Posts by Andriana Hamas

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

February 4, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Amaryllis Gacioppo, Andriana Hamas, and Eva Wissting

Ecopoetry and code-breaking are capturing readers around the world in this week's dispatches.

In this week’s dispatches, Bulgarian readers brave the winter for an event highlighting environmental literature, Sweden commemorates the beloved children’s book author, Astrid Lindgren, and Italy celebrates what would have been Umberto Eco’s 90th birthday with a new publication. Read on to find out more!

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria

Believe it or not—it is already February, and despite the cold weather in Bulgaria, various cultural events are popping up here and there. With an ever-increasing focus on climate change and the dire consequences we are already facing, different local artists are attempting to highlight the need for conscious, collective action.

One of the strategies employed to combat phenomena such as global warming constitutes the recycling of different materials. Interestingly enough, the whole concept also happens to be at the heart of literary critic and professor of literary theory Amelia Licheva’s latest poetry collection, The Need for Recycling, which considers the act through the prism of creative impulses and intuitive journeys through one’s feelings and experiences. The book, officially published by Lexicon Publishing House on Christmas Eve, 2021, also contains illustrations by the painter Veselin Pramatarov. In an interview for the Bulgarian National Radio, Licheva revealed that the title could be interpreted as “the search for lost meaning.” She is fully aware that the formula is far from light, but insists that the initial shock—bound to rock the reader’s inner world—is in fact a sought-after provocation of sorts.

The launch of the book, which took place not long ago at Sofia City Library, was attended by over fifty people eager to hear the poetess’s newest verses. The lively discussion was hosted by the prominent writer Georgi Gospodinov (whose works have previously appeared in Asymptote) and translator Daria Karapetkova, with the actress Snezhina Petrova was in charge of recitation. After the long-anticipated premiere, the author used her social media profile to extend her gratitude to “all of my colleagues, friends, and students who attended the debut of my poetry collection. Thank you for the solidarity and for the unique privilege to be able to feel like a part of a meaningful community.”

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

A week ago today, on January 28, Sweden commemorated twenty years since the country’s most internationally known writer, Astrid Lindgren, passed away at the age of ninety-four. The creator of strong, ingenious, and unforgettable children’s book characters like Pippi Longstocking, Karlsson on the Roof, Ronja the Robber’s Daughter, and Lotta on Troublemaker Street, Lindgren has enthralled and inspired readers around the world for generations. Her books have been translated into 107 languages, including numerous translations into English by Joan Tate—who also has translated other significant Swedish writers like Ingmar Bergman, Kerstin Ekman, and P.C. Jersild. Lindgren has been awarded both national and international literary awards, as well as received honorary degrees from Linköping University in Sweden, the University of Leicester in the UK, and the University of Warsaw in Poland. On the year of her passing, the Swedish government instituted the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (ALMA), which awards a writer, illustrator, or promoter of reading in March every year. During her lifetime, Lindgren not only wrote for and about children, but she was also an activist for children’s rights––which is why the Astrid Lindgren estate today, together with Save the Children, continues to work on the Pippi of Today campaign for refugee girls. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

December 17, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Andriana Hamas, and MARGENTO

The latest from Mexico, Bulgaria, Belgium, and Romania!

Though Asymptote is winding down with the year, literary events and going-ons continue to thrive around the globe. In Mexico, the Guadalajara International Book Fair presents its impressive line-up, and Polish female poets are celebrated in a new collection. In Bulgaria, the Christmas Book Fair returns to delight the locals. and in Romania, the Gaudeamus Book Fair features over one hundred exciting events. Read on to find out more!

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

On December 10, Mexican editor, poet, and translator Isabel Zapata presented Dentro del bosque, an English-Spanish translation of the autobiographical essay Into the Woods by American author Emily Gould. The essay reflects on contemporary capitalist precarity through Gould’s personal experience as a young woman trying to make a living as a writer in New York City. Originally published in 2014, its translation into Spanish is part of the Editor’s Collection from Gris Tormenta, an independent publisher based in Querétaro, a rapidly growing state three hours north of Mexico City. Gris Tormenta has published several Asymptote contributors in the past, including Yuri Herrera, Tedi López Mills, and Thomas Bernhard.

