Monthly Archives: June 2019

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The glorious fragrance of fresh literary works, hot off the presses from around the world.

It seems that national literatures around the world are shaping their next representatives as we receive further updates of new works by authors from around the globe. From publications by a Guatemalan indie press, to a remarkably young award honouree in Brazil, to a historic list of nominations for the most prestigious literary prizes in Japan, our editors are bringing you a glimpse of what is in yourand your bookshelf’sfuture. 

José García Escobar, Editor-at Large, reporting from Central America 

The biggest book fair in Central America, the Feria Internacional del Libro en Guatemala (FILGUA) is only a few weeks away. And like every year, on the days leading to FILGUA, the Guatemalan indie press Catafixia has been announcing its newest drafts. Mid-July, Catafixia will put out books by Manuel Orestes Nieto (Panama), Jacinta Escudos (El Salvador), and Gonçalo M. Tavares (Angola-Portugal). 

Additionally, this year’s FILGUA marks the tenth anniversary of Catafixia, which has helped launch the careers of poets like Vania Vargas and Julio Serrano Echeverría.

Last month, Costa Rican press los tres editores put out Trayéndolo todo de regreso a casa by Argentine author Patricio Pron, who won the Alfaguara Prize in 2019. los tres editores have previously published books by Luis Chavez, Mauro Libertella, and Valeria Luiselli. 

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Announcing Our June Book Club Selection: Transfer Window by Maria Gerhardt

Transfer Window is a dispatch sent from a kind of hell, but Gerhardt reports with something approaching panache.

Transfer Window was Maria Gerhardt’s last novel: she died within a week of its publication, having battled breast cancer for half a decade. Transfer Window is a dispatch from the front line of that battle, offering a series of wry and witty observations on the “mistakes of the healthy” and a vision of a futuristic Danish society that occupies the liminal space between utopia and dystopia. In Lindy Falk van Rooyen’s English translation, it “fully deserves the international recognition its author never quite received in her own lifetime.”

In nineteen months, the Asymptote Book Club has brought subscribers selections of the best newly translated fiction from nineteen different countries. You can sign up in time to receive the next title via our website, or join the online discussion on our Facebook page.

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Narcyza, Our Contemporary

The first Polish woman writer to focus on women’s experiences and issues that particularly affected women’s lives.

On the bicentenary of her birth, Polish writer Narcyza Żmichowska is more relevant than ever. Though only one of her novels has been translated into English, her poetry, letters, and prose influenced feminist thinkers for generations after her death. Read on to learn about Żmichowska’s portrayals of same-sex relationships and her forward-thinking views on womanhood and religion. 

Narcyza Żmichowska (1819-1876), author of novels, other prose including educational tracts, poetry, and a vast lifelong correspondence, is regarded by feminists and literary historians as the first Polish woman writer to focus on women’s experiences and issues that particularly affected women’s lives. Often referred to as a “proto-feminist,” she was in fact a feminist by any standard, that is, someone who analysed discrimination against women on grounds of their gender and fought against it, in her case with the pen. She was not a “suffragette” fighting for political rights. The political context of the nineteenth-century Polish lands, divided since 1795 between three partitioning empires, where Polish men also had no political rights, is crucial to understanding the emphasis of her struggle; free-thinking women of her generation were confronted not only by a conservative, predominantly Catholic society with its ideologically entrenched ideals of womanhood, but also by political censorship that suppressed any mention of Polish political independence. That said, many of the issues Narcyza Żmichowska addressed were, in broad terms, similar to those addressed by women across Europe. Well-read in French but also other literatures in French translation and abreast of major developments in European science, including Darwinism, Żmichowska was a European writer par excellence, a fact generally unappreciated thanks to the relative obscurity of nineteenth-century women writing in Polish and other “periphery” languages, caused by their marginalisation by traditional mainstream literary criticism in their own countries and by the lack of translations.

