Posts by Kathryn Raver

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

March 22, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou and Kathryn Raver

The latest literary news from Greece and France!

This week, our editors take us to Greece and France, where they find exciting projects at the National Library, urgent new poetry in translation, and theater adaptations. From the Afro Greek experience to new takes on the work of Annie Ernaux, read on to find out more!

Christina Chatzitheodorou, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Greece

The National Library of Greece (NLG) is currently displaying the fruits of their project “We, the Afro-Greeks: black literature as a cultural bridge.” Until the end of April, the Library will be displaying new books by authors of African origin that focus on themes of immigration and racism—additions enabled by this project. This comes after a few initiatives by and for Afro-Greeks that engage with the lived experience of Black people in Greece. The term “Afro-Greek” itself, as Adéọlá Naomi Adérè̩mí explains, is relatively new: “We started using it around 2015 to 2017 as a term to express the experience of being Black and raised or born in Greece, of having our formative years in Greece and identifying as Greek citizens legally and culturally. We are Greek and African.” READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2024

March 11, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Bella Creel, Daljinder Johal, and Kathryn Raver

New works from Alexander Kluge, Marjane Satrapi, and Jón Kalman Stefánsson!

The latest text from one of German New Wave’s founding members and all around heavy-hitter; a wide-ranging compilation of art and testimony championing the Iranian feminist movement from Marjane Satrapi; and a moving, braided narrative of grief and recovery from a lauded Icelandic author. Our editors review some of the most exciting works in translation coming to the Anglophone this month. 

kluge

The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul by Alexander Kluge, translated from the German by Alexander Booth, Seagull Books, 2024

Review by Bella Creel, Blog Editor

Filmmaker, author, and philosopher Alexander Kluge’s most recent oeuvre, The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul, is an act of rethinking. Born in Germany in 1932, Kluge blurs the edges of the many years of his life in this ambitious work, expanding beyond the first-hand, beyond generations, drawing connections between now and before, all in order to fully describe the experience of a single life. Alexander Booth offers a wonderfully dense and witty translation from the German, with no aversion to a confusing syntax that demands rereading and rethinking.

Kluge is trying to find the right words throughout this collection, which, in the process of its creation, must have been turned over and inside out, stretched to snapping and magnified to the molecular; reading it, in turn, requires a certain liquifying of the brain. This giving-in allows one to absorb the words, which only then can be reformed into some sort of meaning. Kluge himself seems to follow a similar process:

Where does all my ‘fluent speech’, my rabid desire to write, come from? I listen to others. And carefully! A word that flies towards me, an observation that charms me into conversation, a quotation that I read: all of this gets stored inside me for the long-term.

I usually tear books to shreds, marking any places that captivate me in colour pencil before ripping the page out. These I attach to other findings of mine with a paper clip. They’re often annotated. My flat is full of these piles of paper. My personal bastion against the ‘ignorance that shakes the world’.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 1, 2024  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, José García Escobar, and Kathryn Raver

The latest literary news from Central America, France, and the United States!

This week, our team brings you literary news from around the world, including an experimental poetry reading and a festival celebrating comics! From cross-continental prize to a new exhibit at the Centre Pompidou, read on to find out more.

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the United States

On February 7, I watched as the internationally-renowned Mexican poet and recent Asymptote contributor, Rocío Cerón presented a spellbinding performance at New York University’s KJC Center. Through sound, voice, and moving images, the performance expands on Cerón’s 2022 book Divisible corpóreo, a poetry collection that thematizes the relationship between language, poetry, and the body.

While Cerón read from the book, the screen behind her projected images featuring her bedroom and herself. These visuals were not static. Rather, they transformed in rhythmic syncopation along with Cerón’s voice. In addition, Cerón not only read the book out loud. She also brought her poems to a further experiential dimension through several resources grounded in her voice: she raised and lowered her pitch and volume, repeated words and phrases with different speeds, and sometimes elongated vowels and stuttered consonants. The effect was dreamlike. I was immediately thrown into a trance, a characteristic effect of Cerón’s awe-inspiring transmedia readings.

After the audience’s applause, Cerón was interviewed by Irma Gallo, a student in NYU’s Spanish MFA program. During this Q&A, Cerón reflected on her creative process and approach to live readings, noting that her performances often include improvisation, which makes each one of them a unique, ephemeral experience. She also talked about the feminist elements in her poetry, such as references to lineages of women writers and reflections on the mitochondrial DNA, only transmissible from mother to child. To conclude, she specified that the book Divisible corpóreo is the second installment of a trilogy that explores the connection between poetry and different senses. The other two books are Spectio (2019) and Simultáneo sucesivo (2023). Paraphrasing Cerón’s own words, these collections explore the interrelation between what we can observe and what we can hear. Each text establishes an intertextual dialogue with the other two “creating,” in Cerón’s words, “a network of signifiers and symbolic fields that touch and traverse one another.” READ MORE…

‘Obliged to Serve a Memory’: A Review of Vera Mutafchieva’s The Case of Cem

February 19, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Kathryn Raver

Cem . . . is silent, an inanimate object in his own story, only moving when and where other powers will him.

The Case of Cem by Vera Mutafchieva, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel, Sandorf Passage, 2024

Cem—born in the burgeoning Ottoman Empire, the second son of the legendary Mehmed the Conqueror, and in the eyes of history, the exiled prince. In his time, Cem was lauded by storytellers the world over for who he might become and what he might accomplish, until finally he was pitied for all that he endured. But these portrayals of Cem, some true and others exaggerated, have all but faded from the public eye over time—a fact that renowned Bulgarian author and historian Vera Mutafchieva sought to remedy with her comprehensive account of his struggle in her novel, The Case of Cem.

Mutafchieva’s works have been published in nearly a dozen languages, the most recent being Angela Rodel’s English translation of The Case of Cem. Originally published in Bulgarian in 1967, the story follows Cem as he tries and fails to usurp his older brother at the behest of some of his countrymen. He is forced into years of exile that take him far from home, from Rhodes to France to Italy. His imprisonments—though those holding him would call it refuge—turn the almost-sultan into an unwilling pawn and bargaining tool for European powers, and eventually lead to his tragic downfall. 

The Case of Cem is a daring blend of court intrigue, tragedy, and historical fact that masterfully captures complex layers of history in its prose and reads like an epic. Just as prevalently, though, it is a reflection on memory, identity, homeland, and what it means to lose them.

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