Posts filed under 'Fortnightly Airmail'

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

A selection of staff reads from Asymptote’s Fortnightly Airmail!

When it comes to browsing the shelves and diving head-first into the wonderfully vast world of translated literature, sometimes you just need a little help from your friends. In this caselet us be your friends. Our editors are sharing their favourite reads to make sure that yours is time well spent.

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Readers already familiar with Nina Berberova’s fiction in collections such as Billancourt TalesThe Tattered Cloak and The Ladies from St. Petersburg will find her first novel—translated by Marian Schwartz—a surprising divergence in style from the lightness of touch and sparse but pungent details in her stories about small casts of characters grappling with challenges in their everyday lives. Written in 1928-29, The Last and the First (Pushkin Press, 2021) is a drama on a broader canvas about Russian émigrés in France struggling to decide whether to return to the Soviet Union or to throw all their energies into establishing a meaningful life in France, specifically whether to join Ilya, the messianic central character, toiling on the land in Provence. It is driven by a complex plot in which the true identities and motives of some characters are initially hidden, and stylistically has more in common with novels of the nineteenth century, Dostoevsky being the writer who springs most to mind for the intense and knotted emotional relationships between the main characters, their striving for some kind of salvation, as well as in the vivid and grimy descriptions of the backstreets of Paris.

—Janet Phillips, Assistant Managing Editor (Issue Production)

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A tale of two lives, that of a poetess living in the USA and of a Yazidi who saves the women of Sinjar, unfolds through a series of phone calls and a single face-to-face visit. In her pensive The Beekeeper of Sinjar (New Directions, 2018), masterfully translated from the Arabic by Max Weiss, the Iraqi-born Dunya Mikhail recalls her conversations with Abdullah, an ordinary man turned local hero, who has chosen to devote his days and nights to rescuing the innocent girls kidnapped by the militant group Daesh. Simultaneously a meditation on absurdity and a truthful account of real-life experiences, the book offers its readers a path to understanding the shifting values of a region long tormented by its past. The unimaginable loss and heartbreak that pour from every page are curiously accompanied by an almost inhuman ability to forgive, while the deceptively simple descriptions of misery bring home the scale of the disaster. Despite the traumatic events, however, the locals have managed to retain their purity and, what is more, to find time for the poetry of existence. As we all should.

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large for Bulgaria READ MORE…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

A selection of staff reads from Asymptote’s Fortnightly Airmail

We hope you’re staying dry. If you’re looking for a book to curl up with, check out these staff reads—hailing from Colombia, Germany, and India. Sign up for our newsletter to get these recommendations delivered right to your inbox.

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Like an archaeology museum, Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses (New Directions, 2020), translated from the German by Jackie Smith and longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, catalogues objects, places, artwork, people, and animals lost to history across centuries of time and continents through twelve genre-bending and essayistic pieces, one of which was previously featured in Asymptote. Schalansky is a German writer and editor, whose previous novels grappled with the transience of things, isolation, and the disappearance of islands and species. Schalansky adopts a wide range of styles to enter the world of her material and reanimate the objects under consideration, while Jackie Smith captures the idiosyncratic form of each piece. Schalansky’s pieces are indeterminate, meandering collages of history, biography, memoir, and criticism. They are linked through their concerns with the ravages of time, the processes of decay, and memorialization. In the style of W.G. Sebald and Sir Thomas Browne, these pieces represent memento mori, in that they meditate on the disintegration of things, while also asking us to consider how the past is interpreted from writings, artifacts, and a discontinuous archive. These retellings of history are acts of preservation—they give voice to the silenced, reorient the reader toward an era, a place, or a person, while also probing the political and philosophical dimensions of memory and forgetting.

Darren Huang, Editor-at-Large for Taiwan

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David, an aging painter losing his vision to macular degeneration, reflects on the most difficult night of his life: his son’s euthanasia twenty years ago. Such is the plot of Tomás González’s elegiac novel Difficult Light, translated from the Spanish by Andrea Rosenberg, and released by Archipelago Books. As David writes, he keeps returning to the night in New York City when his family waited to hear if his son, paralyzed and suffering, had followed through with his decision to die. Will the doctor show for the illegal assisted suicide in Portland? Will his son change his mind? Death permeates the novel. His son’s. His wife’s. His own, impending. But so does beauty, love, humor, and though it’s difficult, light.

—Kent Kosack, Director, Educational Arm READ MORE…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

Here to help you diversify your bookshelf, a selection of staff reads from Asymptote’s Fortnightly Airmail

If, as the adage goes, readers experience a thousand lives before they die, then readers of translated literature experience a thousand cultures without ever leaving their armchair. Set in Canada, India, Finland, Italy, and Jordan, here is a selection of international reads recommended by our staff for the newsletter. Get ready to be transported!

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The year is 1506. The great artist Michelangelo is furious at his stingy patron the Pope, “the bellicose pontiff who had thrown him out like a beggar.” But as one door closes, another opens in the form of an invitation from the Sultan of Constantinople to come to his city and design a bridge to cross the Golden Horn. Tell Them of Battles, Kings & Elephants, written by Mathias Énard and translated by Charlotte Mandell, is a feat of richly-imagined historical fiction that tells the tale of this sculptor’s journey. Michelangelo is abstemious and driven, consumed by his art and ego. But he soon succumbs to the charms of cosmopolitan Constantinople, its sounds and smells, its poets and performers. Yet dark forces conspire to thwart the artist from completing his designs. Intrigue. Assassins. Daggers in the night. Will Michelangelo complete his bridge and join cultures and continents? What will be the legacy of his journey? You’ll have to read it to find out.