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Translation Tuesday: “He Who Is Worthy of Love” by Abdellah Taïa

I am gay. Gayer now than ever.

As countries around the world celebrate Pride Month, this week’s Translation Tuesday reminds us of the challenges many members of the LGBTQ+ community still face every day. In this short story by Moroccan writer Abdellah Taïa, a gay man agonizes over the death of his mother, with whom he had a fraught relationship, and reflects on the power of both her disapproval and her love.

“My mother has gotten younger. The wrinkles on her face are gone. Look. Look. Her skin is brighter. You can see her veins. They’re blue. You can see the inside of her. Look. Look. It’s red, red. Mother’s younger than us now. She’s sleeping. That’s all. She won’t cry out anymore.”

It’s your daughter Samira who says this about you. And I’m surprised. More than surprised. She’s not afraid of you dead. She’s not gripped by any strange feeling or vertigo. You’re her mother. You’re dead. In an hour she won’t be able to touch you anymore, to physically feel the link to you. She’s not afraid at all. She looks at you. She sees you like she’s never seen you before. She puts her hand on your face. She says “my little mom” and she doesn’t cry. Like the other sisters, she stays focused, she doesn’t want to miss this last real moment with you, she doesn’t want to spoil this ritual. She puts all her heart into it. She forgives you, for absolutely everything. She says it.

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Art as Universal Refuge: Ji Yoon Lee on Translating Blood Sisters

We make art so that we don’t forget what our truth is.

This month’s Asymptote Book Club selection, Kim Yideum’s novel Blood Sisters, raises profound questions about class dynamics, gender roles, and the power of language to uphold existing hierarchies. In today’s interview, translator Ji Yoon Lee talks with Asymptote’s Jacob Silkstone about the challenging process of recreating the tones and nuances of the original Korean in English. They also discuss the parallels between Korean political narratives of the 1980s and the current discourse in the USA, as well as Lee’s innovative use of Spanish to translate Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man.”

Jacob Silkstone (JS): Referring to her work as a whole, Kim Yideum has said (in your translation) that “A female writer needs to fight to build her own language against the default system.” It feels to me as though there’s an echo of that statement when the protagonist of Blood Sisters says, “I speak with my own mouth, so I will address others on my own terms. . .”Could you say a little about that “default system” that Kim Yideum’s work struggles against? Are there any aspects of the struggle that feel unique to Korea?

Ji Yoon Lee (JYL): I absolutely see the echo there, too. Specifically, the protagonist, Yeoul, is resisting: in Korea, we often address people by the role that they play in our lives, such as “teacher,” “president of the company,” “older lady,” and so on. Once intimacy develops, there is a shift in the form of address, often towards familial terms, even when you are not related: “older brother,” “older sister,” and so on. That is meant to make people feel a closer connection beyond the societal roles they play for one another.

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Asymptote Podcast: That Which is Found and Gained through Translation

Translation as bridge and compulsion

Podcast Editor Layla Benitez-James reports back from the Unamuno Poetry Festival in Madrid with an excerpt from a panel she moderated, titled “TransAtlantic: Translation as Bridge and Compulsion.” She also explores the dynamic lecture on translation given by Jorge Vessel, poet and translator of Desperate Literature: A Bilingual Anthology—a book highlighting, rather than what is lost, that which is found and gained through the art of translation. Join us for all the happy accidents that can spring forth from this wonderful and sometimes eccentric practice, and get inspired in your own experiments with language.

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Get close up and personal with global literary happenings.

Let language be free! This week, our editors are reporting on a myriad of literary news including the exclusion of Persian/Farsi language services on Amazon Kindle, the vibrant and extensive poetry market in Paris, a Czech book fair with an incredibly diverse setlist, and a poetry festival in São Paolo that thrills in originality. At the root of all these geographically disparate events is one common cause: that literature be accessible, inclusive, and for the greater good. 