On December 4, Mexican poet Rocío Cerón and Polish poet Marta Eloy Cichocka presented Luz que fue sombra, a Polish-Spanish bilingual collection of seventeen Polish female poets born between 1963 and 1981, translated by Abel Murcia and Gerardo Beltrán. The book was published in the Spanish independent press Vaso Roto, which has published Spanish translations of important authors such as Anne Carson, John Ashbery, and Ocean Vuong. It includes poems by Justyna Bargielska, Barbara Klicka, Krystyna Dąbrowska, and Urszula Zajączkowska. Julia Fiedorczuk, whose book Oxygen was reviewed for Asymptote by Elisa González, is one of the most renowned authors in the collection. The event took place in Talleres de Arte Contemporáneo (TACO), a cultural centre south of Mexico City dedicated to promoting and teaching contemporary art.

The 35th edition of the Guadalajara International Book Fair took place in Guadalajara, one of Mexico’s largest cities, between November 27 and December 5. It is considered one of the most important book festivals in Latin America. This year, the guest of honor was Peru, from where several important authors and artists travelled to Mexico to present their work, lead workshops, and host panels. Among them was Asymptote contributor Victoria Guerrero. Importantly, the events featuring Peru offered significant representation of literature written in indigenous languages, including books by Dina Ananco Ahuananchi, Gabriel Pacheco, Cha’ska Ninawaman, and Washington Córdova. The fair also featured both emerging and established authors from all over the world. Many of them have previously appeared in Asymptote, such as Ana Luísa Amaral, Georgi Gospodinov, Abdellah Taïa, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, and Alejandro Zambra.

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria

Bulgaria has, for a long time now, been in the grips of mass paranoia, an all-encompassing misinformation campaign, and political turmoil. The health situation also not looking up; according to official statistics, the COVID-19 deaths are, sadly, approaching the chilling number of 30 000 since the beginning of the pandemic—a figure that definitely cannot be trivialised given the overall population. READ MORE…

Afternoons—A Case Study: On Teodora Lalova’s Afternoons like these

December 15, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Andriana Hamas

Lalova’s poetry confirms that regardless of the Other’s differences, we could always try and reach them by explaining . . . the unfamiliar details.

Afternoons like these by Teodora Lalova, translated from the Bulgarian by Jason H. Spinks, Kalin Petkov, and Gabriela Manova, Ars and Scribens Publishing, 2021

The Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov writes in one of his books that “August is the afternoon of the year.” With this subtle line, he takes his rightful place next to other insatiable thinkers who have dwelled on the special character of this particular time of day, either attempting a convincing explanation for its beguiling qualities or giving up once and for all their efforts to figure it out. So, even if we choose to ignore the all too famous quote by Henry James about the aesthetic pleasure he derives from the phrase “summer afternoon,” we should at least pay attention to what Jorge Luis Borges had to say on the matter. In one of his short stories, “The End,” he notes that “There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says it, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is as untranslatable as music.”

While I was reading Teodora Lalova’s debut collection of poems, united under the title Afternoons like these, I similarly found myself on the brink of grasping a curious feeling, too elusive for me to fully comprehend. From my perspective, the text appeared to be very close to capturing that crucial essence of the hours preceding twilight that so often escapes our miserable efforts to express it in words. Each poem, as is to be expected, achieves this in its own way. Some prefer the ironic twist of fate, while others choose to shed light on the more delicate nuances of existence. There is also a third kind that tackles complex philosophical questions in an “unbearably light” manner. Nevertheless, once the piece has located the throbbing heart of the unique afternoon, it offers a single or several lines that are certain to remain with the reader:

On afternoons like these I want to write poems about the smell of chimney smoke,
about the unread books and about first loves.
Of course, on afternoons like these
I don’t have my notebook with me.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

November 5, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas and Jacqueline Leung

The latest news from Bulgaria and Hong Kong!

This week we bring you news from Bulgaria and Hong Kong! In Bulgaria, Andriana Hamas recalls the brilliant life of poet and journalist Marin Bodakov, a significant contributor to Bulgarian letters, after his sudden death; Jacqueline Leung highlights the long-awaited return of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival and new book releases centered on personal and social struggles in Hong Kong. Read on to find out more!

