Essays

The Return of the Flood: How ISIS is Destroying Iraq’s Literary Heritage

April 8, 2015  |  in Essays, News  |  by Paul M. M. Cooper

Paul M.M. Cooper assesses the damage done to Iraqi literature and heritage by ISIS’s destruction of thousands of undeciphered cuneiform tablets.

ISIS continues to shock the world with calculated acts of cultural vandalism: taking sledgehammers and electric drills to the millennia-old pieces of art held at Mosul Museum, bulldozing the archaeological sites of Nimrud and Dur-Sharrukin, and most recently releasing a video showing the destruction of artefacts at Hatra. While the predictable images of gleeful vandalism circulate on social media, archaeologists took stock of the antiquities destroyed: statues of the kings of Hatra that form “the finest of all the sculptures unearthed” in the region, several enormous winged bulls with human heads known as lamassu, and assorted irreplaceable relics of the Babylonian, Persian and Roman Empires.

ISIS’s goals are clear: to destroy anything that hints at the region’s pluralistic past, and to strike a blow full of impotent cruelty against the Iraqi government and international organisations such as the UN and UNESCO. Against this backdrop and coupled with the stunning callousness of the group’s ongoing humanitarian atrocities, it has been easy to overlook another loss, one felt particularly acutely by lovers of international literature the world over: that of the still-undeciphered cuneiform tablets caught up in ISIS’s frenzy of destruction. READ MORE…

The Tiff: Is the Translator Responsible for Political Problem Texts?

March 25, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by M. Lynx Qualey and Yardenne Greenspan

Yardenne Greenspan and Marcia Lynx Qualey on the choices we translators can make

M. Lynx Qualey: The most important decision a translator must make is: Will I translate this text?

Being an essentially freelance profession, translation has a mountain of drawbacks, but it does make a bit more allowance for choice. The injunction to “translate only what you love” works—as long as you have a stable income outside of translating. I prefer Samah Selim’s version: “Never translate a book you don’t like unless you have to.” Or my own: “Never translate a text you think you’ll regret (unless creditors are outside the window).”

Yet what makes for a “politically problematic” text may have less to do with the text itself and more to do with context. Propagandists thrive on selective translation. The MEMRI “media monitoring organization,” described by Guardian reporter Brian Whitaker, is perhaps the largest ongoing Arabic-English translation project. Some of the individual news and cultural texts that MEMRI translates might be innocuous, but the project as a whole furthers a political agenda.

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Sir Thomas Urquhart: The Cromartian

March 12, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Josh Billings

Josh Billings delves into the life of the famed 17th-century translator of Rabelais in the latest installment of his series

Read all previous posts in Josh Billings’ Lives of the Translators here.

Translation is supposed to be an impersonal art, but one of the interesting things about studying translators’ lives is that it gives us a chance to see how patterns from their biographies reappear, like watermarks, in the works from which they’ve allegedly removed themselves.

Some of this reflection can be explained by affinity (translators translate authors they like), or chance, or an overactive critical imagination. At the same time, in many cases the parallels between a translator’s life and craft are obvious enough to make us think that something else is going on—something closer to the public soul-searching and -solving that we like to think occurs in more explicitly confessional arts.

A good example of this can be found in the great translation of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel by the 17th-century Scottish translator Sir Thomas Urquhart. A man of incredible energy, Urquhart spent the majority of his life dealing with the debts that his father had accumulated on their ancestral estate of Cromartie. His original books sink like barges under the weight of their pedantry; but his Pantagruel soars on a spume of high comedy, freed by its source material into a pitiless celebration of language’s unwillingness to pay back what it owes.

