Posts by Claire Jacobson

The Seyavash Cycle and Ritual as Translation

If the rituals as such are the bridge from one story to the other, we can view this transformation as an act of translation . . .

In our new column, Retellings, Asymptote presents essays on the translations of myths, those enduring stories that continue to transform and reincarnate. In this essay, Claire Jacobson covers the path of the Seyavash cycle through time and cultures, its adoptions and adaptations. 

In Khurasani poet Abu al-Qasim Ferdowsi’s epic the Shahnameh, symbol of innocence and hero-prince Seyavash undergoes a false rape accusation, a martyr’s death, and a symbolic resurrection. This tale—the pure hero is falsely accused of rape and suffers either a literal or symbolic death and resurrection as a result—is found across cultures and time, often beginning with the hero’s virtuous rejection of a lustful woman: the incorrupt Seyavash recoils from his stepmother Sudabeh’s declarations of love, as does the Khotanese version of the Mauryan prince Kunala from Queen Tishyaraksha; the righteous Joseph (Yusuf) flees Potiphar’s wife, Zulaikha; the chaste Hippolytus rejects Phaedra’s advances; the honorable Bata refuses to betray his brother Anpu by sleeping with his sister-in-law. Much like Seyavash, each of these men are then written into the cycle of accusation, death, and resurrection. 

Many of these myths coexisted in a shared discursive space, but not all of them continued to develop and change as living stories. After the Islamic conquest of the Iranian plateau, several began to converge. By the early Islamic period, the tale of Yusuf and Zulaikha was considered by literary critics to be the same story as Seyavash and Sudabeh but in a more appropriately Islamic format, and many of the rituals that had long been practiced to celebrate Seyavash were repurposed to commemorate the death of Husayn at Karbala. In this case, ritual (by which I mean the popular practice of religion) seems to act as a medium of translation, carrying the shape of the re-enacted story forward even though the language, notions of gender, and cultural landscape were all slowly changing as the millennia passed.

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Blocages and Barricades: Les Misérables and French Dissatisfaction

Revolution by revolution, France inches forward in search of its ideal of a just society, and every revolution thinks it will be the last.

France’s revolutionary past and future come together in Claire Jacobson’s reflections on the gilets jaunes movement and its connections to Victor Hugo’s famous revolutionaries in Les Misérables. Read on for Kylian Mbappé, Édouard Louis, and Emmanuel Macron. Vive la Révolution!

Marius and Enjolras didn’t wear yellow vests to the barricade on rue de la Chanvrerie, at least not as Victor Hugo tells it. But after watching a group of gilets jaunes attack three police officers on the Champs-Élysées on BFMTV the weekend before Christmas, the comparison suddenly didn’t seem so far-fetched.

I was in Paris with friends to see the PSG-Nantes game that evening, enjoying Turkish kebab in Boulogne-Billancourt and then cheerfully singing “joyeux anniversaire” to World Cup hero Kylian Mbappé with a stadium full of his adoring fans, and we didn’t hear the news from the Champs-Élysées until the next morning. It seemed inconceivable that such a thing could be happening scarcely five kilometers away while we chanted “ici c’est Paris!” and picked apart Paris Saint-Germain’s defensive strategy from the nosebleeds. Inconceivable, and yet it made a strange kind of sense; what the gilets jaunes lost in numbers each week, they seemed to make up in desperation and increasing anger worthy of the most vehement nineteenth-century revolutionaries.

I was thirteen when I first heard Les Misérables all the way through, listening to my parents’ Original Broadway Cast Album cassette tape in the car over and over as we moved from Seattle to Iowa City. We saw the touring cast perform in Madison a few years later, and went to see the movie as a family when it came out on Christmas. So when I picked up the book at the end of November, I read with the gilets jaunes watching over my shoulder and the musical whispering in my ear.

