Posts filed under 'Holocaust'

Truths in Ambiguity: On Uljana Wolf’s kochanie, today i bought bread

October 12, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Anna Rumsby

Nissan’s expert translations, in turn, are contemporary in the sense that they are unapologetically “unfaithful”.

kochanie, today i bought bread by Uljana Wolf, translated from the German by Greg Nissan, World Poetry Books, 2023

In German, Uljana Wolf’s work inhabits the liminal spaces between the German and Polish languages, with all the fraught history that this double heritage involves. Now, in an English translation by Greg Nissan, this palimpsest of linguistic plurality has received another layer. Born in the German/Polish borderlands, Wolf has rapidly become a voice for a globalised, post-GDR generation, her life and work echoing the political and social upheaval of the twentieth century. In compact scenes of personal and shared experience, both dreamlike and jarring, she weaves together metaphoric word-sounds, juxtaposed imagery, and multilingualism. Nissan’s expert translations, in turn, are contemporary in the sense that they are unapologetically “unfaithful”. He has incorporated new imagery into the retold poems, such as the echoes of mink fur in “mornmink”, reiterating that his translated poems should not be seen as reproductions or ‘shadows’ of the original, but rather as a “jealous lover, eager to retort”.

Wolf’s verse is extremely dense and laden with historical and cultural references, making both the foreword by Valzhyna Mort and the afterword by Greg Nissan crucial pieces of the puzzle in beginning to decode Wolf’s poetry. This being said, such ambiguous verse is also a joy for the reader or reviewer; there are as many interpretations as there are eyes to read. The poetry benefits from its bilingual presentation, with the German on the left and the English on the right as equal partners that reflect one another without simply replicating the other. This allows readers to appreciate the form and page-feel of both languages, even if they are not bilingual.

Something that struck me initially in Wolf’s German was the formatting: a reader of German would expect the nouns to be capitalised, but here they are not. This only adds to the possibilities of their ambiguity, as words which could be both nouns and adjectives, or nouns and verbs, are no longer distinct from each other; the line einen gehorsam verzeichnen could mean, as Nissan has translated it, “to register an obedience”, but equally could have been translated as “to register (somebody/something) obediently”. The German prose is made ever denser by this use of the language, as the nouns no longer jump out on the page. While reading the German poems, I realised with a start that this is what reading English may have felt like to my German-speaking students, learning to read a language in which the nouns blend in with everything else. READ MORE…

Four-in-the-Morning Literature: On Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq

September 20, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Meghan Racklin

Insomnia does strange things to time, or time does strange things to insomniacs—it estranges, stretches, slips.

Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq, translated from the French by Penny Hueston, Semiotext(e), 2023

While writing this review, I began making a list of everything I’ve tried in my attempts to fall asleep. The first was reading, which didn’t help me fall asleep at all (though not sleeping has helped immensely with reading). The second, which I tried after the first time I told a doctor about my trouble sleeping at age eleven, was melatonin, and I took it dutifully, in varying doses, until stopping cold a year ago. I sleep no better and no worse since. Over the years, I have also tried: valerian root, passionflower, marijuana, CBD gel, NyQuil, keeping my phone in another room, counting sheep, white noise, earplugs, Xanax, watching the same six television shows over and over again, an eye mask, new sheets, exercise, an early and consistent alarm. I have a prescription for trazadone but don’t take it (the benefits of simply being in possession of sleeping pills are often extolled to insomniacs, though I haven’t noticed any). I often end up listing all the people I love, and this last is perhaps least helpful—I always end up imagining what I would say if asked to give a eulogy, or what they would say if they gave one for me. Sometimes I end up in tears, still sleepless.

This is insomniac thinking: each line on a list bends and branches outwards. Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq, in Penny Hueston’s translation, is written in this “totally insomniac mode.” The book, a meditation on this condition, is comprised of lists, footnoted investigations into the history of sleeping and not sleeping, worries about the meaning and morality of insomnia in the face of genocide and climate catastrophe, and a compendium of quotes and anecdotes about sleepless writers or the characters to whom they’ve lent their insomnia. It includes a two-page spread of photos of hotel rooms Darrieussecq has stayed—though often not slept—in. Researching, worrying, organizing, reading: all insomniac activities, which lead as easily away from sleep as towards it.