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria

These past few weeks in Bulgaria have been marked by the sudden demise of the poet, literary critic, and journalist Marin Bodakov at age fifty. Born on April 28, 1971, in the picturesque city of Veliko Tarnovo, Bodakov studied Bulgarian Philology at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski,” where he eventually earned his Ph.D. with a dissertation entitled “Policies of presentation of Bulgarian literature in the print media of the 1990s. Problems of Critical Autoreflection.” Moreover, he was an assistant professor at the Press Journalism Department, as well as a passionate advocate of the path towards a meaningful academic career. His talents were versatile, spanning such different spheres that it comes as no surprise that he also managed to maintain the weekly column, Ходене по буквите (Walking through the letters), published by the renowned Kultura newspaper. His original texts highlighting the best of both local and world literature would come out, without fail, even after the editorial team of Kultura dissolved and reunited shortly afterward as K Weekly. In recent years, Bodakov found a suitable writing platform in the independent outlet, Toest.

His first poetry collection, Девство (Virginhood), was followed by seven others, the latest published in 2018. Another prominent work he authored was Преведе от . . . (Translated from the original . . .), an enchanting volume that comprises of conversations with several Bulgarian translators. The interviews provide an invaluable glimpse into the profession and its “invisibility.” They equip the reader with a better understanding of the social and cultural trends that often play a decisive role by steering the literary scene in unforeseen directions. A year after the book was published, Bodakov received the Knight of the Book Award, granted to journalists and other prominent personalities who have contributed to the publication and promotion of books in Bulgaria.

READ MORE…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

October 7, 2021  |  in News  |  by Andriana Hamas, Janet Phillips, and Mary Hillis

A selection of staff reads from Asymptote’s Fortnightly Airmail!

When it comes to browsing the shelves and diving head-first into the wonderfully vast world of translated literature, sometimes you just need a little help from your friends. In this case—let us be your friends. Our editors are sharing their favourite reads to make sure that yours is time well spent.

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Readers already familiar with Nina Berberova’s fiction in collections such as Billancourt Tales, The Tattered Cloak and The Ladies from St. Petersburg will find her first novel—translated by Marian Schwartz—a surprising divergence in style from the lightness of touch and sparse but pungent details in her stories about small casts of characters grappling with challenges in their everyday lives. Written in 1928-29, The Last and the First (Pushkin Press, 2021) is a drama on a broader canvas about Russian émigrés in France struggling to decide whether to return to the Soviet Union or to throw all their energies into establishing a meaningful life in France, specifically whether to join Ilya, the messianic central character, toiling on the land in Provence. It is driven by a complex plot in which the true identities and motives of some characters are initially hidden, and stylistically has more in common with novels of the nineteenth century, Dostoevsky being the writer who springs most to mind for the intense and knotted emotional relationships between the main characters, their striving for some kind of salvation, as well as in the vivid and grimy descriptions of the backstreets of Paris.

—Janet Phillips, Assistant Managing Editor (Issue Production)

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A tale of two lives, that of a poetess living in the USA and of a Yazidi who saves the women of Sinjar, unfolds through a series of phone calls and a single face-to-face visit. In her pensive The Beekeeper of Sinjar (New Directions, 2018), masterfully translated from the Arabic by Max Weiss, the Iraqi-born Dunya Mikhail recalls her conversations with Abdullah, an ordinary man turned local hero, who has chosen to devote his days and nights to rescuing the innocent girls kidnapped by the militant group Daesh. Simultaneously a meditation on absurdity and a truthful account of real-life experiences, the book offers its readers a path to understanding the shifting values of a region long tormented by its past. The unimaginable loss and heartbreak that pour from every page are curiously accompanied by an almost inhuman ability to forgive, while the deceptively simple descriptions of misery bring home the scale of the disaster. Despite the traumatic events, however, the locals have managed to retain their purity and, what is more, to find time for the poetry of existence. As we all should.

—Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large for Bulgaria READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 17, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Darren Huang, and Thuy Dinh

The latest in literary news from Vietnam, Bulgaria, and Taiwan!

