Monthly Archives: November 2024

What’s New in Translation: November 2024

November 11, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eva Dunsky, Jonathon Atkinson, Rachel Stanyon, and Xiao Yue Shan

Discover new work from Denmark, Mexico, Palestine, Spain, Argentina, Japan, France, and Taiwan!

In this month’s review of newly released titles, we’re looking at works from Denmark, Mexico, Palestine, Spain, Argentina, Japan, France, and Taiwan. From a haunting volume of ecopoetics to the first book in an acclaimed metaphysical septology, from powerful anticolonial verses to a meditation on the art of translating, read on for some of the best work being released now in English!

Balle CALCULATION vol1 rgb

On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland, New Directions, 2024

Review by Rachel Stanyon

After an unremarkable day spent on a business trip in Paris, Tara Selter is enjoying breakfast in her hotel when it strikes her that it is yesterday again. In the first book of Solvej Balle’s seven-part On The Calculation of Volume, Tara’s eighteenth of November begins repeating itself.

What possibilities exist upon the dawning of an old day? Are there wrongs to right, missed opportunities to seize, risks to take or temper? Balle’s heroine does not seem to perceive any such problems or desires; she likes her fairly routine job as an antiquarian book dealer, and works alongside her husband, Thomas, whom she loves. She does not seem to want for nor regret anything, and has blind faith in Thomas, who believes her when she tells him about her repeating days (at least the first umpteen times).

So why has her time “fallen apart”, and what can be gleaned from observing this procession of almost identical days—slowly, meticulously, rhythmically—through the diary Tara keeps? (In this version of eternal return, some of Tara’s physical imprints on the world remain indelible.) Book I details a year (the first of many?) spent haunting the all-too familiar patterns of her husband, all the while lost in loneliness and musing on the volume of her existence. Is she an all-consuming “beast, a pest” or a “tiny monster in an immense space”? READ MORE…

November 2024: Upcoming Opportunities in Translation

November 10, 2024  |  in News  |  by Kathryn Raver

Mentorships, grants, and more—check out this month's latest translation opportunities!

EDUCATION

QUEENS COLLEGE MFA PROGRAM IN CREATIVE WRITING AND LITERARY TRANSLATIONCUNY

The Queens College MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation invites you to a Virtual Open House on November 20. 

Located in the most culturally and linguistically diverse county in the nation, our sponsor, the Queens College MFA program, attracts students dedicated to crossing boundaries in genre, craft, and language. Classes are small, mostly in the evening, and students work closely with faculty mentors. Gain a liberal arts experience with affordable public university tuition in an urban environment with a verdant 80-acre campus.

The program offers tracks in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and literary translation–and students are encouraged to experiment with multiple genres. See how far you can take your writing. Register for the open house here. 

 

ALTA EMERGING TRANSLATOR MENTORSHIPS

The American Literary Translators Association’s annual mentorship program is still open to applicants, but the window is closing soon!

Founded in 2015, ALTA’s mentorship program serves to connect emerging and established translators through collaboration on a translation project of the mentee’s choosing. This undertaking will culminate in a reading of the work at ALTA’s annual fall conference in 2025. In its nearly ten years of existence, the program has supported over 70 translators working from 25 different languages.

The program is available to translators who have published no more than one full-length literary translation. Applicants should submit their CV, a 1000-word project proposal, and an 8-10 page sample translation to be considered. The application window closes on November 30th. Find more information here.

SUBMISSIONS

TWO LINES PRESS – CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Two Lines Press’s Calico series is calling for submissions! The series’ upcoming edition will feature poetry written and translated by Afghan women. Poets living in Afghanistan and the diaspora are invited to submit 8 to 15 pages of previously untranslated poetry, translated from any language, to be considered. They especially hope to receive works “that will inspire, challenge, and expand our conception of poetry from that region of the world.”

The deadline for submissions November 18th. You can find more information here.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

November 8, 2024  |  in News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Kathryn Raver and Zohra Salih

The latest literary news from France and India!

This week, our editors report on literary prizes around the world — from an intergenerational family saga to a new approach to the trope of the madwoman in literature, get ready to add some exciting titles to your to-be-read list!