She circles around sleep, doubles back, spiraling like a Louise Bourgeois drawing (the artist, a prolific insomniac herself, often drew spiraling shapes when awake late at night, but spiraling which way?). Darrieussecq enacts insomnia in her style; the book is fragmentary, intense, shifting. Her metaphors are hypnagogic, caught between reality and analogy: “we insomniacs plummet into horrendous ravines and the bags under our eyes are bruise colored.” Metaphor, incidentally, is one of the things on Darrieussecq’s list of things she’s tried to help her sleep. “I tell myself that a good sleep would be to sleep like a mountain,” she writes, “Oh, metaphors, metaphors.” This effort, of course, failed.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “to make a world habitable” by Mireille Gansel

August 1, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Joan Seliger Sidney

A Heimat-country. Where to put your cries without words emotions memories traumas beyond all languages.

This Translation Tuesday, we present Mireille Gansel’s account of a visit to a “Heimatmuseum” in Montafon, Austria, whose purpose it is to change what we mean by “Heimat”—a charged, tainted word—and to demonstrate its kinder, hearth-like, more inclusive connotations. We present also a note from the translator, Joan Seliger Sidney:

After reading several of Mireille Gansel’s poems about the Holocaust—we are both second generation survivors—I chose to translate them. The more I read, the more I saw how broad her scope, including translating all of Nelly Sachs’ poems, as well as the correspondence between Sachs and Celan; also translating and anthologizing Vietnamese poets; in addition, writing her own poems about refugees, and about their migrations as well as bird migrations, and our everyday environment. Gansel is a much-awarded poet, translator, and memoirist. Her Traduire Comme Transhumer (translated by Ros Schwartz) has contributed significantly to the field of translation studies. Translating her poems is an honor.

to make a word habitable focuses on centuries of “migrations of misery and survival,” and how this Heimatmuseum—once taken over by the Nazis but since restored by its director and the community—with its “humble objects” bears witness to these migrations. This poem also shows us how these “asylum seekers” were welcomed by their neighbors and have become contributing partners to their new village. This poem makes us question, why, in our country, founded by both indigenous peoples and immigrants, refugee populations are being randomly picked up coming home from doing jobs Americans refuse to do, and being deported.

We have much to learn from this Heimat country and from Mireille Gansel’s poems and memoir.

— Joan Seliger Sidney

to make a word habitable

                                                                                                     a thousand times more native…
              the earth where all is free and fraternal
my earth
—Aimé Césaire

like a letter to Bruno Winkler
historian and educator at Montafon in the Vorarlberg

this winter morning. The village of Schruns of the municipality of Montafon. Mountains around and narrow streets all buried in the snow. And up to the small square where one finds the museum. Heimatmuseum: how to translate this word? and then Heimat? The native country and the house, home, the home. A word where there is intimacy: perhaps because in the Middle Ages the strong accent was put on the vowel that preceded the “t,” and was pronounced “o,” thus creating a misunderstanding with Mut. A word that speaks of qualms.

Heimat oscillates between the intimate and the collective, between the spiritual and the terrestrial. A “sensitive” word of the sort that exists in every language, marked with the stamp of a History. So the German language forged in the spiritual, moral, political hearth of the translation Luther made of the Bible.

Yes, how to translate today: Heimatmuseum? And first, how to understand it? Doubtless by taking into account the layers of history deposited in the word Heimat and this museum subjugated by Nazism. Perhaps also by on-the-spot visits. Taking the pulse. In the field.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 2, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar and Julia Sherwood

The latest news from Poland and Central America!

This week, our writers bring you news from Poland and Central America. In Poland, the life and work of the renowned poet Adam Zagajewski has been celebrated after he passed away, while Olga Tokarczuk has published a children’s book; and in Central America, a new literary magazine has been launched to feature LGBTQ+ voices. Read on to find out more! 