As Venice makes its cinema showcase and the MET spreads its red carpets for the lavishly dressed, literature also serves up September as a memorable month with plenty of international displays and showcases of both known favorites and new releases. This week, a vital Vietnamese poet is commemorated in film, a varied arts festival takes place on Bulgarian shores, and an eminent Taiwanese author makes his English-language debut. Read on to find out more!

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

Each year, on September 16, the village of Tiên Điền, in the province of Hà Tĩnh, commemorates the death anniversary of Nguyễn Du (1765-1820), its venerated native son and author of The Tale of Kiều—a 3,254-line epic poem unequivocally embraced as the Vietnamese soul. This year, to mark the 201st year of his passing, the three-hour biopic Đại Thi Hào Nguyễn Du (The Great Poet Nguyễn Du) will make its premiere at the XXII National Film Festival in Hue, Central Vietnam. The film’s original September release—meant to coincide with Nguyễn Du’s death anniversary—has now been rescheduled to November 2021, due to safety concerns related to Vietnam’s recent surge of COVID cases.

The Tale of Kiều, created during a time of warring loyalties and written in the Nôm (Southern) script with Chinese characters modified to reflect Vietnamese spoken vernacular, has been endlessly adapted into cải lương (“reformed” Southern Vietnamese folk opera), chèo (Northern Vietnamese musical theatre), Western-styled opera, and films. Since the idea of trinh 貞 (chastity/integrity/ faithfulness) in Nguyễn Du’s oeuvre represents both a conceptual and linguistic challenge, its complexity has inspired at least six English translations in recent decades. Huỳnh Sanh Thông’s Nguyễn Du, The Tale of Kieu–A Bilingual Edition (Yale University Press, 1983), while still considered the gold standard, employs unrhymed iambic pentameter that often lapses into wooden syntax. Vladislav Zhukov’s The Kim Vân Kiều of Nguyễn Du (Cornell University Press, 2013), in grafting iambic pentameter to lục bát (six-eight syllable Vietnamese rhyme scheme), results in obtuse renderings reminiscent of Nabokov’s eccentric translation of Eugene Onegin. Most recently, Timothy Allen’s The Song of Kieu: A New Lament (Penguin, 2019), while ebullient with vivid syntax, contains numerous errors and self-indulgent interpretations.

Nguyễn Du’s mistrust of chastity goes hand in hand with his concept of exile; his heroine wanders far-flung places and learns to survive by endless transformations—also a recurring theme in Kiều Chinh: Nghệ Sĩ Lưu Vong (Kiều Chinh: Artist in Exile) (Văn Học Press, 2021). Penned by veteran Vietnamese American actress Kiều Chinh, the memoir echoes Nguyễn Du’s art of story-telling “to beguile an hour or two of your long night.”[i] The Joy Luck Club actress—whose dramatic flight to freedom is recounted in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer—will embark on a September-November book tour to Vietnamese diasporic communities in the U.S., sharing chapters from her own life that reflect the larger history of Vietnam.

[i]Huỳnh Sanh Thông’s English translation, The Tale of Kiều, line 3254, p. 167.

READ MORE…

Personal History and Italian History Intertwine in The Year of Our Love

September 6, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Andriana Hamas

[Bonvicini] gradually expands the world surrounding the most intimate human emotions, then reminds the reader of inevitably missed opportunities.

The Year of Our Love by Caterina Bonvicini, translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar, Other Press, 2021

“Life is a combination of magic and pasta,” the celebrated Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini once observed, and who can know this better than the boot-shaped Repubblica famous for an inimitable cuisine that has influenced the course of humanity? It doesn’t come as a surprise that The Year of Our Love was at least partly inspired, as explained in the author’s note, by a local osteria (a simple or inexpensive restaurant) and tales told over aromatic wine and a hot bowl of spaghetti.

Born in the picturesque city of Florence in 1974, the writer Caterina Bonvicini holds a degree in modern literature from the University of Bologna and has written more than ten novels, some of which have won prestigious prizes, among them Premio Frignano in Italy and the Grand Prix de l’Héroïne Madame Figaro in France. Critics often highlight the way her texts expose the bourgeois lifestyle, while placing women, with their conflicting worldviews, internal dilemmas, and well-hidden feelings, at the center of the story.

