Posts featuring Sara Stridsberg

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2021

Our blog editors pick their favourite pieces from the Fall 2021 issue!

Asymptote’s Fall 2021 issue is here, featuring new work from thirty countries and nineteen languages! To help guide you through the latest issue, our blog editors are offering their top recommendations. 

The Fall 2021 issue transcends the boundaries of culture and time through foreign encounters, explorations of personal and cultural memory, and novel ways of approaching the act of translation. One of the themes that emerges from this wide-ranging and deeply probing issue is the transformative potential of speech, song, and music. In the title story of Ham Chŏngim’s 2015 story collection, “After Dinner,” music, whether sung, played, or imagined, stirs memories of joy and loss for the central character, Sunnam, a blocked writer hosting a dinner party in Pusan with the death of her close mentor, P., on her mind. The piece is elegantly translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, who capture the author’s hushed yet lyrical tone, while eruditely rendering this piece’s many intertextual and cross-cultural references to Western authors and music. Like James Joyce’s The Dead, which is aptly referenced at its start, the symphonic piece interlaces multiple threads of memory like different strains of melody within Sunnam’s roving mind while she prepares for the dinner party. These threads are related through their transformative encounters with music, moments of intimate connection, and losses of beloved people from her life. Her meditations suggest the fickleness of memory—both the ways it disappears and the ways it lingers. The fleeting quality of memory is evoked when Sunnam reflects on the first time she used her candlesticks for a party: “The memory of that first time comes tantalizingly close and then poof, it’s gone. But finally it comes back . . .” Through the intricate paralleling of narrative threads, Chŏngim maps Sunnam’s vast interior world across time and place, conjuring a textured history of love and loss within just the few hours before her party. 

The transformative possibility of speech and song is also central to Caitlin Woolsey’s intimate account of translating spoken and sung poetry in “If my heart were a stone, it would drop down to meet you”: Bedouin Oral Poetry and Translation as Reciprocity, a featured piece in this issue’s edition of “Brave New World Literature.” Woolsey describes her experience translating and documenting Jordanian Bedouin oral traditions, while living with an extended family from the Zawaideh tribe in the village of Disah. The genre-bending piece combines memoir, critical analysis, and meditations on the practice of translation to form an illuminating inquiry into Bedouin oral traditions. Woolsey is perceptive yet culturally sensitive in her readings of these poems—noticing, for example, the poems’ practice of employing generalized descriptive language and recurring symbols and characters. She does not dismiss this practice as repetitive or uncreative, but links it to the communal function of the poems, which are recited and must therefore participate in certain descriptive traditions to be understood and retold by its listeners. In this manner, Woolsey performs important critical work by situating this historically overlooked literature within its people’s culture and history. One of the most moving aspects of this piece is the way that oral poetry functions not only as a means of personal creative expression, but as a vital repository for these tribes’ memory and history, a method of preservation for a “historical and cultural record” in the face of erasure by time and modernization.  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Catch up on this week’s latest news in Morocco, Sweden, Vietnam, and France!

This week, our editors are bringing you news from Morocco, Sweden, Vietnam, and France In Morocco, changes to the ministry of communication are affecting book imports. In Sweden, the announcement of the August Prize has brought excitement, whilst the awarding of the Tucholsky Prize to Swedish-Chinese writer Gui Minhai has been met with indignation in China. In Vietnam, the sales of a much-anticipated translation of bestseller South Korean writer Cho Nam-joo have not been as expected. In France, the centennial of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookshop was celebrated. Read on to find out more!

Hodna Nuernberg, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Morocco

Last month, Morocco’s King Mohammed VI ordered major bureaucratic reform, slashing the government’s thirty-nine member cabinet to just twenty-four—the smallest ever—and doing away with the ministry of communication. While the official line was that the ministry was no longer necessary to regulate the kingdom’s newspapers (a convincing argument, given the state of Morocco’s oppositional press), the abolition of the ministry has had a perhaps unintended side effect: all book imports have been blocked in customs since early October.

The first article of Morocco’s 2003 Press Code guaranteed the freedom of domestic publications. Foreign books, on the other hand, were subject to the ministry of communication’s control. Prior to the October reform, this control was carried out by the foreign publications bureau of the ministry’s public relations division. As such, the bureau was responsible for “analyzing the content of foreign publications” and delivering (or not) the visas necessary for importation. Although Morocco does not officially practice state censorship, this process allowed the king to uphold his three red lines (the monarchy, the kingdom’s “territorial integrity,” and Islam), which were enshrined in article 29 of the Press Code. READ MORE…

Who Will Win the 2019 Man Booker International?