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Poland

The literary community not just in Poland but around the world has been mourning the loss of  the great Polish poet and essayist Adam Zagajewski, who passed away in Kraków on 21 March, aged seventy-five. The winner of numerous literary awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2004) and the Zhongkun International Poetry Prize (2014), Zagajewski was appointed a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour in 2016. His 2002 poem “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” (translated by Clare Kavanagh) captured the sombre mood after 9/11. In his final interview, published last summer on culture.pl, he defined poetry as follows:

I’m partial to a very old definition articulated by an Italian Jesuit poet and philosopher at the turn of the 18th century: “Poetry is a dream made in the presence of reason.” I adore that, as it contains two elements—something wild connected to imagination and dreams, yet still kept in order by reason. A sort of dialogue with the imagination.

Although he had been mooted as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature for many years, Zagajewski never received that accolade. Olga Tokarczuk, who won the prize in 2018, and has “always held that writers don’t really have biographies, and that the best way to find out about them is to read their books,” was nevertheless compelled to write a biographical essay, which has recently appeared on the Nobel Prize website (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones,) in which she tackles the subject with her customary warmth and originality.

Tokarczuk has also branched out into picture books with Lost Soul, a “meditation on the fullness of life,” illustrated by Joanna Concejo and also translated by Lloyd-Jones. The translator is also behind the English version of the delightful second outing of the matronly sleuth, Zofia Turbotynska, in Karolina and the Torn Curtain, a retro crime story set in the 1890s in Kraków, penned by Maryla Szymiczkowa, a.k.a. the writer-translator duo Jacek Dehnel and Piotr Tarczyński. For further details of these Polish books and more, due to appear in English 2021, look no further than this helpful list compiled by culture.pl.

The latest threats to freedom of expression in Poland are summed up in a report by constitutional lawyer and former journalist Anna Wójcik. They relate to a 1,700-page anthology on the extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany-occupied Poland during the Second World War, Night Without End. The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland, published in 2018. A Warsaw district court ruled in February that its authors, prominent Holocaust researchers Professor Jan Grabowski of the University of Ottawa and Professor Barbara Engelking, who heads the Polish Center for Holocaust Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, must publicly apologize for statements alleging that the mayor of the village of Malinowo shared responsibility for the death of Jews there in 1943 at the hands of Nazi Germans and that he robbed a Jewish woman of her possessions.

To end on a positive note: in December 2020, writer, publisher, and head of the Pogranicze (Borderland) Foundation, Krzysztof Czyżewski, was awarded the Ambassador of New Europe prize by the European Solidarity Centre in Gdańsk and the Eastern European College in Wrocław for his book W stronę Xenopolis (Towards Xenopolis), while Szczepan Twardoch’s The King of Warsaw (trans. Sean Gasper Bye) was longlisted on 11 March for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development Literature Prize 2021.

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America

Last month saw the launch of a new arts, culture, and literary magazine in Central America: Revista Impronta, which will focus on the work and voices of the LGBTQ+ community in the region. Made possible by the effort of journalist Daniel Villatoro, Revista Impronta has since shared work by Central American artists such as rapper Rebeca Lane, writer David Ulloa, poet Roy G. Guzmán, fashion designer Manuel de la Cruz, and comic book artist Breena Núñez.

Additionally, authors, bookstores, and festivals across Latin America recently came together to honor the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso, who would have turned 100 this year. Monterroso is most famous for books such as La oveja negra y demás fábulas (The Black Sheep and Other Fables), and for his story “El dinosaurio” (“The Dinosaur“). Augusto Monterroso was also awarded the Juan Rulfo Award in 1996, the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature in 1997, and the Prince of Asturias Award in Literature in 2000 and is regarded as one of Guatemala’s finest authors.

*****

Read more on the Asymptote blog:

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

February 14, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Barbara Halla, Nestor Gomez, and Shelly Bhoil

This week's latest news from Tibet, El Salvador, and France!

This week our writers bring you the latest news from Tibet, El Salvador, and France. At Indiana University, a new Tibetan translation of Elie Wiesel’s Night sparks discussion; in El Salvador, the contemporary poet Vladimir Amaya gives an interview about his poetic decisions; in France, the accusations of sexual assault in the literary establishment ignite urgent discussion about French law and the #MeToo movement. Read on to find out more! 

