Posts filed under 'colonization'

I Write From A Lost Place

March 14, 2024  |  in All Eyes on Palestine  |  by Olivia Elias

refugee in Poetry / I live the life that is mine / over which hovers the shadow / of a great Catastrophe

In this wandering, immense poem, Olivia Elias, a poet of the Palestinian diaspora, shares the intimate elegy of the landless, travelling between voids, violences, and grief. Looking at the casualties of not only people and landscape, but also language, Elias’ rhythmic fragmentations hover and intuit around the immense unsayability of hell, in the guise of “civilized realities”. From precipices, from near-disappearances, and estranged by horror, by censorship, this poem is the work of a writer who sees her work—and its singular ability to give weight to negated spaces—as one of the few remaining places to situate life, and all of its losses.

I write from a lost place

on the edge of all edges

a land floating between presence and absence

I write & weave ropes of words
to overcome this Mountain
of fables & legends    lies & betrayals
face the storms of fire      resist the
hurricanes that would throw me
in abysses teeming with vipers
escape the soldiers judges & censors
on my heels

the new Khans & their powerful Allies require that I only use
words listed on their official registers while strictly complying
to the elements of language they carefully crafted over a
century ago

A land without a people     For a people without a land
Bedouins on their camels      and so on

among the forbidden words    this one that starts with the first
letter of the alphabet    using it means immediate excommuni
cation      relegation into the last chamber of hell READ MORE…

“Queen of the Czech Comic”: An Interview with Lucie Lomová

November 9, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Julia Sherwood

To what extent are we shaped by the society we live in? How far are we willing to swim against the current?

In the first of two interviews on the thriving Czech comic art scene for the Asymptote blog, we introduce Lucie Lomová, artist, writer, and author of numerous comic books for both children and adults. Comic art and graphic novels are increasingly gaining recognition as a serious art and literary form; since the start of the millenium, the Czech Republic has seen a boom in the genre. In the second interview, two Czech literature scholars will paint a more comprehensive picture of the scene for Asymptote readers. Dubbed “the queen of the Czech comic,” Lomová is the best-known woman comic book author of the new, postcommunist generation, with three coveted Muriel Awards, including two—for original script and best original Czech comic—for her graphic novel, Divoši (Savages) to be published in English translation by Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Slovakia, Julia Sherwood, and Peter Sherwood. We are delighted to introduce Lucie Lomová to Asymptote’s readers through this interview, conducted by Julia over email.

JS: You are a graduate of the Theatre faculty at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU), but you switched to writing and drawing comics in the early 1990s. In those days, this kind of career change required quite a lot of courage—you said in an interview: “To choose comics as one’s profession was rather like trying to make a living by catching earthworms.” What motivated you to take the risk? 

LL: Did I really say that? Perhaps I wouldn’t use that comparison now, but it‘s true that in those days comic art was a totally marginal and underrated genre, with publication opportunities few and far between. But, it didn’t really require any special courage on my part. The year of the Velvet Revolution, 1989—a turning point in every respect for everyone—saw the publication of my first comic strip about Anča and Pepík, a couple of mice kids. My sister Ivana and I had worked on it together for three years, writing the story and doing the drawings. I had just graduated in dramaturgy and started working in a theatre in Šumperk, a small town about 200 kilometres east of Prague. When the Velvet Revolution came, I decided to return to Prague, although I didn’t really have a clear idea about what I was going to do. I wrote art reviews for newspapers, drew cartoons, and pondered what I should apply myself to in all this new freedom—just then, the children’s comic journal Čtyřlístek (The Four-Leaved Clover) invited me to write and draw more stories about Anča and Pepík for them, this time on my own, as my sister had moved on to other things. In the summer of 1990, I hitchhiked to Greece with my boyfriend. We were penniless, but overjoyed and excited about all the possibilities that had opened up before us. I remember that it was during the long rides in strangers’ cars that the ideas for the first three stories came to me, and once I was back home, I got drawing. For the following ten years, drawing comics for Čtyřlístek was my bread and butter.

Anca&PepikIlu02

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A Silent Textual Revolution: On Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng’s In My Heart

February 7, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Fairuza Hanun

Its words capacitate the human imagination’s ability to dream of change . . .