Poupeh Missaghi, Editor-at-Large, reporting from New York City

Iranians have faced many ups and downs over the years in their access to international culture and information services, directly or indirectly as a result of sanctions; these have included limitations for publishers wanting to secure copyrights, membership services for journals or websites, access to phone applications, and even postal services for the delivery of goods, including books.

In a recent event, according to Radio Farda, Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing stopped providing Persian/Farsi language services for direct publishing in November 2018. (You can find a list of supported languages here.) This affects many Iranian and Afghan writers and readers who have used the services as a means to publish and access literature free of censorship. Many speculate that this, while Arabic language services are still available, is due to Amazon wanting to avoid any legal penalties related to the latest rounds of severe sanctions imposed on Iran by the U.S.

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Imagining Truths: In Conversation with Gabriela Ybarra

I always feel that I’m a detective of my own life.

“The story goes,” begins Gabriela Ybarra’s novel The Dinner Guest, “that in my family there’s an extra dinner guest at every meal.” This guest, Ybarra writes, occasionally “appears, casts his shadow and erases one of those present” and forms part of the complex family mythology that Ybarra seeks to unravel in her stunning documentary-style debut. The Dinner Guest is a free reconstruction of the events surrounding the kidnapping and murder of her grandfather in 1977 and the death of her mother in 2011. Ybarra deftly combines collective memory, media reports, photographs, Google search results, and instinctive imaginings to unearth her family’s traumatic past. Longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, The Dinner Guest, flawlessly translated by Natasha Wimmer, has just been released in the U.S. by Transit Books. On the eve of publication, we spoke with Gabriela Ybarra about writing grief, playing detective, and finding freedom in a photograph of Robert Walser.

—Sarah Timmer Harvey

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): When did you start writing The Dinner Guest, and was it always intended to be the novel it became?

Gabriela Ybarra (GY): I started to work on The Dinner Guest shortly after my mother died in September 2011. Her illness went by so fast that, when she passed away, I felt the need to write down what I had lived through during the previous months just to make sense of it all. During the process, I got stuck several times. In the beginning, I thought that this was because I was a novice writer and still lacked experience, but as time went by, I realized that there were some behaviors in my family that I couldn’t explain. For example, during my mother’s illness, my father kept talking about a rosary covered in blood, which I thought was very weird, but couldn’t find an explanation for it. As I started to look back, I realized that many of these behaviors were related to the kidnapping and murder of my grandfather by the terrorist group ETA in 1977. In grieving my mother, I stumbled upon the unresolved grief related to my grandfather.

STH: The Dinner Guest is a fascinating blend of fact and fiction. The framework of the story is undoubtedly factual; the kidnapping and death of your grandfather, your mother’s illness, and her subsequent passing are all real, and yet, there are also parts that are pure fiction; imagined events, conversations, and connections. Is it important for you that readers view The Dinner Guest as a novel?

GY: Genre isn’t so important to me. I consider the book a novel because I believe that memory is always fiction and, in the case of my grandfather, I had to make up big parts of his kidnapping because nobody in my family would tell me anything about it. For many years, my family lived as if these traumatic events had never happened. I could infer their pain through their silences, but lacked a story; the only information that I had came from the newspapers. In the case of my mother, I did know the events quite well, but reality is often too complicated to make believable, so I had to twist it.

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Review of Mars by Asja Bakic

[B]eing forced to live on Mars—named for the god of war and the male counterpart to Venus—makes her sick . . .

Mars by Asja Bakić, translated from the Croatian by Jennifer Zoble, Feminist Press, 2019

From a journalist reporting from inside a cult village to children who are convinced their neighbor is a forest monster, the characters portrayed in Mars, the debut short story collection by Bosnian poet, writer, and translator Asja Bakić, are forced to figure out how to survive in their strange realities. Bakić, playing a role reminiscent of Rod Serling in “The Twilight Zone,” carefully pushes aside the curtain on these parallel universes to underscore the uncanniness of everyday life. Each story in the collection takes place in a world that looks and feels familiar at first, but becomes stranger and more foreign the longer you spend in it.

