Monthly Archives: March 2021

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 12, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas and Julia Sherwood

The latest news from Slovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria!

This week, our writers bring you news from Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Hungary. In Slovakia, this year marks the centenary of the birth of renowned writer Ladislav Grosman, while Pavol Rankov has made history by winning the European Book Prize 2020; in Hungary, acclaimed poet Krisztina Tóth is being targeted after criticising some books on the country’s school curriculum; and in Bulgaria, George Orwell’s works being released to the public domain in 2021 has sparked a plethora of new translations. Read on to find out more! 

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-large, reporting from Slovakia and Hungary

The beginning of the year marked 100 years since the birth and forty years since the death of Slovak-born writer Ladislav Grosman. Born in the eastern Slovak town of Humenné on 4 February 1921, he moved to Prague after the war where he made his mark as a writer in the 1960s and, following the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, emigrated to Israel where he died on 25 January 1981. Grosman is primarily known for his novel The Shop on Main Street, which he later adapted into a screenplay for the film that won the foreign language Oscar in 1985. His other books, including Nevesta (The Bride) and the 1000-page-long novel Adam remain largely unknown.

With the European Book Prize 2020 for his novel It Happened on the First of September (Or Some Other Time), Pavol Rankov scored a hat trick, becoming the first Slovak recipient of three international prizes (the book won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2009 and the Polish Angelus Prize in 2011). This time a panel of thirteen journalists from the leading European media chose his book as a “a great contribution to researching the memory and consciousness not only of the people of the Eastern bloc but of all Europe.” Reacting to the news Rankov said: “I view the award as more of a recognition of the French translation than of the original Slovak text, which the jury never held in their hands.” Michel Chasteau’s French translation appeared in 2019, and the book is now also available in English, in Magdalena Mullek’s translation.

Slovakia’s literary scene is unthinkable without the colourful figure of publisher Koloman Kertész Bagala. Since founding his publishing house thirty years ago, Bagala has published 500 books by Slovak writers, organised twenty-five rounds of his short story competition Poviedka, and hundreds of discussions, readings and other events, as well as discovering many new Slovak writers. Bagala, sometimes referred to as the “unguided missile of Slovak literature,” has persevered despite several near-bankruptcies and nervous breakdowns. While some authors moved on to more mainstream houses, many have remained fiercely loyal. They include Balla, a past Asymptote contributor, who immortalised the maverick publisher in his novel Big Love. When his narrator bumps into Bagala in a seedy bar in Rotterdam, he observes: “This man looks perfectly at home wherever he is, as if he belongs wherever he happens to be . . . Dishevelled, unkempt, unshaven, frustrated, on the brink of bankruptcy and madness—but right where he belongs.”

And in the week when we celebrate International Women’s Day, we can’t ignore disturbing news from Slovakia‘s southern neighbour, Hungary: Krisztina Tóth, one of most acclaimed contemporary Hungarian poets and writers (and past Asymptote contributor) has become the target of a vicious media campaign after she criticized some of the books in the country’s school curricula for depicting women as passive and submissive (more information on Hungarian Literature Online). Taken out of context, these were presented as calls for the banning of literary classics and she has been subjected to horrendous harrassment, even having dog excrement pushed through her letter box. In an interview with the Czech writer Dora Kaprálová for the Slovak-Hungarian online journal dunszt.sk, Tóth said: “Power has no sense of humour, authoritarian regimes destroy the sense of playfulness and humour, since they assume a variety of points of view. My weapon is irony. But now my weapon has been destroyed and I am bleeding.” READ MORE…

A Brief Introduction to Nermin Yɪldɪrɪm’s Secret Dreams in Istanbul

March 11, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Ümit Hussein

Secret Dreams in Istanbul is a work of literary fiction, but deals with issues that are very much on the agenda of today’s society.

Secret Dreams in Istanbul is a fascinating Turkish novel by Nermin Yɪldɪrɪm, published at the end of last year by Anthem Press. Before I go any further, I must confess that I am the book’s translator, but I would want to share it even if that weren’t the case. Only very occasionally does one come across a book that leaps out from all others and lodges itself in one’s mind. When that happens, it mustn’t be taken lightly.