The facts of her life reveal similarities between Bonvicini and the novel’s protagonists. The journey starts in 1979, only five years after she was born, at the height of the so-called Years of Lead, when Italy is locked in the firm grip of warring right- and left-wing factions. The first pages are filled with markers of the recent past: terrorist attacks, including the infamous Italicus Express bombing; numerous brigades and gangs; brutal kidnappings. Immersed in a world of turbulent clashes and savage confrontations, we meet Valerio Carnevale and Olivia Morganti—raised together even though their families are separated by a social divide that could hardly be bridged under ordinary circumstances. The passing seasons of childhood in the Emilia-Romagna region, home to the picturesque Bologna and the place where Valerio eventually studies to become a magistrate, overflow with stories about guns, hiding places, and bodyguards, exquisitely recounted by the girl’s grandmother, Manon, whose notions about beauty and truth exert a great influence on the children. But after Valerio’s mother begins an affair with a handsome swindler, the family is forced to move to one of Rome’s least prestigious neighborhoods, and the interaction between the two changes profoundly. Finally, it comes to a halt. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 16, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Charlie Ng, and Eva Wissting

Find out what’s been happing in the literary scenes of Bulgaria, Sweden, and Hong Kong!

“Lazy to shake the white fan, nude in green woods . . .” The languorous summer words of Li Bai are perhaps demonstrative of these mild months, but even a writer too lethargic to fan himself is still scrawling poems. The pen never rests, as proved by a bounty of literary news from Bulgaria, Sweden, and Hong Kong this week, as our editors report on book fairs, awards, and festivals. Read on to find out more!

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria

It is a truth universally acknowledged that books—with their magical power to still the world and inspire us in previously unimaginable ways—can transform the course of human lives for good, and this seems especially obvious when it comes down to interpersonal relationships, especially the queen of them all—love. The recently organized Bulgarian literary festival Пловдив чете (Plovdiv reads) demonstrated that by uniting fiction and the deep appreciation of others, resulting in a happy collaboration.

On the last day of the tightly packed program, which included an afternoon poetry reading under the blooming linden trees by the up-and-coming authors Aleksandar Gabrovski, Dimitar Ganev, Gabriela Manova, and Liliya Yovnova, a rather nervous young man from the public stood up and, under everyone’s curious gaze, asked his speechless girlfriend for her hand in marriage. Once it was established that a “happily ever after” was soon to follow, the audience was assured that the world would continue to spin—possibly in patterns that, more often than not, rhyme.

Hosts of this particular occasion were one of the country’s best-renowned writers Georgi Gospodinov (whose verse is available in Asymptote’s pages!) and the talented poet, essayist, and screenwriter Ivan Landzhev. Both shared their fascinating insights into the qualities required of a helpful editor, the art of mentoring gifted adolescents without erasing their unique personalities, as well as the importance of authors reading each other. Another point that was touched upon was the ability to trace foreign influences in one’s works.

Alas, for even more thrilling discussions of this sort, we’ll have to wait until the 2022 edition. Until then, however, let us enjoy the rest of what global literature has to offer!

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

This month, Swedish writers Elin Anna Labba and Alma Thörn have been awarded the Norrlands litteraturpris—a literary prize of northern Sweden. The prize has been given annually since 1973 by a literary association of the region, Norrländska litteratursällskapet, along with the region’s writers’ organization, Författarcentrum Norr. Since 2014, there have been two categories: adult literature and children’s literature. For this year’s edition of the adult category, Swedish Sámi journalist and writer Elin Anna Labba was awarded for her nonfiction book Herrarna satte oss hit: Om tvångsförflyttningarna i Sverige (Sirdolaččat: The Deportation of the Northern Sámi). The jury’s statement pointed to how Labba has woven a literary fabric—oral testimonies, archived documents, yoiks, maps, and photographs that highlight the state abuse and colonial exercise of authority previously made invisible in Nordic history, and calls her book a hybrid that reveals the possibilities of literature. In the children’s book category, Alma Thörn is awarded for the graphic novel Alltid hejdå (Always Goodbye). Thörn’s book is about divorce from a child’s perspective, which the jury deemed “a visually and emotionally strong story.”