—Kent Kosack, Director of Educational Arm

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Kjell Westö’s novel The Wednesday Club, translated from the Swedish by Neil Smith, takes us to Helsinki in 1938–ten years after the Finnish Civil War. The Second World War has not yet started, but Hitler and his policies are already a recurring discussion topic far beyond Nazi Germany. Lawyer and recent divorcee Claes Thune wants to keep the gentleman’s club with his three friends amicable but not only the world around them but also the past keeps intruding. As some of the friends start drifting apart, Thune finds a friend in his new secretary Matilda Wiik. But why is she so secretive about her background? Westö is one of the most highly praised Swedish-language writers in Finland. Although he writes poetry and short stories as well, it’s with his novels set in twentieth century Helsinki that he has truly established himself as a writer. Readers of the engaging and intriguing The Wednesday Club understand why.

—Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large for Sweden

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Smita sends her daughter to the village school in Badlapur for the first time, an action that sets a daring journey in motion. Guila works in her family’s wig workshop, the House of Lanfredi in Palermo, but soon receives news that changes the course of their business forever. In Montreal, a successful lawyer, mother of two, and woman who has it all, Sarah’s priorities are about to shift dramatically. Laetitia Colombani’s The Braid, published by Picador in 2019, interlaces the stories of Smita, Guila, and Sarah—each on the precipice of change. Cinematic in scope and expertly translated from French by Louise Rogers Lalaurie, it is ideal for binge reading. Set in the present day, the alternating perspectives flow seamlessly and are further linked through a poem. Colombani creates a deeply personal tale of women building new paths upon generations of faith, culture, and tradition, while revealing unexpected ways in which our modern lives intersect.

Mary Hillis, Educational Arm Assistant READ MORE…

Ask a Translator with Daniel Hahn

Translation is really something other than a striving for vague perfection.

Our resident translation expert, writer, and jack-of-all-trades, Daniel Hahn, is back to respond to reader questions on the fine art of translation. Today’s question comes from Lin Chia Wei, a reader in Taiwan. Anddon’t miss our first-ever “Ask a Translator” live event with Daniel Hahn in London on Wednesday, July 20 (RSVP at or invite your friends to the Facebook event page here).

Is there anything that is completely untranslatable, in your opinion?

Everything is untranslatable, that’s what I think.

Or alternatively, I think that nothing is.

And honestly, I’m perfectly comfortable with either of those ideas; both make sense to me. I’m not altogether comfortable, however, with the idea behind the question itself.

There are certain components to a text that are likely to present particular challenges to a translator (I talked about these in last month’s column), things that feel like absolute impossibilities. And conversely there are moments when you’re translating and a clever solution presents itself, or when a new voice you’re creating comes into focus, and the sheer rightness seems miraculous, the fact of it being so very possible feels exhilarating. But these experiences, and the question, would seem to suggest a simple binarytranslatable / not translatablewhich is misleading. Translation is all failure, because it’s never “perfect”; and it is all also, simultaneously, a triumph, because however imperfectly something living has been created out of the most unlikely circumstances.

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In Conversation with Yumiko Tsumura

"...she values the translation of her poetry into English, as well as into other languages, to plant her poetry on the globe."

Yumiko Tsumura’s translations of poems by Kazuko Shiraishi, also known as “the Allen Ginsberg of Japan,” appeared in our Winter 2016 issue. Recently Tsumura corresponded via e-mail with Interview Features Editor Ryan Mihaly.

Your first book of translations of Kazuko Shiraishi’s poems dates back to 2002. When did you first meet Kazuko, and how did you begin working with her?

I met Kazuko Shiraishi on September 30, 2000 in Tokyo. My co-translator, Samuel Grolmes, my late husband, and I had been working on a translation of Ryuichi Tamura’s poetry, ever since he was the first guest to the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa established by Paul Engle. I was working on my MFA in poetry and translation and Sam was an assistant director to Paul Engle, and we started translating Tamura’s poetry during his stay at the IWP.

Tamura’s “The World Without Words” was published [in] New Directions Annual 22. When our book Tamura Ryuichi Poems: 1946-1998 was published early September 2000, Shichosha, the publisher of modern poetry, held a symposium in Tokyo called “How to Surpass Tamura” on September 30, 2000. Kazuko Shiraishi was a great admirer of Tamura’s poetry and one of the panelists. During that meeting she came to ask Sam and me to translate her poetry. READ MORE…

Ask a Translator by Daniel Hahn

"As a translator, I feel some responsibility to the writers I translate."

Our literary translator on the street, award-winning writer and editor Daniel Hahn, is back with another installment of “Ask a Translator,” the monthly column responding to readers’ deepest questions about the day-to-day practice of literary translation. This time around, Asymptote reader Mandy Doll from Singapore asked the following:​

Is there a code of ethics when it comes to translation?​

This is how the world looks today, according to the evening news:

Militant groups kill dozens in Brussels bombings!
Britain’s campaign to split from the E.U. heats up!
Trump and G.O.P. rivals escalate anti-immigrant rhetoric!

These are stories of division.

They are stories of a failure of empathy, a failure of imagination. Stories of willful misunderstanding. Stories that tell us how the powerful capitalise on failed media and failed education systems to persuade the powerless that the only thing that really matters is how people are different, not how they are the same.

Every assumption that underpins the translator’s work is in opposition to this. Translation is optimistic. Translation is generous. Translation assumes that—however unlikely—mutual understanding is possible. Translation says, Listen—see that guy over there? Give him a chance, ’cause what he’s saying is worth hearing. Translation assumes that my story can mean something to you, that her concerns way over there are not fundamentally different to his worries over here. Come to that, doesn’t all literature make that assumption? READ MORE…