March 8 was International Women’s Day, and it strikes me as a very apt time to talk about this novel, given that it draws attention to so many issues that are relevant to the battles women have been fighting for over a century to combat injustice. These themes include domestic violence, forced marriage, feigned virginity, self-induced abortion, physical and social inequality, and, more broadly, the condition of being a victim. In varying degrees, all of the characters in this novel are victims: of their gender, their social class, their biological clock, their complexes, social taboos, social expectations, their physical, intellectual and financial limitations, and of their own family. This is a book in which the weak are oppressed by the strong: it’s about facing up to one’s insecurities and confronting one’s demons; it’s about the age-old problem of sibling rivalry. And running parallel to all of these conflicts is the other key theme in the novel—the role of memory in the human psyche.

To use a somewhat frivolous simile, if you have a diamond necklace, you wouldn’t leave it locked away in a drawer where nobody can appreciate it when it could be displayed for all the world to see. I am a translator in the very privileged position of making it possible for Anglophones to enjoy the literature of other languages, and I felt the need to share this particular gem. For that reason, I decided to translate the book and to now write of why I regard the book so highly, as well as the process of translating it.

I first encountered Ruyalar Anlatɪlmaz (as it is called in Turkish) in 2012 when I was commissioned to translate a section (the first seventy pages). It moved me very deeply; I knew there would be elements of this book that would stay with me forever. But it wasn’t until 2016 that I received the go ahead (at my instigation) to translate it in its entirety.

This is Nermin Yɪldɪrɪm’s second novel. She has since written another five, all of them very fine and more successful than this one. Yet it was Secret Dreams in Istanbul that I felt compelled to translate. Whilst re-reading it, four years after my initial reading, I was taken aback to discover it was almost unnecessary to keep reading because I remembered practically every word. I don’t recall that ever happening to me, either before or since.

To briefly summarise the plot, Pilar, the novel’s Spanish protagonist, returns from work one evening to discover that her husband, Eyüp, has suddenly and inexplicably disappeared from the home they share in Barcelona. She learns from the police the following morning that he has boarded a plane for Istanbul, the city of his birth that he has not visited since he left it almost two decades previously. Mystified as to what could have provoked such uncharacteristic behaviour, and assailed by her own insecurities, she decides to follow him there and bring him back. Packing a tiny bag with just a few clothes and the dream diary that Eyüp’s psychologist has asked him to keep (in an attempt to get to the bottom of what has been disturbing his sleep), she sets off for Istanbul, where she will embark on a journey of painful discovery. Meeting Eyüp’s dysfunctional family, from which he has been as good as estranged since before she has known him, and his friends, and seeing for the first time the city where he grew up, she pieces together the clues to uncover the horrifying truth about what drove Eyüp away. READ MORE…

The Dangers of Complacency: An Interview with the Founders of Sandorf Passage

March 10, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Moore

. . . there are a lot of mental borders that writers and translators are crossing every day. I think publishers also have to do that.

Sandorf Passage is a new independent nonprofit publishing house, whose first titles have been launched this month. Its founders, American Buzz Poole and Croatian Ivan Sršen have both previously worked as editors and obtained EU funding to bring works from the former Yugoslavia into English. Sandorf Passage focuses on “writing inspired by both conflict zones and the dangers of complacency.” Their first title, From Nowhere to Nowhere, by Bekim Sejranovic was published at the beginning of March. Now, with their second, Vesna Maric’s The President Shop released yesterday, and two more books due for release next month, Blog Editor Sarah Moore spoke with the founders of Sandorf Passage about the importance of translated works and what to expect from their titles.

Sarah Moore (SM): How did you both come to editing?

Buzz Poole (BP): I was a lifelong reader, studied literature in college as an undergraduate and then graduate student at San Francisco State University, where I got involved with a handbound letterpress literary journal called Em. At the time it was a hotbed of indie lit journals. I moved to New York, got a job as editor at Mark Batty Publisher (MBP), and moved on to be Managing Director of Black Balloon Publishing, which is now an imprint of Catapult—that’s where my story and Ivan’s started to merge. We had met at the Frankfurt Book Fair when I was at MBP and hit it off. Ivan was there as an agent and translator, and at the time we thought that we might try to do something, though it never quite worked out. Then fast forward to Black Balloon. I saw Ivan and said, “Hey, I’m acquiring fiction now—what have you got?” And he had Robert Perišić’s Our Man in Iraq, which was critically acclaimed and unlocked the floodgates in terms of our continuing collaborations.