In My Heart by Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng, translated from the Sesotho by Nhlanhla Maake, Seagull Books, 2021

Despite an intent to explore beyond Anglocentric spaces, the framework of decolonial studies—defined as the analysis of dynamics between Anglocentrism and colonialism as well as of colonised populations—is still plagued with first-world privileges. Most decolonial texts are theorised and written by a dominantly white scholar community, within a hegemonic Euro-U.S. production. In fact, in the introduction to the original text of Pelong ya Ka (translated as “In My Heart”), Simon Gikandi quoted Karin Barber on how postcolonial criticism has failed to include texts written in African languages, “eliminating African-language expression from view.” By designating Anglocentrism as the form of knowledge production, academia defines what can be classified as “decolonial writing” based on an imperialist discipline of worth determination—comprising of research, praxis, theories, formulations, and discourses operating in materialistic space. To have decolonial texts navigate inter- and intrapersonal spaces is almost unheard of, and is unacknowledged as “real” decolonial scholarship in the Anglo academic sphere.

Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng’s In My Heart is a collection of meditative essays which enter and navigate these unheard-of spaces, introducing Sesotho worldview in radical decolonial studies. In this undertaking, he charts the territory of the heart, wherein the values and experiences largely considered universal—such as death and time—are interrogated instead as largely dominated by privilege. Gayatri Spivak introduces this book, the second publication of Seagull Books’ “Elsewhere Texts” series, as among the pivotal works of decolonial studies within their respective countries, essential in fighting  “against a rest-of-the-world counter-essentialism.” She criticises the “global” efforts in bridging multiple cultures, however, through “the imperial languages, protected by a combination of sanctioned ignorance and superficial solidarities . . . even when they are at these global functions.”

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Emma Bovary’s Adventures in Saigon, Part I

June 2, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Thuy Dinh

Hoàng Hải Thủy’s 1973 Vietnamese translation of Flaubert’s classic complicates perceptions of domestication and foreignization.

This is the first in a two-part series that explores the indeterminate translation effects of foreignization and domestication, as illustrated by Hoàng Hải Thủy’s 1973 Vietnamese adaptation of Madame Bovary. Read the second part here.

Note: The below version has been revised to reflect important corrections. Lawrence Venuti’s theoretical framework, as reflected in the revised essay, does acknowledge the subaltern’s perspective and show that domestication and foreignization encompass both discursive approaches and their multifaceted effects.

Since the earlier version did not fairly reflect the full implications of Mr. Venuti’s work, the author owes Mr. Venuti an apology and would like to thank him for his forbearance and collegial support.

In 1813, Friedrich Schleiermacher, the German translator of Plato, had proposed that a translator has two choices, “either such translator leaves the author in peace as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him; or the translator leaves the reader in peace as much as possible, and moves the author towards him.” The former technique could be defined as foreignization, and the latter domestication. Today translation scholar Lawrence Venuti has expanded on Schleiermacher’s perspective by constructing an ethics of difference in translation. According to Venuti, translations geared toward domestication effects risk perpetuating certain uncontested beliefs in the maintenance of the status quo. As a corrective, he has proposed a meticulous yet adaptable theoretical framework that can illuminate any translation, regardless of language and culture, regardless of their status as dominant or dominated, major or minor. In his view, foreignizing translations can expand the linguistic and stylistic resources of the translating language by broadening the parameters of readability.

If we define foreignizing as a translation approach that creates noticeable effects and variations from the prevalent standard, and domesticating as conforming to pre-existing norms, how do we gauge these effects against a translator’s stated intention, his unconscious bias, inadvertent omissions or errors? My essay attempts to illustrate these questions by discussing Hoàng Hải Thủy’s Người Vợ Ngoại Tình—his 1973 adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

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Textual Echoes: Elisabeth Jaquette on Translating Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail

June 25, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Daniel Persia

In the novel, social and political commentary operate at the level of events, as well as at the level of language.

