Posts filed under 'fables'

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: January 2023

The latest reads from Hungary, Sweden, and Kurdistan!

2023 is already setting up to be one of the most wide-ranging and bounteous years for literary purveyors of the world, with an abundance of exciting works slated for publication. This month, we’re presenting three texts that enrapture the imaginative prospects of a world in translation: László Krasznahorkai subverts every expectation for the travelogue, Bachtyar Ali braids storytelling and truth-seeking, and Maria Adolfsson reasserts feminist presence in the male-dominated mystery genre. 

krasznahorkai

A Mountain to the North, A Lake to The South, Paths to the West, A River to the East by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet, New Directions/Serpent’s Tail, 2023

Review by Matthew Redman, Digital Editor

László Krasznahorkai is among Hungary’s most feted writers in the Anglophone world. His works, characterised by inordinately long, slow sentences which chart the depths of obsession and madness, have earned him a cult of devoted readers and international acclaim, while his translators—Georges Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet—are lauded writers in their own right. However, his most recent novel to be translated into English, A Mountain to the North, A Lake to The South, Paths to the West, A River to the East, is an intriguing departure from the works that have made his name. The vast sentences he is known for are intact, but they are used in service of a radically different tonal palette. Where his other novels use length to induce futility and despair, A Mountain to the North explores the beatific, languorous, and even beautiful possibilities of extreme syntax.

Set in Japan, the novel takes the form of a travelogue—albeit with the sheer mass of textual detail slowing the journey to an ooze. Strip this away and you find comparatively simple structural bones: a train deposits us at a deserted platform somewhere in Kyoto, we leave the station and wander half-lost through empty streets until we arrive at our destination, a Buddhist monastery in which we remain for most of the novel, touring the grounds and slowly penetrating the interiors. It is a balmy late afternoon, there are beautiful gardens all around, the monastery is silent and exquisite. This part of Kyoto is almost entirely bereft of inhabitants, but the emptiness is one of the rare details that Krasznahorkai chooses not to linger on. In fact, the absence is fortuitous, because the novel is uninterested in people; what consumes the author instead is the immutable, near indescribable beauty of things wrought in accordance with Japanese tradition. With the streets and monastery empty, the prose is freely devoted to the description of his sublime surroundings. Plants in their carefully tended gardens; the shrine’s architecture—their calculations and materials, the minutiae of their construction; the nigh-divinely sagacious prescriptions according to which every detail within the monastery was planned, planted, and built; the commitment at every turn to the tireless refinement of perfection; and above all the feel of all of this beauty—the texture and the grain, and the effect on the soul.

Each chapter houses a single enormous sentence that describes and extols a single beautiful object (a gate, a shrine, a statue) or craft (carpentry, gardening), and ends only when Krasznahorkai deems the subject exhausted. As demanding and unconventional as this novel is, it is not difficult in the way that experimental fiction is often thought to be.  For all its density, there is a deceptive simplicity, even a solicitousness to Krasznahorkai’s prose. His sentences are slow enumerations in service of a simple message that never changes: the monastery and everything within it are perfect, and it could only ever have been so, for it is all the product of patient, genius craftsmen adhering immaculately to faultless prescriptions. The long succession of accounts of perfect things has an incantatory quality, the meticulousness neither torturous nor bewildering, but rather intended to soothe. Krasznahorkai wants to leave you tranquil:

[…] it was something like a labyrinth, of course, but at the same time the chaos causing the oscillation of the layout of these streets wasn’t frightening and even less so futile, but playful, and just as there were finely wrought fences, the grated rolling gates protected by their small eaves, above, leaning out from both sides here and there, were the fresh green of bamboo or the ethereal, silver foliage of a Himalayan pine with its firework-like leaves unfolding; they bent closely over the passerby as if in a mirror, as if they were protecting him, guarding him and receiving him as a guest within these tightly closed fences and gates, these bamboo branches and the Himalayan pine foliage; namely, they quickly gave notice to the one arriving that he had been placed in safety […]

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Translation Tuesday: “Bestiary” by Mike L. Bigornia

And for the first time, she felt throbbing from inside her chest.

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, a wish bestows the meaning of life in this allegorical prose poem by Mike L. Bigornia, excerpted from his award-winning collection, Dark Prose. A Diwata, a divine spirit of precolonial Filipino theology, grants a wish to the World of Beings, which includes the moon, the stars, the stone, and the wind. But the river wishes for something unusual—and she might not be the only one making the request. “Bestiary” is a thoughtful modern-day creation fable about the primacy of human intimacy. 

This was the one and fateful hour. Though the Diwata be gracious, this was set to happen for the first and final time in the World of Beings.

