Monthly Archives: April 2021

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 30, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Darren Huang, Julia Sherwood, and Thuy Dinh

The latest news from the Vietnamese Diaspora, Taiwan, and the Czech Republic!

This week’s dispatches feature an extended report from the Vietnamese Diaspora in homage to the late Nguyễn Huy Thiệp, who passed away in Vietnam aged seventy. In addition, we bring you news of the publication of Nishikawa Mitsuru’s diary in Taiwan and a plethora of current online events celebrating literature from the Czech Republic. Read on to find out more! 

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

Nguyễn Huy Thiệp, who catapulted into international fame during Vietnam’s Đổi Mới (Renovation) period, died on 20 March in Thanh Xuân District, Hanoi, Vietnam. He was seventy.

Born on April 29, 1950, Thiệp graduated from Hanoi University of Education with a history degree in 1970 and was sent to Sơn La—Vietnam’s northwestern mountains—to teach communist cadres. While there, he absorbed local Hmong folklore, Vietnamese poetry, translated selections from modern and classical Chinese literature, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Gorky, Camus, Goethe, Tagore, Neruda, and the Bible.

From 1986 to 1991, Nguyễn Huy Thiệp’s short stories were widely read and debated both in Vietnam and abroad for their startling break from social realism. His most controversial—which can be read as nesting narratives—were “Vàng Lửa” (Fired Gold), “Kiếm Sắc” (“Sharp Sword”), and “Phẩm Tiết” (“Chastity”). These stories employ decentralized, conflicting points-of-view, vernacular language, and spare dialogues to render complex portraits of established historical figures such as the poet Nguyễn Du, and Emperors Quang Trung and Gia Long. The works embody Thiệp’s signature themes: the relationship between the artist and the state, the porous border between trust and betrayal, and the concept of chastity as it relates to sexual power, ideological orthodoxy, and political expediency.

The era of open expression was short-lived. Thiệp’s ambiguous, scatological tales were considered too destabilizing to the Communist view of Vietnamese history. Accused of heresy, overnight Thiệp became a de-facto dissident. The editor Nguyên Ngọc, his literary mentor, was also fired from Văn Nghệ (Literature and Art) Magazine—where his works first received a nurturing reception. To sustain his livelihood, Thiệp made ceramic art and managed a restaurant serving wild game.

He kept a low profile but continued to write and publish short stories. His oeuvres at this juncture—a hybrid form of literary homage and Dadaist musings—were considered too insular to merit attention. “As The Crane Ascends It Gives a Startled Cry” (“Hạc Vừa Bay Vừa Kêu Thảng Thốt”) is an allegory about mortality, missed opportunity, and “the pale glimmer” of poetic fame. The protagonist in “A Vietnamese Lesson” (“Bài Học Tiếng Việt”) posits that the compound word tâm hồn (soul) in Vietnamese, coming from an impoverished lexicon, is sadly deprived of affiliations to sexual organs (forthrightness) and yellow traffic signal (moderation/doubt).

Thiệp was awarded the Chevalier Insignia of France’s “Ordre des Arts et des Lettres” in 2007, and the Premio Nonino Prize by the Italian government in 2008. At his death, his legacy consists of some fifty short stories, a novel, seven plays, and a collection of essays called A Net to Catch The Birds (Giăng Lưới Bắt Chim). READ MORE…

Announcing Our April Book Club Selection: A Perfect Cemetery by Federico Falco

April 29, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Shawn Hoo

Here is writing which transforms provincialism into the province of fiction, drama, and ultimately, nourishment . . .

The vast contours of the internal landscape are painted with delicacy and precise restraint by Argentine writer Federico Falco in A Perfect Cemetery, our Book Club selection for the month of April. With his studies of life on the rural outskirts, the author gently but determinately probes the stoicism and stillness of human existence, and how a perceptible smallness and inwardness can betray a complex and considered philosophy of living. In light of our days being increasingly filled with aspirational stimuli, Falco’s work is a respite of care, of untangling the secret threads that connect the nature of being with the ways of the world.

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 Q&As with the author and/or the translator of each title!

A Perfect Cemetery by Federico Falco, translated from the Spanish by Jennifer Croft, Charco Press, 2021

In five impeccably crafted short stories, Argentine writer Federico Falco displays his distinctive gift for distilling and dramatising the quietude of rurality to generate—from such ostensibly minor landscapes—an intense and varied portrait of life on the geographical periphery. Take, for example, the titular story: Víctor Bagiardelli, a scrupulous engineer of cemeteries, is commissioned by the mayor of small town Colonel Isabeta to build their first cemetery. Mayor Giraudo no longer wants to have the town’s dead sent to nearby Deheza to rest, but he meets resistance from the town council, who accuses him of abusing public funds in the interest of ensuring that his father is buried at home. “A bunch of ignoramuses who care nothing for progress,” Giraudo grumbles of a council whose inertness, he believes, only serves to secure the town in its provinciality.

