Posts featuring Euripides

Balancing Familiarity and Strangeness: Rebekah Curry on Translating Euripides

Making a poem or remaking a poem into new language—it’s all part of the same whole.

Euripides’ Alkestis, written in the fifth century BCE, tells the story of a queen who volunteers to die instead of her king and husband. Our Spring 2022 issue features an excerpt from the play in Rebekah Curry’s new translation—a delightfully contemporary rendition of this Ancient Greek work based on a collaboration between Curry and classics scholar Stanley Lombardo. In our conversation, Curry—an award-winning translator of old and current languages—reflects on humor in Euripides’ disturbing play, the appeal of ancient stories, and the different shapes collaborative translation can take.

Michal Zechariah (MZ): A new translation of an ancient text is always an exciting event—it seems to go beyond the text at hand and suggest a new relationship with the past, as in Emily Wilson’s recent translation of Homer’s Odyssey. How did you first encounter Alkestis, and what drew you to translate it? 

Rebekah Curry (RC): If memory serves, I first read Alkestis (in translation) as a sophomore classics major at the University of Kansas, while taking a “Greek Lit and Civ” class. Admittedly, I don’t believe I gave any more thought to it at that time than I did to the other texts I read for the class. Then, a few years ago, I was in a conversation with Stanley Lombardo, whose student I’d been at KU, and he proposed a collaboration. He’d spent some time on a translation of Alkestis that he wanted to take in a different direction, and his idea was for us to work on (and, we hoped, publish) it together.

MZ: I noticed you chose to title your translation Alkestis rather than the better-known anglicized Alcestis, a choice that reminds me of Willis Barnstone’s return to original name forms in his Restored New Testament. What made you choose to use the Greek forms of Alkestis’ and other characters’ names? Is this choice part of a wider approach you took to your translation?

RC: My idea in using Greek forms of the names rather than the Latinized/anglicized forms (“Apollon” rather than “Apollo,” “Herakles” rather than “Hercules”) was to create a sort of productive estrangement. The Greek names defamiliarize the story somewhat, distancing it from the accumulated versions and adaptations of classical mythology in English. At the same time as the translation aims at bringing Alkestis into the twenty-first century, the names are a reminder that this narrative is happening in a remote time and place. I should say, however, that this isn’t an approach that I would push everyone translating from Ancient Greek to take—it just depends on what kind of effect you’re trying to create.

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Spring 2022: Highlights from the Team

Still don’t know where to start with our latest edition? Here are some more entry points, courtesy of our generous multicontinental team!

I felt that the Spring Asymptote was an incredibly timely and unsettling issue and I hope that broader readers can use it as a lens to think about ongoing dynamics of imperialism, capitalism, and more. I was drawn immediately to Kim Hyesoon’s poems from The Hell of That Star (tr. Cindy Juyoung Ok), with its overwhelming and abundant female presence that kept mutating. In Signe Gjessing’s poems from Tractatus (tr. Denise Newman), I really enjoyed the tension between the abstract and the material—for example, the fact that shampoo is able to exist alongside transcendence. The voice of Nina Yargekov’s “The Obedient Little Girl” (tr. Charles Lee) was immediately disarming! I was delighted by the emphasis on disobedience at the end. Last but not least, I enjoyed reading Agnieszka Taborska’s The World Has Gone Mad: A Surrealist Handbook How to Survive (tr. Soren Gauger). Leonora Carrington is my favorite artist and writer (I actually have a tattoo of one of her paintings); it was exciting to see her mentioned at the conclusion. I also enjoyed the automatic writing components. This is a text I do need to spend more time with and I am so glad that it was included in this issue.

