Posts by Clayton McKee

Translation Tuesday: from “My Father’s Cité: An Adolescence in Social Housing” by Mehdi Charef

My mom, my sister, my brother, and I have waited in France for ten years to get this privilege.

This Translation Tuesday, Mehdi Charef recounts his father’s teenage experiences in a newly-built Parisian banlieue. Social housing holds undreamed of comforts for his migrant family, and apprehension quickly turns to delight. Comfort! Safety! Privacy! Hot water! A new, fuller life beckons in the projects, and it involves quantities of rock ‘n’ roll, girlfriends and Carson McCullers.

It’s the Chinese building manager who told us that we had to move.  The immigrant families who had lived in shacks—think shipping containers turned ruins with wear and tear over the past eight years—in the cité de transit, or transitional social housing, on Rue de Valenciennes in Nanterre would now need to pack their bags. Two feelings arise with the announcement of the news: anxiety and melancholy. This move represents a separation. We know where we came from but not where they are taking us. They didn’t ask us about anything, and they aren’t telling us about anything. We are leaving our most recent safe place.

In the bidonville, I had learned that there were Algerians outside of the ones in the village where I was born. In the cité de transit, I had learned Berber and African expressions as well as all the Portuguese curse words.

It isn’t the shacks that I liked but the people who lived in them. In front of them, I kept my head held high because I was like them. It’s only in front of my French classmates that I was ashamed…

Our housing project is going to be demolished. The construction of a large industrial park is set to take its place:  la Défense.

Our new apartment is in Cité Rouge. The neighborhood is named that because of the brick façades of the buildings. It’s in the city Gennevilliers surrounded by small, old houses. We are no longer the isolated immigrant population. People walk down our alleys, underneath our windows. We are no longer the shame of those who were kind to us. We became visible before we were heard… READ MORE…

Where Theater Starts and Reality Ends: A Review of Fernanda Torres’s Glory and Its Litany of Horrors

When does fiction stop and reality begin? What is theater’s role in the production and perception of reality?

Glory and Its Litany of Horrors, by Fernanda Torres, translated from the Portuguese by Eric M. B. Becker, Restless Books, 2019

“When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.”
William Shakespeare, King Lear

You just sat down, opened up your internet browser—Chrome, because any other browser is just subpar—went to asymptotejournal.com, and finally stumbled across this review of Glory and Its Litany of Horrors by Fernanda Torres. Before reading, you had decided to go for a run, five miles through the woods behind your house that looked similar to the Brazilian backlands. As you ran, you saw a group of soldiers dressed in camouflage about to fire at each other. Without knowing it, you were running through a paintball match; but, thinking it was real, you hit the deck and waited to see what fate would bring you, allowing you to identify with Mario as he struggles through the theater, his acting career, and own reality.

For some of you, this story could be completely true—all details being events that may have occurred throughout your day; for some, bits and pieces were true, while for others, only the act of reading this review is true. These levels of the “you” in reality and the fictional “you” in the above story are the same levels that exist throughout Mario Cardoso’s life in Torres’s work. Published by Restless Books in 2019 (originally published in 2017), Eric M. B. Becker renders Torres’s blurred lines of the protagonist’s fiction and reality (narrated in the first person) in a prose that flows like the action and lines of a play, drawing the reader even further into the scene.

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Rawness and Taboo: Kono Taeko’s Toddler Hunting and Other Stories in Review

There’s a rawness in these stories that leaves the reader feeling bare, visible, and reflective.

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Toddler Hunting and Other Stories, collection written by Kono Taeko, translated from the Japanese by Lucy North and Lucy Lower, New Directions, 2018

Reviewed by Clayton McKee, Copy Editor

Interior and exterior, public and private, Kono Taeko explores constructed façades in social situations and crashes them down in intimate settings. Each of the narratives in Toddler Hunting and Other Stories delves into the feminine psyche and investigates themes of motherhood and family. Shifts from exterior persona to interior desire rupture Kono’s cold prose, shocking the reader out of socially normative interactions and thrusting them into the taboos lurking deep inside, followed by a quick return to her straight-faced writing. This keeps readers on their toes, not knowing when the next rupture will occur. Contrasting the interior with the exterior and social expectations with personal desires has the effect of enrapturing, sometimes shocking the reader, plunging them into the depths of her/his own imaginary and propelling each story forward.

Kono Taeko is considered amongst the most influential Japanese women writers that first made an appearance in the 1960s. Her impressive portfolio includes over a dozen works in Japanese, all centered on unexplored aspects of human character—female characters in particular, further pushing the envelope not only on these unexplored aspects but also on a gender that was underexplored in Japanese literature at the time. Kono comes to the English-speaking world in this translated collection published by New Directions, which includes a lot of her short fiction written during the sixties. Not only was she the first woman to be on the committee for the Akutagawa Literary Prize, but she also received that prize in 1963, followed by the Yomiuri Prize in 1969 and the Tanizaki Prize in 1980. Before dying in 2015, she was also awarded a Bunka Kunshō, or Order of Culture, which is presented by the Emperor.

