Posts filed under 'music'

European Literature Days 2023: Literature for a Better World

From the famed literary festival in Krems an der Donau!

Since 2009, acclaimed writers, artists, readers, and friends of literature have gathered in a small Austrian town for four days to attend the European Literature Days festival. With each edition addressing a vital, timely theme of contemporary European writing, the packed program features some of the most brilliant minds across the continent. In the following dispatch, Editor-at-Large MARGENTO reports from this singular event.

The town of Krems an der Donau in Austria is a unique place in Europe, conducive to genuinely special literary and arts events such as the annual European Literature Days. Off the trodden path of regular tourist destinations, it is both compellingly picturesque as well as conveniently distant from the hustle and bustle of the capital, but nevertheless retaining the latter’s intransigence for excellence in higher education and the arts. 

The city’s tortuously narrow medieval streets wind between old churches and traditional pubs, and every now and then, they open upon wide panoramas of the Danube and the terraced vineyards surrounding it, resulting in a landscape both mysterious and inspirational. Ancient, blurred guild symbols and still-colorful frescos of winemaking deities and feasts are punctured by modern glass-and-concrete design and dernier-cri technology logos and landmarks. The stately Minorite Church in the heart of the old town is one such hub that combines rich cultural and architectural traditions with widely relevant contemporary interests and activities; the church is nowadays a generous cultural event and concert hall of excellent acoustics and high-tech video and audio equipment. It was the venue of most of European Literature Days’ 2023 events, while the former monastery’s annexes host a museum, art galleries, and multiple multi-purpose spaces—some of which also played an important role in the logistics of the festival.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

Dispatches from Romania, Sweden, and North Macedonia!

In this week’s dispatches, our editors report on the continual remembrance of iconic poets, interdisciplinary festivals, and writing that draws attention to the climate crisis. Read on to find out more!

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia

Sixty years after the tragic passing of Danica Ručigaj, iconic poet and pioneer of écriture féminine in North Macedonia, an anniversary edition containing the entirety of her oeuvre was published this month. The collection, entitled Srebreni nokjni igri i zarobenici na vetrot (Silver Nighttime Games and Prisoners of the Wind) was prepared by two prominent publicists and journalists working at Radio Skopje, Sveto Stamenov and Iskra Cholovikj, who have dedicated over two decades to researching Ručigaj’s reception and sustaining the vivacity of her legacy.

Ručigaj (1934–1963), sometimes referred to as the Sylvia Plath of North Macedonia for the unabashed vulnerability of her writing, studied ancient Greek, Latin, and Southern Slavic literature, and also worked for the Cultural Ministry of North Macedonia. She passed away at the age of twenty-nine in the 1963 Skopje earthquake—a devastating event that resulted in numerous casualties and left the entire city in ruins. Two poems famously discovered in the ruins of Ručigaj’s home—“Circles” and “Untitled”—will be featured in the anthology, along with essays about her work by prominent scholars and a complete bibliography of publications containing Ručigaj’s writing.

Ručigaj’s poetry, informed by her academic background and nonconformist, taboo-defying artistic attitude, occupies a prominent position in Macedonian literary history. Her refusal to comply with patriarchal norms continues to retain its relevance, as anti-equality sentiments are rising amidst the public. In one of her best-known poems, “No, Do Not Speak to Me” (“Ne, Ne Zboruvaj Mi”), a feminine voice laments the death of a bird who lived “within eyes that have now dried up”, simultaneously noting that its death might be a relief to some: “Come hither, do not fear / Those eyes no longer shine / And so, come hither.” As the poem progresses, we begin to realize that the owner of the eyes is the feminine speaker herself; without the bird—their inner songsmith—they no longer pose a threat to the Other that the poem is directed to. This poem remains an accurate image of gender relations in Macedonian society, where equality is still considered a threat to the “sanctity of the family”. READ MORE…

Dipped One in Dusk: Mai Serhan on the Diasporic Memoir and Translating Lyrics and Letters

I had a lot I needed to clarify, plenty of stereotypes to debunk, a narrative that was screaming at me to rewrite. . .