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Hong Kong, My Home

March 11, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Alicia A. Beale

“The moment I felt most at home in Hong Kong, my entire body was covered in tear gas residue and I sat exhausted on a sidewalk corner. ”

The smell was an acrid burning, very unlike the cool sea breeze that usually wafts off the harbor and drifts down Connaught Road in Central, Hong Kong. In Admiralty, I knew, there were students lined around the Tamar government buildings. Earlier I had seen the protestors shouting and shoving past barricades before the pepper spray began. It was hard to believe the same students who had written me polite emails explaining their reasons for protesting and thus being absent from class would one minute make promises to complete all their assignments, and the next minute be the source of this burning and smoke. As I walked across the abandoned street, stepping over empty water bottles and cardboard boxes, I remained skeptical that these same students would cause any violence. And as I came closer to the ramble of dark figures perched on median strips in the road and scattered in the streets, I wanted to see what could possibly be destroying my city.

Saying the phrase “my city” in reference to Hong Kong and not Long Branch, New Jersey, where I was born still strikes me as partially profound and partially profane. When I told people back in New Jersey about being tear-gassed during the protest, they replied, “Why would you put your life at risk? You’re not Chinese.” I am not Chinese. I am African-American; in Hong Kong, children will point at me, old men will stare rudely at me, and the customs officials will always pull me out of line at the airport to be searched. Yet the lush hillside backdrop of this city is as familiar to me as the crisply cut suburban lawns of my American childhood. In the years I have lived in Hong Kong, I have realized myself, grown creatively, and matured personally in the city’s closet-sized apartments and stifling humidity, while I have listened to the clink of Mahjong tiles and the phlegmatic cough of its old men, smelled the scents of ripped open slabs of cows in the markets and the fragrance of sun-drying abalone. I could live the rest of my life somewhere else but suddenly always have a yearning to taste the syrup of iced lemon tea. It would be the nostalgia of home.

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What We’re Reading in March

March 4, 2015  |  in Essays, Reviews  |  by Dong Li, Matthew Spencer, and Rosie Clarke

Experimental contemporary novelists, classic science fiction, and not-to-be-missed writings on art: Asymptote recommends!

Rosie Clarke (marketing manager): Last month I found that “torturous” reading need not mean “badly written.” I inadvertently spent February with books fixated on death, mourning, poverty, and disturbing desires. In anticipation of her new novel Gutshot, I raced through Amelia Gray’s AM/PM and Threats, in addition to a difficult digestion of Jane Unrue’s Love Hotel, and finally a more peaceful meander through Swiss-German proto-modernist Regina Ullmann’s The Country Road. Together, the intensity of these works had a simultaneously invigorating and exhausting effect.

Gray poses a rather exciting figure to me—of her own fragmentary and boldly inventive fiction, she commented in a recent interview with the New Yorker that “life is such a natural mix of horror and humor that it lends itself easily to the form.” AM/PM is a collection of interconnected vignettes: single page scenes and observations, made on relationships, loneliness, madness, all set in unsettling scenarios of ambiguous reality.

Threats extends Gray’s use of dark humor coupled with a troubling sense of dread. It takes you to a dark place, where loss and solitude manifest in ways almost too real to take. The novel begins with its protagonist, David, watching his wife bleed to death, then sitting with her body for days before intervention. His fragile mental state dissolves, and he loses all concept of time, with short chapters mimicking this to great effect. The titular threats are paper scraps inscribed with poetic, surreal warnings, which David tries to understand. I have never read a book that so effectively communicates the desolation and emotional destruction death can have on a person. This, interwoven with the mystery of his wife’s death and the anonymous notes, makes Threats bizarre and intoxicating.

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Life in Grinding Years: Latvia in Transition and Translation

March 3, 2015  |  in Essays, Interviews  |  by Inara Cedrins

A conversation with Amanda Aizpuriete, Latvian poet and translator

Amanda Aizpuriete is a mystical poet. In conversation this past fall, she told me she writes “about places I haven’t been, lives I haven’t lived.” We met in Jurmala, a place whose name literally means “seashore” and which comprises a string of resort towns halfway between Riga and Kaugari, where Aizpuriete has lived all her life. Her mother was entitled to military housing there. Her children went to the same school she attended as a child. “I have lived through the most dramatic changes,” Aizpuriete says, who was born in 1956 and has published collections of poetry while Latvia was under Soviet control to the present.