Bakić was born in Tuzla, Bosnia, where she obtained a degree in Bosnian language and literature, two themes deeply explored in the collection. Mars, originally published under the same title in 2015, was shortlisted for the Edo Budiša Award. The stories shift seamlessly in genre from science fiction to dystopian horror, and Bakić deftly combines aspects of speculative fiction and realism to form a cohesive collection that explores universal issues. Bakić has a unique, perceptive voice and was selected as one of Literary Europe Live’s New Voices in 2017. Her work has been translated into seven languages. She currently lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Verdict” by Perveen Shakir

What to say to the ASI? / He who has outsourced the whole working of his mind / what would he know of the perfume of the soil?

Towards the last decade of her life, Shakir worked in different departments in bureaucracy, including the department of Customs and Central Excise. The natural vibrancy and inquisitiveness of her temperament was, understandably, at odds with the drudgery and apathy of mindsets prevalent in these circles. Her writings, provocative on many counts, often got her into trouble with authorities, but she remained steadfast in her poetic verve.

Her encounters with authority figures from the world of bureaucracy form the subject of some of her most interesting poems, ranging in character from light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek encounters, to verse that reads like an open indictment and battle cry.

“Verdict” is part of a selection of one hundred poems published in Defiance of the Rose (Oxford University Press, 2019). This first translation of her work with an international publisher makes her work accessible to the English-speaking world.

—Translator Naima Rashid

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What’s New in Translation: June 2019

The best new reads from across the world, selected and reviewed by members of the Asymptote team.

Not sure what to read this summer? Our team has you covered with reviews of this month’s most anticipated literature in translation, including a Brazilian bestseller set in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, an Egyptian writer’s take on life in the USSR, and an entertaining novel from a beloved Bengali author.

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The Sun on My Head by Geovani Martins, translated from the Portuguese by Julia Sanches, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019

Reviewed by Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large for Brazil

Look out for blowtorches and the BOPE in Geovani Martins’s debut, The Sun on My Head, a collection of thirteen short stories that bring us into the heart of twenty-first century life in Rio’s favelas. Tensions run high between the police, drug slingers and traffickers, and the men, women, and children trying to live their everyday lives. Martins shows us that the language of the favelas is just as legitimate as the language of the academy, keeping “literature” true to everyday form. Julia Sanches preserves this legitimacy in English, delivering a carefully crafted translation filled with colloquialisms, slang, and Portuguese. The result is “some real trifling shit”—a wild ride that exposes us to the complexities of life in the periphery and the complexities of translating that life from one language into another.

Published in Brazil just last year, 2018, O sol na cabeça became an instant bestseller—a literary sensation that brought the voice of twenty-six-year-old Martins into the spotlight. Martins draws on his experiences of living in a favela to paint a modern-day picture of an ever-evolving Rio—particularly around the time of two major international events: the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. In “Spiral,” we see how racial and class profiling begins at a young age, and how irrational assumptions are perpetuated through inherited distrust. Those who live in the favelas are feared by the private school kids, the teenagers taking tennis lessons and the people waiting, anxiously, at the bus stop. “I remembered how that same old woman who’d trembled with fear before I’d given her reason to certainly hadn’t given any thought to how I probably also had a grandma, a mother, family, friends,” the narrator reveals, in a statement that demonstrates one of the overarching premises of the collection: to turn these stories on their head, to legitimize the experiences of those who face prejudice by representing them as whole human beings. The old lady walking on the street, clutching her bag, eyes turned sideways, isn’t the one telling the story anymore…

Martins takes us in and out of the favelas, introducing us to characters who are often in the heat of action (or one step away). In “Russian Roulette,” a young Paulo traces his dad’s gun down his body, into his pants, “savoring the hot-and-cold sensation”—a sign of both his innocence and a complicated relationship with power. In “The Case of the Butterfly,” a young boy fails to save a butterfly as it flitters into the kitchen and falls into a pool of leftover oil on the stove. The narrator in “TGIF”, fed up with collecting tennis balls for rich kids day after day, heads to Jacarezinho to get his fix, only to be robbed by a crooked cop. Each recollection is more of a vignette than a full-fledged story, where image (rather than plot) holds the metaphor. Though these images are strikingly clear, they (intentionally) leave us with minimal resolution—with an uncertainty as to how these characters endure, or overcome, the situations that they do.