Short story writer, poet, memoirist, and translator Mai Serhan was born to a Palestinian father and an Egyptian mother, and raised between the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. Going on to study between Cairo, New York, and Oxford and work in Cairo, Dubai, and China, this mapping of her personal cartography and her transnational lineage transcends the borders of postcolonial nation-states—and so does her forthcoming memoir, Return is a Thing of Amber, which touches among national histories, letters, and the personal essay.

In this interview, I asked Serhan about her book in the landscape of the larger Arab memoir from the diaspora; the languages and genders that thrive in the liminalities of modern Egyptian literature; state censorship in publishing and the consequent rise of the literary blog; and translating the songs of Egyptian composer Sayyed Darwish as well as the letters of Palestinian activist Ali Shaath. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): The language of contemporary Egyptian literature, de facto, is Modern Standard Arabic—but there are writers who write in colloquial Egyptian Arabic and aʽīdi Arabic, echoing the lived reality of Egyptians in a gamut of dialects. Can you tell us the lingual milieu you write from—and how your decision to write in English come in? 

Mai Serhan (MS): Let me first map my geo-genealogical gamut. I was born to a Palestinian father and Egyptian mother, and carried a Lebanese passport for most of my life, since it is where my father’s family moved after 1948, and Egyptian mothers did not have the right to pass their nationality down to their children until 2009. When the Lebanese Civil War broke in 1975, my paternal grandparents moved to Cyprus where they waited for the war to end for fourteen years. It is there that I spent all my summers and Christmases as a child and teenager. The rest of my Palestinian family would fly into Limassol from all corners of the world—Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, the UK, and the US—and I spent all my formative years exposed to these different registers around me. After university, I joined my father in China where he worked in the export business, and I got to help him until the final year of his life. We travelled far and wide there, meeting with many of his Arab clients. After his death, I moved to Lebanon briefly, then Dubai where I worked as an English copywriter, then to New York where I studied screenwriting at New York University, eventually ending up in Oxford for my Creative Writing degree. All these places have deeply informed my upbringing—which is quite an international one.

I write in English because I went to a private British school, then to American and British universities. It’s the language I have been formally trained in all my life, both academically and professionally. I know how to express myself very well in Arabic, but the written word is definitely more present to me in English; it’s the language that has housed my scholarly and creative pursuits the most. That said, I am able to slip between Arabic and English with total ease and I am the bicultural product of both the East and West—and pretty much everything in between as well.

If we were to speak of my memoir, Return is a Thing of Amber, specifically, I would say the choice to write in English was a political one first and foremost; I wanted to address the English-speaking world, to debunk its many myths about land and people, and to promote awareness, compassion and understanding when it comes to Palestine and Palestinians. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary news from North Macedonia and the United States!

In this week of literary news, we hear from our editors-at-large reporting from North Macedonia and the United States! From the recent poetry collection of a prominant North Macedonian poet to a dazzling few days of multilingual poetry and revelry, read on to learn more!

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia

In the last days of April, a new poetry collection by the prominent poet Katica Kulavkova, Na Vrv Na Jazikot (On the Tip of the Tongue), was published by Ars Lamina Press. The collection leans into an interrogation of the concepts of home and identity in the current day, a question that, in the Macedonian cultural context, is fraught with challenges and debates.

Katica Kulavkova (born December 21, 1951), whose work was featured in the Winter 2020 issue of Asymptote, is a poet, writer, and academic. She is a member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, and a professor of theory and methodology of literature, hermeneutics, and creative writing. Her writing is deeply rooted in the interplay of the personal and collective; Kulavkova’s lyrical voice is informed by the negotiations between various aspects of being, as Macedonian, woman, mother, academic, artist, activist . . .

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary news from India, Hong Kong, and Sweden!

