Posts filed under 'mexican literature'

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Hong Kong, Mexico, and North Macedonia!

This week, our Editors-at-Large explore blockchain publishing, poets’ novels, and literary surrealism. Read on to find out more!

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

In December, Hong Kong independent bookstore Mount Zero Books announced that it will be closing in March 2024 due to anonymous complaints on the bookstore’s “illegal occupation of government land”, and the resulting warning from the Lands Department regarding the tiled platform outside of the bookstore. Mount Zero Books’ experience is not an isolated issue; it is part of the narrowing of Hong Kong’s cultural space under the current political climate, in which independent publishers and bookstores are facing increasing control and censorship. In 2022, for instance, local independent publisher Hillway Press was not allowed to participate in the annual Book Fair organised by Hong Kong Trade Development Council. The publishing house then planned to host a “Hongkongers’ Book Fair” featuring 14 independent local publishers and bookstores in the shopping mall Mall Plus in Causeway Bay. Unfortunately, the book fair was forced to cancel as they were accused of violating the terms of venue use. In December 2023, one of the founders of Hillway Press emigrated and the company decided to close down. What is more, two of Hong Kong’s remaining independent bookstores, Have A Nice Stay and Hunter Bookstore, have said that they face frequent complaints and regular monitoring by government departments.

In light of increasing challenges — both economic and political — faced by the local publishing industry, Hong Kong writers are beginning to explore new means of publishing their works and reaching out to readers. Hong Kong writer Dung Kai-cheung has been counting down to the 15 February publication of his new work, Autofiction, on his own writing platform, Dungfookei. Autofiction will be published in the form of an NFT. The new autobiographical nonfiction is part of the writer’s exploration of the potential of Web3’s blockchain technology for decentralizing publishing and granting more autonomy in user control and ownership of data. In 2023, Dung joined Likecoin — an application-specific blockchain for decentralized publishing developed by Hong Kong entrepreneur Ko Chung-kin — to republish his famous novel Tiangong Kaiwu·Lifelike, which became the first Chinese novel to be published as an NFT. While Tiangong Kaiwu·Lifelike is available for purchase on Likecoin’s website, Dung also developed his own platforms Dungfookei and DKC in Translation to digitalise his works and interact with readers in new ways. Although the project is still experimental, by turning to the web for more freedom and opportunities, Dung’s foray into Web3 and NFT publishing represents an innovative frontier in the evolving landscape of literature and author-reader interaction. READ MORE…

There Must Be a Poem: A Conversation With Alí Calderón, Founder of Círculo de Poesía

. . . this is the best time for poetry: there were never as many readers as there are today. . .

Mexican poet and scholar Alí Calderón is one of the founders of Círculo de Poesía, an online poetry journal that celebrated its fifteenth anniversary in 2023. From the very beginning, the project aimed to diversify the cultural panorama of Mexico and has now established a publishing company that explores world literature. In this interview, I spoke with Calderón about the nature of translation, the importance of dialogue with other cultures, and how publishing can be an alternative to sustain literary projects. 

René Esaú Sánchez (RES): You have mentioned in other interviews that Círculo de Poesía was born as a project to perceive Mexican poetry from other angles. Why was that necessary?

Alí Calderón (AC): When we talk about Mexican poetry, it is a deceiving category; we think of it as something inclusive when it’s not. Just by analyzing the indexes of poetry anthologies or by seeing who receives certain scholarships, we realize that it is more of a cultural elite. 

In 2008, with the birth of the internet and other forms of media, we decided to reinvent culture from other sources. We started working against the tide, promoting poetry from other states of México, like Puebla, Sinaloa or Colima; we decentralized it.

That’s how the journal was born: with the intention of democratizing poetry and making it more visible. But we didn’t do it only with Mexican poetry: we included poetry written in other Spanish-language countries and, out of curiosity, in other world languages.

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Tampoco tenemos nombre / We, too, are nameless: A Conversation with Ilana Luna

When I translate, my approach is much more of an interpretation, in the musical sense; it is a jazz riff, it is a feeling . . .