Another recent book that calls attention to serious issues is Dansa med corona (Dance with Corona) by the staff of the care home Östergård 2 in Kristianstad. Last year, media frequently wrote about the place, which was one of the first care homes in southern Sweden to be struck by COVID-19. Now, the staff are sharing their own experiences through the recent publication: “Your children beg you to stay home from work because they believe you will die if you go there. Media depict you as the executioner and your friends flee when they see you. At the same time, the elderly need you at work to survive.” The book gives precious insight into the life of the caretakers during extreme times, with guilt and fear as only a couple of the challenges they have had to manage.

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

Having been suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the Hong Kong Book Fair returns this year with the theme “Inspirational and Motivational Reading,” running from June 14 to 20 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai. Besides collaborating with numerous publishers to showcase new books in Chinese and English, the organizer also invited famous local and international writers to participate in talks and workshops, including Neil Gaiman and Julia Lovell. However, with the introduction of the national security law, Hong Kong’s publishing sector is overcast by the anxiety over tightened freedom of speech and expression. As reported by the Hong Kong Free Press, the Hong Kong Trade Development Council announced that police would be notified should they receive complaints on exhibits that breach the national security law. This warning is among a series of censoring actions taken against oppositional voices, including the forced closure of the Apple Daily newspaper and the removal of some political books from public libraries.

Despite the tense political situation in Hong Kong, Hong Kong literature is varied enough to represent Hong Kong in different ways. In a recent interview published by Words without Borders, Louise Law, the director of Spicy Fish Cultural Production Limited and publisher of the local literary magazine Fleurs des Lettres, speaks to translator Jennifer Feeley on Hong Kong’s literary scene and the translation of Hong Kong literature. Feeley is a major translator of the works of Xi Xi, and her translation, Not Written Words: Selected Poetry of Xi Xi, was a prizewinning collection. Zolima CityMag’s recent Hong Kong’s Great Writers series also highlights Xi Xi as their second feature. The article introduces Xi Xi’s literary life and explores the playfulness in her characters as well as her literary style.

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Read more on the Asymptote blog:

All Literature Is Worth Investigating: An Interview with Translator Stefan Rusinov

June 21, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Andriana Hamas

All cultures are exciting, both for their achievements and failures, for their beauty and nastiness.

In 1999, almost 170 years after his birth, Bulgaria honored publisher Hristo G. Danov’s legacy by establishing national literary awards in his name. In 2021, Stefan Rusinov, a translator who isn’t afraid to ask the important questions about the essence of his trade, won Best Fiction Translator for multiple books he had worked on over the course of twenty-four months. In addition to these admirable recent endeavors in Chinese prose, he juggles his work at Sofia University and his tasks as a freelance interpreter. Our conversation highlights his current projects, the importance of honest answers, and the value of simply “hanging out” with writers.

Andriana Hamas (AH): I would like to begin by asking you about your Бележка под линия (Footnote) podcast, thanks to which you meet fellow translators and discuss “behind-the-scenes torments,” the decisions they eventually have to make, and their inevitable missteps or failures. What have you learned so far?

Stefan Rusinov (SR): I’ve learned a lot, which was really the selfish reason to start this project to begin with. Private conversations with other translators and several years of translating gradually made me realize how case-specific this activity is and that mastery comes rather from accumulating solved problems than from learning universal principles (not to underestimate translation theory). That’s why I wanted to create a space where we won’t so much muse over the nature of translation and other such abstract questions, but we would dig into the specifics, where translators would be put in the position of explaining their considerations and decisions to someone who doesn’t know their working language. Nine episodes on, I’m even more certain that discussing actual problems encountered by translators from all kinds of languages is an important way to understand this activity (and also a major way to pump up my own translation skills).

I’ve learned, or rather, I’ve confirmed, that uncertainty is part of the game, and it should be. I find it very hard to trust a confident translator. There are tons of problems we need to solve and tons of decisions we need to make and, to borrow Wolfgang Iser’s idea of interpretation, the mere existence of these cases means that we are bound to create a gap between the original and the translation. So, in a way, we are bad translators by default.

I also learned that in French unfuckable means “incomprehensible.” READ MORE…

Physical Object and Metaphysical Destiny: To the Lake Journeys to the Heart of the Balkans

May 19, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Andriana Hamas

Kapka Kassabova’s English-language travelogue invites readers in the Balkans to consider local culture with a fresh perspective.