Knowing the musical backwards and forwards has actually helped me while reading, keeping the greater narrative arc in view despite frequent digressions analyzing corrupt church leadership, all of the potential reasons Napoleon lost at Waterloo, or the value of monasticism to society. The unabridged French edition is 1,254 pages, which I read alongside the Fahnestock and MacAfee translation, an update of Charles Wilbour’s 1862 original. READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2018

Don’t know where to start with our Fall 2018 issue? Here are the stand-out pieces, according to our section editors.

The brand new Fall 2018 issue of Asymptote was released last week and we are still enjoying its diverse offerings from 31 countries, including a Special Feature on Catalan fiction. After the blog editors posted their highlights two days ago, the quarterly magazine’s section editors share their favorites from this season’s haul: 

What good is French today? After years of patient apprenticeship, and years of mastery, perhaps writing in French was only a means of escape, or a way of doing battle. These are the questions that Abdellah Taïa battles with, in ‘To Love and to Kill: Why Do I Write In French?’ Beautifully translated by Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernberg, Taïa’s essay attacks the French language, with great vigor and style, and—of course—in French. In a succinct essay, Taïa adroitly sets out the class politics of speaking French in Morocco, and the satisfactions (and oblivions) of conquering a language and a place, and all the complicated forms of hatred (and self-hatred) that come with it.

—Joshua Craze, Nonfiction editor

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Teaching and Learning Narrative Identity

"Though there is no substitute for language immersion in pursuit of fluency, you don’t need to leave home...all you need is a book"

What does it take to truly communicate? In this essay, Claire Jacobson takes us on a journey from language classrooms to the souqs of Morocco, exploring the narrative frameworks that create culture. Read on to discover the differences between learning a language, and the narrative identities that language use is built on.

Humans are inveterate storytellers. We narrativize our memories, use allegory and metaphor to communicate complex ideas, and search for meaning in suffering by placing it in the narrative arc of our lives. “When someone asks you who you are,” writes Richard Kearney, “you tell your story. That is, you recount your present condition in the light of past memories and future anticipations. You interpret where you are now in terms of where you have come from and where you are going to.” Or, as Paul Ricoeur says, “Selfhood is a cloth woven of stories told.”

But it’s not only individuals, Kearney writes. “Communities come to know themselves in the stories they tell about themselves.” When families gather, we always tell stories, sometimes new ones but mostly the old ones over and over—these stories are part of what makes us family. No Christmas celebration in my home is complete without reading about shepherds and wise men and the sociopolitical implications of the term “messiah” in first-century Palestine. These stories are part of what marks us as people of faith and also total nerds. A few weeks ago, my boss told me about the day we went from one bookmobile in town to two, traveling around to neighborhoods without access to the public library—this is one of the many stories that place me firmly in Iowa City, the only city I’ve ever known where you can find inter-bookmobile competition drama.

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Translating le multilinguisme

Translation is never a horizontal movement; there is always an uneven power dynamic between two languages.

Mektoub. Taleb. Mesquin. Cheb. Bezef. Each of these French words is also Arabic, albeit represented in French orthography. Through long proximity by colonization and immigration, Arabic influence has bled—at some moments more overtly than others—into the French language, and Azouz Begag’s 1986 autobiographical novel Le gone du Chaâba engages with this reality in each word choice and every line of dialogue.

The son of an Algerian migrant worker who settled permanently in France in 1949, not long before the brutal war for independence began, Begag employs a remarkable mixture of French, spoken Arabic, and Lyonnais slang to illustrate the linguistic realities of his community—something that poses problems for a translator who wants to retain its linguistic flavor without rendering the text totally opaque. Written in the eighties, the book and its projet linguistique is perhaps even more relevant at a time when so many Westerners think the Arabic phrase “Allahu akbar” is exclusively synonymous with terrorism.

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Winter 2018: In Conversation with Translator Paula Gordon

What I love about translating the languages of this region is the richness of expression and playful use of language by native speakers.