In India, the country mourns the loss of Kerala’s groundbreaking tribal novelist. In Hong Kong, a genre-bending poet is being celebrated across the nation. And in Sweden, two talented writers have won the prestigious Klas de Vylder’s Grant Fund for Immigrant Writers. Read on to find out more!

Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

On August 16, India’s first tribal novelist Narayan passed away in Kochi. Born in the Mala Araya tribe in Kerala, Narayan gained nationwide recognition for his book Kocharethi (1998), which won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award. The book was a way to counter the misrepresentations of his community from outsiders, and Narayan struggled for ten years to find a publisher willing to release it; despite critical acclaim, many complained his work lacked literary merit. Translator Catherine Thankamma, who translated the text into English—winning the Crossword Book Award for it—wrote a tribute to him for Scroll.in. Her tribute honors the struggles and biases he faced in the literary world.

August has seen many new releases in translation. A significant one is Satya Vyas’s Banaras Talkies, translated from Hindi by Himadri Agarwal. A campus novel, the book is centered around three law students from Banaras Hindu University. The translation was facilitated by Ashoka Centre for Translation from Ashoka University, where Agarwal graduated from. According to Mohini Gupta’s review, “The Hindi novel seamlessly accesses Bhojpuri and English words and phrases and the translation captures these linguistic variations beautifully.”

Many translators in India are also turning to writing fiction. Aruna Chakravarti, winner of the Sahitya Akademi award for her translation of Sarat Chandra’s Srikanta, is known for her dedication to Bengali literature. Her first translation, Tagore: Songs Rendered into English, came out in 1984, and her critically acclaimed novels explore the lives of women in the household of Rabindranath Tagore. Her latest book, The Mendicant Prince, explores the Bhawal case—an extended court case from 1920-46 about a man claiming to be the prince of Bhawal. An excerpt of the book can be read here. READ MORE…

A Portrait of Twenty-First-Century Seoul: An Interview with Sang Young Park, Author of Love in the Big City

I just happen to think the ugliness of love is just as close to the essence of love as the beauty of it.

Sang Young Park’s English-language debut Love in The Big City follows Young, a queer man in search of love and meaning. An aspiring writer who drinks and dances the night away in Seoul’s gay clubs, Young tries to make sense of his life through short stories in the morning, watching anxiously as others around him seem to be growing up and leaving. After many unsuccessful dates and arrogant boyfriends, he finally meets the man who could be his soulmate, but the two must come to terms with the cruelty of reality. With dark and humorous prose translated from Korean by Anton Hur, Park navigates the messiness of friendship and dating while capturing the rawness of breakups. The result is a book as addictive as the pack of Marlboro Reds that Young and his roommate keep in their freezer. In our interview, translated by Hur over email, Park and I discuss writing about love, being a person in the twenty-first century, and finding inspiration in pop music.

Rose Bialer (RB): I don’t like the cliché of a setting in literature being viewed as another character. However, in Love in The Big City, Seoul seems to have a developed personality. It can come off as melancholy, exuberant, romantic, and—depending on its current mood—Seoul affects how the characters live and love. Since you live in Seoul, I wanted to ask how you experience the city. Like the characters in the book, has it changed how you interact with the world?

Sang Young Park (SYP): I think a person’s environment decides their character. I was born in a city called Daegu—one of the most conservative places in Korea. When I was a teenager, I dreamed of Seoul as a kind of platonic ideal; I arrived here in my twenties for college, and that’s when my life began for real. Living here has made me realize that I resemble Seoul—it’s multi-faceted and passionate and at the same time, a very lonely and bleak city. I think these are my own sensibilities, as well as sensibilities that are present in the novel.

RB: How would you say that the city affects how the characters both love and receive love?

SYP: Each “big city,” as they appear in the book, possesses different aspects. Seoul is complicated and crowded but lonely and sorrowful at the same time; Bangkok is like a Mecca for gays—that kind of thing. The characters’ situations shift according to where they are. I think there’s definitely an organic interaction between the characters and their settings.