On a website called Lost Bulgaria, anyone curious enough can browse thousands of carefully preserved and curated photographs depicting the poignant yet essential ways in which the people, customs, and landscape have transformed or been transformed from the last quarter of the 1800s until 2010. About a dozen of the blurred images kept in this time machine take us back to the first half of the twentieth century and Lake Ohrid, one of the world’s oldest and deepest, which nowadays is split by the border between North Macedonia and Albania. The majority of the visuals reveal everyday life near the shores, the monasteries that dot the mountainous terrain, the traditionally clad locals, or the passers-by who felt the need to extend a prayer to Saint Naum of Ohrid. Kapka Kassabova’s latest travelogue with distinct autobiographical elements, To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace, offers a similar but much more powerful passage through the lake’s past and present.

The book, which reviewers often place in the travel fiction genre, is pronouncedly personal, even though the disclosed memories, both on an individual level and as an outlet for the collective subconscious, undoubtedly remind readers from diverse regions of the globe of their unique roots and unending voyage of self-discovery.

The author (b. 1973) spent her childhood and teenage years in Sofia and later moved with her family to New Zealand, only to finally—or at least for the time being—settle down in the Scottish Highlands. Her extensive travels have informed her writing, which encompasses poetry collections and novels, in addition to literary travelogues. Although Kassabova’s mother tongue is Bulgarian, she writes in English, a practice that evokes the likes of Vladimir Nabokov, Khalil Gibran, and Joseph Conrad and makes her Bulgarian translations all the more fascinating.

Located on the edge of her grandmother’s homeland, Lake Ohrid is where she passed a few of her summer holidays. Once considered the pearl of the Balkans, nowadays it is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site and boasts endemic species and unique prehistoric remnants. Despite this international protection however, its pristine waters are still threatened by climate change and widespread pollution. While making a convincing case for immediate preservation action of global scale, Kassabova’s fictionalized reportage can also be perceived as a continuation to her previous one, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, in which she sets on a quest to comprehend the meaning of the separation points not only between countries, but also between people. In a similar fashion, To the Lake prompts us to tag along as she traces the ancient Via Egnatia and dives into the bloody history of the region, where Bulgarians, Macedonians, Albanians, and Greek are always at crossroads, especially in the aftermath of the two Balkan wars and the ensuing decades under communist rule. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

May 7, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Carol Khoury, and Jovanka Kalaba

The latest news from Bulgaria, Palestine, and Serbia!

This week our writers bring you the latest news from Bulgaria, Palestine, and Serbia. In Palestine, the Sheikh Zayed Book Award winners have been announced, including Iman Mersal taking the Literature Award; in Serbia, a new anthology of Miloš Crnjanski’s poetry has been translated into English; and in Bulgaria, a conference about Bulgarian Literature as world literature was held at the National Book Center. Read on to find out more! 

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

It is an unusually hot spring, Ramadan is in its last third, and the country has been under partial lockdown for a long time, which leaves no reason to wonder that the literary scene in Palestine is suffering from Frühjahrsmüdigkeit (aka springtime lethargy)! One cannot but wonder how people in hotter regions, such as in the United Arab Emirates, not only manage to get through with their days, but also make international literary news.

Seven authors and researchers, from Egypt, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, and the US, as well as a publishing house from Lebanon, have been declared the winners of this year’s Sheikh Zayed Book Award. The winners were selected from a pool of more than 2,300 submissions, the most the annual award has received since it was founded in 2007. The awards will be formally presented via a livestream ceremony on Youtube during the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair (23–29 May 2021).

This year’s Literature Award went to Iman Mersal for her 2019 work of creative nonfiction Fee Athar Enayat Al Zayyat (In the Footsteps of Enayat Al-Zayyat). This look into the life of the Egyptian writer Enayat al-Zayyat, who killed herself in 1963, illuminates the challenges of writing while female, of attitudes toward mental health, and life in mid-20th-century Egypt. It is part detective story, part biography, and part memoir, and unfolds tender and surprising connections. It recently came out in Richard Jacquemond’s French translation as Sur les traces d’enayat Zayyat. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

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

The latest news from Slovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria!

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

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

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

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

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

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