Shelly Bhoil, Editor-at-Large, reporting from United States

There was a powerful coming together of two exile stories—the Tibetan and Jewish—at the Central Eurasian Studies Department of Indiana University through a panel discussion—The Tibetan Translation of Elie Wiesel’s Night—on January 29. The Nobel Peace Prize-winner Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night (1960), discussed by the distinguished Jewish literature scholar Alvin Rosenfeld in the panel, has been translated into more than thirty languages, its Tibetan version being the most recent. Wiesel was a Holocaust survivor upon whom the Dalai Lama conferred the International Campaign for Tibet’s Light of Truth award in 2005.

Wiesel’s Night is the first work to be translated into Tibetan under New York-based Latse Library’s 108 translations project and made available for free here. According to Latse’s statistics, “In the first two weeks alone [since the book’s publication in Oct 2019], there were 3,300 downloads of the ebook and PDF, and countless more instances of sharing and forwarding on social media and email.” Gendun Rabsel, the Tibetan language expert, spoke in the panel about the welcoming reception of Night among Tibetan readers. Pema Bhum, Night’s translator and a leading Tibetan intellectual, discussed his meeting with Wiesel and the challenges and choices in translating this work into Tibetan, including his consultations with the celebrated historian on Tibet, Elliot Sperling, and with IU Jewish Studies faculty. READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2020

January 27, 2020  |  in News  |  by Caridad Svich, Eva Heisler, Lee Yew Leong, Sam Carter, and Varun Nayar

Our Section Editors pick their favorites from the Winter 2020 issue!

We thought of the Winter 2020 issue as a fantastic salad, surprising and delightful in its compact variety. We’re willing to concede, however, that it is a large salad; the challenges it presents might be more approachable if they’re coming from a buffet. With so many delights and delectables on offer, where does one begin? Perhaps, we humbly suggest, with these selections from our section editors, which include a Federico García Lorca play and an Eduardo Lalo essay.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction, Poetry, and Kurdish Feature Editor:

Brought into English by Caitlin O’Neil (a former team member, I’m thrilled to say), Corinne Hoex’s sensuous—and sensational—Gentlemen Callers is full of exquisite treats, rivaling Belgian compatriot Amélie Nothomb’s wit, humor, and imagination. Although Asymptote makes it its mission to move beyond world literature’s Eurocentric focus, it’s gems like this that remind me that there’s still much to discover from smaller, less heard-from countries within Europe. I would consider it scandalous if Hoex’s fiction is still unknown in the world literature canon ten years down the road. From the Poetry section, Gnaomi Siemens accompanies her sexy, updated take of Ephemeris (horoscopes from the 16th century) with a thought-provoking note: “Horoscopes (hora / time, skopos / observation) are ephemeral. Translation is an observation of time and a holding up of the writings and ideas of one time to observe them in a new temporal context.” Pair with Joey Schwartzman’s 21st-century renderings of T’ang dynasty poet Bai Juyi. Whip-smart and bittersweet, these timeless poems about transience will stay with you for at least a little while.

From Sam Carter, Criticism Section Editor:

This issue’s Criticism section introduces us to two poetry collections that embody the Asymptote mission by refusing to be contained by borders, whether linguistic or geographic. Our very own Lou Sarabadzic takes us through the important work done by Poetry of the Holocaust: An Anthology, which contains poems from ninety-three writers and nineteen languages in order to provide a comprehensive portrait of this terrible atrocity. And Emma Gomis reviews Time, Etel Adnan’s latest exploration of temporality and poetic form that arose from a series of postcards exchanged with the Tunisian artist Khaled Najar. READ MORE…

Thirteen Keys to a Doorless House in Toledo: On Tela de sevoya by Myriam Moscona

May 16, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Sergio Sarano

The Ladino language has etched on her tongue the addresses of countless houses in the Jewish Quarters of Toledo and Burgos.

Myriam Moscona’s Tela de sevoya (Onioncloth) was published in English in 2017, translated from the Ladino by Antena (Jen Hofer with John Pluecker). In today’s essay, Asymptote’s Sergio Sarano, himself a Ladino speaker, uses Moscona’s book as a starting point to explore the language and its history, shaped by the complex migrations of the Jewish diaspora. Sergio also discusses Ladino’s current status as an endangered language and highlights the important role that Moscona, as one of just a few writers who continue to publish in Ladino, has to play in keeping the language alive.