Giraudo’s description—though unkind—is perhaps not an inaccurate assessment of Falco’s characters who, in their locality, shun the promise of progress. They are searching, instead, for a place to rest. Whether a literal burial place at the end of one’s life, or simply a spot to retreat to in order to go on living—the quest for silence and solitude constitute the central drama of their phlegmatic dispositions. After all, ‘cemetery’—from the Greek koimētḗrion—refers first and foremost to a sleeping chamber. A perfect cemetery, as the dark comedy of the collection’s title suggests, refers then to an ideal place for rest, recuperation, and languor. Read together, Falco’s fiction cohesively articulates—as the book’s intellectual and emotional pleasure—retreat as a way of life against the hedonism of pursuit.

Meanwhile, even as Mr Bagiardelli oversees the cemetery’s construction on the hillside down to the last weeping willow, and residents are eager to reserve the best spots for themselves—the 104-year-old Old Man Giraudo refuses to die, much to his son’s consternation and the engineer’s chagrin. Even the pinnacle spot in the cemetery, under the shadow of a majestic oak, is unable to convince the centenarian to rest reliably, as he actively plots against not just the cemetery’s but his life’s completion; as such, we come to understand how the ideal resting place never comes easy for these characters. That is, the only legitimate form of pursuit for the people who populate Falco’s landscape is one that is restlessly in search of stillness; a philosophy of solitude that knows how a privacy to live and die can be a hard-won thing. READ MORE…

The Strange—and Strangely Familiar—World of 1800s Science Fiction Novella Les Xipéhuz

April 28, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Andrea Blatz

Rosny suggests that colonialism will eventually end because of a lack of communication.

In J.-H. Rosny’s 1888 novella Les Xipéhuz, strange beings invade humans’ territory and immediately begin to kill them. Communication becomes impossible; translation is useless because the Xipéhuz threaten humanity’s existence. In today’s essay, Andrea Blatz argues that, whilst science fiction purports to tell stories foreign to our own experience, this French book represents an all-too-familiar colonial situation—and crystalizes the relationship between language and imperialism.

J.-H. Rosny—the nom de plume of brothers Joseph Henri Honoré Boex and Séraphin Justin François Boex—wrote during the Third Republic, when France was expanding its empire in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. But the country had also recently lost the Alsace-Lorraine region to Germany after the Franco-Prussian War, and a loss so close to home was a brutal blow to national pride. Borders also shift in Les Xipéhuz, in which mysterious creatures invade the humans’ territory. The French empire claimed that its raison d’être was to bring its civilization to the rest of the world, and one way to do this was to spread its language. Consequently, the Alliance Française was established in 1883 to teach the French language and spread its culture and civilization, as well as to help create a new French identity.

In this context of imperial expansion, science fiction emerged. Belgian author J.-H. Rosny Aîné—the later pen name of elder brother Joseph—was one of the first authors to write science fiction in the French language, along with Jules Verne. In his works, Rosny pushes readers to imagine humans evolving to create a better world, free of colonialism, through science. The protagonist in Les Xipéhuz, Bakhoûn, represents the use of scientific knowledge for human advancement. Although seen as an outsider for his strange habits—for example, he farms instead of hunting and gathering—he is respected, and the nomadic Pjehou tribe turns to him when their methods against the invading Xipéhuz—who may or may not be from another planet—prove useless. Bakhoûn, who is thousands of years ahead of his time, represents modern rationality in comparison to the primitive beliefs of the other members of his tribe. His beliefs are based on logic rather than superstition:

Premièrement, il croyait que la vie sédentaire, la vie à place fixe, était préférable à la vie nomade, ménageait les forces de l’homme au profit de l’esprit. Secondement, il pensait que le Soleil, la Lune et les étoiles n’étaient pas des dieux, mais des masses lumineuses; Troisièmement, il disait que l’homme ne doit réellement croire qu’aux choses prouvées par l’expérience.

First, he espoused the idea that sedentary existence was preferable to nomadic life, allowing man to channel vital forces toward the development of the mind. Second, he thought that the Sun, the Moon and the Stars were not gods but luminous bodies. Third, he taught that man should only believe in things that can be proven by Measurement.

In other words, Bakhoûn bases his conclusions on evidence he has gathered, employing a quantitative methodology to learn about the Xipéhuz. During the weeks he spends observing them, he formulates and tests hypotheses regarding the invaders’ social, educational, and communication systems.

His findings mirror an anthropological study and the importance of science for the spread of the French empire. As the French did with their subjects, Bakhoûn used his newly acquired knowledge to gain a position of power over the Xipéhuz. Scientific advancement was said to measure how advanced a group of people were and thus was used as a tool in imperial expansion. Scientism, which promoted an objective view of the world, became the dominant ideology. To spread science, language also had to be spread. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Progress of Josef K.’s Trial and the Appearance of a Tiger Hornet” by Phu Kradat

April 27, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Peera Songkünnatham

Barely had Josef K. begun to touch on the progress of his trial when that one tiger hornet flew into the room.