Ivan Sršen (IS): During my studies I started working in a small bookstore that was owned by a small publishing house in Zagreb. I was just a twenty-year-old student, watching all these great authors and translators coming into our small bookstore. Being part of that collective was very important for me and shaped my view of the business of publishing and what editing really is. It’s a lot about communication: knowing the people, what they are looking for, what they have to offer, and where their horizon is spreading. I was lucky enough to get a job as an intern editor working on music books, which launched me into the world of creative publishing—a small scene but very diverse, with the legacy of former Yugoslavia. Many big writers came from Yugoslavia, like the Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andrić, and I wanted to pursue a literary editing career. So I worked with a few publishers until, in the end, I realised I would have to start something on my own. That’s how I started Sandorf in 2008—basically without any savings and on the verge of the world economic catastrophe! So those were interesting years, but that’s the time when I met Buzz. I always knew that I wanted to go beyond the borders. Not just national borders, but all kinds of borders—imaginary, mental—and in working with books there are a lot of mental borders that writers and translators are crossing every day. I think publishers also have to do that.

SM: So how did Sandorf become Sandorf Passage?

BP: We’re very similar and we both have the desire to be as self-sufficient as possible and to do things the way we want them done. The Our Man in Iraq project was the first stepping-stone in this becoming something more official. Ivan was representing Robert as his agent and the book had already been published in a UK English-language edition so I had the benefit of being able to read it. When I read it, I liked it, but immediately said—with my editor’s cap on—that it needed to change and could become so much better. Robert and Ivan were open to that, and that’s the reason why the book got as much attention as it did; it’s a better book now, having received a more thorough edit than it had received originally in the Croatian or in the UK edition. This opened the door to its potential. Then Ivan and Robert were given funding from the Croatian Ministry of Culture to start a literary festival called Lit Link, which still exists. We started being able to invite international writers and editors to Croatia to meet Croatian authors. For the first project, Journey to Russia, Ivan was able to secure some funding for a Croatian domestic English-language edition that I worked on with Ivan and Will Firth, the translator. Then at an ALTA conference in Minneapolis three years ago, Ivan and I were both there. Sandorf had gotten to a very good place so we thought, what if we did a US imprint? And here we are. We got a grant from the EU to provide subsidies for bringing writing from the former Yugoslavia into the English-language market.

IS: Yes, having these four books that are now coming out, buying the rights for them, and discussing them with Buzz marked the beginning of Sandorf Passage. I already had the rights for late Bekim Sejranović’s novel From Nowhere To Nowhere. Then Vesna Maric sent me her new manuscript, The President Shop. And we had Journey to Russia, already translated by Will Firth and published by Sandorf in Croatia in English. So with these three main books in English, we agreed that we had to continue—we couldn’t say no! It’s great when you start a new independent publishing project because you can really enjoy the books and dedicate your time to each title. That’s what it’s all about in publishing: having time to work on the books, to take care, and to discuss them with the author. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: from Pork Ribs by Amarylis de Gryse

March 9, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Jenny Watson

There are few things sadder than a launderette. It’s the perfect place to cry your eyes out without anyone disturbing you.

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, a seemingly mundane chore adds to a woman’s existential frustration in this painfully funny excerpt from Amarylis de Gryse’s 2020 debut novel, Pork Ribs. Translator Jenny Watson contextualizes the excerpt’s place in the story: “In the aftermath of her breakup with Blok, the favoured son of a family of butchers, narrator Marieke finds herself living in a hire car in the middle of a heatwave, reflecting on the failure of their relationship, her childhood at the mercy of her mother’s depression and emotional abuse, and her private history of disordered eating.” In the following passage, Marieke finds herself in a no-win situation as a laundromat’s unforgiving policies place her in a nearly Kafkaesque level of bureaucratic helplessness. As misfortunes compile, we’re taken on a narrative journey through minor tragedies in the shadow of major tragedies, shedding light into the humorous but heartbroken mind of our protagonist. As Watson writes in her introduction: “Through her subtle narration, wry humour and flights into vivid fantasy, Amarylis de Gryse offers a raw and moving depiction of shame, love, and human relationships that feels especially pertinent in the context of contemporary fat liberation movements and renewed interest in trauma and physical health.” A tragicomic gem from a rising star of Flemish literature.