“I come upon a city
I remember
that there lived
my two mothers
and I wet my feet
in the rivers
that from these and other waters
arrive to this place”

—Myriam Moscona

READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2018

April 23, 2018  |  in Dispatches, News  |  by David Smith, Sarah Booker, and Stefan Kielbasiewicz

Our blog editors pick their favorite pieces from the Spring 2018 issue!

Here at the blog, we continue to be amazed by the breadth of the material featured every quarter at Asymptote. From our Korean literature feature to a Japanese dadaist‘s outrageous fusion of text and image, our Spring 2018 issue again proves that the most groundbreaking material is being produced far from the centers of Anglo-American literary dominance. This issue’s Tolstoyan theme, “Unhappy Families,” might suggest an individualized focus on how each of us is unhappy in our own way. However, the blog editors’ selections all touch on wider themes of war and genocide, suggesting an undercurrent of collective trauma beneath the stories of personal travail. These pieces are just a small taste of the vast terrain covered in the Spring 2018 issue. You won’t want to miss any of it!

Iya Kiva’s three poems from “little green lights” (translated by Katherine E. Young) almost immediately caught my attention in this new Spring issue. It is divided into three sections that are distinguishable through their tone—the first one resentful, the second satirical, and the third calmly futile. The second section revolves around the punning of воды [water] and война [war], which is perhaps a rare instance when the translation succeeds even more than the original. The war in the Donbass region of Ukraine is now in its fifth year of conflict between Ukrainian and pro-Russian forces, with no end in sight. Kiva’s ironic assertions of “what if there’s no war by the time night falls” and “in these parts it’s considered unnatural / if war doesn’t course through the pipes” creates two possible interpretations: the disbelief at the war’s complete destruction, to the point that there is no running water (as if a war could be comfortably fought from both sides), and the biting accusation that war, not water, is essential to a people’s survival, as well as their nation. Running water is no longer the passive object for Romantic contemplation, but has become a basic expectation for life in a modern society, tragically, just as war has. On the other hand, not everything in Kiva’s poems is double-edged. One of my favourite lines is the simplest: “and it’s really beautiful / like in a Tarkovsky film”, which at first sounds like a platitude, but becomes charming with the realisation that nothing more can be said about a Tarkovsky film without slipping into pretention. I highly recommend our readers to delve into this poem, to question Kiva’s stance and at the same time to feel as if their own ideas are being questioned.

—Stefan Kielbasiewicz

READ MORE…

In Conversation: Stephanie Smee

April 19, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by Brigette Manion

As her translator, I have had the opportunity to sit quietly with her as she pondered the inhumanity of the Nazi regime when she was forced to flee

The Spring 2018 issue launch is just around the corner (stay tuned…) and it is full of amazing writing from around the world. This season we approach the question of family. Texts explore exiles, adulterers, and a levitating aspirin in our Korean Fiction Feature, headlined by acclaimed filmmaker Lee Chang-dong. Amid exciting new writing and art from twenty-nine countries, gathering together such literary stars as Mario Vargas Llosa and Robert Walser, discover “tiny shards” of childhood on the verge of experience as remembered by Jon Fosse—a giant of Norwegian letters in his own right—or not remembered by Brazilian author Jacques Fux à la Joe Brainard.

Although “unhappiness is other people,” according to Dubravka Ugrešić, we’re just as likely to be imprisoned in our own family, a predicament brought to light in Dylan Suher’s review of Eileen Chang’s Little Reunions. In a generously personal essay, Ottilie Mulzet reveals how she turned to Gábor Schein’s “father-novel” to unlock the secret of her intransigent birth mother, whose refusal to speak to her had “stood in [Mulzet’s] life like a monumental cliff.” Schein’s poetry also graces this issue, and in a timely echo of Spring and past horrors, he takes up the refrain of Dayeinu of the Passover Haggadah—it would have been enough for us: “Enough, if you or I still / hoped for something. Enough, if we forgot to remember…”

For some, family remains a hall of mirrors, leaving the outlook bleak for human brother- and sisterhood: “My path doesn’t lead to you. Your path doesn’t lead to me,” writes the Libyan poet Ashur Etwebi. At times, language cuts as deep as our common mortality, that kinship beyond all social roles, as in the poignant drama, The Last Scene. Echoing the resignation of Alain Foix’s death-row prisoner, poet Esther Tellermann laments, “breathe me / sister in death.” Others, like Cairo-based artist Amira Hanafi, strive to knit together connections between strangers. Her recently concluded installation, A Dictionary of the Revolution, deployed a vocabulary box of 160 words to generate conversations with more than two hundred people across Egypt.