I discovered one of my favorite poets—the musician, filmmaker, and diplomat Gaspar Orozco—through Ilana Luna in the pages of Scotland-based Reliquiae: A Journal of Nature, Landscape, and Mythology. In Luna’s lulling translation, Orozco’s El Libro de los Espejismos (The Book of Mirages) meditates on the lacuna between memory and myth, and the interstices between sentience and sleep. In this interview, I asked Luna about, among other things, translating Mexican poet Gaspar Orozco and essayist Carlos Monsiváis, as well as Mexican literature in translation, with small indie presses as their prime movers. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): I love your translation of Gaspar Orozco published at Reliquiae Journal! And you have a forthcoming book of translation from Orozco’s poems under the Corbel Stone Press imprint, Xylem Books. What should Orozco readers like me expect from this new title? 

Ilana Luna (IL): In fact, we have several manuscripts we’ve been working on. The first we completed is El libro de los espejismos/The Book of Mirages. It’s quite a marvelous book, with prose poetry as well as formal poetry, haiku, sonnet, octaves. They were the most fun to translate, truth be told; I love the puzzle or game-like challenge that formal limitations pose. Several of these poems appeared in Reliquiae, as well as in the July 2021 issue of Indian publication Poetry at Sangam. The one you mention, with Corbel Stone Press, is what we’re currently working on. It is more of an anthology of Orozco’s work, with a focus on natural phenomena and a mythic tone, taken from across his ten-book corpus. As always, Gaspar’s poetry is full of luminescent landscapes, vignettes, and often, has a mesmerizing, rhythmic quality. I try to capture this in my translations.

AMMD: In his prólogo to Lapidario: Antología del aforismo mexicano (2014), critic-translator Hiram Barrios maps the presence of aforismos en verso (“aphorism taking refuge in the short poem”) within Mexican poetry since the late nineteenth century, naming Gaspar Orozco’s father as a practitioner of this “anomalous” free-verse that “questions the nature of genre.” Do you think Orozco has followed in his father’s footsteps, and how, if so, has that influenced the way you translated his works?

IL: I’m quite sure that Orozco was deeply impacted by his father’s love of literature, and he tells stories of youthful interactions with preeminent Mexican scholars and literati—for example, the infrarealist poet José Vicente Anaya, also from Chihuahua, whose famous poem “Híkuri” is a reference in our “Notas de un cuaderno de híkuri”/ “Notes from a Peyote Journal.” Orozco’s prose poetry has been elegantly analyzed in “‘Image Machine’: Gaspar Orozco’s Book of the Peony and the Prose Poem Sequence as Perceptual Trick,” Helen Tookey’s chapter of Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2022). As for how this paternal influence has impacted my translation, I’d have to say not very much—or at least not directly. I know I can’t be alone in this, but when I translate, my approach is much more of an interpretation, in the musical sense; it is a jazz riff, it is a feeling, it is something like a cover. It is always a direct interface between me and the poem, nothing else. As sheer as that, it is an immersion and a remaking, a new thing unto itself. 

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest in literary news from Palestine and Mexico!

This week, our Editors-at-Large bring us updates on prestigious awards and literary festivals from Palestine and Mexico! From the 2023 winners of the Mahmoud Darwish Award for Creativity to multisensorial poetry from the UANLeer book fair, read on to learn more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine

The 2023 edition of the Mahmoud Darwish Award for Creativity has been announced, with three winners selected from different categories. In the Palestinian Creative category, Palestinian poet and academic Dr. Salma al-Khadra al-Jayyusi won for her significant contributions to contemporary Arabic poetry, including leading a translation project that brought several notable works to English readers.

Lebanese composer, singer, and musician Marcel Khalife won the Arab Creative category for the remarkable additions he has brought to Arab musical heritage. Khalife is known for his devotion to Palestinian poetry, particularly that of Mahmoud Darwish, and has left an indelible mark on the Arab audience’s consciousness.

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Translating at the Limits of Language: Lisa Dillman on Yuri Herrera

[Herrera's] writing is for everyone on an individual level, regardless of education, regardless of language, regardless of national histories.