Every being could make a wish to the Diwata but only once. Each granting of a wish lasts an entire night. So each wish should be of value; each fulfillment enough to stand the test of time.

That night, the Diwata went around the woods and listened to the wishes of the beings.

The moon made a wish and the Diwata giggled. The stone made a wish and it nodded. The wind made a wish and it puffed its cheeks. The stars made a wish and its eyes shone.

Until it saw the anxious river. “What is your wish, Beloved Child?”

“I want to know the meaning of life, Diwata. I believe I would find it once you give me breath.” The Diwata looked back, as if it had remembered something and gazed at the distance. But only for a moment. After, it smiled and turned back toward its companion.

Before the Diwata vanished, all the beings had made their wish. And before midnight, the river had now transformed to a beautiful maiden. Her complexion unblemished, fresh. Her hair flowed lavishly like waves. Under tonight’s unbelievable light from the clouds, her body seemed to glide through the woods.

What rare features, what rare sight! By her charm that surpasses the jasmine and the ilang-ilang, the cicadas resounded, the owls aroused in half-sleep, the civet made to sing. READ MORE…

Announcing our March Book Club Selection: Three Apples Fell From the Sky by Narine Abgaryan

Given the array of epic horrors she alludes to, Abgaryan could’ve opted for fast-paced . . . narration; instead, she goes for delicate portraiture.

On the tails of its celebrated success in Russia, Narine Abgaryan’s award-winning novel, Three Apples Fell From the Sky, is now available to English-language readers in Lisa C. Hayden’s expert translation. This tripartite tale takes on the form and mysticism of fable to spin a narrative of a village constantly at the mercy of catastrophe, and, as Josefina Massot points out in this following review, may act as a poignant response to our current age of precarity. With its characteristically sensitive descriptions, Abgaryan’s work explores the human things that evolve in the aftermath of disaster; in times that teeter on the edge of dystopia, it invites us to read our lives into them—a reminder that one of literature’s most enduring gifts is its expansiveness.

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!

Three Apples From the Sky by Narine Abgaryan, translated from the Russian by Lisa C. Hayden, Oneworld Publications, 2020

They say the best way to ward off anxiety is to focus on the here and now. At the moment, though, “here” is a seemingly shrinking apartment and “now” is any time I hit refresh on decidedly growing pandemic statistics. It’s been that way for weeks, so when Abgaryan’s novel hit my inbox (my locked down city’s impermeable to foreign paperbacks), I was desperate for a folktale. What better than a nowhere, no-when land to flee the grim here-and-now—a tale that would end happily, or at the very least end, flouting the boundless infection curves that plagued my feeds and fed my dread?

Three Apples Fell From the Sky isn’t the strictly uchronic utopia I’d expected: most of it unfolds in the Armenian village of Maran during the twentieth century. When I googled “Maran Armenia,” however, I found no such place, and the search I then ran on “Մառան Հայաստան,” courtesy of Google Translate, yielded a stub on a village for which “no population data had been retained.” In fact, there seems to be no data at alljust an unverified note on villagers’ deaths and deportations during the Genocide. As far as I was concerned, Maran might as well have been fictional. Grounding the novel in time proved equally tricky: save for a few scattered references to telegrams or left-wing revolutions, its protagonists could’ve just as easily lived through the 2015 constitutional referendum or the Russo-Persian Wars. My sense of chronology was further challenged by recurring flashbacks, occasional changes in verb tense, and the Maranians’ own cluelessness regarding dates. Near perfect fodder for escapism, you’d think, but by the time I’d put it down, I was more firmly rooted in the times than ever. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Myths of the Nivaklé

Three unsettling myths of an indigenous tribe of Paraguay, translated by Elisa Taber

The Nivaklé are an indigenous tribe of the Gran Chaco, a sparsely populated region of Paraguay referred to as “the green hell.” These stories pertain to ethnographic statements by indigenous informants, compiled by the anthropologist Miguel Chase Sardi. Masking cultural identity is a recurring theme in this polyglot society’s mythology. Enacting submission to preserve agency seems contradictory. However, the narrative devices employed render a convincing mode of defying assimilation. By translating the informant’s statements I attempt to extract the narrative potential of these myths, in addition to making the work intelligible in English.

The Unfurrowing of Birds

We treat them like lepers because their mother became a savage. Collecting parrot eggs with her husband incited the change. Something shifted as he hacked a hole in the trunk and extracted the parrot’s nest within.

“Catch them,” he called down as he dropped a frail egg. His wife caught it. Instead of placing it in the basket, the woman broke the shell and consumed the chick. She swallowed the following one whole.

The nest was nearly empty. Her husband peered down and discovered that so was the nest. READ MORE…