—AM Ringwalt, Educational Arm Assistant

I have a love for Nordic literature in general, there is something about its directness and its simplicity, and yet at the same time its ability to confront existential issues through the details of the everyday. As I live in Sweden and yet am not Swedish, I see literature as a way into understanding the place and society where I am. I was struck by how so many of the pieces in the Swedish special feature confronted the deep hypocrisy that is there in Sweden’s self-presentation as a tolerant, progressive, consensual, and equal society: The uncovering of misogyny and violence against women in the Kristina Lugn (tr. Zach Maher), Lina Hagelbäck (tr. Freke Räihä) and Hanna Nordenhök (tr. Saskia Vogel) (there is a reason that the original Swedish title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was Män som hatar kvinnor [Men Who Hate Women]); or history of institutionalized homophobia in the Jonas Gardell (tr. Elizabeth Clark Wessel); and racism in the Majgull Axelsson (tr. Kathy Saranpa). These all show that there is something deeply troubling in the supposedly comfortable Swedish society that people here live in. And yet, for all this social awareness, these texts are not themselves sanctimonious or worthy. There is a distinct existential edge in each of them, they show how these social issues penetrate deep down into the world of the characters affected by them. Oppression is not an accident or mistake that can be simply rectified or remedied, it is a constitutive fact of the world as it exists and is revealed and experienced: violence, oppression, and torment penetrate and persist right through the world, into each blade of grass, bunch of flowers, childhood memory, or everyday action, and all this writing captures something of that pain and its penetration. This is the world. And it needs to be shown and seen again, recognized for what it is, as it is in this writing; and through the seeing again that this writing provides, it can also be recreated as other than it is.

—Liam Sprod, Copy Editor

Andrii Krasnyashchikh’s As Bombs Fall (tr. Matthew Hyde) made me cry. This account of daily life in Kharkiv made me think of my grandmother living in Rome under Nazi occupation—the immediacy of daily life while the world crumbles around you. Accounts such as this allow us a window into the individual human impact of war that newspaper reportage does not. Johannes Lilleøre’s My Sick Friend (tr. Sharon E. Rhodes) read like prose poetry. I love the way it plays with time: we move through a life, and then once illness strikes, time slows down. The taut, matter-of-fact sentences, with their seemingly throwaway observations and details, evoke not just the immediacy created by bodily illness and suffering, but also convey the pain and helplessness of the narrator. Kate Tsurkan’s interview with Zenia Tompkins discusses so many vital questions, for example: what responsibility do we children of the diaspora have to our homelands? How much is our image of homeland shaped by the trauma of our parents and grandparents?

—Amaryllis Gacioppo, Newsletter Editor

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Listening to Syntax: Eugene Ostashevsky on Lucky Breaks

[Belorusets] writes in this beautiful, off-kilter, very non-state, non-Russian Russian

Reviewing Yevgenia Belorusets’s Lucky Breaks, Shawn Hoo writes, “The question of what photographs and literature can do in war, I suspect, will not be resolved anytime soon.” Still, as one reads Belorusets’s text of stories from the fringes of wartime, the role of writing within conflict—even if varied and not always discernible—emerges as vital, urgent. Our Book Club selection for the month of March, Lucky Breaks provides a doorway by which the voices and images of Ukrainian women, and their ordinary lives, emerge and connect in unexpected, miraculous ways. In the following interview with Eugene Ostashevsky, whose expert and precise translation of Lucky Breaks has given this title a formidable presence in English, Hoo and Ostashevky discuss the rejections of typical narratives, transitions of impossible grammars, and translating as a pursuit of poetics.

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.

Shawn Hoo (SH): You have translated mostly Russian avant-garde and absurdist poetry. Were the things that drew you to these poets the same things that drew you to Yevgenia Belorusets’s Lucky Breaks?

Eugene Ostashevsky (EO): I translate as a poet, if that makes sense, which means that translation is vital to my poetic work (which foregrounds translation, which problematises translation) but, more importantly, that my poetics help me make translation choices. I started translating the OBERIU, the so-called absurdists, an avant-garde group in the ’20s and an underground group in the 1930s. The way their work formed me as a reader and a poet, even before I started translating, was their absurdisation of language: the way they took classical poetics and projected avant-garde poetics on them, breaking up classical poetics to build these very beautiful linguistic structures which questioned rather than affirmed language. They questioned rather than affirmed reference or the veracity of statements, and greatly relativised linguistic truth. So here’s the important point: I think maybe what drew me to them was the fact that I’m an immigrant. It was the fact that—I don’t want to say I don’t write in my native language, but—I don’t write in my native language, technically speaking.

With Belorusets, you read Lucky Breaks and there is a lot of Daniil Kharms, member of OBERIU, for the reason that Kharms really reflects on and deconstructs narrative. When Belorusets takes her stories about war and cuts out authorial omniscience, writing about the fog of war, and about interacting with people whom you don’t know much about, she describes these people in this kind of glancing way, often slipping into these Kharmsian rejections of classical narrative.