In Ten Planets, our February Book Club selection, the acclaimed Yuri Herrera made his short fiction debut in the Anglophone, featuring a myriad of worlds and inventions as seen through the author’s signature wit, playfulness, and fierce intelligence. Through the inspired language of his longtime translator, Lisa Dillman, Herrera elucidates the workings of humanity through a series of sci-fi miniatures, engaging with the philosophical queries of contemporary existence as only the writer can—through imagination. In this following interview, Georgina Fooks speaks with Dillman about the narrative-political, how she navigated Herrera’s neologisms and idiosyncratic style, and how such writing continues to push limits.

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.   

Georgina Fooks (GF): Could you tell us about your relationship with the Spanish language and what brought you to translating it?

Lisa Dillman (LD): I’m sort of the poster child for study abroad programs. I was an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego when I went to Barcelona for a year and fell in love with Spanish, and also with Catalan—with the creativity and the ludic qualities I found in these languages. I don’t want to essentialize and say that Spanish is a particularly ludic language, but I found the possibilities for play really enticing.

Honestly, I think my entrance into translation was just the result of returning from studying abroad and having very stereotypical experiences of talking to friends who had not gone—telling a joke or something, and them not finding it funny. And that was frustrating: why is this funny in Spanish and you don’t think it’s funny in English? That kind of challenge was something I found infuriating to begin with, and then fruitful afterwards to try to deal with.

I then ended up going to the UK to study translation at Middlesex, under Peter Bush. I had been in a Spanish literature doctoral program, but the US is really bad with translation programs and courses. There are more now, but none that I knew of at the time. In the UK and most other countries, translation is a proper field which you can study—so that’s what I did. I moved to the UK, I did my masters there, then spent subsequent years, you know, translating a short story, sending it to a journal by snail mail, waiting for five or six months to get a rejection letter, sending it out again, and eventually, finally I got somewhere.

GF: When did you first encounter Herrera’s work? And what motivated you to translate him? As you’ve translated all of his novels into English so far.

LD: I have. And I’m actually working right now on the one that came after Ten Planets. I had a friend who was asked to translate an excerpt for Symposia Way, which is the literary magazine of City of Asylum in Pittsburgh. The City of Asylum has writers in residence who are in exile from their home countries, and they were doing a series in which they asked the writers and residents to select one writer they thought deserved attention. Horacio Castellanos Moya selected Herrera.

At the time, it was just a short excerpt of  Kingdom Cons, which they published in their magazine, and I was thrilled to do it because it was immediately apparent that Yuri’s style is just so rich and nuanced and does so many different things at the same time. It struck me as incredibly poignant and beautiful, and very different from anything I had read. READ MORE…

Multiplicity as Part of the Process: An Interview with Robin Myers

I’m always trying to think about what sounds harsh, or sweet, or fluid, or abrupt—about the consequences of sound.

I had wished to interview Robin Myers for a while now, particularly after reading her bilingual book Tener/Having and finding out that she had translated into English some of my favorite contemporary writers, including Isabel Zapata, Andrés Neuman, and Ave Barrera. My interest in meeting her only grew stronger when I discovered that she lived in Mexico City, where I grew up. Though we live in quite distant parts of the city, I feel like sharing the experience of living in this chaotic yet exceptionally effervescent place immediately made us neighbors, peers, and even accomplices.

The interview took place in a bright and slightly too warm day in Coyoacán. We sat down at a lovely café that is also home to the most important feminist independent bookstore in Mexico. The original interview is almost three times longer than what I present here. But even though this is an abridged version, readers can get a full sense of Myers’s thoughtfulness, creativity, and generosity. I hope they enjoy listening to her as much as I did.

Alan Mendoza Sosa (AM): What were your earliest experiences with translation?

Robin Myers (RM): I loved reading as a child, and as a teenager I became especially interested in poetry. In retrospect, I realize I did have experiences of reading poetry in translation, but I didn’t really think about what that meant. As a high school student, somebody had given me a book by the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, who I loved, and there were a few poems that made a strong impression on me, but I don’t remember actually stopping to think about who had made that happen in English.