Why was Kafka’s The Trial never completed? Critic Michael Masiello has suggested that the master chronicler of bureaucracy “struggle[d] to give any beginning-middle-end narrative shape to what is essentially dead and undistinguished time—time spent waiting, vainly seeking answers from different-yet-the-same sources, time lost in futility and longing and empty hope,” adding that Kafka himself probably did not realize how eerily what he conjured would “come to life in our modern bureaucratic hellscapes.” In the following story that takes place in The Trial’s parallel universe, Thai author Phu Kradat skillfully stages an encounter between Josef K. and “you” to reflect Thailand’s political reality in the twenty-first century—one that is similarly pierced with fear and paranoia. By introducing a very local motif—the dangerous tiger hornet—Phu Kradat, who published the story in 2018 in response to the ongoing abuse of judicial power under military rule in Thailand, makes the story fully his own.

Josef K. hobbled his way through the valley to the cement brick cabin where you reside one afternoon, about an hour before a tiger hornet flew right in and precisely ten years after you started residing in this cabin here.

The sunlight scattering in through the breeze block wall that afternoon had exerted itself to the point of fatigue. The lazy coos of the pigeons who shared your roof. The sharp smell of their droppings jabbing at your nostrils. Three geckos lying flat on the wall in serenity. Cobwebs wrapped around corners and breeze blocks just like fishnets expertly set down in the shallows. The cold blast barreling on relentlessly with none of its reputed wind chill effect. You were waking up with a pang of hunger and thirst. With sticky, bleary eyes you sat around in a stupor for a long while. A bitter taste in your mouth lingered from the painkillers you’d consumed before flopping down for a siesta right around noon.

A knock on the door made you get on your feet and shake off your sluggishness. Today was your day off. Same as yesterday and the days before. You had to take a break from your job cutting grass on the eucalyptus plantation after having come down with the flu. You’d remained bedridden for days on end, until today when the fever subsided somewhat. As the door opened, you were taken aback by one small-framed scrawny creature. Popping rib cage. Disheveled hair. Old clothes torn to rags. Strong body odor. A step back to recompose. A silent stare at the visitor’s face. When finally your ability to process returned, enough of it anyway, you asked, “Who are you?”

The gaunt, small-framed man moved his trembling lips and out came in broken syllables:

“Ka . . . My . . . name . . . is . . . Josef . . . Ka . . .”

You stared hard and motionless. Little by little, a story the landowner used to tell you over and over took shape in your mind’s eye. Now filled with certainty you said, “Oh my . . . Ka, it’s you. It’s really you, Josef Ka. You’re still alive?”

In that instant, K. threw himself in your arms. You embraced him in return, still without any explanation from him to clear your suspicion.

After a while, K. slid from the embrace and collapsed in a heap on your feet despite your concerted effort to keep him upright. It was all in vain: there wasn’t enough energy in your limbs. So you dropped to your knees and embraced K. once more.

“Look how skinny you are now. Skin and bones, Ka. I can hardly recognize you.”

Josef K. could only nod with difficulty.

You fetched water for yourself and K. Vitality restored and hunger gone into hiding, you examined every nook and cranny of the man all over again. K. sat with his eyes closed a wingspan away from you in the middle of the stifling room stuffed with a day’s worth of sun rays. The pigeons no longer cooed, though their droppings continued to saturate your nostrils, leaving no hint of K.’s body odor.

Unbelievable. How does a bank accountant with a promising future end up like this? You can’t tell this one apart from a mangy stray dog. READ MORE…

Truth Strangled From Ego: On Noémi Lefebvre’s Poetics of Work

April 26, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Poetics of Work wears its designation of “novel” like an alibi.

Poetics of Work by Noémi Lefebvre, translated from the French by Sophie Lewis, Les Fugitives, 2021

The deluge of our paroxysmal century has initiated a current in public intellectualism: a (only negligibly desperate) return to the texts that had attempted to reconstruct human thought and society in the aftermath of WWII, the total fracturing of order having led to a global crisis of aimlessness. I too, like many others, found myself, in the last year, grabbing my copy of The Origins of Totalitarianism in search of some clarity: “There are, to be sure, few guides left through the labyrinth of inarticulate facts if opinions are discarded and tradition is no longer accepted as unquestionable.” Though one wants to resist the striking relevancy of Arendt’s preface to the 1950s edition—“It is as though mankind has divided itself between those who believed in human omnipotence . . . and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives”—it befits to understand its sustaining fact: our past is with us. Miles won by the powers of a corrupt engine are not achievements, but illusory, precarious compromises.