As a special treat for our blog readers, we bring you a special interview conducted with this new issue in mind. As she prepared her enlightening criticism, Brigette Manion sat down with translator Stephanie Smee to talk about her translation of No Place to Lay One’s Head by Françoise Frenkel. As Brigette explains in her review, “No Place to Lay One’s Head looks back over Frenkel’s life, from her youth as a bibliophile and her establishment of a bookstore in Berlin, to her journey across France and final passage into Switzerland. Frenkel presents a story of survival and resilience dedicated in her foreword to the memory of the ‘MEN AND WOMEN OF GOOD WILL’ who, with great courage and often at considerable risk to their own lives, helped and inspired her along the journey.” Happy reading!

Brigette Manion (BM): How did you first come across Françoise Frenkel’s memoir, and do you remember your initial response to it? 

Stephanie Smee (SS): I first came across Frenkel’s memoir after reading a review in Lire magazine. I had the good fortune to be in Paris when I read it for the first time, and many of the images she described, particularly of her early years in Paris, felt incredibly poignant. Perhaps my response to her very moving story was tempered by that. I also found her descriptions of different places so detailed and lyrical that they evoked a visceral response in me. I remember, too, being terribly affected by the immediacy of her writing, a characteristic of her memoir which truly sets it apart, in my view, from many other memoirs that are often written several years after the events that are the subject of the work.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: January 2018

January 8, 2018  |  in New in Translation, News, Reviews  |  by Cassie Lawrence, Jacob Silkstone, and Theophilus Kwek

The new year kicks off with new releases from Japan, Germany, and Italy.

Every month, our staff members pick three notable new releases in world literature to review. The first month of 2018 brings us short fiction from Japan and novels from Germany and Italy.

bear and the paving stone

The Bear and the Paving Stone by Toshiyuki Horie, translated from the Japanese by Geraint Howells, Pushkin Press

Reviewed by Theophilus Kwek, Editor-at-Large for Singapore

Mention ‘contemporary Japanese fiction’ to the average reader and bestselling names like Haruki Murakami, Ruth Ozeki, and Keigo Higashino might come to mind; or indeed last year’s Nobel laureate, the British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. From that perspective, at least, Toshiyuki Horie can be considered one of the modern Japanese canon’s best-kept secrets, happily resurfaced for an Anglophone audience by the ever-intrepid Pushkin Press. A critic, translator, and professor of literature, Horie has garnered numerous accolades for his fiction and essays, and is also—as the three novellas collected here reveal—a masterly prose stylist, a ruthlessly effective narrator, and a seasoned traveller between the real and imagined geographies of experience and history, dream and memoir, and past and present.

The first and longest section of the volume contains Horie’s novella “The Bear and the Paving Stone,” which won the Akutagawa Prize in 2001, and lends this volume its title. The tale opens in a strange, allegorical dream-sequence that ends just as abruptly when the narrator wakes, alone, in a rural farmhouse in Normandy. Drawing on Horie’s own time as a graduate student at the Sorbonne, the story unfolds with exquisite pacing into a long-awaited reunion between two unlikely college pals: the narrator (then a student from Japan, now a professional translator) and Yann, a free-spirited, petánque-playing photographer. As they embark on a breakneck drive to see the sun set over Mont St Michel from Yann’s favourite spot on the coast, we are plunged as if into another dream: this time, comprising the layered narratives of French intellectual history, the Holocaust and its aftershocks, and a post-modern, international friendship. Ghostly historical figures such as Émile Littré, Jorge Semprún, and Bruno Bettelheim haunt these pages with a sense of driving, almost teleological purpose, but the two friends’ conversation somehow remains light, and movingly human, throughout.