I would say that my path into translation happened in two, for a long time parallel, ways that didn’t actually touch. One was a love of poetry—both reading and writing it—and the other was an interest in Spanish, specifically because I was really curious about Mexico. I have some family history in Mexico, and I wanted to spend time here, and I understood as a kid that that meant I had to learn Spanish as well as I could. So I studied it in school and began reading in Spanish to the extent that we were given literature to read in class. Once I had learned enough Spanish to be able both to read and to speak more comfortably, I had the experience, living in Oaxaca, of coming across a poem in English that I loved and wanting to be able to share it with a Spanish-speaking friend. So my first experience as a translator was translating a poem into Spanish, which I’ve never done ever again.

AM: I read about this poem in one article, and from what I understood you havent published it, right? And you are not planning on doing so.

RM: Nope. Somebody else can do a much better job.

AM: But thats a good question that I often find myself asking. What do you think about translating to a language that isnt your mother tongue? Because I feel like sometimes people who study or engage with translation fetishize the mother language. Do you know what I mean?

RM: Yes, absolutely. To be honest, I think that’s something I did for a long time. I had this sense of the first language as the “dominant” language, and it’s been through talking with and reading other translators that I’ve come to realize what a problematic way of thinking that is—about language and about the multiplicity of languages in our lives and how multilingual so many people are, and how many different kinds of intimacy there are with different languages. I think it’s been a continual process of moving away from that mindset. In my case, I don’t personally feel very comfortable translating into my second language, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think other people can and should. Or that it isn’t crucial that they do. You know?

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Translation Tuesday: “Luz” by Samanta Galán Villa

Her tone of voice was like the chirping of a small bird.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, treat yourself to this sparse and beguiling story of a young schoolgirl who escapes from home and encounters a strange little girl, Luz. Written by the Mexican writer Samanta Galán Villa and published in Monolito magazine in May 2021, this story—related through the perspective of an innocent child—appears deceptively simple, but conveys a deeper sense of the way a child’s gaze can defamiliarise her little world into something bizarre and oftentimes beautiful. Tricia Viveros explains, in her translator’s note, how she strives to preserve this duality and makes a case for reading this writer from Guanajuato who represents a counterpoint to the dominant ways Mexican literature is read.

“My English translation of ‘Luz’ aims to maintain Galán Villa’s artful economy of language as much as possible—a task that required some compromise as, for instance, it’s not possible to omit the first-person pronoun ‘I’ in English. Adopting an adequate level of rudimentary wording was also challenging. The Spanish original elicits a sense of irony by juxtaposing its childish diction and syntax with a sophisticated narrative structure. Writing that is too unrefined risks detracting from the text and inhibiting the plot’s development; by frequently using simple sentences and contractions, my translation seeks to convey the near-surrealistic irony of the original without diminishing the prose. Samanta Galán Villa is part of a growing number of emerging contemporary voices across underrepresented regions of Latin America. Hailing from the Mexican state of Guanajuato, her writing evidences a long-established literary tradition beyond that of more cosmopolitan, affluent centers like Mexico City.”

—Tricia Viveros

Mama slapped me. Her lower lip trembled. How could they possibly have punished me, after class was dismissed, she said, together with the disobedient children. I tried to explain that it wasn’t my fault, that someone had smeared my braids with paint and I’d defended myself.

She didn’t want to hear it. She said that she knew me. That I wasn’t going to eat chocolate cereal with the family later, that she’d only give me a glass of juice. Zip it and don’t talk back to me, brat. Go to your room, right now.  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest from Mexico and Hong Kong!

January brought a plethora of literary events, from author talks to publishing announcements. In Mexico, the publishing house Juan de la Cosa / John of the Thing put out a new bilingual poetry volume. In Hong Kong, the Dante Alighieri Society hosted a discussion on writing in your second language. Read on to find out more!

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

The first month of 2022 has seen many commercial and independent publishers announce new books, both in Spanish and in translation. Though the year, like the two before it, will also be strangled by the global pandemic, the exciting vitality of the publishing scene brings momentary solace and hope.