Paula Gordon is a freelance editor and translator of Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin based in Delaware. She has lived in Bosnia and Herzegovina, working in the nonprofit sector as a translator, and on the staff of the Sarajevo Film Festival. Her translation of Ilija Đurović’s “Pod čistom podu” (“Across the Clean Floor”), in our Winter 2018 issue, is the very first translation from the Montenegrin to appear in Asymptote. 

In her translator’s introduction, Gordon writes: “Many stories [by Đurović], but particularly this one, stand out for what remains unsaid as much as for what is spoken or described. “Across the Clean Floor” is told in the first person, but the narrator speaks tersely and dispassionately, leaving it to readers (should we be so inclined) to provide the backstory. It is as if we are observing a night in the life of this couple through a telephoto lens, or perhaps through a keyhole.”

Our interviews editor, Claire Jacobson, conducted this interview with Gordon.

Claire Jacobson (CJ): In your translator’s note, you talk about realizing that you were “filling in the gaps” in the narrative in English, and making changes (such as the tense) to your draft as a result. Where did you find yourself over-interpreting by translating, and how did you bring the piece back to its natural ambiguity?

Paula Gordon (PG): Interestingly, when I look back over my various drafts, I don’t find much proof in the text of what I said in my translator’s note. The biggest revision was in changing past tense to present fairly early on (and I tracked those changes, so I guess I wasn’t certain whether that would work or not).

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2018: A Year of Reading Adventurously

In 2018, I’ll be making an effort to trace my inheritance as an Anglophone, Southeast Asian poet of faith and colour.

After the recently concluded blog series in which we looked back on 2017’s literary discoveries, we bring you our New Year’s reading resolutions.

Chris Power, Assistant Editor:

I work in French and German, so I’ll start with my French literary resolutions: I’m reading Marx et la poupée (Marx and the Doll) by Maryam Madjidi with my friend and former French professor, the psychoanalytic literary theorist Jerry Aline Flieger. Excerpts of the novel of course appear in our current issue. If it isn’t my favorite work we’ve published, then it stands out for being the one that overwhelmed my critical faculties. I couldn’t write about it in the disinterested manner that I prefer. Instead I wrote a confused, gushing blurb listing my favorite scenes and describing how it brought tears to my eyes. An emphatic “yes” was all I could muster. Next on my list is Réparer le monde (Repair the World) by Alexandre Gefen, to which Laurent Demanze dedicated a beautiful essay in Diacritik in late November. I’m looking forward not only to an insightful survey of contemporary French literature, but also to a provocative anti-theoretical turn in the history of literary theory, namely a theory of the utility of literature (to repair the world) which cites pragmatist philosophers like John Dewey. Gefen introduces this theory enticingly through a reading of Barthes in his lecture “A quoi bon ? Les pouvoirs de la littérature (La tentation de l’écriture)” / “What’s the use? The powers of literature (the temptation of writing)” which is available online, but I must admit that I’m reminded of a Baudelaire quote dear to me: “Être un homme utile m’a toujours paru quelque chose de bien hideux.” (“To be a useful man has always appeared to me to be particularly hideous.”) In 2018 I’ll also continue exploring the work of Sarah Kofman, who seems to me to be a diamond in the rough of historical amnesia and a potential dissertation topic. She’s exactly the kind of Nietzschean, Parisian philosopher-poet of the 1960s who worked at the intersection of philosophy and art that we’ve grown so comfortable labelling a “theorist,” but she hasn’t (yet) acquired the cult following of her dissertation advisor Gilles Deleuze or colleague Jacques Derrida.

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In Conversation: Christopher Merrill, Director of The International Writing Program

What persists through every job I have held...is my love of reading and writing, which at every turn has helped me to navigate my time here below

I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are
     with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I
     translate into a new tongue.

—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

This is perhaps the most appropriate introduction to Christopher Merrill, the award-winning poet and translator from Slovenian and Korean who directs the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa. Gifted with a style that frequently combines, as Kirkus Reviews called it, “Merrill-the-poet’s gorgeous writing, and Merrill-the-reporter’s sharp eye,” he has risen to greater international prominence in part through his involvement with the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO and extensive cultural diplomacy engagement all over the world.