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France

A few weeks back, I wrote an update for Asymptote about France’s Prix Goncourt shortlist, which at the time had just been announced—and this week, the results are in! On Monday, from among a shortlist of seven other authors, the Academie Goncourt awarded the prize to Algerian writer Kamel Daoud’s Houris. Daoud’s novel follows a young Algerian woman as she navigates her country in the aftermath of the civil war of the 1990s and is Daoud’s second Goncourt success—the first being his novel Meursault, contre-enquête, which won the Prix du premier roman in 2015. I’m on a mission to read all of this year’s shortlist and only just started Houris– but from what I’ve read so far, it certainly deserves the accolades it’s received.

The Prix Femina—another of France’s coveted literary prizes—also named its winner this week. Franco-Venezuelan author Miguel Bonnefoy took home the award for his most recent novel, Le rêve du Jaguar—an intergenerational story that explores the bonds of family amid the turbulent political climate of 20th century Venezuela. The novel was also awarded the Prix du Roman de l’Academie Française last month. READ MORE…

The Dastardly Things a Translator Might Do: An Interview with Shelley Fairweather-Vega

November 7, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Willem Marx

My advice is to simply get started. Pick up anything from the region and go.

The enormously prolific Uzbek writer, Hamid Ismailov, is one of the vanishingly small number of Central Asian authors to crack the code of being translated into English. He experiments in virtually every literary form and genre—from the novel to the play, from translation to poetry; has lived in exile from Uzbekistan since 1992; and continues to build on the wealth of Central Asian culture and memory.

The breadth of history that informs his work can be felt in “Trinity”—a dramatic scene excerpted from a sprawling, six-book novel (Russian Matryoshka) that follows a peasant as he harvests a field of wheat only to have the yield stolen, again and again, when the wider world forces its way into his life. Published in Asymptote’s Summer 2024 issue, “Trinity” is a fragment of a fragmented text, a scene from an unfinished play embedded within an unpublished novel. In many ways, it is emblematic of the whole, knotted process that is translation. The short, dramatic scene is ripe with pungent symbols of the past, yet also exhibits a linguistic dexterity such that each word seems to impose its own gravity on the text. Longtime Ismailov collaborator Shelley Fairweather-Vega’s sensitive translation of “Trinity” achieves an exquisite balance between intimacy and distance, accessibility and mystery. I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with her about staging this piece, the influence translators exert on a text (and each other), and much more.

Willem Marx (WM): Your translations of Hamid Ismailov’s writing have introduced him to many English readers, myself included, so I’d like to start off by asking: how did you discover his work? And what set you on the path to become one of his principal English translators? 

Shelley Fairweather-Vega (SFV): Willem, that might be the most gratifying thing a translator can hear, that our work introduced a reader to a great author they might not have discovered otherwise. I’m so happy to hear it.

The story of my collaboration with Hamid Ismailov began more than a decade ago, when he happened across a pro bono translation I did of an essay by an Uzbek political prisoner. He contacted me through the organization who published that translation, looking to add to his very small list of people who could translate from Uzbek to English. Within a short time, he had convinced me to try translating his short story, “Tosh mehmoni,” which Words Without Borders published as “The Stone Guest” in September 2014. That story is so sad and powerful, and working with the author was such a good experience, that I was instantly, permanently hooked. So, you could say I also discovered Ismailov through my translations. You and I have that in common.

After translating several more of Ismailov’s short stories and essays, and now four of his novels, I’m nowhere near tired of his work and will always jump at the chance to translate it—but I do have competition, especially in the UK where he was first published in English, and where American translators sometimes aren’t eligible for the funding Ismailov applies for. A forthcoming short story collection combines work translated by me and several others. Ismailov did a very good job building that collection of translators.

WM: It’s telling to hear how tenacious an author must be in order to have their work translated into English. To shift slightly, I wonder if you ever find that your work is influenced by the way other translators have approached his writing. Do you notice different emphases or ways of tackling an aspect of voice among your fellow Ismailov translators?   READ MORE…

Life Without Breathing: On Water: A Chronicle by Nguyễn Ngọc Tư

November 6, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Alex Tan

In this swirling quasi-novel, saturated with insatiable quests of all varieties, everyone is engaged in endless seeking.