The favela, the morro, the barraco: these are complex, distinctly Brazilian, places. Readers who are familiar with them will have an easier time navigating Martins’s text, while those who aren’t might find themselves a bit lost on “the hill”—particularly amidst the vernacular of stories like “Lil Spin,” “The Tale of Parakeet and Ape,” and “The Crossing,” where words are exchanged as quick as drugs. In her latest essay, Sanches points out that Martins seems to choose “to not explain; to let certain readers in and keep others out; there’s something for everyone here, but more for some than for others.” This is a book that lives on the streets, among the people of Rio’s favelas. And life there doesn’t slow down just because we might be unfamiliar with it.

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Ice by Sonallah Ibrahim, translated from the Arabic by Margaret Litvin, Seagull Books, 2019

Review by Sam Carter, Senior Editor

Between 1971 and 1973, the Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim studied at the All-Soviet Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. Yet there he spent less time learning the craft of filmmaking than engaging with cinema as spectator, and, by the time he returned to Egypt in 1974, he had confirmed that his preferred medium was the written word rather than the silver screen. That meant a return to a form in which he was already famous. 1966’s That Smell, which had been banned even before its printed copies could be distributed, was a loosely autobiographical account of a political prisoner after his release yet still under house arrest in Cairo. It is now widely regarded as one of the most significant texts written in Arabic in the second half of the twentieth century.

Margaret Litvin’s deft translation of Ice, which originally appeared in 2011 after being written the year before, sharply observes the Soviet situation in roughly the same period as Ibrahim’s stay there. But rather than a writer interested in potentially becoming a filmmaker, the novel features a scholar pursuing further study in history. Ibrahim’s style, though, resembles nothing so much as that of slow cinema as it stitches together an array of episodes that never yield to the exigencies of a plot and instead offer us the subtle intricacies of life in the USSR.

The result is a compelling depiction of the listlessness that often besets student life. Shukri, the historian, spends some of his time sitting down at a typewriter without producing many pages or sifting through an extensive set of Egyptian newspapers given to him by a journalist and creating a collection of cuttings whose ultimate purpose is unclear even to him. Yet most of this novel suffused with vodka and frequently frustrated sexual desires revolves around the social space of the obshchezhitie or dormitory, where he lives with a rotating cast of roommates that includes Hans, a German student who often attracts the interest of the women Shukri lusts after. These young people have come to Moscow from many parts of the world unsure of what exactly awaited them, and many of them seem to leave with an even less clear idea of what the future will hold after their Soviet sojourns.

Although it is a novel about indecision—about the inability to figure out both what one is doing right now and will then do next—Ice decisively deploys what Litvin calls a “flat style” and does so to great effect. There is something intensely absorbing about the abrupt prose that traces the numbing experience Shukri has as he finds only convolution and irresolution in what had promised to be a place of revolution.

9780811224734Harbart

Harbart by Nabarun Bhattacharya, translated from the Bengali by Sunandini Banerjee, New Directions Press, 2019

Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Editor

By the time he died in 2014, Nabarun Bhattacharya, the author of Harbart, had a Bengali cult following. Through translator Sunandini Banerjee’s mediation, his pool of post-mortem admirers is sure to expand throughout the anglophone world.