In his recent memoir Self-Portrait with Dogwood, Merrill writes: “The invention of language made possible what we imagine to comprise human experience, for good or ill—agriculture, warfare, religion, government, poetry, philosophy, art, and science, not to mention the emotions that drive individuals, societies, and civilizations. Long ago, under a tree, we learned to express ourselves in a new key, building structures of meaning word by word, phrase by phrase, alert to the necessities of living, to the varieties of love and grief, to the mysteries of faith, quirks of nature, and consolations of storytelling… The musical possibilities encoded in language expanded our understanding of the worlds without and within, giving birth to poetry—and so much more.”

Claire Jacobson: Can you tell me how you got started writing poetry, and translating, and being involved in the international writing community? Basically, what is the origin story of Christopher Merrill?

Christopher Merrill: A writer’s origin story may change over time, especially if the writer’s life takes many forms, as mine has. Thus at different points along the way I have dated the beginning of my literary vocation to a love affair; a serious illness at the age of twenty-four; working as a war correspondent in the Balkans; making pilgrimages on the Holy Mountain of Athos; and so on. But the most enduring story is that as a teenager in New Jersey I wanted to be a soccer player and a poet: two career paths that did not sit well with my parents—which only enhanced their appeal. When I matriculated at Middlebury College, where I was recruited to play soccer and intended to be a French major, I had the good luck to take a poetry workshop with the novelist Thomas Gavin, who became a lifelong friend; his encouragement inspired me to serve what turned into an unusual literary apprenticeship, which included stints as a graduate student, nurseryman, college soccer coach, caretaker, bookstore clerk, director of writers’ conferences, and freelance journalist. What persists through every job I have held, each of which I viewed as a gift regardless of the pay or working conditions, is my love of reading and writing, which at every turn has helped me to navigate my time here below.

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Section Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2017

Our editors choose their favourites from this issue.

Asymptote’s new Fall issue is replete with spectacular writing. See what our section editors have to say about the pieces closest to their hearts: 

As writer-readers, we’ve all been there before. Who of us hasn’t been faced with that writer whose words have made us stay up late into the night; or start the book over as soon as we’re done; or after finally savoring that last word, weep—for all the words already written and that would never to be yours. The feeling is unmistakeable, physical. In her essay, “Animal in Outline,” Mireia Vidal-Conte describes this gut feeling after finishing El porxo de les mirades (The Porch of the Gazes) by Miquel de Palol: “What are we doing? I thought. What are we writing? What have we read, what have we failed to read, before sitting down in front of a blank sheet of paper? What does and doesn’t deserve readers?” There are the books that make you never want to stop writing, and the books that never make you want to write another word (in the best way possible, of course). Vidal-Conte reminds writers again that none of us is without context—for better or for worse. Her essay is smart, playful, honest, and a must-read from this issue.

—Ah-reum Han, Writers on Writers Editor

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Close Approximations: In Conversation with Poetry Winner Anca Roncea

On translation as an impossible object, and the possibility of a direction.

Today, we continue our spotlight on the winners of Asymptote’s annual Close Approximations translation contest, now into its third edition. (Find the official results and citations by judges David Bellos and Sawako Nakayasu here.) From 215 fiction and 128 poetry submissions, these six best emerging translators were awarded 3,000 USD in prize money, in addition to publication in our Summer 2017 edition. After our interviews with poetry runners-up Keith Payne and Sarah Timmer Harvey, we are thrilled to bring you poetry winner Anca Roncea in a short but illuminating conversation with Asymptote Assistant Interviews Editor, Claire Jacobson. 