North American publishing house Deep Vellum published The Love Parade, George Henson’s translation of El desfile del amor, a detective fiction by acclaimed Mexican writer Sergio Pitol originally published by Anagrama in 1985. An expert in contemporary fiction from Latin America, Henson has also contributed to Asymptote in the past, publishing the translated work of other outstanding Spanish-speaking authors such as the Mexican Alberto Chimal and the Peruvian Pedro Novoa. Deep Vellum is not new to Mexican literature either; its catalogue includes the names of contemporary international luminaries from Mexico, among them the poets Carmen Boullosa, Rocío Cerón, and Tedi López Mills.

The renowned Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli co-edited the sixty-fifth edition of independent San Francisco-based literary journal McSweeney’s, assembling a stellar collection of stories, letters, and translations. The compendium is not only dazzling but also urgently political. According to the journal’s website, the issue “delves into extraction, exploitation, and defiance.” The quarterly includes work by several internationally acclaimed writers from the American continent. Many are authors whom Asymptote has featured in the past, such as Gabriela Wiener, Samanta Schweblin, and Claudia Domingo. Their names are listed alongside other famous voices who have rapidly achieved international fame, including Laia Jufresa, Megan McDowell, and Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil.

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Announcing Our November Book Club Selection: Home Reading Service by Fabio Morábito

It’s rare for a novel to so deftly balance character and plot. It’s even rarer for a complex plot to sprout from such unlikely sources . . .

A winner of Mexico’s prestigious Xavier Villaurrutia Award, Fabio Morábito’s El lector a domicilio is the first of his works to appear in English—and having read it, we can only hope there’s more to come. It’s hard to think of recent novels as well-rounded as this, which is why we’re delighted to announce it as our November Book Club pick: in just over two hundred pages, it delivers rich characters and riveting plots; it balances heart with humor; it sets us up only to shake our assumptions. More importantly, though, it finds value in lives that are often neglected, prompting us to fully see, hear, and touch those around us—an especially timely reminder as we continue to emerge from our pandemic solitudes.

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.  

Home Reading Service by Fabio Morábito, translated from the Spanish by Curtis Bauer, Other Press, 2021

If ever a novel was deviously set up for stasis, it’s Fabio Morábito’s latest. Its protagonist, thirty-four-year-old Eduardo Valverde, is “stuck in second gear” after a case of reckless driving costs him his license, part of his job, and much of his time. Already living at home with an ailing father, he must now serve as a home reader to some of the other “elderly and infirm” in Cuernavaca—many of whom spend their days alone or half-silently with others, in dim rooms at the end of long passageways. Meanwhile, Eduardo has either cut or strained all ties with friends and family, and doesn’t seem keen on forming new ones; he, too, lives in “his own little world,” and while his court-mandated gig beats scrubbing public toilets, his heart just isn’t in it.

This is apparent to several of his listeners. “You come to our house,” one berates him, “sit on our sofa, open your briefcase, and with that magnificent voice of yours you read without understanding anything, as if we weren’t worthy of your attention.” To be fair, though, he’s not exactly dealing with a rapt audience. The Jiménez brothers are more eager to taunt him with vocal antics than take in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment; the Vigils lose focus on Verne’s The Mysterious Island when they can’t read his lips (they appear to be deaf), and they don’t bother to mention it until he brings it up; Coronel Atarriaga drifts off like clockwork after two or three pages of Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe.

The characters’ mix of decrepitude, distance, and detachment sprouts from their broader environment. Once worthy of its nickname as the “City of Eternal Spring,” Cuernavaca has long since been “expelling young people and keeping only the old-timers around, like any godforsaken town of emigrants”—even “the bougainvillea on the fences are rotting.” The remaining population lives “closed up in houses and yards surrounded by high walls,” and these walls have “infected” them: “everyone walk[s] around stone-faced.” It is the product of “unchecked danger” at the hands of drug lords and mobsters, one of whom routinely visits the Valverde furniture store to collect a “protection fee.” But even this rattling occurrence is mentioned almost in passing, thus avoiding the immediate strike of conflict. The novel’s context in its first few dozen pages, then, seems hardly ripe for character or plot development. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: The Double Cat Syndrome by Carmen Boullosa

We urgently needed to ask questions, because there had been so many things we didn't understand.

