Posts filed under 'Seven Stories Press'

What’s New in Translation: March 2024

March 11, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Bella Creel, Daljinder Johal, and Kathryn Raver

New works from Alexander Kluge, Marjane Satrapi, and Jón Kalman Stefánsson!

The latest text from one of German New Wave’s founding members and all around heavy-hitter; a wide-ranging compilation of art and testimony championing the Iranian feminist movement from Marjane Satrapi; and a moving, braided narrative of grief and recovery from a lauded Icelandic author. Our editors review some of the most exciting works in translation coming to the Anglophone this month. 

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The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul by Alexander Kluge, translated from the German by Alexander Booth, Seagull Books, 2024

Review by Bella Creel, Blog Editor

Filmmaker, author, and philosopher Alexander Kluge’s most recent oeuvre, The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul, is an act of rethinking. Born in Germany in 1932, Kluge blurs the edges of the many years of his life in this ambitious work, expanding beyond the first-hand, beyond generations, drawing connections between now and before, all in order to fully describe the experience of a single life. Alexander Booth offers a wonderfully dense and witty translation from the German, with no aversion to a confusing syntax that demands rereading and rethinking.

Kluge is trying to find the right words throughout this collection, which, in the process of its creation, must have been turned over and inside out, stretched to snapping and magnified to the molecular; reading it, in turn, requires a certain liquifying of the brain. This giving-in allows one to absorb the words, which only then can be reformed into some sort of meaning. Kluge himself seems to follow a similar process:

Where does all my ‘fluent speech’, my rabid desire to write, come from? I listen to others. And carefully! A word that flies towards me, an observation that charms me into conversation, a quotation that I read: all of this gets stored inside me for the long-term.

I usually tear books to shreds, marking any places that captivate me in colour pencil before ripping the page out. These I attach to other findings of mine with a paper clip. They’re often annotated. My flat is full of these piles of paper. My personal bastion against the ‘ignorance that shakes the world’.

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The Basic Color is Compassion: Ivana Bodrožić and Ellen Elias-Bursać in Conversation

February 14, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Ellen Elias-Bursac

I am apologizing to those who have been persecuted by this society.

Ivana Bodrožić’s latest novel, Sons, Daughters, is an astounding work of empathy and a masterful depiction of the deepest inwardness, tracing the always-shifting definitions of what we can and cannot say to one another. With three individuals at its center—a paralyzed but completely aware young woman, a transgender son, and a mother who has been irrevocably marked by the cruelties of patriarchal society—Bodrožić arranges the various storylines in a delicate and constellating balance, showing how singular truths in one’s own life can come to be mirrored in another, seemingly opposite, existence. Translated with precise lyricism by Ellen Elias-Bursać, Sons, Daughters is due out from Seven Stories Press in March, and we were proud to feature an especially moving excerpt in our Winter 2024 issue. Now, in this following interview, translator and author speak to one another about the psychological labyrinths inlaid throughout this narrative, and the writer’s role in bringing invisible consciousnesses to the forefront.

Ellen Elias-Bursać (EEB): Sons, Daughters examines the inner lives of three protagonists: Lucija, Dorian, and Lucija’s mother—all on a profoundly intimate and personal level. What was it like for you to create the dynamics of this very internal narrative, and how did the process compare to your other novels: Hotel Tito or We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day?

Ivana Bodrožić (IB): I certainly spent more time researching for this novel than I did for my other works of prose. I have no personal experience with physical paralysis; I haven’t felt the sort of bodily dissonance I describe in the novel, nor can I know what it is like to be a sixty-year-old woman who was abused as a child in ways that were, at the time, socially acceptable. In order to create my characters and give them the necessary credibility and life, I spent a great deal of time reading, talking, and researching about all these things which have not been part of my own experience. But more important than research is to write from who you are—to draw on your own feelings. Indeed, I have, often, in my own life, felt paralysed, powerless to move, though only at a metaphysical level. Similarly, when I was growing up, I felt bad, wrong and uncomfortable in my body, stricken with shame and guilt that also stem from the patriarchy. And finally, there were times when I felt—and still feel—as though my life were flying before my very eyes, as if everything has already happened, as if the scars from my trauma and pain cannot be erased and I am passing them on to my children. These are authentic experiences which are crucial to my ability to write fiction, as well as to my attempts to feel my way in, empathize with, and hold deep respect for the themes I’m writing about; they matter much more than my research of facts. READ MORE…

Leaving and Staying: Liliana Corobca and Monica Cure on Kinderland

December 21, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

I have the responsibility to go to the end with a good book.