Anca Roncea is a poet and translator. She is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently attending the University of Iowa’s M.F.A. program in literary translation. In 2012–2013 she was a Fulbright visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. She was born and raised in Romania and now lives in Iowa City where she writes and translates poems. She is working on translations of Romanian poetry, an experimental translation of Tristan Tzara, as well as her first book of poetry. She explores the space where language can create pivots in the midst of displacement while incorporating the aesthetics of Constantin Brancusi. She is the 2017 winner of the Omnidawn Single Poem Broadside Contest. Her work can be found in Omniverse, Berkeley Poetry Review, Beecher’s Magazine, and The Des Moines Register.

Close Approximations poetry judge Sawako Nakayasu writes, “I’m thrilled to have selected this year’s winner for poetry: “wrong connections” by Andra Rotaru, in Anca Roncea’s excellent translation from the Romanian. I love how this work reads like a film that can only take place in the mind of the reader. The scenes (I read them like scenes) carry you through a changing landscape that can be menacing, historical, scientific, or downright violent—all in torqued connection with each other like the “incorrect connections” of the tribar.

“Ms. Roncea brings to our attention a new voice in contemporary Romanian poetry: Ms. Rotaru’s work has already been translated into numerous European languages, but very little has been translated into English so far—though this is soon to be remedied, I believe.”

Claire Jacobson (CJ): In your translator’s note you refer to the tribar, or “the geometrical concept of an impossible triangle whose three sides do not connect but still exist in the form of a triangle, creating a direction for movement.” What are some ways you see Andra Rotaru’s work embodying the “wrong connections” of this impossible shape, and how have you recreated those moments in English?

Anca Roncea (AR): I think that in some ways Andra’s “wrong connections” in her tribar here are speaking to the interesting ways that poetry works to create human experience. It made me think of one of Lyn Hejinian’s lines in her book My Life that says: “You put two things next to each other they start resembling each other.” In Andra’s poems there are strong tactile images next to visual memory next to literary quotes and even descriptions of chemical elements and they all connect and speak to each other even though they technically shouldn’t, but together form an experience. In the translation process, I tried to make the images as visceral as possible because I knew the connections would come through the more the reader could experience these different elements.

CJ: Can you talk about the shifting format of these poems? Moving from citation to almost-prose to definition and back to free verse, how did you maintain the threads of connection between these disparate elements?

AR: That was one of my favorite things about this poem in the Romanian—the fact that the text felt free enough to move through all of these different formal gestures to express what it needed to. One of the biggest challenges was that in Romanian there were quotes in English, and the question was whether to show that and how to do it. In Romanian, the quotations sounded to me like an external voice that comes in the text and is somehow able to be inhabited by the speaker and become part of the tribar, and in English the graphic gesture of leaving them in quotes and citing the author in addition to the change in tone in those moments came through in a very similar way.

CJ: Do these citations—among them Bruno Ernst, Aldous Huxley, and Anne-Marie Blanchard—have significance to a Romanian readership? How does this linguistic and cultural cross-pollination affect the way these poems are perceived?

AR: I couldn’t speak for every Romanian reader but I think it’s different for every one of them. Aldous Huxley might be more recognizable than Susan Howe in Romania, but what I found interesting about these citations is the fact that it shows a poet who is influenced by and in conversation with a range of genres and discourses across time and space from 20th century fiction to 21st century poetry to psychology. You really get to see how the poem is in conversation with what the poet is reading and thinking about.

CJ: You write in your translator’s note, “The poems shift from the movement and breath of a child’s body—the powers and limits of her movement—to those of a dead, ghostly body—its visibility and invisibility.” How do these images interact and overlap throughout the work?

AR: These antithetical images I think connect through how visceral they are. You really see and hear what the child is going through even if you don’t get a narrative of these scenes they play out in the senses—it’s almost an inner perspective which then shifts to an outer perspective when death comes in the poem, but the speaker is still using senses to connect by hearing and feeling their way through. I think it gives the whole work presence in a different way than what I have seen before in Romanian poetry, and it ultimately felt much more haunting to me.