RB: I wanted to talk about the book’s structure. It is written as four short stories which connect to form the compelling whole. Each section is set at a specific moment in the narrator’s life, spanning from the time he is in college to when he is in his thirties. What drew you to this narrative form?

SYP: I wanted to show a different kind of love in each chapter. Part One, through Jaehee, I wanted to show the love we call friendship; Part Two was maternal love, along with first love; Part Three romantic love; and Part Four about what remains after the end of love. Through the last chapter, I wanted to wrap up my thoughts on the previous chapters, so the entire book would be a treatise on love itself. I thought, by showing the various emotions the narrator feels as he encounters different people in his twenties, I could effectively show the changes a character goes through, and at the same time see the emotion of love from different angles through this structural choice. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest in literary news from Vietnam, Bulgaria, and Taiwan!

As Venice makes its cinema showcase and the MET spreads its red carpets for the lavishly dressed, literature also serves up September as a memorable month with plenty of international displays and showcases of both known favorites and new releases. This week, a vital Vietnamese poet is commemorated in film, a varied arts festival takes place on Bulgarian shores, and an eminent Taiwanese author makes his English-language debut. Read on to find out more!

Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Vietnamese Diaspora

Each year, on September 16, the village of Tiên Điền, in the province of Hà Tĩnh, commemorates the death anniversary of Nguyễn Du (1765-1820), its venerated native son and author of The Tale of Kiu—a 3,254-line epic poem unequivocally embraced as the Vietnamese soul. This year, to mark the 201st year of his passing, the three-hour biopic Đi Thi Hào Nguyn Du (The Great Poet Nguyn Du) will make its premiere at the XXII National Film Festival in Hue, Central Vietnam. The film’s original September release—meant to coincide with Nguyễn Du’s death anniversary—has now been rescheduled to November 2021, due to safety concerns related to Vietnam’s recent surge of COVID cases.

The Tale of Kiu, created during a time of warring loyalties and written in the Nôm (Southern) script with Chinese characters modified to reflect Vietnamese spoken vernacular, has been endlessly adapted into ci lương (“reformed” Southern Vietnamese folk opera), chèo (Northern Vietnamese musical theatre), Western-styled opera, and films. Since the idea of trinh 貞 (chastity/integrity/ faithfulness) in Nguyễn Du’s oeuvre represents both a conceptual and linguistic challenge, its complexity has inspired at least six English translations in recent decades. Huỳnh Sanh Thông’s Nguyn Du, The Tale of Kieu–A Bilingual Edition (Yale University Press, 1983), while still considered the gold standard, employs unrhymed iambic pentameter that often lapses into wooden syntax. Vladislav Zhukov’s The Kim Vân Kiu of Nguyn Du (Cornell University Press, 2013), in grafting iambic pentameter to lc bát (six-eight syllable Vietnamese rhyme scheme), results in obtuse renderings reminiscent of Nabokov’s eccentric translation of Eugene Onegin. Most recently, Timothy Allen’s The Song of Kieu: A New Lament (Penguin, 2019), while ebullient with vivid syntax, contains numerous errors and self-indulgent interpretations.

Nguyễn Du’s mistrust of chastity goes hand in hand with his concept of exile; his heroine wanders far-flung places and learns to survive by endless transformations—also a recurring theme in Kiu Chinh: Ngh Sĩ Lưu Vong (Kiu Chinh: Artist in Exile) (Văn Học Press, 2021). Penned by veteran Vietnamese American actress Kiều Chinh, the memoir echoes Nguyễn Du’s art of story-telling “to beguile an hour or two of your long night.”[i] The Joy Luck Club actress—whose dramatic flight to freedom is recounted in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer—will embark on a September-November book tour to Vietnamese diasporic communities in the U.S., sharing chapters from her own life that reflect the larger history of Vietnam.

[i]Huỳnh Sanh Thông’s English translation, The Tale of Kiều, line 3254, p. 167.