READ MORE…

“2817 Perec”: The Celestial Eccentricity of Georges Perec’s Writing

September 27, 2017  |  in Profile  |  by Marie Darrieussecq and Penny Hueston

A profile of the extraordinary French writer that explores how he used experimentation and imagination to understand the horrors of reality.

This article by the prodigious French writer Marie Darrieussecq appeared in Le Monde des Livres on May 11, 2017. The occasion was the publication of the two-volume La Pléiade edition of the Complete Works of Georges Perec, who died thirty-five years ago, in 1982. It is a huge honor for a writer’s work to be published (usually posthumously) in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, which is a critical edition, with annotations, notes, manuscript and editorial variations, and accompanying documents. The books are pocket format, leather bound, with gold lettering on the spine and printed on bible paper. The series was begun in 1931 by the editor Jacques Schiffrin and was brought into the Gallimard publishing company in 1936 by André Gide.

—Penny Hueston

Georges Perec is now part of the Pléiade series. The novelty of the list of his titles being collected in this edition might have brought a smile to his face. He used to say, “Nothing in the world is unique enough not to be able to be part of a list.”

But Perec is unique. More than anyone else’s, his collected works resemble a UFO. He is a successor to Jules Verne and Herman Melville, to Stendhal and Queneau, to Poe and Borges, to Rabelais and Mallarmé…And yet Perec stands alone, bearded, playful, coiffed with a cat in his hair, like an icon in our popular imagination. And, although a dizzying number of references are woven through his work, his way of writing is freakily inventive.

His books were only intermittently successful in his lifetime, but after his premature death at the age of forty-six in 1982, his reputation grew exponentially. Perec quickly became the most recent of our classics. “A contemporary classic,” as the editor of this Pléiade edition of his Complete Works, Christelle Reggiani, writes in her preface, but an odd classic, both amusing and melancholic, whose humour shaped his despair.

His lipograms, constrained writing (the speciality of Oulipo, of which he was without doubt the most famous member), play around an absent centre, a missing letter, or an alphabetical prison house. His novel, A Void (1969), written without the letter “e,” is therefore written without them: without his father, who was killed in the war, without his mother, who was murdered in Auschwitz.

What seems to be Perec’s pleasant game with words is his way of saying the unsayable, of giving shape to absence, of proclaiming the abomination of the death of his mother and of the destruction of the Jews of Europe. He had what it takes to write that. READ MORE…

When There’s No Wind, the Sounds of the Past are Audible Over the Danube

August 10, 2017  |  in Dispatches, Essays, Interviews  |  by Eva Andrejčáková and Julia Sherwood

On opposite banks of the Danube in Hungary and Slovakia, separated peoples find a way to talk in many languages across the ancient river.

Today we profile a unique literary gathering, AquaPhone Festival, that takes place on both banks of the Danube. It not only features literature from Hungary and Slovakia but also acts as a cultural bridge between the nations that have been isolated from each other’s shared histories by totalitarian rule. It serves as a powerful symbol against the rising tide of xenophobia, as a conversation with Karol Frühauf reveals. 

it could be done by us just shouting
just talking to each other over the water
and not by me going over to you by boat
you going angling? I’d shout into the wind
and your voice would echo across the water
no! I’m going angling! oh, right! I’d shout
all right I thought you’re going angling

— From ‘Modalities of Crossing’ by Dániel Varró, translated from the Hungarian by Peter Sherwood

From the southwestern part of the Danubian Hills, poetry drifts above the waves of the Danube. Lines of verse bounce from one side of the river to the other, hard on each other’s tails yet in accord, dissolving in the air.

lehetne az is hogy csak kiabálunk
hogy csak beszélgetünk a víz fölött
és nem megyek át hozzád ladikon
horgászni mész? kiáltanám a szélbe
és hangod visszaringna a vizen
nem! horgászni megyek! ja! kiabálnám
ja jól van azt hittem horgászni mész!