In Noémi Lefebvre’s Poetics of Work, the narrator is similarly attempting to decode the estranged world with resilient methods—reading (and re-reading) Klemperer’s The Language of the Third Reich, ingesting an extraordinary number of bananas, smoking what appears to be an unlimited supply of weed. Lyon, the city trembling in the background, is both a container and a newly unbreachable concept, reconstituting after waves of unrest caused by a proposed workers’ rights reform bill. There is a “strange new climate” that clots the senses, and one is struck, at the very beginning lines, by the great distances at the intersection between the private and the public. That we are trapped in our regarding, our helpless understandings, and the world, irreverent and oblivious, goes on anyway.

Poetics of Work wears its designation of “novel” like an alibi. It is not a story of a person, a place, or a time, and is entirely unconcerned with reality as a thing to be adopted or adapted. Instead, it is a radical assertion of the mind’s omnipresence, at once myriad and intact, the only entity capable of reconciling impossibilities—the physical with the abstract, the immense and the intimate, the existent and their ghosts in memory—by strange, incredulous methods of inquiry. By thinking. It is a transcript of the transcendental geometries created by thinking, as it flows and elevates, creating depths, creating beyond limits.

It is also, of course, an acknowledgement of the world going on, anyway. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 23, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Barbara Halla, José García Escobar, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest news from China, Albania, and Central America!

This week, our writers bring you news from China, Albania, and Central America. In China, the prestigious October Literature Prizes have been presented, with Jidi Majia awarded the 2020 Special Achievement Award; in Albania, the National Center for Books and Reading has revealed the winners of the its 2020–2021 translation fund; and in Central America, Carlos Fonseca and José Adiak Montoya have been featured on Granta‘s best young Spanish-language authors list. Read on to find out more! 

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting for China

October 十月, the renowned literature magazine founded in August 1978, gets its name from the downfall of China’s Gang of Four (a group of Communist Party leaders who took most of the blame for the Cultural Revolution’s devastations) in the October of 1976—upon which, as the line goes, the people of China were able to put behind them ten years of terror, and begin anew the aspirational proceedings of a new national context. As such, it is a publication that took upon itself the tremendous responsibility of delineating the rapidly changing cultural milieu, as well as rousing once more the imaginary and illuminating capacities of a language crippled from years of demolishment. It remains today one of the most prestigious publications of the nation, and the October Literature Prize amongst the highest honours awarded to Chinese writers.

On April 16, the sixteenth and seventeenth October Literature Prizes were presented in “the first town built on the Yangtze”—Lizhuang in Sichuan province. Of each edition, twelve writers were honoured in categories of Novel, Novella, Short Story, Essay, Poetry, and Special Achievement. Jidi Majia 吉狄马加 received the 2020 Special Achievement Award for his book-length poem, 裂开的星球 (The Split Planet), a totemic work that brings the soaring epics of myth into the startling light of the present, as inquiries to the human soul once again come to the poet’s consciousness; the work is emblematic of Jidi’s conviction that poetry holds a knowledge of the future. Also amongst the awardees was writer A Lai 阿来 for his novel 云中记 (In the Clouds), which describes the complete disappearance of a Tibetan village in the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and a local priest’s invocations of how one copes in the face of profound, replete obliteration. A full list of winners can be found here (Chinese only).

If you are to find yourself somewhere near Nanjing, it would be worth your time to visit the Tangshan Quarry Park, a devastatingly beautiful, painterly topography formed from a past limestone mine. It is also the site of the latest location of the Librairie Avant-Garde, a chain of bookshops well-respected for its literary selections, newly opening this month. Taking over the site of an abandoned processing plant, the newly opening Librairie is a stunning feat of contemporary architecture, preserving the red-brick facades rounded towers of its past life, while adopting cleanly to the slopes and gentle light of its natural surroundings. And even if you’re not the type to be impressed with elegant arches and staircases, the books should do; Librairie Avant-Garde is known especially for their revere of poetry, and the thousand-volume collection available here, ranging from Bei Dao to Pessoa, is given proper regard and pertinence. The opening event, held on April 17, also featured the first Librairie Avant-Garde Poetry Awards. READ MORE…

To Channel a Voice: Adam Morris on Translating Beatriz Bracher’s Antonio

April 22, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Nicole Bilan

[T]he concept of mediumship resonated with me as a metaphor for what it was that I was trying to do as a translator.

In Antonio, our Book Club selection for March, acclaimed Brazilian writer Beatriz Bracher uses the mystifying, sustaining story of one family’s tragedy to paint a larger portrait of a tumultuous nation’s political and sociological landscape, reverberating through the discrete lives of its citizens. Constructed in a triad of narratives and rich with the fullness of voices in distinct oration, Antonio is both an electrifying mystery and a carefully constructed study of inheritance. In the following interview, Assistant Editor Nicole Bilan discusses with translator Adam Morris about the rigors and pleasures of translating this multifarious, scrupulously woven text.

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!

Nicole Bilan (NB): I’m going to be really reductive with my first question and say that Antonio is like a book of stories—or various perspectives of the same story—and this makes it quite difficult to kind of pin down its continuity. How did you navigate this ambiguity, that dynamic of mystery?