One of Mexico’s leading writers, Carmen Boullosa gives us the unsettling story of a thirteen-year-old girl who comes to grips with the grief of losing her mother as she navigates life under the deranged household and authoritarian control of her father and new stepmother. All this while, supernatural elements haunt her experience of home: how is she the only one who sees the cat with eight legs next door? What does the ghost of her mother, who paces around the house visiting her six children, want to say? Blending the comic and the macabre, and told from the perspective of this unforgettably precocious narrator, this week’s story opens up the mutinous, multitudinous feelings of needing to find answers, of having to name one’s feelings, in short, the messiness of what we call growing up.

My season in hell lasted from November 1970 to July of the following year. It seemed so long, I thought for sure that it would last the rest of my life, that my only ticket was to misfortune. I was thirteen and had just barely become a woman—back then girls took a long time to mature.

Nothing made sense, and when I say nothing, I mean nothing. For example: the neighbors had a cat that I used to see from my bedroom window, basking in the sun and grooming himself at the foot of a glass door in his garden. He was black and white, which is how he got his name, Cow. Cow had a temper—on our block we said that he was our guardian cat because he attacked at the slightest provocation dogs, children, women, street sweepers, or cats. Since that hellish November, I continued to see Cow where he always was, and a short distance away, inside the neighbors’ glass door, I noticed another, identical, cat, lying on the rug, taking a nap. When I could, I asked the neighbor—who was my age—“Hey, is the other cat Cow’s son? Because they are identical.”

She answered me, “Come on, we don’t have another cat, Cow wouldn’t stand for it, you know that.”

“But I have seen him, inside your house,” I said, and in response she looked at me like I was crazy.

From my window, I continued seeing double: one sleeping cat, and one kitty grooming himself. Today I have no doubt that no one else saw the second cat, only me. But things went on like that. For me every cat had eight legs. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “General Treatise on Counter-attacks” by Aniela Rodríguez

I preferred to make my own way. To let the world know how much is lost with a poor pass, and how much is gained with a good shot.

An aspiring footballer’s obsession with his former hero becomes an all-consuming quest for revenge in Aniela Rodríguez’s cerebral short story “A General Treatise on Counter-attacks,” our pick for this week’s Translation Tuesday. Our narrator is a small-town youth who idolizes football star Güero Hidalgo, but what begins as adoration quickly turns to loathing after a tragic accident. Years pass, Hidalgo’s greatness falters, yet our protagonist never strays from his mission to murder the disgraced footballer, a task that becomes less a heroic act of justice and more an unmerciful act of a disappointed fanatic. Rodríguez’s mature and emotionally complex subversion of the revenge genre forces us to connect the meaning of “pathos” with the varied meanings of “pathetic,” demonstrating the dangers of meeting your heroes—and the dangers of meeting your fans.

In this story Güero Hidalgo dies. I told my mother when I started writing, but she didn’t believe me: she rolled her eyes and looked at the ceiling, wondering aloud when she should turn off the soup. What a shame, she said, indifferent, and kept moving the spoon in circles. Nobody wants to hear a story in which the biggest football star that this country had ever produced is stabbed to death with an old knife blade.

In the story, Güero crashes his Cadillac into a bus full of passengers, delaying a good number of people. The bus has come from la Merced; atop it ride vendors who head for Chiapas every week in search of Zoque handicrafts at the best prices. So, the best part: Güero gets out of his impeccable latest model, expecting to fix everything with an autograph. But that’s not how it goes down. He has words with the driver and in amidst the irate vendors the commotion gets serious. Tempers flare, women shout. A man in a leather jacket steps forward. Nobody pays attention. He walks towards Güero, looks him in the eye and plunges a dagger into his chest. Nobody does anything. Silence. Before sticking the knife into him, the man says: Thanks for the penalty, moron. Güero lies face up on the ground, trying not to hear the words that will curtail his existence forever. The story ends like this, with my mother reaching for the wooden spoon to stir the noodle soup. But this story isn’t about Güero Hildalgo now, is it?