The titular story, “Toddler Hunting,” delves deep into the psyche of Akiko, a character with a strong distaste for little girls and a strange attraction to little boys. Her disgust for female children led her to not desire kids at all, and knowing that her “fear” is not logical, she hides behind a façade of disgust for all children. This disgust is contradicted, however, as she impulsively buys lavish clothing for young boys, only to gift them to her acquaintances’ boys in hopes to watch them “crossing [their] chubby arms over [their] chest, concentrating with all [their] might . . .”  just to take the shirt off by themselves. Akiko describes such things as an “intensely pleasurable.” READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: January 2019

You won't be lacking reading material in the new year with these latest translations, reviewed by Asymptote team members.

Looking for new books to read this year? Look no further with this edition of What’s New in Translation, featuring new releases translated from Kurdish, Dutch, and Spanish. Read on to find out more about Abdulla Pashew’s poems written in exile, Tommy Wieringa’s novel about cross-cultural identities, as well as Agustín Martínez cinematic thriller.

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Dictionary of Midnight by Abdulla Pashew, translated from the Kurdish by Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse, Phoneme Media (2018)

Review by Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large for Hong Kong

Dictionary of Midnight is a collection of several decades of Abdulla Pashew’s poetry as he recounts the history of Kurdistan and its struggle for independence. Translated from the Kurdish by Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse, the work includes a map of contemporary Iraq and a timeline of Kurdish history for those unfamiliar with the plight of the Kurds, something Pashew, one of the most influential Kurdish poets alive today, has taken upon himself to convey and to honor.

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Le Rouge et le Noir: Marrakech Noir In Review

“Amerchich was the kind of insult you hurled at someone to accuse them of both foolishness and insanity . . . ”

 

Marrakech Noir, collection edited by Yassin Adnan, translated from the Arabic, French, and Dutch by various, Akashic Books

With the twisting, winding small alleys in el-Medina, the bustling Jemaa el-Fna, a main square and marketplace, with its storytellers and performers, and the endless souks frequented by tourists and locals alike, Marrakech is the perfect environment for myths, legends, and stories. Seeing a rather large population increase over the past two decades as villagers and immigrants move to the city for opportunities, as well as an influx of tourists come to explore the tanneries, cuisine, and find a bit of paradise, the Red City contains a diverse landscape unlike any other in the world. Storytellers, like al-Sharqawi in “The Mummy in the Pasha’s House,” control the city’s reputation, and they can even “incorporate [a story] into the city’s very soil, till it became a part of its reddish clay or the dark green of its palm trees.” This phenomenon is notable throughout Marrakech Noir as each story, despite being written in the noir style, doesn’t reflect a noir city, but the noir that can exist in its occupants.

Marrakech Noir joins Akashic Books’s Noir Series, a series of anthologies of dark short stories set in different neighborhoods and locations around the world. This exploration of Marrakech includes stories by Fouad Laroui, Fatiha Morchid, Halima Zine El Abidine, Mohamed Zouhair, and more translated from Arabic, French, and Dutch, showcasing not only the linguistic diversity of the city but also the cultural and societal differences found within Marrakech’s meandering back alleys and main thoroughfares. But, as editor Yassin Adnan notes in the introduction: “Despite their variety, these stories remain rooted on Moroccan soil . . . ” which provides readers with new insight into a city with ever-increasing global popularity. The noir genre, while an odd literary form to use to boast about a city, manages to emerge in most stories in the anthology. The authors, however, make a conscious effort to divert the noir from the city itself and place it within the mélange of people of the city. Adnan describes the Marrekechi’s desire to tell stories with a lot of pizazz and spice; however, noir is a genre that doesn’t work as “the Marrekechi impulse is to always remain joyful.” Fortunately, that impulse was placed aside, allowing the noir to seep into the work for some powerful moments in the diverse cityscape.

Jemaa el-Fna unites practically every story as its importance in the city draws performers, local guides, tourists, and locals. Whether there to make a spectacle or simply sit in a café and witness one, everyone passes through this square. It’s in this square that Abu Qatadah in “An E-mail from the Sky,” after receiving an email from the heavens, shouts in religious fanaticism and awaits his escort to Paradise. Although not present in the square with the other onlookers, Rahal and his entire cybercafé watch as Abu Qatadah terrorizes tourists and is taken away by the police. In the same square in a different story, “A Person Fit for Murder,” Guillaume, a Frenchman who comes to Morocco to escape the monotony of France, is picked up by a young Moroccan boy who’ll fulfill his fantasies and eventually murder him. It’s also where Yusuf in “Mama Aicha” goes to gift a precious purple silk to the eponymous character and visit his former comrade, Aziz, with whom he joined in revolutionary thought and action until Aziz’s arrest.

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