Adam Morris (AM): Well, one thing that helped was that I actually decided not to read the novel the whole way through before translating it. When New Directions accepted my initial proposal to translate I Didn’t Talk, they wanted to make sure that they had a follow-up. I recommended Anatomy of Paradise (2015), the author’s most recent novel, but the editors decided on Antonio, which I had only sampled for the purposes of writing the proposal. After reading about four or five chapters, I decided that if there was a chance I going translate Antonio, I wouldn’t want to know the explanations behind the novel’s central family secret as I worked; I wanted to find out as I was translating, to see if I could replicate that sense of not-knowing the reader is supposed to experience. So that’s what I did.

NB: That is an absolutely incredible thing to do, because even encountering it as a reader, you’re just constantly thinking: Wait, hold on, hold on, I’m lost. And then it hits you all at once. So how did you find it looking back in retrospect, trying to untangle those pieces of information—how did you refine something that’s so messily constructed in a way?

AM: I think “tangle” and “untangle” are the right verbs to use here; that was what it felt like to be working with the three narrators of Antonio. The way this novel is constructed, the voices aren’t interwoven. They’re tangled. It feels deliberately very messy, as you said; there’s conflicting information disclosed by the three voices as they evolve throughout, each becoming more familiar with their silent interlocutor, Benjamim. And one of the ways that I handled the untangling of these competing strands was to look at the novel in continuity, with each voice isolated, to see how they individually evolved without interference from the others—it’s almost impossible, of course, because their interlocutor transmits portions of each of their stories to the others, and they respond accordingly. So I tried to look at the story as a whole, and then as discrete narrative lines, and then finally reconstructed a synthesis with my revisions. But for the first draft, I just went straight through; I wanted the conversational approach that Bracher adopts to feel as natural as possible. That’s why, when I’d first started reading the novel, I knew I needed to stop. I wanted to preserve and capture the narrative effects. READ MORE…

Literature as Homeland: The English-Language Debut of Tezer Özlü

April 21, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Matt Hanson

[Özlü] attempted to make sense of life and death, and to create an individual by way of literature.

The conspicuous absence of Tezer Özlü’s work in the English language is, to many readers of Turkish literature, a huge oversight. With precise, knowing style and modernist sense of bending convention, the lyrically humanistic nature of her prose propelled her reputation as a writer in deep dialogue with the specificities and absences of her place and time. Now, in anticipation of her Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri, soon to be released as Cold Nights of Childhood by UK publisher Serpent’s Tail, Matt Hanson gives us a glimpse at the themes of Özlü’s oeuvre, as well as how the sensitivities of her writing continue to carry through to present day.

In 1980, a Turkish novel appeared under the name Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri (Cold Nights of Childhood), written by one of the country’s most beloved writers. As the text reached the public, Tezer Özlü had just six years left to live, before breast cancer would take her life at the age of forty-three. Even amidst illness, she continued to influence European literature from its fringes as internationalist writers—entering the late twentieth century—continued to adapt modernist expressionism as representative of individual, universal humanism.

Özlü wrote mainly in her mother tongue of Turkish, yet her style, temperament, voice, and life aligned technically and thematically with the earlier German and Italian writers she admired, from the Joycean experimentalism of Italo Svevo to the singular meta-fictions of Franz Kafka; yet, it was the atheistic loneliness of Cesar Pavese who inspired her to end her last book, Yaşamin Ucuna Yolculuk (Journey to the End of Life)—first published in German two years before her untimely death—in the very hotel room where he committed suicide. Along with the aforementioned, her four books, issued by Turkey’s prestigious publishing house Yapi Kredi, include a collection of letters with fellow lifelong comrade in literature Leyla Erbil, and a complete works edition of a plays, prose, and translations prepared by her sister, Sezer Duru.

In the last four decades, Özlü has not faded from the literary landscape of young readers. Between her books, the thirty-five printings of Yaşamin Ucuna Yolculuke are only outmatched by the thirty-eight printings for Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri. She is known, adoringly, as the melancholic princess of Turkey by the youngest generation of readers (such as the editor Dilara Alemdar), and as the wild child of Turkish literature by experts (such as NYU Turkish literature professor Sibel Erol). READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “How I Went to War” by Miguel Gila Cuesta

April 20, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Will Carr

So he said, “Go on, get killing. In this company we kill hard 9:00 to 1:00 and 4:00 to 7:00.”

Gila’s star-making monologue “How I Went to War” (1951) broke a tacit taboo of postwar Spanish society. For twelve years, public discussion of the civil war had limited itself to the Franco regime’s mythos of a Glorious National Uprising, but Gila, with pitch-perfect working-class vernacular, replaced saintly heroes with indignant aunts, petulant commanders, and innocent spies dressed in drag. The diametrical contrast has led critics to hail Gila’s war routines as a comedic takedown of Franco’s official story. And yet the comedian never suffered reprisals—not even when he performed for the Generalissimo himself.