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Music, Midribs, and Mexicanisms: Christina MacSweeney on Translating Daniel Saldaña París’s Ramifications

It’s hard to judge characters as a translator . . . because you’re living with them. They're part of your life.

Our first-ever live Q&A could have hardly gone better: award-winning translator Christina MacSweeney chatted with Blog Editor Josefina Massot for a solid hour, covering everything from voice, rhythm, and expletives in our exquisite October selection to her “unfixed migrant identity” and its effects on her craft. Read on for a taste of this riveting conversation, which Book Club members can request in fullhearty laughs, pensive pauses, and all!

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!

Josefina Massot (JM): Ramifications is largely character-driven, and there are so many elements to the protagonist’s psyche and voice. I was wondering about your experience inhabiting that complexity: were there aspects of it that particularly resonated with you, or that you found especially challenging to tap into?

Christina MacSweeney (CM): One of the things that played into my experience is that I read the first fifty pages of the novel when they were still in the process of inception (Daniel will often send me work at early stages). As I read more—as he progressed and made subsequent changes—the character grew with me, with the reading. And he’s very complex, but what most came through to me was this sense of paralyzed masculinity, a sense of frustration that very much stayed with me. He’s somebody I want to root for in some way, for him to break through all the issues that are holding him back.

I often talk about translation as getting into a character’s shoes and walking around in them, feeling that I can wear them. Daniel’s writing is so beautiful and precise that it helps you get into it. When you’re translating, it’s usually months and months, and the characters’ voices are there with you all along: you wake up with them in the morning, you go to sleep with them at night, they talk to you while you’re washing the dishes. So I think it’s hard to judge characters as a translator; you can’t feel judgmental about them, because you’re living with them. They’re part of your life.

JM: You’ve lived with several of Daniel’s characters, too, since you’ve also translated his first novel, Among Strange Victims. There seem to be some commonalities between both books: the protagonist in Ramifications is in many ways passive, and at the same time, he’s trying to piece together clues about his mother’s disappearance; in Among Strange Victims, Rodrigo could be described as indolent, and Marcelo tries to retrace someone’s footsteps (not his mother’s this time, but an enigmatic boxer-poet’s). Could you point to other continuities? And might there be, in some sense, a “signature” Saldaña París book? I realize two novels are hardly enough to make such generalizations, and they’re also very different in tone, but perhaps you could point to certain tendencies.

CM: If we think about the two books, but also Daniel’s poetry and the non-fiction pieces that he writes, he is exploring masculinity. But in fact, in Among Strange Victims, the main character is Beatriz, the woman who is in Mexico with the boxer-poet at the beginning of the twentieth century. Rodrigo’s mother is also a very strong figure in his life. In that respect, the books are very different, because Among Strange Victims has a much clearer female presence. In Ramifications, you still have the mother figure (the absence of the mother) and the narrator’s sister, who is also an influence in his life. But they’re ultimately quite different. I don’t think Daniel is ever going to be the kind of writer of whom you can say, “This is a Saldaña París book,” because his writing is constantly changing—his point of focus changes, the angles from which he views things change. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2020

Our favorite selections for the month, featuring David Diop, Yi Lei, and Pergentino José!

There’s plenty to get excited about in the latest offerings from around the world, bound to satisfy the desires of any readerfrom the emotionally visceral, to the patiently curious, to the surreal and the hallucinatory. In scoping for the finest translations, we bring you reviews of anti-colonialist fiction by a Prix Goncourt des Lycéens winner, a new collection from a leading figure of contemporary Chinese poetics, and the first ever literary translation from the Sierra Zapotec into English by a thrilling new voice. 

at night

At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop, translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020

Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

David Diop’s brutal sophomore novel, At Night All Blood Is Black, translated elegantly by Anna Moschovakis, is a relentless indictment of the colonial power structure. Through the utter dissolution of the protagonist, Alfa Ndiaye, the novel demonstrates its ripples and rhizomes throughout society—from the individual to the geopolitical to the environmental—rotting away what does not serve it. Though heavy and dark from beginning to end, this is a highly specific, deftly illustrated, poetically rendered critique that justifies the emotional slog.