I tried to decipher from their inflection and word choices whether perhaps one of the books held their attention more than the others.

We know you’re just as eager as we are to learn who will win the Man Booker International Prize tomorrow, so we’ve enlisted our very own Barbara Halla to walk you through her predictions! A member of this year’s Man Booker International Shadow PanelBarbara has read every book on the short- and longlists, making her our resident expert. Read on for her top 2019 MBI picks!

Last year, someone called the Man Booker International my version of the UEFA Champions League, which is fairly true. Although I don’t place any bets, I do spend a lot of my time trying to forecast and argue about who will win the prize. And I am not alone. For a community obsessed with words and their interpretation, it is not surprising that many readers and reviewers will try to decipher the (perhaps inexistent) breadcrumbs the judges leave behind, or go through some Eurovision level of political analysis to see how non-literary concerns might favour one title over the other. Speaking from personal experience, this literary sleuthing has been successful on two out of three occasions. After a meeting with some of the judges of the 2016 MBI at Shakespeare & Company, I left with the sense that Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (translated by Deborah Smith) would take home the prize that year. In 2018, Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights (translated by Jennifer Croft) seemed to be everyone’s favourite, and despite a strong shortlist, I was delighted, although not shocked, to see it win.

The winner of this year’s Man Booker prize is proving more elusive. The shortlist is strong, but no one title has become a personal, or fan-, favourite. And I find the uncertainty at this stage in the competition very interesting. It is almost in direct contrast to how the discussion around the prize unfolded between the unveiling of the longlist and the shortlist. When the longlist was announced on 12 March, it was immediately followed by a flurry of online reactions that are all part of a familiar script: despite predictions by “expert” readers, few big names and titles made it onto the longlist. With good reason, some literary critics addressed the list’s shortcomings with regards to its linguistic and national diversity. Independent presses were congratulated for again dominating the longlist, a reward for their commitment to translated fiction. But as dedicated readers tackled the longlist head-on, there was a general feeling of disappointment with a good portion of the titles, which allowed the best to rise to the top quickly.

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What’s New in Translation? November 2016

Asymptote reviews some of the best new books from French, Swedish, and German.

cabo-de-gata

Cabo de Gata, by Eugen Ruge, tr. Anthea Bell, Graywolf Press

Review: Sam Carter, Assistant Managing Editor, US

First published in German in 2013—when his In Times of Fading Light appeared in EnglishEugen Ruge’s Cabo de Gata, out this month from Graywolf Press, might strike a familiar note for readers who have witnessed a surge in autobiographically-inflected works that frequently take the production of fiction as a subject worthy of novelistic exploration. Hailing from both the Anglophone world and beyond, such novels record the process of their creation or the struggles to even begin them, and Ruge quickly aligns himself with this approach in his tale of a writer’s attempt to get away from it all in the hope of figuring something out. “I made up this story so that I could tell it the way it was,” declares the dedication to this slender volume, and a more precise formulation arrives soon after as the narrator recalls a period in which “I was testing everything that I did or that happened to me at the same moment, or the next moment, or the moment after that, for its suitability as a subject … as I was living my life, I was beginning to describe it for the sake of experiment.”

While in Cabo de Gata, a small town on the Andalusian coast, the narrator quickly settles into routines designed to simultaneously distract him from blank pages and provide him with some inspiration to fill them. The local fishermen, whom the narrator visits on his daily stroll, can empathize with such difficulties: ¡Mucho trabajo, poco pescado! A lot of work for only a little fish—it’s a piscatory philosophy that applies just as well to the writing life. Ruge, however, proves to be an exceptionally gifted angler as he reels in catch after catch in what would seem to be difficult waters, namely a single man’s short trip to this seaside village.

Serving as a metronome marking out the rhythm of memories that constitute the novel, a refrain of “I remember” begins many of the paragraphs that have been expertly rendered by translator Anthea Bell. Far from repetitive or reductive, such a strategy instead seems somehow expansive, particularly when we are reminded that, “fundamentally memory reinvents all memories.” Both the vagaries and the vagueness of memories—“I remember all that only vaguely, however, like a film without a soundtrack,” remarks the narrator in a line that will be hard to forget—serve as the subjects of reflection that find their counterpart in the rhythms of the sea and the surrounding Spanish countryside.

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