Water: A Chronicle by Nguyễn Ngọc Tư, translated from the Vietnamese by Nguyễn An Lý, Major Books, 2024

Water might have been the first floating signifier, if the image is anything to go by. Depending on its form, quantity, and culture of reception, it can be an agent of ritual purity, a destroyer of crops, a source of life, a symbol of illegible emotion. For the Vietnamese, water has been an operative metaphor and a lived reality since time immemorial; the word nước indexes both ‘water’ and ‘country,’ the two elements inseparably wedded in the linguistic psyche. A ruler of the Nguyễn dynasty once compared his precarious position on the throne to being in a boat, with the hoi polloi as the waters around him, threatening to overturn him at the slightest discontent. The scholar-translator Huỳnh Sanh Thông pointed out that Lạc, the first recorded name for the Vietnamese people, has a sonic affinity with numerous words denoting water: lạch (creek), lạt (to taste bland like water), lan (to spread like water).

The newly translated Water: A Chronicle, by the Vietnamese writer Nguyễn Ngọc Tư, embeds itself in this serpentine tradition. Better known as a litterateur of short stories than a novelist, Nguyễn Ngọc Tư’s popularity is virtually unmatched in her native country, even being named by Forbes as one of Vietnam’s most influential women in 2018. Many of her other works are similarly obsessed with the liquid element—as evidenced by their titles: Nước chảy mây trôi (Flowing Water, Drifting Cloud), Đảo (Island), Không ai qua sông (No One Crosses the River).

Though she mobilises a distinct dialect that is difficult to translate, spotlighting rural inhabitants swept up in the caprices of fate, her oeuvre is not unknown to the outside world. Her short story collection Cánh đồng bất tận (Endless Field) snagged Germany’s LiBeraturPreis in 2018, but the Anglophone sphere has thus far only received her work in dribs and drabs. This is now set to change with the groundbreaking labour of Major Books—a brand-new UK-based indie publisher dedicated to Vietnamese literature in translation, and with the poetic flair of translator Nguyễn An Lý, who deservedly won two PEN Translates awards this year. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “That Old Woman” by Raul Germano Brandão

November 5, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Jacqueline Frances Austin

She unhinged herself to eat, made herself small to eat, appeared stupid and contemptible to eat.

For November’s first Translation Tuesday, we bring you a short story by Raul Germano Brandão, translated from the Portuguese by Jacqueline Frances Austin. In this haunting tale, Brandão recounts the woes of the destitute woman Candidinha. Like Voltaire’s Candide, her life is an unremitting stream of unearned misfortune, but unlike her optimistic counterpart, she maintains an iron grip on her fury and indignation. In order to survive, Candidinha transmutes her tragedy into entertainment, adopting an exaggeratedly ludicrous persona; her affluent neighbors reward her performance with leftovers. The narrative traces this disjunction between public and private, unfolding between the voices of the onlookers—who alternate between mocking gossip and scathing reprimands, feasting on her misery—and Candidinha’s own voice, bitter and cursing. Brandão unsparingly renders the acute discomfort provoked by direct confrontation with inequality, a grotesque reminder of the irrationality of fate.

That old woman who sometimes faces me on nights of supreme affliction, dressed all in black, ragged and stiff, is made of hatred and stone. I speak to her. She doesn’t respond. Her mouth held tight she keeps her silence, a ragged shawl pulled up around her chest. She is huge, like despair, dry as the stones. . . What is her story?  

On ill-fated Tuesdays she always turned up in that big, lugubrious house, that witless, ridiculous old woman, holding her son, António, by the hand. Looking like a damp bird she would leap across the living room, her shawl aflutter, carrying her hat. Everybody found her comical and stupid, always dragging her boy, her look disorientated and her appearance somehow contemptible.  

“Here’s Candidinha again. . .”

“Oh no.”

“Oh my dears. It could only happen to me, just imagine. . .”

On seeing her they would all start to laugh at that dry and stumbling figure, crushed by her disgrace, her hat missing feathers and her smile quite put on. She was like some kind of starving jester to whom, for their poverty, one tosses a crust, but mostly because they are inoffensive and ridiculous. You could tell that old woman anything: troubles, disasters, irritations. . . If you did, for a few minutes she’d exchange a few words, her smile forced and sinister. Trailing her ragged shawl, she’d go hopping around the house. READ MORE…

Towards a Greater Social Consciousness: Persa Koumoutsi on Translating Arabic Literature Into Greek

November 4, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou and Persa Koumoutsi

If a text is written simply to express our personal wants or concerns, it is not literature, in my view, but a form of self-centered expression.

