What’s New in Translation: June 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review by Sam Carter, Senior Editor

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

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

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

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

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

Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Editor

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

Read more reviews on the Asymptote blog:

What’s New in Translation: June 2022

New work from China, Tibet, and Slovenia!

In this month of highlights from the world of translated literature, we’re spotlighting three singular, wide-ranging, and immersive texts. From the Chinese, Shawn Hoo discusses the philosophical and journeying collection from celebrated poet Xi Chuan. From the Tibetan, Suhasini Patni reviews a dark, compassionate novel of womanhood and urbanity from Tsering Yangkyi. And from the Slovenian master Drago Jančar, Eva Wissting gives a look into his latest novel, on how personhood and identity survive the ravages of war.

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Bloom and Other Poems by Xi Chuan, translated from the Chinese by Lucas Klein, New Directions, 2022

Review by Shawn Hoo, Assistant Editor

In the title and opening poem of Xi Chuan’s (西川) Bloom and Other Poems, a simple verb like “bloom” begins lyrically and unsuspectingly enough—

if you’re going to bloom then bloom to my rhythm
close your eyes for one second breathe for two be silent for three then bloom

—but in the course of its exuberant and exacting repetitions across six pages, the action soon blossoms into a sophisticated geometry. At times, the verb seems to indicate an instructive concern for those new to the world (“bloom a pear blossom in case the nape of your neck is cold”). Other times, we hear the speaker issuing something of an injunction or a dare: “bloom / unleash a deep underground spring with your rhizome.” In a poem structured around insistence (to borrow Gertrude Stein’s understanding of how repetition works), Lucas Klein—who also curated and translated Xi Chuan’s Notes on the Mosquito—constructs a resonant architecture, allowing the echoes to bounce off the pages’ acoustics, often to rhapsodic effect: “bloom barbaric blossoms bloom unbearable blossoms / bloom the deviant the unreasonable the illogical” and later: “bloom three thousand boundless universes / and string up and beat any beast that refuses to bloom.”

In English, though not in Mandarin, bloom sits uncomfortably close to blood; in this titular poem, this simple word—across both languages—operates with an undertone of violence, belying its vivacious exhortations until the end, ending up as a verb that has swelled beyond its initial premise. The poems that come after “Bloom” all seem to share this restless inflation of the poetic image and line, each taking the verse to its various geometric limits, upon where it strains to meet other worlds. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2021

The best and latest from Mexico, Sweden, and Poland!

This month, our selections of excellent works from around the world are manifold with mystery: some historical, some psychological, and some linguistic. From Poland, philosopher Remigiusz Ryziński attempts to figure out the sexual politics behind Michel Foucault’s hasty departure from Warsaw. The newest autobiographical novel from Linda Boström Knausgård contends with the author’s own experiences with electroshock therapy, and its impact on her memories. Lastly, in an essay collection by Mariana Oliver explores the act of moving between the various territories of cities and languages, between familiarity and curiosity. Read on to find out more!

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Foucault in Warsaw by Remigiusz Ryziński, translated from the Polish by Sean Gasper Bye, Open Letter, 2021

Review by Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large for Slovakia

“Michel Foucault came to Poland in October 1958. He took a position as the first director of the newly founded Center for French Culture at the University of Warsaw. It was in Warsaw that he finished his doctoral thesis, later published as History of Madness. Yet in mid-1959, he was forced to leave Poland. The reason was a certain boy, Jurek. No one ever figured out who this boy really was.” With the mystery laid out, Remigiusz Ryziński opens his exploration of this little-known episode in the life of the philosopher as a young man, and his attempt to find out what led to Foucault’s expulsion from Warsaw.

Foucault in Warsaw is the first non-academic book by Remigiusz Ryziński—a Polish philosopher and cultural critic who studied at the Sorbonne—and another addition to Sean Gasper Bye’s impressive portfolio of translations. Combining the techniques of literary reportage with the analytical tools of Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, Ryziński has unearthed secret police dossiers and trawled through hundreds of pages of reports filed by undercover cops and snitches: “Stories typed or handwritten, full of dates and places, names and connections, meetings, relationships, breakups, love, and suffering. Reading them felt like flipping through someone’s family photo album.” He immersed himself in the press and newsreels from the period, incorporating details, such as the price of everyday goods and statistical information, to conjure up the flavours, textures, and colours of Warsaw—the city that is as much a hero of this book as the philosopher himself, along with “the boys whose company Foucault enjoyed most.”