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Memory in Present Tense: On Haruki Murakami’s First Person Singular

Murakami's latest collection returns to his perennial fixations with jazz music, baseball, and mysterious meetings with women and animals.

First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel, Knopf, 2021

In Haruki Murakami’s short story, “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning” (from his 1993 collection The Elephant Vanishes), the archetypal Murakami protagonist—an unreliable, doubtful man—fleetingly encounters an unfamiliar girl on the street and suddenly realizes she is the 100% perfect girl for him, though he has never spoken to her, nor finds her particularly beautiful. Instead, this melancholic, gently absurdist piece concerns itself with what the narrator would have said had he approached the girl. After dismissing a number of ridiculous ideas, the narrator decides on a long fabulist story, in which a young girl and young boy meet, discover they are one hundred percent perfect for each other, and separate to test their feelings. While apart, however, both lose their memories, and when they eventually encounter each other again, both only briefly acknowledge that they are perfect counterparts, but still go on to forever disappear from one another’s lives.

The story, which later served as inspiration for Murakami’s novel 1Q84, employs the author’s recurring narrative device of intermingling reality and unreality in the minds of his narrators, largely applied to the fleeting but transformative romantic encounters between men and women—most famously evident in his early bestselling novel, Norwegian Wood. It also reflects Murakami’s longstanding thematic concerns of loss, estrangement, doomed love, and loneliness. Notably, the young girl and boy not only become estranged from each other, but also from themselves in the loss of their memories; this theme of disconnection unites the stories in the author’s latest release, First Person Singular, fluidly translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel. The collection is his first since the English publication of Men Without Women in 2017, and returns to Murakami’s perennial fixations with jazz music, baseball, and mysterious meetings with women and animals. They are all narrated by an aged writer—resembling Murakami himself—who wistfully reflects on loosely chronological formative experiences. In this way, the stories blur not only dream and reality but also author and narrator, playfully employing the lens of memory to grapple with how we transcend—or fail to transcend— the disconnections that occur between others and ourselves.

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Each Sentence a Dagger: Tim Mohr on translating Alina Bronsky’s My Grandmother’s Braid

Her world expands beyond the margins; there's the world that she's telling in detail, and then there's all this other stuff just outside the lens.

In our Book Club selection for January, we were thrilled to present Alina Bronsky’s brilliantly comic and irreverent My Grandmother’s Braid, a study of familial dysfunctions that renders its players in all their idiosyncratic fascinations. Now, Assistant Editor Barbara Halla talks with Bronsky’s translator, Tim Mohr, about his intimate connections to Germany and its language, the German tradition of immigrant literature, and the challenges of rendering Bronsky’s surprising and intuitive narration.

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!

Barbara Halla (BH): You have a longstanding relationship with Alina Bronsky, having translated five of her books. Could you speak a little bit about how you came across her work and what inspired you to translate her?

Tim Mohr (TM): Her first book, Broken Glass Park, was either my second or third translation. It came after I attended a speech at Carnegie Hall, under the auspices of a festival called Berlin Lights. I sat in the audience to watch these ostensible experts speak on the German publishing world, and they claimed there was no tradition of immigrant literature there.

I remember thinking that the last ten German novels I’d read were all by what you might call “immigrant” writers, or writers writing in German as a second language. I was really adamant about working in that field and trying to get more of that material into the U.S. market, so people would be aware that this tradition did exist over there, and that it was booming. And then I came across Alina. I loved her debut novel, Broken Glass Park, and because the translation went well, we wanted to continue working together. I wouldn’t want another one of her books to come out with a different translator.

As far as our relationship goes, I tend not to work closely with the authors when I’m translating, and a lot of them speak really, really good English, so it’s all the more daunting in some ways—I don’t want them to be looking over my shoulder, basically! I’ll email them a few queries sometimes, but for the most part, I’m trying to do it on my own. I am somewhat friendly with Alina, but when we get together we don’t really talk about translation or her books, we just have a cup of coffee or something.

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What’s New in Translation: October 2020

The best new writing from Norway, Argentina, Japan, and Colombia!