As soon as I reach the town centre, a wall of heat hits me through the car window. I could have hired one with air conditioning but I would only have been able to keep it until tomorrow. I drive onto the roundabout, past the primary school and Bermuda’s, the laundrette. I lost all my summer clothes in there yesterday. Maybe “lost” isn’t the right word. I know exactly where they are: in the far recesses of the shop, inside the second to last washing machine.

*

There are few things sadder than a launderette. It’s the perfect place to cry your eyes out without anyone disturbing you. When I went in yesterday, there was an old man there. He was wearing a white vest with a brown stain, and watching the flat screen TV above the washing machines from an uninviting sofa. I suspected it was gravy, the mark on his vest, and wondered why he hadn’t put it in the wash. He looked at me as if he’d heard me thinking.

“Customers doing their washing have priority over the dryer,” he said. He pointed to a sign on the wall that said exactly the same thing.

“I know,” I said. “I’m here for the washer too.”

I smiled but he didn’t. Instead, he tilted his chin back up towards the television, a gesture of disdain rather than necessity, and kept his eyes locked on the screen from then on. On it, people on mute were kissing. I went over to the second machine from the back, heaved a knot of fusty clothes from my cardboard moving box, extricated the underwear, T-shirts and dresses and stuffed them into the drum. I probably should have divvied them up between two machines, but I had just enough change for one wash and one drying cycle. I could feel the old man’s eyes drilling into my back. His arms were probably folded over his big belly in contempt, the stain on his vest still visible.

“It’s quiet in here today,” I called over my shoulder but he didn’t answer so I gave up, walked back to the front of the shop in silence, bought soap and fabric softener from the vending machine, then dropped my coins into the slot on the washer and slid my box in front of it. READ MORE…

The “Untranslatable” Osvaldo Lamborghini’s English-Language Debut

March 8, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Paul Holzman

Lamborghini is all wild and free in his work, and Sequiera corrals it, grounds it.

Two Stories by Osvaldo Lamborghini, translated from the Spanish by Jessica Sequeira, Sublunary Editions, 2021

The subject of Osvaldo Lamborghini’s impact on Argentine Literature summons a polarity of responses. The late Leopoldo Marechal, commenting on Lamborghini’s seminal El Fiord, said: “It’s perfect. A sphere. Shame it’s a sphere of shit.” On the contrary, César Aira, Lamborghini’s mentor/curator of sorts, extrapolates his singularity—claiming his work to be unparalleled. Academics of the greatest rigor and other heavyweights of the contemporary Latin American literati—such as Tamara Kamenszain and Roberto Bolaño—have unfettered their comments on the writing of Lamborghini as well: the former finding the need to unabatedly analyze, theorize, and deconstruct the dialectic around Lamborghini’s work, and the latter encouraging the reader to enter with caution. With so much contention surrounding his oeuvre, taking on the task of translating any of Lamborghini’s work is a mighty—even ominous—task. It therefore comes to no surprise that a print translation into the English has taken a relatively long time to reach our hands, but it has arrived: Two Stories by Osvaldo Lamborghini, by the intrepid hand of translator Jessica Sequeira.

The written word, for Lamborghini, permeates the conscious with a concise and potent mechanism, boggling the minds of readers with an intelligently savage use of syntax, punctuation, and orthography. I first encountered his antics in El Fiord, his first publication. After quickly scrapping my thesaurus and dictionary, I stumbled between aversion and infatuation, rummaging through a labyrinth of blogs and academic databases for explanations and makeshift guides to the text. After a few years of indulging in the somewhat toxic relationship of attempting to translate El Fiord into English, my notes revealed that a great many elements of his writing transcend conventional translation approaches and decisions, culminating in ever more possibilities for the text. Thus, translation is an important tool for engaging the multifarious nature of Lamborghini’s work, and Two Stories demonstrates that the act of translation proves to be a helpful light while shadowboxing what some call the “untranslatable” Osvaldo Lamborghini.