Alfa is a chocolat soldier, a Senegalese man who has voluntarily travelled to fight on the side of France in the first World War. During the ensuing battles, Mademba, his childhood friend and “more-than-brother” is disemboweled before his eyes by an enemy soldier. We meet Alfa shortly after he has watched Mademba die slowly, refusing his pleas for mercy. In these scenes of articulate gore and moral anguish, Moschovakis reveals her poetic side in the restraint and somber vivacity with which she renders Diop’s descriptions. Alfa then finds himself in the throes of both deep regret and liberation from the moral conventions which had prevented him from acting in Mademba’s best interest. “No voice rises in my head to forbid me: my ancestors’ voices and my parents’ voices all extinguished themselves the minute I conceived of doing what, finally, I did.” The horror of both bearing witness to and being complicit in the suffering of a loved one silences the voices of morality in his head and marks his entrance into a world of alternate, competing guiding forces: his own tortured impulses and the abstract interests of the narcissistic state. He begins performing solo operations late at night in no-man’s land, disemboweling enemy soldiers and keeping one hand and a weapon from each kill.

A progression that functions on multiple planes expands the novel upwards and outwards from where it remains firmly rooted—in viscera spilled. As time advances and settings shift, Alfa’s psychological state, the narrative mode, the realms of reality, the overarching value system, and the gender coding of these spaces evolve in conjunction. Generally speaking, the trajectory is from the concrete to the abstract, the sober to the unhinged, the current to the eternal, the “real” to the mythological, the individual to the collective, and the masculine to the feminine. Alfa remains our guide, however unreliable, through this uncertain terrain, until his psychological coherence evaporates entirely, leaving the reader stewed in his reflections and testimonies. READ MORE…

Announcing our October Book Club Selection: Ramifications by Daniel Saldaña París

[A]n absorbing character study, driven not just by voice . . . but by a deeply original theme: (a)symmetry as a curb on growth.

It is perhaps fitting (though regrettable) that our October Book Club announcement has been somewhat delayed: Daniel Saldaña París’s Ramifications is all about holdups. Via Christina MacSweeney’s seamless translation, the acclaimed Bogotá39 writer gives us a counter-formative tale that is both masterfully constructed and poignantly penned. In it, he exposes existential and political conservatism without dealing cheap blows, and introduces readers everywhere to a profoundly relatable narrative voice.

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!

Ramifications by Daniel Saldaña París, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, Coffee House Press, 2020

Ramifications opens with a brilliant gambit; within a handful of paragraphs, it both sets up and crushes the prospect of a bildungsroman. A grown narrator feeds us the near-requisite opening, the painful loss at a much-too-tender age: in 1994 his mother, Teresa, flees their home in Mexico City, leaving ten-year-old him and teenage sister Mariana in the care of an oblivious father. Just a few lines later, though, we get a sharp taste of his current predicamentfar from being the seasoned, thriving type mandated by the genre after years of fruitful struggles, he defines himself as “an adult who never leaves his bed.” 

The rest of the novel artfully explores the tension between the classic formative tale and its antithesis. Parts one and two delve into Teresa’s disappearance and her young son’s attempts to make sense of it, culminating in what could have been an archetypal “journey of self-discovery”he tries to follow her to Chiapas, where she’s run off to join the budding zapatista movement. Part three, by contrast, hones in on the trip’s bland aftermath, both instant and deferred. It’s not as tidy as that, of course (the narrator jumps back and forth in time), but there’s an overarchingly grim shift from promise to flop. It’s made all the starker by a series of deliciously clever winks from the author: the protagonist’s childhood neighborhood and school are literally called “Education” (“Educación” and “Paideia,” respectively), and he’s thirty-three at the time of writing—an age that, for culturally Catholic audiences at least, can’t help but trigger unfavorable comparisons.

A disclaimer, lest readers think I’ve spoiled the plot: the novel doesn’t ride on events. It is, at its core, an absorbing character study, driven not just by voice (more on that later) but by a deeply original theme: (a)symmetry as a curb on growth. READ MORE…