In the shorter brightnesses of autumn, we bring you four sublime new translations from around the world to fill your days with their generous offerings of fantasy, mysticism, intrigue, depth, and good old excellent writing. From a radical, genre-defying text that blends the textual and the cinematic, to an Argentine novel that expertly wields dream logic, to lauded Japanese writer Hiroko Oyamada’s latest release, to the first ever volume of poetry from a Colombian woman to be published in English, we’ve got the expert guide to your next literary excursions.

girls

Girls Against God by Jenny Hval, translated from the Norwegian by Marjam Idriss, Verso, 2020

Review by George MacBeth, Copy Editor

Unlike musicians, who often hear the same refrains sung back to them in crowds from Norway to Nizhny-Novgorod to Nottingham, writers can become disconnected from their corpus through the process of translation, often finding new markets and new readers for their early novels well into the mature phase of their authorship. Sometimes these multiple lives run in parallel, but more often than not, they’re discontinuous. Translated authors therefore begin to live out-of-sync with their work, jet-lagged as their oeuvre moves in transit across borders and between languages. This much is true of Jenny Hval, whose celebrated debut novella Paradise Rot was translated into English by Marjam Idriss in 2018, nine years after it was originally published in Norway. Now comes its highly anticipated successor Girls Without God, again translated from the Norwegian by Idriss.

Though mainly known for her eponymous musical output, comprising five studio albums and multiple collaborations (all in English), Jenny Hval originally studied creative writing in Melbourne and then in the Midwest, an experience of deracination (she originally hails from a small town in the south of Norway) that became the template for Paradise Rot. This book was a compost heap of bildungsroman, fantasy, horror, and queer love story—a peculiar, taut dreamwork that left residual stains in this reader’s memory. Its success lay in its distillation of a very particular ambience, the same oneiric mood conjured up by Hval’s music at its best (as on 2015’s Apocalypse, Girl): a dank warehouse filled with rotting fruit, sprouting mushrooms, and trashy novels; the estrangement of the Anglosphere’s soft food; the paradisical claustrophobia of a sudden and intense intimacy.

As Hval expressed in a discussion with Laura Snapes at the LRB bookshop in London, writing (rather than lyricism, or music) was her original aspiration—not so much because she felt she had any particular aptitude for it, but that, unlike the technological or instrumental expertise demanded by music, “it was unskilled. I could just do it.” This DIY ethos clearly informs the ambitious Girls Against God (whose title is itself drawn from a CocoRosie zine), which works over its themes in the same transgressive, intermedial groove as authors like Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, and, more recently, Jarett Kobek’s invective “bad novel” I Hate the Internet. For this reason, the novel deliberately resists a simple synopsis. An unnamed narrator, who in many respects resembles Hval, is back in Oslo after a spell abroad, working on a film treatment that will channel the provincial hatred of her rebellious adolescence, the legacy of early Black Metal’s irruption against Norwegian petit-bourgeois society, and the desire of “Girls Against God” to sustain their rebellion against the heteronormative “Scandinavian reproduction blueprint” even when “our corpse paint has long since run from our cheeks.” Whilst working on her filmscript, she documents the formation of a sort-of witches’ coven with her bandmates, co-conspirators, and weird sisters Venke and Terese, with whom she engages in esoteric rituals and discussions about art, gender, and magic.  READ MORE…

Internal Harmonics: Fionn Petch on Translating Luis Sagasti’s A Musical Offering

It is a very delicate balancing act . . . Any discordant note, and the whole might collapse.

True to its title and Sagasti’s style at large, our July Book Club selection reads like a Bachian fugue: it features countless shifts in pace, genre, tone, and content, but it weaves them into soulful patterns; it’s filled with deliciously nerdy in-jokes, but it ultimately strikes a universal chord. How does one transcribe such a complex score into English, making sure its author’s voice still sings? Fionn Petch has done it twice (he translated Sagasti’s Fireflies to great acclaim in 2018), and here he talks about it at length. One of many priceless takeaways: don’t get lost in theory—get lost with the author in a maze-like garden crammed with sculpture-poems instead.