Harbart, born into a wealthy family, but orphaned as a young boy and abandoned to the care of his father’s unloving relatives, grew up reading books about the occult. One day, he has a dream in which his Naxalite revolutionary cousin Binu, who’d been shot by the police, reveals the location of a diary hidden behind a picture of Kali in his aunt’s prayer room. He directly sets up a lucrative business; “Conversations with the Dead. Prop: Harbart Sarkar,” says the sign over his door. “Harbart could sense it. He would have to charge-barrage now. Binu had had his time. It was Harbart’s time now. He would have to produce pandemonium—rip apart everything, turn everything upside down until the entire universe reeled in the dance of devastation.” He’s a fake, but also not. True, he lies to his customers. But another truth it that the dead stand on the sidelines of the novel, coexistent with the living, squabbling and commentating. Harbart is a haunted man, and the telling of his own death bookends the rest of the narrative. The reader has the impression that he’s not as much a fraud as a victim-participant in the forward march of capitalism and of the impetus to assign significance to the pointlessness and chaos of material existence.

We meet Harbart, already dead, through the eyes of a lizard. He’s “so still that the lizard crawled across his chest and then down his arm to his left hand, only to find it immersed in a bucket of blood-smelling cold water.” We proceed to learn about him by having a look around his room with him dead in the middle of it. This opening scene is characteristic of the rest of the novel. The perspective is askance, never straight on, and driven by happenstance—a narrative style that playfully destabilizes the gravitational pull of the central plot, protagonist, and message in a traditional novel.

This decentralization, the focus on society’s castaways and their surroundings and vernacular, is typical of Bhattacharya’s body of work. Banerjee’s acrobatic translation is both enormously fun and true to the radical content. The writing disrupts the hegemony of the English language from the inside by celebrating the multilingualism possible within it. Harbart’s English is characterized by staccato dialogue, aurality, sensory experience, and inventive swearing: “Illi! Fucking willy! So many big people—lawyers—doctors—everyone—believed but now all of a sudden blam, it’s a sham! Some strand of pubic hair from somewhere—and I have to go to him and confess. Why? I am a monkey and you’re my uncle? Carbuncle!”

Additionally, the Bengali original is full of English phrases, which can act as status symbols or simple residue of globalization. The translation maintains these phrases in italics. Their clumsy affectation often makes a buffoon of the speaker: “Then he turned to the cameraclicking girl and said, ‘See, as soon as you expose them, they begin to scream and shout. They think that all this melodrama will help them get away with it.’ ‘But he seems to be a dud,’ . . . ‘Oh, he’s a sweet, cute, small-time crook.’ . . . Harbart got angrier. ‘Don’t think your English talking scares me! Fucking English!’”

Without giving away the ending, I will say that it summarizes what’s been already demonstrated throughout the novel: the most explosive volatility is found in what is most thoroughly overlooked.

*****

Read more reviews on the Asymptote blog:

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Friendship, solidarity, and freedom: this week, our editors present literary news under the banner of liberation.

Borders fade into the background during literary festivals and book fairs in Spain, El Salvador, and Kosovo this week as our editors report on an increasing resolve to disregard distance in honouring literature, gathering readers, publishers, and writers from around the world. Madrid glows with a rich festival of poetry, history is made in El Salvador as its first multilingual online literary publication is unveiled, and Kosovo pays tribute to women artists and writers in its capital. 

Layla Benitez-James, Podcast Editor, reporting from Spain 

A rowdy concert, out-of-control house party, or public protest are what come to mind when I think about the police showing up to a gathering in Madrid. However, it was a poetry reading whose audience had spilled out onto the street in front of bookshop Desperate Literature which brought them to give a warning on a warm Tuesday night on May 28.