Gila’s comedic monologues present atypical challenges even for translators used to working with humor. Rather than relying on wordplay and culture-specific references, “How I Went to War” creates incongruities through clashes of tone and aspect. The comedian tells his war story in a casual, un-military style. The blue-collar narration and dialogues sometimes morph into exchanges that evoke children playing at soldiers. I’ve attempted to carry over the informal tone of Gila’s oral performances, with his hesitations and false starts, and to choose words and phrasing that would maintain the uncanny juxtapositions of a war narrated as work and play. Part of Gila’s genius is that he crafts a war story in which the words war and killing feel out of place both contextually and grammatically. When he uses matar (kill / killing), he breaks conventions of aspect in the same way that kill does when used instead of work or do (“How you killing?” “Killing good, how about you?”). I’ve tried to surround these words with a consistent baseline of idiomatic speech so that wherever Gila hammers matar into his workaday Spanish, kill fractures U.S. English along similar lines.

–Will Carr, translator

“How I Went to War”[1]

I’m going to tell you the story of how I went to war.[2]

I was working as an errand boy for . . . for some pharmacy warehouses.[3] And one day I accidently broke an aspirin tablet and they fired me.

So I went home and sat down in a chair we had for when we got fired, and my Uncle Cecilio came in with a newspaper with a want ad for the war: “Prominent War Seeks Hardkilling Soldier.” And . . . and my mom said, “You’re quick on the uptake, you should apply.”

And I said, “Me? Why do I have to go to war?”

She said, “Well you have to work somewhere.”

So I said, “But I . . . I don’t kill so good.”

She said, “They . . . they’ll teach you to kill good soon enough.”

Then my aunt said, “But now we’re going to have to buy him a horse.”

And my . . . my mom said, “Nonsense, the army gives you one when you join up.”

My aunt says, “No thank you, God knows who’s been sitting on that thing. He’s better off packing his own horse.”

So we went to buy a horse, but you couldn’t buy them separate. You had to get the cart and the flies with it.

And my mom said, “No, you’re not bringing flies to the war. At least as a foot soldier you’ll keep things clean.”

So I packed myself a hot lunch and went off to war. I showed up Monday at 7:00 AM, and the war was closed because it was too early. And there was this lady outside selling churros and bread and stuff. And I said, “Hey, is this the war of ’14?”

And she said, “This is ’16; ’14’s just down the street.”

So I went to the other war, and when they opened the war at 9:00 I went in. And there was this soldier killing there. I said, “How . . . how you killing?”

He says, “Killing good, how about you?”

I said, “Me, not too good right now, but once I get trained up . . .”[4] READ MORE…

From Japan to Brazil: An Interview with Translator Rita Kohl

April 19, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by David Boyd

Murakami has definitely opened a lot of doors for Japanese literature . . . I’m just anxious to see different people passing through those doors.

In recent years, the popularity of Japanese literature has risen in Brazil, and a much larger share of Japanese titles is now being made available in direct translation into Portuguese. Rita Kohl, who has worked on fiction by authors such as Yoko Ogawa and Hiro Arikawa, is one of the most prolific literary translators working with this pair of languages. 

In this interview with Editor-at-Large for Japan, David Boyd, Kohl speaks about several of her recent translations—from Haruki Murakami’s Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 (Ouça a canção do vento & Pinball 1973) to Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (Querida konbini) and Earthlings (Terráqueos). She also touches on the current state of Japanese literature in Brazil.

David Boyd (DB): Who’s reading Japanese literature in Brazil? What kind of translations are they reading?

Rita Kohl (RK): I’ll try to give you my general impression of the reception of Japanese literature in Brazil, although I wouldn’t say that I’m particularly knowledgeable about the publishing world here. I used to read reviews of translations much more closely, but I haven’t been able to stay on top of it lately, as—thankfully—there’s been so much more of it.

One important thing to keep in mind is that the direct translation of Japanese fiction by mainstream publishers is a relatively recent development. Up to the 1990s, we had some pivot translations from English, such as a few novels by Mishima translated into Portuguese in the 1980s, but direct translations typically came from the academic world or the Japanese-Brazilian community, and didn’t really reach a popular readership.

This started to change toward the end of the 1990s. Leiko Gotoda’s translation of Miyamoto Musashi, published in 1999 by Estação Liberdade, had a significant impact; I say this because it became something of a bestseller (but as this work was the subject of my master’s research, I might be biased). Since then, translations of Japanese literature have been steadily increasing, and are mostly translated directly from Japanese, although it’s still not uncommon to see some indirect translations (thrillers by Natsuo Kirino and Kanae Minato come to mind).