The second thing is that, like virtually all Ukrainians, she is bilingual. But she writes in Russian because that’s what they speak in her family. Now the Russian language is associated with the Russian state, but there basically used to be, in the twentieth century, two forms of Russian: an émigré Russian and a Soviet Russian. After the Soviet Union collapsed and the émigrés started publishing in Russia—because that’s where the readers were—it turned out that the compromise, the attaching of the language to the political unit of the Russian Federation (even though nobody did it consciously) turned out to be very harmful for the language. [Belorusets] writes in this beautiful, off-kilter, very non-state, non-Russian Russian which has (it sounds like I’m talking about wine) tinges of Austro-Hungarian syntax. Also, she is trained as a translator from German, so that’s also there; beyond that Central Europeanness of her Russian, there is Gogol. You feel that in the ironies, in the way the words and the clauses are not lined up one after another but rub up against each other, the way they are defamiliarised. I just love that.

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Epic Reasons to Love Greek: An Interview with Andrea Marcolongo

The study of a language that challenges us the way that Greek does teaches us the trade of living . . .

Andrea Marcolongo’s motivation for writing The Ingenious Language is refreshingly straightforward: the Italian writer, translator, and classical scholar wants everyone to fall in love with ancient Greek. Casting aside the rigid pedagogical practices and elitism traditionally associated with classical studies, Marcolongo focuses on the personal, exploring the “extraordinary” challenges, ecstasies, and opportunities ancient Greek offers to all who engage with it. Written for “those who have never studied it and are curious, those who have studied Greek and forgotten it, those who have studied it and hated it, and those who are studying Greek literature in school today,” The Ingenious Language is a bestseller in Italy and, in translation, has been embraced by readers around the world. Masterfully translated from the Italian by Will Schutt and published by Europa Editions, Andrea Marcolongo’s love letter to ancient Greek is now finally available in North America. To celebrate, Asymptote spoke with Marcolongo about falling in love with an ancient language, the “strange” appeal of studying Greek, the myth of Greek color blindness, and the need for a common utopia.

—Sarah Timmer Harvey

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): In the introduction to The Ingenious Language, you mention “falling in love” with ancient Greek as a young girl. Can you tell me why Greek was so appealing to you, why you fell in love?

Andrea Marcolongo (AM): I always say that the love story with Greek is the longest of my life. However, it wasn’t love at first sight: I don’t believe in that. Instead, it was a path of knowledge. I remember myself as a young girl waiting for the yellow bus to go to high school with a big Greek dictionary in my hands. It was a challenge, first of all, to learn an alphabet that I didn’t know, and then a challenge to myself, my openness to the world.

Obviously, every language is “ingenious” in its own way because it expresses thinking of those who use it every day. The adjective “ingenious” which gives the title to my book derives from three different languages: the Greek, where it comes from the verb root “to create” and means, as in Aristophanes, “creative mind,” the Latin, in which it refers to the “genium” which, according to mythology, is a small being that accompanied man throughout the course of life to make him happy, and then the French, in which “génial” means fun, or beautiful. I played with these same words in three different languages as a way of explaining why I, Andrea, a thirty-year-old woman, love Greek. I love it because it is a free and human language. Free, because its quirks—maybe even those that drove us crazy at school—were not made obligatory by grammar, but left to the free choice of those who used Greek daily to speak and write. It is, therefore, a human language because it leaves people the responsibility of choosing not only what to say, but also how to say it. And in doing so, Greek also allows the speaker the freedom to express who they are. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Prologue to Bacchae by Euripides

"I have compelled this town to rant and howl, / dressed it in fawnskin, put my pine-cone-tipped / and ivy-vested spear into its hands"

Dionysus:

Here I am, Dionysus, Zeus’s son,
the god whom Semele, the daughter of Cadmus,
birthed, with a bolt of lightning for a midwife.
I am back home in the land of Thebes.

My sacred form exchanged for this mere mortal
disguise, I have arrived here where the Springs
of Dirce and the river Ismenos
are flowing. I can see my lightning-blasted
mother’s tomb right there beside the palace,
and I can see as well her former bedroom’s
rubble giving off the living flame
of Zeus’ fire—Hera’s deathless rage
against my mother. I am pleased that Cadmus
has set the site off as a sanctuary
to keep her memory. I am the one
who covered it on all sides round with grape leaves
and ripe grape clusters. READ MORE…