Over the past two years, I have become involved with the Unamuno Author Series in Madrid, first by doing some introductions for the more or less monthly reading series, and eventually becoming their Director of Literary Outreach as we began to make plans to launch Madrid’s first ever anglophone poetry festival. A grassroots and volunteer outfit from the beginning, the series started by accident on March 27, 2012 when poet and Episcopal priest, Spencer Reece, held what was intended to be a “one-off” reading on the patio of the Catedral del Redentor for Cuban-American poet, Richard Blanco. In partnership with bookseller and co-founder/co-manager of Desperate Literature Terry Craven, and scholar Elizabeth Moe, Reece was unaware that the series would eventually evolve into the packed and vibrant Unamuno Poetry Festival. In the end, the week of May 27 through June 1, 2019 would see eighty readings spread across five venues, including a lecture series hosted in the historic Residencia de Estudiantes, where Federico Garcia Lorca, Salvador Dalí, and Luis Buñuel all lived and studied. Taking place in the mornings, these panels counted poet Mark Doty, Laura García-Lorca (niece of Federico García- Lorca), and local Madrid native poet Óscar Curieses among their ranks, alongside many others. 

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Armenian Literature: A History, A Future in Translation

It is something of a surprise that a country with such an ancient literary tradition has not had more of its corpus translated into English.

Armenia is a small country with an enormous diaspora and a rich literary tradition—so why hasn’t more Armenian literature been translated into English? Today, Assistant Editor Andreea Scridon takes us on a tour of Armenian literary translation, introducing us to influential writers, both ancient and contemporary, who have yet to appear in English.

Many people in the English-speaking world, upon hearing of Armenia, naturally tend to think of the Armenian Genocide. While the recognition of a national tragedy beyond its borders is central to acts of both justice and healing, this notoriety can serve as a double-edged sword for a country’s culture. On the one hand, healing implies a significant act of transcendence, and so cross-border translation of Armenian literature has been important in the past for victims of the Genocide and presumably remains important for the Diaspora today. On the other hand, the works by (and about) Armenians that have received the most exposure have been those written in other languages, outside of Armenia. Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (originally published in German in 1933) is the most notable example of this kind, creating a ripple effect immediately after the dramatic effects took place and raising awareness for the Armenian plight tremendously; decades later, Varujan Vosganian’s The Book of Whispers (first published in Romania in 2009) was longlisted for last year’s PEN America Award. Vasily Grossman’s An Armenian Sketchbook (originally written in Russian), along with two English-language books, Chris Bohjalian’s The Sandcastle Girls (Doubleday, 2012), and Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul (Viking Press, 2006) have enjoyed great success and are examples of the many texts that make up a sort of canon on the subject. But although the topic of the Armenian Genocide remains relevant and important, the fact that none of the best-known books on the topic were written in the Armenian language point to a lacuna that continues to present a question mark today. What’s more, though the Genocide is a central point in Armenian history, we still don’t publish enough Armenian literature in translation. Let us take a trip through this part of the world, then, and explore its literary history. READ MORE…

Transporting Poetry Across Borders: On Teaching Ethnographic Poetry in Japan

With its multiple writing systems, Japanese seemed to lend itself particularly well to the task of writing multilingual poems.

Educator’s Guides are published alongside each issue of Asymptote and include detailed lesson plans that can be used with students of literature, language, or writing. The Asymptote website has additional audiovisual materials, translator and author bios, and works in the original language, making it a valuable educational resource. The most recent issue of the Educator’s Guide can be found on the Asymptote for Educators page.

This article describes the lesson plan Language in Transit: Understanding Ethnographic Poetry from the Asymptote Summer 2018 Educator’s Guide. The piece, from House to House, consists of two poems, “House to House” and “Barjeel,” both of which were written and translated by Shamma Al Bastaki. These poems are part of her undergraduate senior project based on interviews she conducted with people living in the United Arab Emirates. Although she has translated the poems into English, some words or phrases are transliterated, while others are left untranslated and remain in the original languages. From the translator’s note, we discover more about the role of language in the piece:

. . . it is a project about language: language in translation, language as bearer of meaning and medium for story telling, language as a catalyzer of communion and communication, language as sound and a series of phonetics, and language as physical material, existent for its own sake.

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