The shift we’ve seen from indirect to direct translation isn’t limited to Japanese literature. It reflects a change in public perception of translation on the whole, which can also be seen, for example, in the translation of Russian literature. At the same time, since editors typically can’t read the original work, we continue to depend on the canon of Japanese literature translated into other languages, and I feel as though we’ve been trying to catch up, translating authors who were translated into other languages quite some time ago: Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, Sōseki Natsume, and so on. In contemporary literature, the overwhelming majority of translated works are by Haruki Murakami, but we also have some books by Banana Yoshimoto, Hiromi Kawakami, Yoko Ogawa, Ryu Murakami, and Sayaka Murata. I think that a lot of these new additions are the result of an effort to translate and publish more female authors. Personally, I’m very happy with this development, and I tend to prioritize women authors when recommending novels or thinking about what I’d like to translate next.  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 16, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Eva Wissting, and Kwan Ann Tan

The latest news from Hong Kong, Sweden, and Malaysia!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Hong Kong, Sweden, and Malaysia. In Hong Kong, a commemoration of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death and Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine talks are some of the live events that have started taking place again; in Sweden, Axel Lindén was awarded the Aftonbladet annual literary award; and in Malaysia, Catherine Menon’s debut novel, Fragile Monsters, has been released in English translation, while the Malaysian Poetry Writing Fortnight (MPWF) has been launched. Read on to find out more! 

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

As the fourth wave of the COVID-19 outbreak slows in Hong Kong, cultural and literary activities have begun to return to live venues. Local bilingual poetry magazine Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine organised a poetry talk on the theme of wine, titled “If Our Poetry is Wine” on April 10 in Lai Chi Kok. Poet Chan Li-choi and translator Ko Chung-man were invited to share their views on poetry and wine. Participants could enjoy wine together with the guests to celebrate the inspirations endowed by Dionysus.

Hong Kong’s Dante Alighieri Society hosted three sessions of “Dante Alighieri Flash Readings” to commemorate the 700th anniversary of the death of the great Italian poet. Italian actress Nicole Garbellini and local actor Marc Ngan were invited to give lectures on Dante’s The Divine Comedy, covering the three cantiche: Paradiso, Purgatorio, and Inferno. The events took place at landmarks of the Central and Western District, and Causeway Bay to engage the public in the appreciation of the famous medieval poet.

From March 2 to April 14 artist Michael Leung’s exhibition “Publishing (To Find Each Other)” was open to the public at the Floating Projects in Wong Chuk Hang. The interdisciplinary exhibition explores the themes of publication and storytelling. Throughout March, Michael Leung also hosted sessions to discuss his experience of hybrid publishing with the audience. Workshops were held by the artist to produce zines with participants.

As well as face-to-face events, going online is still a popular way to stay connected with the public however. Local arts centre MILL6 Foundation is organising an online discussion forum, “Poetic Emergences: Organisation through Textile and Code,” to explore cross-boundary aspects of textile and weaving, including technology, art-making, and social mediation.

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet has announced that its annual literary award will go to Axel Lindén this year. Lindén’s first book, Fårdagboken, was published in 2017 and translated into English by Frank Perry as Counting Sheep: Reflections and Observations of a Swedish Shepherd in 2018 (Atria Books). It was followed up in 2020 by Tillstånd, with the English title Every Other Pine, Every Other Fir. The jury’s motivation is that Lindén’s authorship “takes on the largest questions of our time by turning away from the center and all literary salons, towards the rural areas, the animals, the forest, and the self-doubt.” READ MORE…

Agustín Fernández Mallo’s The Things We’ve Seen Holds a Trick Mirror up to History

April 15, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Maddy Robinson

The writer proceeds as though attempting an exorcism, dragging flesh and blood relics to the present.

The Things We’ve Seen by Agustín Fernández Mallo, translated from Spanish by Thomas Bunstead, Fitzcarraldo, 2021

In 1989, an extraordinary exhibit opened at the Zoology Museum of Barcelona. Visitors flooded the unveiling of a retrospective on the work of German zoologist Peter Ameisenhaufen, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1955, and his assistant, Hans von Kubert. The exhibit consisted of the meticulous field notes, drawings, photographs, and x-rays of the rare animals the scientists discovered on their travels: Perrosomus, a desert rabbit with exaggerated incisors, Squatina squatina, a leathery sea creature with grotesquely humanoid features, and Solenoglypha polipodia, a snake with birdlike legs running along the length of its body.

If this is starting to sound far-fetched, it’s because it is.

Ameisenhaufen and von Kubert are the alter egos of Catalan photographers Pere Formiguera and Joan Fontcuberta, and the exhibition was, in fact, an artistic one. Designed to question the intentions of photography and its rich potential for deception and fakery (around 30 percent of those attending the inauguration with university degrees said that they believed the animals were real), the exhibit asked visitors to examine the blurred line between fact and fiction and see what truth they could extract.