Born and raised in Cairo, Persa Koumoutsi is a literary translator and a writer. Having returned to Greece after completing her studies at the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University, she began focusing solely on translating Arabic literature into Greek in 1993. She has since worked on the works of many distinguished authors, including fourteen novels by the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, as well many Arab poets. Her bibliography includes the first Anthology of Contemporary Arabic Poetry in Greek, for which she received the First Prize of the Hellenic Society of Literary Translators in 2017. Among her other works, the Αnthology of Modern Arabic Female Poetry was also widely lauded in 2022. She has also published the Αnthology of Palestinian Poetry and the Anthology of Egyptian Poetry.

In this interview, originally conducted in Greek, I spoke with Persa about the renewed interest in Palestinian literature in times of genocide, the importance of translation as a means to make struggles known and build solidarities beyond human borders and language barriers, prison literature, as well as the future of Arabic translation in Greece. The latter concerns not solely translation for the sake of itself, but as a powerful tool to bring forth voices of those marginalized.

Christina Chatzitheodoru (CC): Since October 7 and the ongoing genocide, several young Arab writers and poets have been translated into Greek, including your recent translation of Najwan Darwish. There is a renewed interest in Palestinian literature in particular. Can you tell us more about this?

Persa Koumoutsi (PK): Of course there is a renewed interest, not only in Greece but all over the world, especially in Europe. The tragic events in Gaza have brought to the fore an unspeakable tragedy, and thus many of my colleagues and translators around the world—and in Greece—have devoted themselves to translating works that highlight this problem and its dimensions, as well as its impact on our collective and individual consciousnesses—especially those of whom are concerned with contemporary Arabic culture and its literature. One such work is a collection by the renowned Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish entitled, in Greek, I Kourasi ton Kremasmenon (Exhausted on the Cross), which, as the title suggests, alludes to the enduring pains of the Palestinian people, the irredeemable trauma, and the grievous injustice they have been inflicted upon them. Poetry, in my opinion, is the most powerful literary genre in these cases, since everything can be said and highlighted through the condensed word of poetry. . .

CC: The Palestinian writer and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani once stated: “My political position springs from my being a novelist. In so far as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case, and I can categorically state that I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite.” How does this view relate to your own approach to translation? READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

November 1, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest from Peru and Bulgaria!

This week, an exhibition honouring an iconic poet resonates with contemporary social movements in Peru, and a play causes quite the stir in Bulgaria. Read on to find out more!

Xiao Yue Shan, reporting from Peru

At the Casa de la Literatura Peruana (House of Peruvian Literature), space has appropriately been made for a poet who never wavered in his conviction of literature’s physical presence. Alejandro Romualdo (1926-2008) was a key figure of the Generación del 50—a Peruvian literary movement dedicated to a social ars poetica that would address daily realities and further political agency, formed amidst the dictatorship of Manuel Odría. Though few beyond the country will have knowledge of the power and continual influence of Romualdo’s works (which are regrettably yet to appear in English), this new exhibition, ‘Alejandro Romualdo: En la extensión de la palabra (in the extension of the word)’, firmly establishes the poet’s legacy, multiplicity, and role in shaping the Peruvian poetic landscape. Moving through not only his written works but his prolific activities as a graphic designer, humorist, cartoonist, and revolutionary, the brief but wide-ranging collection reveals a writer deeply embedded in the consciousness of his country.

‘The extension of the word’ is the title of Romualdo’s 1974 collection, which saw its writer interrogating poetry’s materialism for what more it could give to a world that demands a continuously evolving application of language. Working with concrete poetics, polyphonic constructions, and techniques of montage, Romualdo equalised the blank space of the page to the air—that which is both a separation and a link. In this era, he conceptualised the poetic form as a space where disparate or even antithetical ideas are held in a closed frame, thereby demonstrating the mind’s capacity to travel back and forth between them, uniting them as a single conceivable reality. Distance is relative in these poems, something easily breached by a long vowel sound or a dangling, dismembered line. READ MORE…