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): Like Fireflies, A Musical Offering flaunts a striking variety of literary genres: narrative, essay, aphorism, the occasional script-like quotation, and even something like blank verse (e.g., a fragment on the Voyager probe towards the end of ‘Sky Ants’). You’ve translated fiction, poetry, drama, and children’s books, among other things; did your experience with these different genres come in handy when translating Sagasti? Is there a genre you particularly enjoy working with?

Fionn Petch (FP): First of all, I’d like to thank you for a wonderfully insightful and deeply thoughtful review in Asymptote. It’s no exaggeration to say it brought new perspectives to the book for me.

Yes, it’s true that the short sections that comprise A Musical Offering switch between styles very rapidly. Sometimes, readers barely have time to find their bearings before they are propelled onto the next one. Of course, this is also a reflection of the swift changes in pace in the Goldberg Variations—which rather undermines the story that it was composed as a cure for insomnia! So in translating, it was important to be alert to these abrupt changes in tempo and intensity, and to what Sagasti is trying to get across with each section: evoke a feeling, make a subtle observation, set up an unspoken echo with another passage, or just convey a piece of information. Even the disarmingly straightforward segments that read like a line from a biography or encyclopedia require careful attention to how they are structured, as they have a very deliberate weight and emphasis. These are what Sagasti describes as ‘poetic facts.’

So there’s no doubt that all the genres you mention are relevant to draw on. You need a poetic ear for the specific weight of single words, a dramatist’s attention to gesture and glance—Sagasti is very precise in describing these—and you also need the innocence and sense of wonder often found in children’s literature. Of all the genres you mention, this last is undoubtedly the hardest to translate . . . But they all have their pleasures and challenges. READ MORE…

Announcing our July Book Club Selection: A Musical Offering by Luis Sagasti

If silence and solitude go hand in hand, so do music and communion.

After Fireflies’s acclaimed release in 2018, we are thrilled to present our July Book Club selection: Luis Sagasti’s A Musical Offering, the Argentine author’s second translation into English by Charco Press. Out this month in the UK alone, it is an early gift to our subscribers overseas. And what a gift it is: adding plenty of heart to the author’s signature heady humor, this exquisitely lyrical, genre-bending work explores music’s ties to everything from sand paintings to stars—and above all, perhaps, its ability to ward off death and loneliness.

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

A Musical Offering by Luis Sagasti, translated from the Spanish by Fionn Petch, Charco Press, 2020

In his classic Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter waxes lyrical about the German composer’s BWV 1079. The Musical Offering is, he claims, J.S. Bach’s “supreme accomplishment in counterpoint”: “one large intellectual fugue” rife with forms and ideas, hidden references, and cheeky innuendos. The same could be said of Luis Sagasti’s near-eponymous book (the author humbly drops the “the” for an “a”), out now from Charco Press in Fionn Petch’s seamless rendition.

Anchored in music itself, this magpie suite of literary bites spans centuries, geographies, and disciplines. It opens with an allegedly nonfictional one-pager on the birth of the Goldberg Variations, another Bachian staple: in the retelling, Count Keyserling requests a musical sleep aid, to be executed nightly by the young virtuoso after whom it’ll be later named (a fetching origin story, no doubt, though I must side with those who think it apocryphal; as a seasoned insomniac, I can’t fathom sleeping through the shift from mellow aria to zesty first variatio, let alone the jump to outright fervid fifth).