As thousands of Palestinians protest against Israel’s newly announced annexation plans for significant parts of the West Bank and Jordan Valley, Adania Shibli’s haunting, persistent novel, Minor Detail, seems especially potent as our May Book Club Selection. The text is written in two parts: the first is set in 1949 and details a horrifying act of violence committed by Israeli soldiers, while the second takes place during present day, in which another young woman discovers the crime and makes a place for it within her own life. As Palestinians continue to struggle in turmoil, Shibli’s masterful language transposes the past into now, in a profound recognition of violence and its intricate legacies. In the following interview, Daniel Persia speaks to the translator of Minor Detail, Elisabeth Jaquette, about how she has rendered this powerful narrative for English-language readers.

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Daniel Persia (DP): Time seems crucial to our understanding of Minor Detail, both in terms of its historical context and the passing of events. Can you talk a little bit about time in translation—how it’s expressed in the Arabic language, and whether this presents any challenges when thinking about English tenses or ways to recreate stillness and movement?

Elisabeth Jaquette (EJ): Time often poses challenges for me as a translator working from Arabic to English, but oddly enough this book didn’t pose particular conundrums in that regard. With other books, I’ve found that English publishing has a greater expectation that readers be able to place events on a precise timeline in relation to one another, whereas that’s somehow less crucial in the Arabic book. In Minor Detail, I felt that the reader’s sense of time was constructed less through events or tense, and more through repetition, pacing, and tone. In Part I in particular, there’s a somewhat paradoxical contrast between dates being directly stated: “9 August 1949 . . .Before noon, 10 August 1949,” and so on, and the way that the officer’s repetitive, enumerated actions make one day bleed into the next, creating stillness even though the passing dates are marked. In Part 2, I also felt that tone and voice, and especially narrative digression, were central to the reader’s sense of movement.

DP: The scene in which Israeli soldiers capture and hose down the young Arab woman is, I think, one of the novel’s most haunting. What was it like to translate this kind of trauma? Does a scene like this demand more of you as a translator—not only technical skill, perhaps, but something like emotional resilience?

EJ: In the face of such traumatic scenes, should we understand readers as bearing witness, or as implicated onlookers? Translators, like writers of course, are more intricately involved: a translator recreates the scene word-by-word in English, actively crafting it. The scene where the soldiers hose down the girl, and her subsequent rape, were certainly the most raw for me. There is tension between the emotional trauma of the actions and the matter-of-fact way in which they is narrated, and I consciously worked to maintain that impassivity at the level of language, following the Arabic’s choice of neutral words, even though the emotional impact of these scenes is high. In some ways I felt that the distanced style of narration amplifies the horror, because the girl is all the more isolated in what she endures. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 27, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Anna Aresi, Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernberg, and José García Escobar

Our wide-ranging literary dispatches this week cover protests, translations, and debuts.

This week’s dispatches report on a four-day literature festival in Italian-speaking Bellinzona in Switzerland, a new podcast dedicated exclusively to Guatemalan and Central American literature, as well as news of the arrest of journalist Hajar Raissouni in Morocco and a theatre group resisting such censorship and freedom of the press violation with a performance of Don Quixote.

Anna Aresi, Copy Editor, reporting from Switzerland

An interest in mapping (often the result of conquests and colonization) and remapping—rethinking what was erased and systematically left out in the mapping process—is at the core of Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli’s latest novel. In Lost Children Archive, mapping is related to sound: “Focusing on sound forced me to hear as opposed to seeing, it forced me into a different rhythm. You cannot consume sound immediately,” she explains, “when focusing on sound, you have to sit with it, let it unfold.” It is within this rhythm, she adds, that English emerged as the language that was conducive to the writing of this novel, which she had begun writing in both English and Spanish simultaneously.

Luiselli reflects on this and other aspects of her writing in an intense conversation with Italian writer Claudia Durastanti, in the intimate setting of Bellinzona’s social theater. 

Every year, Bellinzona—the capital of Swiss Italophone Canton Ticino—hosts Babel Festival, a four-day event entirely dedicated to literature and translation. This year’s fourteenth edition, entitled “You will not speak my language,” explored the limits and boundaries of language and literature, as well as languages that are “imagined, invented, despised, censored, regional, silent, visual, and enigmatic.”

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Impossible Technologies: Pola Oloixarac’s Dark Constellations in Review

July 1, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Nina Perrotta

The characters and plot points can be imagined as stars in the night sky . . . that give the novel its visible, traceable structure.