Our penultimate Book Club selection for this year was Liliana Corobca’s Kinderland, an exquisitely lyrical narration of childhood amidst the instabilities of poverty, underlined by an unexpectedly penetrating look into economic migration in eastern Europe. Told in the mesmerizing voice of Cristina, whose mind slips flowingly from magic to sorrow, from urgency to tenderness, the novel traces the known and unknown forces that shape our lives, during that most delicate and mutable of times: youth. In the following interview, Corobca and translator Monica Cure discuss the political context of this work, as well as their exceptionally close and collaborative partnership.

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. 

Michelle Chan Schmidt (MCS): I wanted to ask about any autographical aspects of this novel. Liliana, are there moments here that were drawn from your own memory—or are there aspects of your experience that you wanted to include in Kinderland, but didn’t?

Liliana Corobca (LC): I’ve written nine novels, and none of them can be considered autobiographical. My first book translated into English, The Censor’s Notebook, was based on my research experience, which surrounds institutional censorship under communism. I had read about such a document (the notebook of a censor) in the archives, but I never found it, so I imagined it.

Therefore, there’s no single character with which I can identify and say: this is me. Cristina, the girl in Kinderland, is imaginary. Still, there are very special and concrete biographical elements—even if they verge more on the mystical. Kinderland is a novel about migration, a very common phenomenon in Romania and Moldova. I was born in a Moldovan village like the one in the book, and my parents were teachers who worked with children such as those in the book. They told me of many situations and stories which I used and adapted, and I also drew on my relationship with my own younger brother to write the relationship of the siblings.

Actually, I hesitated to write this novel because I have no children, and I was sure that if I wanted to write such a book, I would’ve needed to bring up children, to follow them, to observe them, and to study their reactions. But instead, I just imagined, drawing on my own experience. There are moments in the book that stem from my little village, which was by the biggest forest in Moldova; my father and I walked there a lot, and such memories are incorporated into the novel. Another source is related to the mystical experience of children. I was born in an atheist country where it was forbidden to have a Bible or to go to church, so I don’t have those more customary experiences of spirituality, but I think human beings are naturally mystical, so those scenes or passages of magic or mysticism in the book are my own. They are of my impulse. READ MORE…

A Year of Reading the World

December 14, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Sometimes reality would seem unbearable if literature were not there to decipher it, to give it heart.

Every month, the Asymptote Book Club shares a newly published, translated title with readers and subscribers. From Nobel laureates to electrifying debuts, this selection features some of the most powerful voices writing in any language, opening up an entry into the immense archives of  wold literature. In this essay, we look back on the books of 2023 thus far. 

Sign up for the Asymptote Book Club here and have our curated titles sent to your door!

Whenever a major event transpires, anywhere in the world, the instinct of many is to reach into the annals of writing—for explanation, ruminations, solace, transcriptions of history, glimmers of what’s to come, stories of people and their ordinary or extraordinary lives. . . On January 1 of this year, Croatia officially joined the Schengen Area, making it the twenty-seventh member to benefit from the region’s removal of border controls—and the search for Croatian books and literature went up 30%. During the surprising and intermittently absurd “Chinese balloon incident” in early February, searches for books on Chinese espionage went up a full 100%. Interest for Ukrainian literature stayed at a high amidst the ongoing conflict, and peaked when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin for committing war crimes regarding the illegal deportation of children. As a devastating civil war broke out in Sudan in mid-April, the world immediately sought out writing from and about the region, and when Niger’s government was overthrown in a military coup on July 26, searches for Nigerien books and authors also saw a significant surge. And as writers from Palestine and Israel continued, over the decades, to release texts around nation, land, exile, occupation, humanity, and violence both physical and psychological, we all watched in horror as the devastation grew almost unimaginably—and we looked for those books.

Books and the world they’re written in, books and the worlds they give us—sometimes reality would seem unbearable if literature were not there to decipher it, to give it heart. As the poet Adonis said, “My homeland is this spark this lightning in the darkness of the time remaining. . .” (translated by S.M. Toorawa); with language, such texts lend us that brightness, and we are rendered able to discover the many narratives and landscapes of our long, shadowy era.

In this year’s Book Club, we’ve thus far featured eleven titles: eleven authors, eleven countries, eleven languages, and eleven translators. Each brought their own entrancing energy of storytelling, whether taking history or the human psyche as material, building on myth or fearlessly experimental. There were titles that sought to give us a vivid portrait of a certain neighbourhood, a certain period. Others dove into the intricate channels of thinking to paint a picture of the mind. READ MORE…

Announcing Our November Book Club Selection: Kinderland by Liliana Corobca

November 29, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

Kinderland contains its call for kindness within concentric circles of humor, irony, and tragedy. . .