Whatever its epistemic status—much of the book waltzes gracefully from fact to fiction—the narrative soon leads to something like a micro-essay packing a Borgesian punch: is Goldberg an inverted Scheherezade, Sagasti wonders, his endless performance meant to usher in sleep’s “little death” rather than stall it? These musings, in turn, link to a personal anecdotethe author humming his favorite lullaby—echoed in what can only be described as aphorism: “When a child first learns to hum a melody, the child stops being music and (…) becomes [its] receptacle” (or, ditching poetry for pop, “No child could fall asleep to [the Beatles’s] ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’”). This is just a sample; a thousand and one ties can be drawn among snippets on music and sleep, silence, space, or war, not just within the book’s broadly themed sections but across thema veritable fugue of insights and literary forms. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Haim Nachman Bialik 

There is Love in the world, they say. / Love—what is it?

This week features the Hebrew language poetry of Haim Nachman Bialik, a poet and cultural leader who influenced twentieth century Hebrew and Yiddish poetry like few others. Bialik’s commitment to innovation in stylistic Hebrew comes across in these skillful translations, which carry emotion upon a poignant succession of nouns that cover a stirring breadth of emotion in relatively few words. Verdant religious language is foiled by a personal lack. Yearning, the language evokes a sense of constantly thwarted arrival met with evacuation. Yet, the poems brim with hope for the future, foregrounding the hope which gives meaning to the barren condition of the present. Bialik remains the national poet of Israel.

Drops a Sprig in Silence

Drops a sprig in silence
To the fence.
Like him,
I’m mute. Shorn of fruit,
Estranged from branch and tree.
Shorn of fruit, the flower
Memory forgotten,
The leaves do sway,
Sure victims for the gale to slay.
Then the nights do come.
The nightmare—
The gall—
I thrash about in the dark,
I knock my head against the wall.
And spring will come.
Is splendour
A foil
To me, a barren twig,
Which bringeth forth
No fruit, nor flower, nor nill.

Take Me Under Your Wings

Take me under your wings,
Be to me sister and mother.
Let your bosom shelter my head,
Nestle my banished prayers.

Then in twilight, the hour of mercy,
Bend down to me, my anguish I’ll tell thee:
There is Youth in the world, they say.
My youth—where is it?

And another secret I’ll tell:
My soul, it is all burnt out.
There is Love in the world, they say.
Love—what is it?

The stars have all deceived me.
There was a dream, it too has passed.
I have not a thing in the world now.
I have nothing, at last.

Take me under your wings,
Be to me sister and mother.
Let your bosom shelter my head,
Nestle my banished prayers.

Translated from the Hebrew by Dahlia Ephrat 

Haim Nachman Bialik (1873-1934), recognized today as the national poet of Israel, wrote in Hebrew and Yiddish. Born in the former Russian Empire, Bialik, who wrote passionately about the persecution of the Jewish people in Russia, moved to Germany and then to Tel Aviv. He had a relationship with Ira Jan, a painter and writer who followed him to Tel Aviv. After his untimely death in surgery, a massive funeral procession mourned down the street which now bears his name, showing his importance as an icon of an emergent Jewish literary movement and a significant cultural leader. During his productive career, Bialik wrote extensively, and his poems are well known to the Israeli public. On top of his poetry and essays, which have now been translated into more than thirty languages and set to music, Bialik translated a book of Talmudic legends called Sefer Ha’agada (The Book of Legends). 

Dahlia Ephrat lives in Tel Aviv, where she was born. She began writing poetry at a young age, and began work as a translator at eighteen. She has translated scores of English language poetry into Hebrew. She remains interested in Hebrew, and embarks on linguistic studies of Hebrew etymology and thought. 

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Translation Tuesday: “Genealogies, Imprints, and Flights” by Ana Luísa Amaral

in an invisible layer: / an imperceptible figment of skin, and an inherited voice: / more kora than cello / and played to a European beat

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, we follow a moving lyrical meditation on family, belonging, and racial identity in an Angolan-Portuguese family as Ana Luísa Amaral traces the elements of a ‘glorious imperfection’ through music, photography, and the contours of the human face.

Genealogies, Imprints, and Flights

My great-great-grandmother was Angolan and black,
the other day I found her name on the reverse
not of a poem stuffed in a drawer,
but of a piece of paper imprinted
with silver salts and light
READ MORE…