*****

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Read more interviews with Close Approximations winners:

Close Approximations: In Conversation with Poetry Runner-Up Keith Payne

Language is local; for all our travel and world-webbed wideness, we are beasts of habit and most often stay within the same 10 square miles

Today, we continue our spotlight on the winners of Asymptote’s annual Close Approximations translation contest, now into its third edition. (Find the official results and citations by judges David Bellos and Sawako Nakayasu here.) From 215 fiction and 128 poetry submissions, these six best emerging translators were awarded 3,000 USD in prize money, in addition to publication in our Summer 2017 editionAfter interviews with fiction winner Suchitra Ramachandran, fiction runners-up Brian Bergstrom and Clarissa Botsford, and poetry runner-up Sarah Timmer Harvey, today we have poetry runner-up Keith Payne in conversation with Asymptote Assistant Interviews Editor, Claire Jacobson. 

Keith Payne is the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award winner 2015–2016. His collection Broken Hill (Lapwing Publications, Belfast, 2015) was followed by Six Galician Poets (Arc Publications, 2016). Forthcoming from Francis Boutle Publishers is Diary of Crosses Green, from the Galician of Martín Veiga. Keith is director of the La Malinche Readings between Ireland and Galicia and the PoemaRia International Poetry Festival, Vigo. His translation of Welcome to Sing Sing, by Galician poet Elvira Ribeiro Tobío, was a runner-up in Asymptote’s Close Approximations contest. A poet in addition to being a translator, he shares his time between Dublin and Vigo with the musician Su Garrido Pombo.

CJ: The motif of imprisonment strongly undergirds these poems, from Bob Dylan to Ethel Rosenberg and everything in between, with Rosenberg’s Sing Sing prison providing the title and backdrop for these reflections. Where does this theme come from, and what was the significance of writing (and now translating) these famous imprisoned women in verse? 

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Close Approximations: In Conversation With Poetry Runner-up Sarah Timmer Harvey

"I spent less time in my head or researching, and more time translating purely from instinct, from the body."

Today, we continue our spotlight on the winners of Asymptote’s annual Close Approximations translation contest, now into its 3rd edition. (Find the official results and citations by judges David Bellos and Sawako Nakayasu here.) From 215 fiction and 128 poetry submissions, these six best emerging translators were awarded 3,000 USD in prize money, in addition to publication in our Summer 2017 editionAfter interviews with fiction winner Suchitra Ramachandran and fiction runners-up Brian Bergstrom and Clarissa Botsford, today we have poetry runner-up Sarah Timmer Harvey in conversation with Asymptote Assistant Interviews Editor, Claire Jacobson. 

Sarah Timmer Harvey is a writer and translator currently based in New York, where she is completing her MFA in Writing and Translation at Columbia University. Her excerpted translation of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s poetry collection Kalfsvlies (Calf’s Caul) was a runner-up in Asymptote’s Close Approximations contest. Poetry judge Sawako Nakayasu wrote, “The tumbling syntax of this poetry could not have been easy to translate, but it works so very well here—carrying the reader along the dark swerves of this youthful, yet not-so-innocent series of mini-narratives with a touch of the surreal.”

Claire Jacobson (CJ): I loved reading your translation of several of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s poems from her collection Kalfsvlies (Calf’s Caul). What was it that drew you to this text and motivated you to translate it?

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): I first became aware of Rijneveld’s work through Dutch literary magazines and blogs in 2015, when Kalfsvlies was first published in the Netherlands by Atlas Contact, who have a great reputation for attracting and fostering exceptional writers. Both readers and critics seemed completely bowled over by Kalfsvlies, something rather unusual in the Netherlands, given the genre and Rijneveld’s youth, but once I read the collection, I understood why everyone was raving. The first line of the first poem in Kalfsvlies (Calf’s Caul) reads “How do you go to bed when you have just run over a sheep?” Now, that is an opening! I found it so incredibly brutal and compelling. I read the entire collection in one sitting and then, the next day, I began translating, purely for the pleasure of it. A little while later, I contacted Marieke Lucas to discuss doing something with my translations.