For those familiar with recent works of Polish literature, Ryziński’s reconstruction of the life of the gay community in Warsaw in the late 1950s will bring to mind Lubiewo, Michał Witkowski’s groundbreaking 2004 novel depicting gay life on Poland’s Baltic coast, before and after the end of communism. While Witkowski’s book presents fictionalised versions of real stories and characters, Ryziński has tracked down the actual people who knew Foucault during his time in Warsaw (including some who were romantically linked to him) or were active on the gay scene at the time. He retraced the places Foucault did—or was likely to—frequent, recreating a detailed topography of Warsaw’s cruising spots: an assortment of cafés and bars from the seedy to the sophisticated, steam baths both ornate and functional, public squares and monuments ideally suited for pulling soldiers, and public toilets such as the French-style urinals known as “mushrooms,” to the bathrooms at the Palace of Culture, considered “the height of luxury.” READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (Aug 2019)

We've been keeping busy!

What do Asymptote staff get up to when they’re not busy advocating for world literature? Answer: Quite a lot! For those interested in joining our team, please note that we have just completed the first phase of our recruitment drive and will conclude the second and final phase by the end of the month. It’s not too late to send in an application!

Communications Manager Alexander Dickow published two poems in Plume, in English and French versions.

Assistant editor Andreea Iulia Scridon‘s poem, Glossa, a re-writing of Mihai Eminescu’s Romanian poem of the same name, has been published by WildCourt.

Copy Editor Anna Aresi‘s Italian translation of Ewa Chrusciel’s Contraband of Hoopoe (Omnidawn, 2014) was released in May by Edizioni Ensemble. 

Chris Tanasescu (aka MARGENTO, editor-at-large for Romania and Moldova) has been featured in a Romanian poetry anthology in Italian translation, Sette poeti rumeni (Seven Romanian Poets) edited by Matteo Veronesi.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2019

Noirs, voyeurs, and sensuality abound in this week's reviews of the newest in translated literature.

This week’s reviews of the newest and most compelling translated literature include the latest work by Poland’s preeminent writer, Olga Tokarczuk, a fascinating portrayal of manic self-interrogation and class by Stéphane Larue, and a darkly dionysian tale of the female gaze by the award-winning Nina Leger. Our editors burrow into the philosophy, language, and atmosphere of these three novels to give you some extra additions to your reading list.

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Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Riverhead Books, 2019

Review by Andreea Scridon, Assistant Editor

Janina Duszejko is the kind of woman that many would call “eccentric”: she’s in her mid-sixties, often bordering on paranoia, and she’s firmly convinced by astrology, absolute vegetarianism, and William Blake. In rural Poland, Janina—as she hates to be called—lives peacefully and in relative solitude as a guardian for the summer cabins surrounding her home. However, she quickly comes into conflict with the insensitive and barbarous hunters who reign over the area. The death of a neighbor escalates such tension, creating a series of mysterious murders that Janina will be privy to, and which will culminate in an unexpected twist.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2019

Four reviews of translations you won't want to miss this month!

From translations by heavyweights like Ann Goldstein and Jennifer Croft to novels by writers appearing for the first time in English, July brings a host of exciting new books in translation. Read on for coming-of-age stories set in Italy and Poland, a drama in rural Argentina, and the tale of a young man and his pet lizard in Japan. 

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A Girl Returned by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, Europa Editions, 2019

Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Editor

In A Girl Returned, Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s award-winning novel, a nameless young woman retrospectively narrates the defining event of her adolescence—the year when the only family she has ever known returns her to her birth family. From the title, the reader can already sense the protagonist’s conundrum. A passive object of the act of being returned, her passivity in her own uprooting threatens to define her identity. Ann Goldstein’s searing translation from the Italian inspires the reader both to accompany the narrator as she wades through the tender memories of that time and to reflect on her or his own family relationships through a new lens.

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What’s New with the Crew? (May 2019)

With new publications and festivals, Asymptote staff are being celebrated all around the world!

We have such an amazing collective of literary talent over here at Asymptote. Check out some of our news from the past quarter and stay tuned for more of the international literature you love! If you are interested in being a part of the team, please note that we will be extending our recruitment drive for two more weeks through May 21, out of consideration for those of you who are busy with end-of-semester work and graduation! 

Communications Manager Alexander Dickow published a long poem, The Song of Lisaine, at the journal X-Peri.

Copy Editor Anna Aresi recently ran her Italian translation of Pulitzer-winning Forrest Gander’s “On a Sentence by Fernanda Melchor” on Interno Poesia’s Blog.

Criticism Editor Ellen Jones had an excerpt of her translation of Nancy by Bruno Lloret—forthcoming from Giramondo Publishing in 2020—showcased in a feature on Chilean domestic life in Words Without Borders. Her review of Samanta Schweblin’s Mouthful of Birds was also printed in The Irish Times. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

This week, we bring to you literary news from Palestine, India, and Central America!