It is not only Lamborghini’s quirky punctuation and witty syntax that deems his work untranslatable; the challenge lies within his deep plunge into Argentine history, politics, literature, popular culture, and identity at large. Two Stories is no exception. Each story is meticulously laced with gaucho and contemporary slang—not to mention the author’s own neologisms. Jessica Sequiera is to be commended, then, for a translation that does not break or loosen the tensions Lamborghini creates with the aforementioned layers embedded in his work, setting the state for the Anglophone community to consider how Lamborghini has set himself apart, breaking from the established literary scene. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 5, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Clémence Lucchini, Darren Huang, and Thuy Dinh

The latest news from the Vietnamese Diaspora, Taiwan, and the United States!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from the Vietnamese Diaspora, Taiwan, and the United States. The diasporic Vietnamese community has been mourning renowned poet Nguyễn Lương Vỵ; in Taiwan, Leo Ou-fan Lee and Esther Yuk-ying have released their highly acclaimed co-authored memoir; and in the United States, PEN America has announced the Longlist for the 2021 PEN America Literary Awards. Read on to find out more! 

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

The diasporic Vietnamese community is mourning poet Nguyễn Lương Vỵ, who recently died of COVID-19 at aged sixty-eight. Tributes and essays devoted to his fruitful legacy have appeared online, with mentions of his March 3, 2021 funeral in Midway City, California.

Born in Quảng Nam, Central Vietnam—a hardscrabble terrain famous for its revolutionaries and poets—Nguyễn Lương Vỵ used onomatopoeic speech to create multivalent “compressions” of sound, image, and sense. Instructed in Chinese and Nôm scripts by his grandfather, Nguyễn Lương Vỵ gravitated toward Tang poetry, haiku, and Zen philosophy. These influences shaped his lifelong exploration of Âm, a Vietnamese homonymic concept that represents the motherlode of sound, voice, language, female, and night, overlapping with the Buddhist, Hinduist, and Jainist Om. READ MORE…

Twenty Poems and Two Women: Kathrin Schmidt and Sue Vickerman

March 4, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Andreea Scridon

Schmidt is determined to use the most searing images to jolt the reader into the reality she has been forced to live in.

Twenty Poems by Kathrin Schmidt, translated from the German by Sue Vickerman, Arc Publications, 2020

Born in the former GDR and now of Berlin, Kathrin Schmidt is a renowned poet and novelist. Notorious in her native Germany as a competitor of Herta Müller (since beating the celebrated writer for the 2009 German Book Prize), she is a strong and serious voice of what translator Sue Vickerman terms “the left-behind east.” Schmidt, who has worked as an editor and a child psychologist, has published six poetry books and five volumes of fiction in German. A versatile author whose own interior and external experience stands at the base of her writings, Schmidt continually broaches contemporary topics, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to migration in the era of the internet, with relentless perspicacity and humor.

An excellent translator doesn’t necessarily have to be a writer, but when an exceptional translator is an exceptional writer in his or her own right, as is the case with poet-translator Sue Vickerman, the experiment takes on a new aura, advancing transcultural dialogue and culture itself. In her introduction to Kathrin Schmidt: Twenty Poems (the author’s first collection in English), Vickerman draws the reader into her own personal experience of translating Schmidt, a project she completed with obsessive attention to detail and superhuman dedication.

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Ernesto Calzavara: Between Dialects and Words

March 3, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Marina Dora Martino

Calzavara had left Italian behind, a language “in which he could never raise his voice.”

In 1966 the poet Ernesto Calzavara, born in Treviso in the northeast of Italy, published e. Parole mate, Parole pòvare (And. Mad words, Poor words). This collection of poems written in the trevisàn dialect became the emblem of Calzavara’s rebellion against the disappearance of local idioms in favour of the Italian language, but it was also his first step breaking away from the Neodialettali poets and the rural themes and settings of traditional vernacular poetry. The puns and wordplay in this collection are irretrievable in the Italian language—they are part of Treviso as the landscape is, or the weather—but Calzavara believed that dialects had an inherent linguistic power, and only by tapping into that power could they break free from their condition of dying languages. In this essay, Assistant Editor Marina Dora Martino, looks at Calzavara’s poetry in the context of Italian local languages in danger of fading away forever, and considers what it means to remember and forget a language, a place, and a way of life.

Growing up, I absorbed the notion that speaking in dialect was vulgar and inadequate, especially at school. I am not sure where or when my first encounter with the local dialect even occurred—my family (originally from Naples) didn’t speak it, the schools didn’t use it, and most of my friends practiced it only with their grandparents, if at all. Treviso, my hometown, is an ancient city in the northeastern plains of Italy, whose local variation of the Veneto dialect is known as trevisàn—the Veneto dialect being a sort of regional language understood everywhere in the Veneto region, from the mountains to the sea. Excluded from school and spoken rarely among friends, Veneto lingered somewhere at the edge of my life for a long time. It was only by chance, picking up a secondhand book at the town market, that I found out about the existence of local poets, and an entirely new literary world opened to me. This is how I met Ernesto Calzavara’s poetry and realised that I had to rethink everything I knew about the dialects of my country.