First published in 2013, Liliana Corobca’s Kinderland links modern Moldova to the metaphysics of magical thinking, bridging the chasm between socio-political reality and children’s play. The second novel to emerge from Corobca and Monica Cure’s writer-and-translator duo, Kinderland follows the acclaimed The Censor’s Notebook, which earned Cure the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize; it colors in The Censor’s Notebook’s negatives of political repression, probing the social legacies proliferating in the long shadow of communism through the tangential prism of a young girl’s imagination.

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. 

Kinderland by Liliana Corobca, translated from the Romanian by Monica Cure, Seven Stories, 2023

From the German, Kinderland: children’s land, land for children, the country of children, the children’s state. But also: winterland, wonderland, Alice, wanderland. Liliana Corobca’s original Romanian title for Kinderland refracts its light onto the novel’s substance, and Monica Cure’s English translation draws on an exquisite textual structure, sensitively conveying its narrator’s preternatural style of creative contemplation.

Beyond the third person opening sequence, no section of the novel is over six pages long; they follow the irreverently earnest voice of Cristina, a young girl caring for her two siblings in her parents’ absence, and is directly addressed to a shifting “you”. Throughout, page breaks are forfeited, constructing a visual configuration that reposes on Corobca’s and Cure’s craft as writers and sustaining an undialectical, seemingly uncontrolled style that recalls the meanderings—and moral certitude—of one’s own twelve-year-old introspections. These ruminations and recollections are a succession of light exposures, spanning the summer of Cristina’s thirteenth year, and each resembles a photograph, a vignette of latent action that flows into the memory or emotion at its blurred peripheries. Kinderland’s loose-limbedness articulates Cristina’s coming-of-age in limpid textuality, impressed on a textual emulsion milky with village childhood.

Kinderland’s omniscient “proemium” also preaches on speed, instructing the reader on how to plumb Cristina’s fragmented essence from the novel’s brevity: “Quickly, everything’s done quickly. Wash it quickly. . . if you wash the stain quickly, it comes out easily.” And Cristina, in particular, inhabits the same spiritual and wondrous landscape as Lady Macbeth (she and her brothers play in woods as otherworldly as Birnam Wood). From a cinematic, bird’s-eye view, Kinderland’s incipit glides the reader over the country of children. With her parents elsewhere, she looks after “two brothers, a dog, a cat, a pig, ten chickens, a scrappy rooster. . . the last thing I needed with this entire army was a bunch of goats.” She, Dan, and Marcel live in an atavistic, almost pre-technological village of wells and wool and walnuts, but beneath their daily corporeality flower a sensuous realm of fleawort, wounds, and witchcraft. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2023

September 11, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Meghan Racklin and Samantha Siefert

New translations from the Catalan and the French!

This month in newly released translations, we’re featuring two authors of inimitable voice and style. From the Catalan, a surrealist masterpiece by Ventura Ametller sharply blends history with mysticism in an epic retelling of the Spanish Civil War; and from the French, the latest text by Annie Ernaux returns to some of the author’s most central themes—sex and memory—in a poignant examination of corporeal and psychological navigations.

Summa Kaotica by Ventura Ametller (Bonaventura Clavaguera), translated from the Catalan by Douglas Suttle, Fum d’Estampa, 2023

Review by Samantha Siefert, Marketing Manager

A monstrosity of a fish gnashes at a tiger, the tiger leaps towards a gun, the gun is aimed perilously at the prone body of a nude woman. . . It’s all so unexpected and moving, but what do these objects have to do with one another—or with anything at all?

Such is surrealism: the challenge of reconciling the disparity of absurdity. “Everything leads us to believe that there exists a spot in the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the high and the low, the communicable and the incommunicable will cease to appear contradictory,” declared André Breton in his manifesto. Riding on the coattails of Dadaism, surrealism emerged as an impulsive reaction to the tragedy of the First World War: If reason had resulted in such great suffering, then what good was a movement rooted in realism?

The antithesis of reason, then, was the way forward, and the efforts of the avant-garde were so resonant that they continue to exist today as comfortable figures of popular culture, where the discordance of fish, tiger, and gun feel almost familiar in Salvador Dalí’s famous painting, “The Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening.” The surrealist world of letters, however, leave room for discovery.

