed, but as I write it I am protected by solid walls.

Occupation, Julián Fuks’ latest novel to appear in English translation by Daniel Hahn, is a quiet masterpiece. Touching on family and relationships, birth and death, colonialism, the refugee crisis, political activism, the Holocaust, our (in)ability to identify with one another, and how to find hope in a world of ruin, this novel is sweepingly ambitious in its themes, yet the measured, self-critical voice of the narrator and the calm, understated prose prevents it from veering into sensationalism or sentimentality.

The novel’s chapters alternate between the different preoccupations of our narrator, Sebastián: his father, who is occupying a hospital bed; his wife’s decision to have a child, which will occupy her body and shift the dynamics of their relationship; a group of migrants occupying a dilapidated building, many of whom exiles from lands that have been occupied, now seeking refuge in Brazil, a country with its own history of occupation; and his own attempts to understand what all of this means for his occupation as a writer.

Small jumps in time, along with chapters that begin mid-conversation, can at times create a sense of dislocation, but Fuks weaves the strands together so gently and dexterously that when they coalesce, it does not feel like the technique has been a pretext for creating suspense; rather, it is as though the narrative has been constructed this way so that the narrator might himself work through and better understand the components—as if each narrative thread must be understood on its own to bring the whole into relief. Nevertheless, the technical mastery of this construction should not be downplayed, and throughout the book, the reader will notice explicit motifs along with subtle echoes and patterns in the language. All this adds to a sense that the novel’s threads are both connected and discreet, amplifying the plurality of the voices and experiences which ultimately merge with the voice of the narrator, who “allow[s] them to occupy [him], to occupy [his] writing: an occupied literature.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Small Crescendos” by Pirkko Saisio

But all love strives towards that big crescendo.

From the Finlandia Prize-winning author who published the first Finnish-language lesbian novel, this week’s Translation Tuesday features a genre-defying work of autofiction from Pirkko Saisio. The eroticism of encountering a stranger—be it in a tram or a seminar room; in real life or one’s imagination—is what ties together this attempt to follow the ruminating mind. In relating the path of her own desire, our narrator asks: “Is this story actually going anywhere? And is this even a story?”—cognisant of the limits of narrative in pinning down unruly desire. In Mia Spangenberg’s translation, Siasio’s virtuosity and playfulness is on full display. “Small Crescendos” is a perfect addition to your reading list this Women in Translation Month. 

“As a reader and translator, I’m enchanted by the lightness of Saisio’s prose and its rhythm and pacing, but it also poses a challenge, since Finnish is an agglutinative language and more concise than English. During revision, I focused on reading the translation out loud, as if it were a spoken word piece. Finnish can exhibit a gender fluidity that does not exist in English (there are no gendered pronouns as “hän” refers to both he and she), which may seem radical but is simply a tolerance for knowing less about people’s gender in writing. However, when Saisio writes about her love affair with an actor, I ultimately chose the word “actress” because it is otherwise easy to assume that Saisio is describing a heterosexual relationship when she is in fact not. This would be clear to most Finnish readers as Saisio came out publicly as a lesbian in the 1990s and has long advocated for LGBTQ+ rights in Finland.”

— Mia Spangenberg

When a wave crashes against a rocky shore, it sprays
glistening pearls of water into the air. Like small crescendos.

A gaze. One is at the bottom of the stairs, and another is descending
the stairs.
There’s a gaze, and the beginning and ending of a relationship are in that
   gaze, with a slight
acceleration in the middle, an accelerando.

A hand grips a pole on the tram. It’s a man’s
hand, slender and beautiful, meant for some instrument, maybe
a cello or viola.
I place my hand beneath his and squeeze the pole.
And yes!
The cellist’s hand slides down the pole and covers my own. Oh those long,
thrilling seconds between stops!

And that gaze again. READ MORE…