It is widely known that Italy has many regional dialects, but not everybody knows that they are more than a bit of an accent and the occasional slang word. Far from being only a distortion of standard Italian, dialects are complex and ancient ways of speaking—in some cases languages in their own right—and they have been around since long before standard Italian even existed. They were known as “volgari,” from vulgo (a.k.a. not Latin but the languages that most common people spoke in their daily life) and they had started emerging from Latin itself as early as the eighth century, transformed by virtue of contact with pre-roman local languages (Etruscan, Osco-Umbrian, Messapic, and the like) but also, throughout the years, by the influence (or invasion) of tongues from other lands, such as Gaulish, Spanish, French, and Arabic. The volgari were generally considered inadequate for the high expressions of the mind, so it was normal praxis for intellectuals to write and discuss their work in Latin. This was until Dante and Petrarch came around, bringing their Tuscan dialect to the forefront of poetic innovation and proving once and for all that volgari could take on the most exalted topics (the Sicilian school of poets had prepared the ground in this sense) as well as the lowest. Indeed, in De Vulgari Eloquentia Dante went even further and made the argument (in Latin, so that it couldn’t be ignored by the intellectuals) that the mother tongue was more noble because it was learnt from infancy, and non-mediated by grammar. Which makes it all the more ironic that his fourteenth-century Tuscan (and Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s) would later be picked by sixteenth-century intellectuals as the basis for standard Italian, as the result of an educated debate on which of the peninsula’s many languages should become its lingua franca; in reality, a debate of intellectuals for intellectuals that had little or nothing to do with the life of the vulgo. In 1861, the year of Italian unification, 78% of Italians were illiterate, and most of them spoke only their regional language. The unionist phrase “we made Italy, now we must make Italians” shows the uneasiness of a young country whose people couldn’t communicate with each other from region to region, which led to standard Italian being made the language of education, politics, administration, and entertainment in the attempt to “italianise” Italy. Despite this, by the 1950s and ’60s the gap between the official role of Italian and its place in the life of people, particularly in rural areas, was still shockingly wide. With the arrival of television the nation found its most powerful tool for counteracting illiteracy: TV programs like Telescuola and Non è mai troppo tardi (it is never too late) are believed to have taught half a million Italians how to read and write.

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Translation Tuesday: “Eternal Children” by Satomi Hara

March 2, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Toshiya Kamei

My cells would be cared for and fed to form another human being. Eventually, they would attend school and grow into components forming the system.

This week’s Translation Tuesday presents a coming-of-age science fiction drama from an emerging voice in Japanese literature. Translator and Asymptote contributor Toshiya Kamei introduces this week’s feature: “Set in the near future, Satomi Hara’s ‘Eternal Children’ depicts the subtle, subdued interaction between two adolescents on the eve of their graduation. Trapped within the confines of the dormitory, the ungendered narrator quietly examines their own existence while gazing at their classmate, who dances outside in a carefree manner. Each word, each glance, and each motion become replete with significance. The dormitory setting and somewhat unreliable narration carry echoes of other works in the genre such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. The world created merely with 4,000 Japanese characters lingers in the reader’s mind long after this brief tale concludes.”

One hour after lights-out, I still tossed in bed. Usually, I’d drift into sleep as soon as I pulled my comforter over my head. Something stirred outside the window, and I strained my ears. It wasn’t B7. They snored and gritted their teeth. It wasn’t D25 either. D25 was a sound sleeper and almost always slept through till morning.

Out of habit, I hesitated to peek outside. If somebody found out I was still awake, I’d get into serious trouble. But I decided to peek outside anyway. By this time tomorrow, I would no longer be a student here. Nobody could punish me then. Nothing mattered anymore. I pulled the thick beige curtain open slightly.

It was you, A1. You danced around the pond in the middle of the yard.

You moved your long, sinewy limbs while gliding through the darkness with carefree abandon.

Your graceful movements exuded childlike innocence, and yet, at the same time, reminded me of a fragile work of art.

I held my breath and watched you dance the night away.

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

March 1, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Barbara Halla

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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