To me, Rijneveld’s work feels quite rebellious—the narrative voice in Kalfsvlies is unfiltered and entirely unconcerned with establishing its authority. Rather, it is blatantly vulnerable and at times incredibly naïve considering the deeper themes at play: the death of a sibling, alcoholism, struggles with gender and sexuality, the confines of a rural upbringing. But Rijneveld’s youthful eye is also her strength, it draws the reader into a world that feels spontaneous, wildly intimate and full of unexpected wisdom. I can’t wait to read her debut novel, which will be published in the Netherlands (also by Atlas Contact) in October.

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Close Approximations: In Conversation With Fiction Runner-up, Clarissa Botsford

Claire Jacobson speaks to Clarissa Botsford about translating excerpts from an Elvira Dones novel from Italian to English.

Today, we continue our spotlight on the winners of Asymptote’s annual Close Approximations translation contest, now into its third edition. (Find the official results and citations by judges David Bellos and Sawako Nakayasu here.) From 215 fiction and 128 poetry submissions, these six best emerging translators were awarded 3,000 USD in prize money, in addition to publication in our Summer 2017 edition. After our interviews with Suchitra Ramachandran and Brian Bergstrom, we are thrilled to bring you fiction runner-up Clarissa Botsford in conversation with Asymptote Assistant Interviews Editor, Claire Jacobson. 

Clarissa Botsford has worked in the fields of teaching, intercultural education, editing, translating, publishing and is also a singer, violinist, and independent celebrant. She currently teaches English and Translation Studies at Roma Tre University. Her translations include Sworn Virgin by Elvira Dones (And Other Stories, 2014), Valerio Magrelli’s Condominium of the Flesh (Free Verse Editions, 2015), and excerpts of Magrelli’s Geology of a Father (Comparative Critical Studies, 2017), which received a commendation at the John Dryden Translation Competition.

Ms. Botsford’s translation of excerpts from Elvira Dones’ novel Burnt Sun was a runner-up in Asymptote’s Close Approximations contest, featured in the most recent issue. Fiction judge David Bellos wrote, “In a different class and genre, Burnt Sun by the distinguished Albanian émigrée writer and film-maker Elvira Dones delves into the inner worlds of her compatriots forced into prostitution and exile. Translated from Italian by Clarissa Botsford, Dones’s second language, Burnt Sun is both documentary and fiction, a crafted story and a powerful exposé.”

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Close Approximations: In Conversation With Fiction Runner-up, Brian Bergstrom

The translator on the complex interplay of Japanese and "hegemonic" English, and how the relationship informs his translation.

Today, we continue our spotlight on the winners of Asymptote’s annual Close Approximations translation contest, now into its 3rd edition. (Find the official results and citations by judges David Bellos and Sawako Nakayasu here.) From 215 fiction and 128 poetry submissions, these six best emerging translators were awarded 3,000USD in prize money, in addition to publication in our Summer 2017 edition. After our podcast interview with Suchitra Ramachandranwe are thrilled to bring you fiction runner-up Brian Bergstrom in conversation with Asymptote Assistant Interviews Editor, Claire Jacobson. 

Brian Bergstrom is a lecturer in the East Asian Studies Department at McGill University in Montréal. His articles and translations have appeared in publications including Granta, Aperture, Mechademia, positions: asia critique, and Japan Forum. He is the editor and principal translator of We, the Children of Cats by Tomoyuki Hoshino (PM Press), which was longlisted for the 2013 Best Translated Book Award.

His translation of “See” by Erika Kobayashi from the Japanese was a runner-up in Asymptote’s Close Approximations contest. This is what fiction judge David Bellos had to say about it: “Erika Kobayashi’s ‘See’ earns its place as a runner up by imagining a world just like ours save for a craze for a pill called ‘See’ that induces temporary blindness. People take it so as to go out on blind dates and drives to the sea. Read on! The English of the translation by Brian Bergstrom seems to me flawless.”

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