Dark Constellations by Pola Oloixarac, translated from the Spanish by Roy Kesey, Soho Press, 2019

The Incas, according to Pola Oloixarac’s Dark Constellations, didn’t see the night sky as we do: instead of what we might call “connecting the dots,” they focused on the darkness between the stars, the shapes formed by negative space. If true—and it’s hard to know what, exactly, is true in Dark Constellations—it’s an intriguing image, one that informs our understanding of the novel’s structure as well as its content.

Dark Constellations, translated into English by Roy Kesey, is the second novel from Pola Oloixarac, one of Argentina’s rising literary stars (pun intended). Like her countrywoman Samanta Schweblin, whose story collection Mouthful of Birds has recently garnered considerable attention, Oloixarac tends to blur the line between science and the supernatural, taking a certain kind of pleasure in repeatedly throwing the reader off balance. Dark Constellations, however, has a much wider range than Schweblin’s stories, skillfully handling subjects as varied as botany, world history, and computer programming. The book’s publisher, Soho Press, calls Dark Constellations “ambitious,” and while I agree completely, I would argue that the novel’s ambition is its greatest weakness as well as one of its strengths. 

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“A Rebirth Moment”: Evelyn Flores and Emelihter Kihleng on Editing Indigenous Literatures From Micronesia

April 24, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Marek Maj

Our writing is often not for a Western audience, and many of us are writing for ourselves, to express who we are as Indigenous peoples.

Next week, University of Hawaii Press will publish a ground-breaking anthology, Indigenous Literatures from Micronesia, which, for the first time ever, will bring together works—short stories, poems, essays, chants, and play excerpts—by Indigenous Micronesian authors. Some of the basic facts about this project are truly astonishing: the anthology includes one hundred pieces by over seventy authors, nine out of the thirteen basic Micronesian language groups are represented (Palauan, Chamorro, Chuukese, I-Kiribati, Kosraean, Marshallese, Nauruan, Pohnpeian, and Yapese), and it covers the entire Micronesian region—over two thousand islands spread across almost three million square miles of the Pacific Ocean. Micronesian literature has been excluded by academia, and, despite its long history, remains unknown outside of the region. As 2019 is the official UNESCO Year of Indigenous Languages, this anthology is an especially timely and necessary addition to the landscape of world literature. Asymptote contributor Marek Maj spoke with the editors, Dr. Evelyn Flores and Dr. Emelihter Kihleng—who began working on the anthology over ten years ago—about the process of putting together such an unprecedented collection and about the history, present, and future of Indigenous Micronesian literatures.

The anthology is the first of the “New Oceania Literary Series,” which, under the general editorship of Dr. Craig Santos Perez, aims to create anthologies of Pacific literature that address important themes and feature a diverse, multilingual, and intergenerational selection of Pacific authors. Dr. Santos Perez has said he hopes these anthologies will be inspiring and empowering for Pacific Islanders, as well as educational for non-Pacific audiences, and that he hopes these books will circulate both in classrooms and in the community. The next anthology will focus on Pacific Literature and the environment, eco-Justice, and climate change. Future anthologies will spotlight food, LGBTQ identity and experiences, science fiction and futurism, and more.

Marek Maj (MM): First of all, congratulations on the publication of Indigenous Literatures from Micronesia. How it does it feel that it will now finally be out in the world?

Evelyn Flores (EF): My immediate response?—Huge relief!—it’s done!
Then the deep joy rolls in—joy that we’re making a difference, trying to carve out a niche for voices from our region, doing our part to challenge a gross miscalculation of our abilities and our productive force.

There’s deep satisfaction that we’ve taken yet another step to clear the way for our children so they can see themselves walking upright in yet another book. All of us who’ve been invisible in published creative work know the deep awe we’ve experienced when we stumble upon ourselves in books, film, dance—it’s a rebirthing moment for us—realizing all the time we were there but excluded. Readers will see this moment of realization and protest enacted in several of the pieces, in Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s “History Project,” for instance, and in Anne Perez Hattori’s “Forefathers,” and Isebong M. Asang’s “Language with An Attitude.” READ MORE…