In Catalonia with Dalí at the beginning of the twentieth century, the writer Ventura Ametller—the pen name of Bonaventura Clavaguera—was hard at work, producing a prolific collection of poetry, essays, and novels that turn the world upside down in raucous prose, described by essayist Lluís Racionero as “Dalí in words.” His work has remained only quietly appreciated, but perhaps the time has come for that to change with the new publication of Ametller’s groundbreaking magnum opus, Summa Kaotica, in a masterful translation from the Catalan by Douglas Suttle. READ MORE…

Compass and Rifle: On Roque Dalton’s Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle

August 21, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by José García Escobar

No one escapes Dalton’s inquisitive pen . . .

Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle by Roque Dalton, translated from the Spanish by Jack Hirschman, Seven Stories Press, 2023

On Thursday, July 6, 2023, the inaugural day of Guatemala’s International Book Fair (FILGUA), the government of El Salvador requested organizers to exclude Salvadoran author Michelle Recinos’ Sustancia de hígado (F&G Editores) from the fair. The next day, online news outlet elfaro revealed that El Salvador’s ambassador in Guatemala had said, “It would’ve been an unpleasant thing for the government of El Salvador if this book had been a part of the fair.” Details are scarce, but presumably, this action was related to Michelle’s story Barberos en huelga, winner of the 2022 Mario Monteforte Toledo Prize, which openly criticizes sitting president Nayib Bukele’s war on gangs. 

Hearing this, I can only imagine what Roque Dalton would have written about Bukele. 

Roque Dalton’s Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases (Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle) dates back to 1975, and remains as timely as ever. In a time when most Central American countries are under authoritarian regimes and have experienced backslides of democracy, the life and work of Roque Dalton is at once a beacon of hope, an inspiration, and a warning sign. Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases is a book filled with courageous testimony, the poet’s typical dry humor, and bone-chilling depictions of state violence. Here, Dalton is hyperaware of the pain and plight of his compatriots, but in addition to his typical grittiness and social critique, we also find tenderness, softness, beauty, and frailty; Dalton’s acute perception is both a rifle and a compass, manifesting in words of both rebuke and encouragement. 

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Cracks in the Ordinary: Yasmina Reza’s Babylon in Review

August 30, 2018  |  in Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla

How are ordinary people pushed to inconceivable acts of violence and stupidity?

Babylon by Yasmina Reza, translated from the French by Linda Asher, Seven Stories Press, 2018

The “soirée entre amis” (literally an evening among friends) is one the most quintessential of French clichés. Quintessential not only for its pervasiveness in art centred in Paris, but also because it is ridiculously pervasive in real life, too. A staple, even, of life in France. And, if like Yasmina Reza, you believe that “you can’t understand who people are outside [their] landscape,” what better setting for the exploration of the pressures and absurdities of daily existence than precisely a dinner party between friends, a space that demands constant performance due to its many spoken and unspoken social rules?

In a fictional suburb of Paris, Elisabeth and her husband, Pierre, are throwing a party for their friends and family. Invited, at the very last minute, are their neighbours the Manoscrivis, Jean Lino, and Lydie. The party goes well, but tragedy strikes shortly after: Elisabeth and Pierre are woken in the middle of the night by Jean Lino, who has killed his wife after a banal domestic dispute. Even more inexplicable is what follows as Elisabeth, a sensible and rather ordinary woman, decides to help Jean Lino get away with the crime, despite sharing nothing more than a tentative friendship.

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In Conversation with Peter Constantine

May 18, 2016  |  in Interviews  |  by Daniel Goulden

"The only role I filled in my Chekhov translations was that of the translator."

Peter Constantine not only speaks German, Russian, French, Modern Greek, Ancient Greek, Italian, Albanian, Dutch, and Slovene, but he translates them as well. He has translated Machiavelli, Sophocles, Mann, Rousseau, and a host of others. As a translator from Russian, he has an interest in translating the lesser known, early works of Anton Chekhov.

In the West, Chekhov is known primarily as a playwright, but he was equally accomplished short story author. Peter Constantine’s most recent translation, Little Apples and Other Early Stories, out now from Seven Stories Press, is a collection of Chekhov’s early works, when he wrote under a pen name to support his family and put himself through medical school. These stories are tragic and comic; gut-wrenching and laugh-out-loud funny. Constantine’s translation captures the wit and skill that would make Chekhov known as one of the greatest writers of all time. I discussed Little Apples with him through email.

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Daniel Goulden: What drew you to translating Chekhov, particularly his early stories?

Peter Constantine: Chekhov is one of the great stylists of Russian literature. His range and creativity present an interesting challenge for a translator; particularly his early stories of the 1880s, where every week he would publish several pieces in a number of literary magazines, sometimes two or three pieces per magazine, writing under different pseudonyms: Mr. Champagnsky, Man Without a Spleen, My Brother’s Brother. He had a great facility for writing fast and well and with spectacular energy and creativity. READ MORE…