In much the same way, Agustín Fernández Mallo’s latest novel in three parts, The Things We’ve Seen, sets the mind racing with blurs and glitches—periodic and perturbing reminders of just how malleable our reality, both past and present, can be in the hands of an expert. The English title of the book is taken from a line of poetry by Beat poet Carlos Oroza, which serves as one of the epigraphs to the novel, and subsequently appears with mantra-like regularity:

It is a mistake to take the things we’ve seen as given

With this as his cornerstone, Fernández Mallo creates an intricate network of information and stories, which sprawl outward and intersect seemingly at random, to form a vertiginous commentary on history, war, memory, and our interconnected, twenty-first century lives. In the first part, a writer not unlike Fernández Mallo himself attends a conference on the small Galician island of San Simón, where a group of Twitter-obsessed creatives and thinkers reflect on digital networks. He is accompanied by Julián Hernández, a real-life man who is part of a real-life punk band, Siniestro Total. With the mention of actual people, places, and events so early in the novel, it is tempting to think that what follows will be a species of essay. However, The Things We’ve Seen is published by Fitzcarraldo, whose color-coded covers give the game away (white for essays, Klein blue for fiction). Far be it from me to judge a book by its factuality, but in this case, it is as though the author is daring the reader to believe, to latch on to the recognizable markers of our shared world. READ MORE…

Announcing Our March Book Club Selection: Antonio by Beatriz Bracher

April 14, 2021  |  in Book Club  |  by Nicole Bilan

Bracher vaguely nods toward the uncanny, peeping out from behind confrontational realism.

Our Book Club selection for the month of March comes from one of Brazil’s most powerful contemporary voices. With Antonio, Beatriz Bracher brings philosophy and narrative in a deeply ruminative and immersive expedition through familial lineage, uncovering the various fragments of a tumultuous paternal relationship in order to understand the myriad forces that carries an individual from their origin to their present.

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!

Antonio by Beatriz Bracher, translated from the Portuguese by Adam Morris, New Directions, 2021

“The spectators were part of the show, but they only realised it once they had gone by.”

To read Antonio is to become part of its story. In the conversational style that has become one of Beatriz Bracher’s calling cards, the narrative begins in a direct address to the reader, immediately situating us as characters for whom the story is told, as though one was crowded around a fireplace, listening to a relative tell stories from an armchair. Adopting the same hushed tones and subtle drama of the fireside orator in her writing, Bracher crafts a layered story which brims with mystery and tension. Effortlessly weaving her way through points of obscurity and shocking revelation, she plays with the reader-turned-listener as she leads us through the undulating landscape of a murky family history.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Swings” by Oswaldo Estrada

April 13, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Sarah Pollack

Sometimes Sophie calls me mamá. Poor thing. She gets confused, even though my skin’s as dark as my luck.

Oswaldo Estrada’s story, “The Swings,” is one of twelve pieces of short fiction from his 2020 collection Las locas ilusiones y otros relatos de migración [Wild Dreams and Other Stories of Migration], winner of the International Latino and Latin American Book Fair Prize at Tufts. “The Swings” poignantly captures the dilemma of mothers who care for other women’s babies in order to support their own sons and daughters whom they have had to leave behind. The narration stitches together snippets of conversation over time of an anonymous nanny from Mexico who speaks with a new nanny at the park where they push “their kids” on the swings. The story offers haunting insight into the offloading of domestic labor and love to vulnerable immigrant women. I find particularly compelling Estrada’s representation of the paradoxical monetizing and stigmatization of Spanish, and the precarious position of caregivers who simultaneously need to forge a strong bond with children while never posing an emotional threat to the parents who employ them. In translating this story, I was challenged to find a balanced oral register with a decidedly Mexican lexicon. It was a rare pleasure to revise this translation with Estrada in a gentle back-and-forth process befitting the title of the story.

—Sarah Pollack, translator

Each generation paints them
a different color
(highlighting their childhood)
but leaving them as they are

—Fabio Morábito “The Swings”

 

I like these cold, early mornings, bathed in sunlight. The trees begin to fill with a pretty green, and even the park seems painted a different color. Maybe it’s all the kids who are drawn outside after the winter, like birds leaving their nests. Those who were crawling only a few months ago are already walking, and those who barely toddled around like ducks are now up to mischief.

You’re new, right? From miles away, it’s easy to see that you’ve just arrived. Here, we all know each other. My girl’s the little blonde running around over there. How old is yours? She’s still in diapers? You should take them off, take advantage that it’s hot. Trust me. Here they train them when they’re about to go to school. Some baloney that children will let you know when they’re ready. That it’s best not to rush them. That they’ll be traumatized. Nonsense. Look at them. Little whoppers with shit up their backs. It doesn’t bother you now, but imagine in a year.

I trained mine in a week. Because it was summer, I put her in undies. That’s how they learn. They feel when they’ve wet themselves and don’t like it, and they’re the ones that ask to be taken to the bathroom. She doesn’t even wear a diaper at night. She wakes herself up, runs to the toilet and goes back to sleep. I hear her because my room is next to hers, but I don’t get up. You have to teach them when they’re young.

READ MORE…