Want to find out what’s happening in the literary world? This week, our Editors-at-Large bring you news from Palestine, where a landmark issue of World Literature Today features nearly two dozen of the most eminent Palestinian writers; India, where lockdown is slowly being lifted, and bookstores begin to bustle; and Central America, where writers from Guatemala to Costa Rica are releasing new books. Curious about this wide-ranging itinerary? Read on to find out more! 

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

“While most writers offer their writing to the masses, Palestinian writers offer their very souls,” writes the Guest Editor Yousef Khanfar in his introduction to “Palestine Voices,” the Summer 2021 issue of World Literature Today (released earlier this month). Throughout its ninety-five-year publishing history, World Literature Today  (published at Oklahoma University), has never devoted a cover feature—let alone a dossier—exclusively to the literature, art, and culture of Palestine. Even when WLT dedicated an issue in 1986 to “Literatures of the Middle East: A Fertile Crescent,” Palestinian writers were conspicuously absent from the lineup, reveals Editor Daniel Simon. Indeed, in Mona Mikhail’s essay introducing the 1986 issue, one of the most pivotal events during the modern era of the Middle East—the Palestinian Nakba that led to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948—isn’t even mentioned.

With less attachment to the Nakba but more freedom for exploration and imagination, the expanded issue, at 128 pages, “represents a long-overdue—and especially timely—attempt to remedy this deficit” writes Simon. “As with other recent dossiers dedicated to so-called “stateless” literatures, WLT’s Summer 2021 issue recognizes an autonomous literary tradition that dates back centuries and now, in the diaspora, is one of the most cosmopolitan literatures in the world.” The voices gathered in “Palestine Voices,” according to Khanfar, “speak a universal language: one of life filled with human dignity that celebrates a rich cultural heritage and vibrant present along with aspirations for freedom, justice, and hope for a better future.”

Nearly two dozen of the most eminent Palestinian writers and poets are gathered in WLT’s Summer 2021 issue, along with the work of twenty renowned artists and photographers. Since a number of the pieces are web exclusive, it is all worth it to explore the issue online, and to appreciate the well-chosen art works that compliment the texts. As “colonization slowly dehumanizes Palestine and the Palestinians,” according to Khanfar, Simon believes that the work by the writers featured in this WLT issue “rehumanizes a people who have much to offer the world.” At any rate, trust them when they say “these voices are designed to captivate and not to convince.” READ MORE…

In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

We spend days between four walls, but nobody said anything about nights.

Bringing you translated literature from around the world during troubling times, this week’s In This Together presents a selection of Spanish writer Jordi Doce’s journals. Translator Lawrence Schimel introduces this work and its significance below:

These entries come from Spanish poet, translator, and critic Jordi Doce’s careful attention to and recording of the minutiae of life under quarantine, his looking inward (while at the same time observing the world around him) just as Madrid began that explosive & expansive flourishing that is Springtime.

Originally published on his blog, forty entries (the literal “forty days” of the Italian “quarantena” that ships suspected of carrying disease were required to be isolated before passengers and crew were allowed to disembark) spanning eight weeksSunday, March 15th through Monday, May 11—are about to be published in book form under the title La vida en suspenso (Life on Hold), by Fórcola, in June 2020.

Jordi has been a steady if intermittent diarist since the Spring of 1997, as he notes in La puerta del año. Enero-febrero 2004 (The Year’s Gate: January-February 2004), the first of his diaries to be published in book form. He continues to write his diaries, first and foremost “out of a need to order my thoughts, to soothe them, but also with a will of lightness, almost weightlessness, as if wanting to remove the thorns of reality.” Sometimes (as in the case of these entries) he also shares them online or in book format, when the observations can stand on their own or make a sort of thematic sense or unity.

I began translating these entries into English while Jordi was still writing them—a curious twist which perhaps helped him at a dark moment. As he noted, “the tone has grown darker and even bitter with the days. I guess it was inevitable, but I resist. I don’t want to turn these notes into an account of aggravations and laments.”

He wrote: “If these notes brought a bit of serenity to friends, a bit of patience and good humor, I’d be satisfied.” Hopefully, his satisfaction is even greater as these notes and observations are now available to an even broader audience, in English translation.

Confinement Notebook

by Jordi Doce

Confinement Notebook 8
Tuesday, March 24, 2020

The midday sun (a clean sun, like one between storms) warms the large cauldron of the patio. One can see clothes hung out to dry at the rears of buildings and people (few) working on their balconies. Others simply emerge to get some air or smoke a cigarette. The light falls directly on the window and dazzles me. I’ve had to lower the blind. In the street it’s cool, but here I note how the studio heats up in just a few minutes. I feel the urge to greet the sun, like in Frank O’Hara’s poem, but I don’t yet have the necessary level of intimacy. I prefer to celebrate it with words. READ MORE…