— From ‘az átkelés módozatai’ by Dániel Varró

Someone is reciting poetry. It takes a while for the words, carried by sound waves, to cross the river. This is how poetry behaves when a poem is recited aloud above a river. The author of this year’s poem, “Modalities of Crossing,” is the wonderful Hungarian poet and children’s writer, Dániel Varró.

dá sa aj tak že si len zakričíme
len si nad vodou pohovoríme
a neprejdem za tebou cez lávku
ideš na rybačku? volal by som do vetra
a tvoj hlas by sa na vode prihojdal
nie! idem na rybačku! aha! volal by som
aha dobre myslel som že na rybačku!

— From ‘možnosti prepravy’ by Dániel Varró, translated from the Hungarian into Slovak by Eva Andrejčáková

Varró’s poem is read out in several languages: first in Hungarian (the poet’s native tongue), then in Slovak, and finally in German. You have to wait patiently for the lines to reach you from the far shore before you can send your version back by the same route. The extraordinary dialogue is accompanied by live cello, saxophone, and clarinet. There is no wind, the June sunshine is reflected in the water, bathing the majestic domes of the basilica in the distance in its soft light. This is what the AquaPhone festival is like.

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What’s New in Translation? May 2017

May 11, 2017  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by MARGENTO, Nozomi Saito, and Theophilus Kwek

We review three new books available in English, from Yiddish and Hebrew poetry to an extraordinary Russian account of exile.

 

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The Golden Cockerel & Other Writings by Juan Rulfo, translated by Douglas J. Weatherford, Deep Vellum

Reviewed by Nozomi Saito, Senior Executive Assistant

Juan Rulfo’s prominence within the canon of Mexican and Latin American authors has been undeniable for some time. Regarded by Valeria Luiselli as one of the writers who gave her a deeper understanding of the literary tradition in Mexico and the Spanish language, and depicted by Elena Poniatowska as a figure deeply rooted in Mexican culture, it is clear that modern Mexican and Latin American literature would not be what they are without Rulfo. Indeed, Rulfo often has been credited as the figure to whom the Latin American boom of the 1960s and ‘70s is indebted, and Gabriel García Márquez has said that it was because of Rulfo’s works that the former was able to continue writing and ultimately produce One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Yet for all the recognition that Rulfo’s works have so rightly earned, there has been a persistent misconception that he only published two works of fiction, The Plain in Flames (El Llano in llamas, 1953) and Pedro Páramo (Pedro Páramo, 1955). The Golden Cockerel (El gallo de oro, c. 1956) for too long remained excluded from Rulfo’s oeuvre, even being miscategorized as a text originally intended for the cinematic screen. To reclaim and secure its position in Rulfo’s canon, Douglas J. Weatherford has brought forth The Golden Cockerel and Other Writings, which provides deep insight into the work, ruminations, and personal life of the legendary writer.

The result is a text that is refreshing and diverse. The titular story follows the rise and fall of Dionisio Pinzón, an impoverished man whose crippled arm prevents him from farm labor, the only viable work in the town, and whose destiny changes when someone gives him a golden cockerel that has been badly beaten, having comprised the losing side of a cockfight. While the majority of the story follows Pinzón’s migration in pursuit of wealth, his path eventually intersects with that of the singer Bernarda Cutiño, familiarly called La Caponera, whose own migratory wanderings lead them from one town to the next, to various cockfights throughout Mexico.

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New in Translation: 33 Days by Léon Werth

April 22, 2015  |  in Reviews  |  by Yardenne Greenspan

“I recount the lowly; I tell, in the immensity of this war, the stories of insects.“

Every year, as Holocaust Memorial Day approaches, my husband and I begin looking for a film, a book, or an article with which to commemorate the day. Each year this tradition becomes more challenging and more exciting, as we move away from Hollywood epics and into the realm of small-scale, private stories. As I grow older and my mind expands, I become more interested in the minutia of this enormous tragedy: what people talked about, what mundane things preoccupied their minds, what made them laugh.

In his memoir 33 Days, Léon Werth chronicles the time he and his wife spent on the road fleeing Paris during the Fall of France in 1940. They move between farmhouses and through blockaded roads. They worry for their teenage son, who has left earlier with friends. They pilfer whatever remains in empty homes and abandoned vehicles, and sleep on hay bales. They are at war, but not in the Holocaust. They are Jews who do not yet know what their identity will come to mean.

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