“There was only one publisher at the start, and an ‘inside’ review was of the greatest importance.” She explained this meant a critique and recommendation of a prospective book by a well-known writer.

Aizpuriete studied philology and philosophy at the Latvian State University from 1974-1979, as well as at the M. Gorky Literature Institute’s Translation Seminary in Moscow from 1980-1984. Through this time, she met translators from Ukraine and Azerbaijan and discovered what she describes as “great writings,” just opening up to publishing in the mid-eighties when Gorbachev entered power. First to translate this work into Latvian, she interviewed Josef Brodsky a couple of years after he’d won the Nobel Prize, and translated his play Demokratija into Latvian with his collaboration. “This was a beautiful episode, done through relationships,” Aizpuriete says. As poetry editor for the magazine Avots (Wellspring) in the mid-eighties, Aizpuriete was able to see the debut of banned Latvians, those it was not possible to publish earlier. READ MORE…

Discovering Terroir

February 26, 2015  |  in Essays, Food and Literature  |  by Nina Sparling

In Part 4 of her series on food and literature, Nina Sparling talks terroir—in France, and in Dany Laferrière's Haiti

The word is known: terroir. It has become familiar in English, borrowed from French instead of translated. The word means soil or land. To discuss the terroir of a region, of a plot of land, imbues the subject with meaning and history: terroir is tradition.

Terroir isn’t about being close to where your food grows as a consumer but rather describes the experience of place. It describes the taste of a place. Understanding it comes from the experience of being from and living somewhere. There is an understanding in France that specific foods come from particular places. Every other item in a market is a produit du terroir, de somewhere: poulet de Brest, fleur de sel de Guerande, crottin de Chavignol, and so on. Terroir also points to an obsession with authenticity and tradition—one could argue that the worst of French nationalism and identity expresses itself in terroir. Indeed, exclusion and tradition are both part of its usage in France.

Yet the term also values the communities and weathered rhythms of a place in a more general sense. Food and people come from somewhere: both are rooted. This, the understanding that food and eating are basic and essential to how we inhabit the world—that personality and society are connected to the land and what it produces—is where terroir pulls me in. Dany Laferrière illustrates this aspect of terroir in his novel Pays sans chapeau. The work is fiction and autobiography, part memory and part story. In it, the narrator returns home to Port-au-Prince after twenty years living in Montreal. The city is in disarray, grappling with political instability and violence. He returns to his mother’s house, where the most vivid scenes and memories occur over plates of shared food.

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This Monster, the Volk

February 25, 2015  |  in Essays, News  |  by Monika Cassel

At the Pegida demonstrations, the soul of Dresden has been revealed: reckoning with the mentality of my native city

Monika Cassel translates Durs Grünbein’s op-ed, which appeared on the front page of Die Zeit’s weekly magazine on February 12, 2015, the day before the 70th anniversary of Dresden’s bombing. 

Every year, the city I was born in falls again. On the one hand this is a ritual (of commemoration), and on the other hand it is a reality (of history). All over the world, people know what happened to Dresden in February 1945, just before the great turning point in history when Germany was given the opportunity to better itself. The city lost nearly everything that had once made her charming and was from then on condemned to live on, severely handicapped, hideously deformed, and humiliated. Where once courtly splendor and stone-hewed bourgeois pride had delighted the eye, now desolate wastelands unfolded as I wandered through my city as a child. It is hard to imagine that this was where Casanova contracted a venereal disease and Frederick the Great, when he was still the crown prince, lost his virginity. According to legend, one of the delectable ladies-in-waiting pulled him through a concealed door and initiated him into the Saxon mysteries of love. I still remember imagining the Marquis de Sade visiting the city on the Elbe. In one thing, at least, historians are in agreement: what was supposedly once the most beautiful Italian city north of the Alps was a paradise on earth for all of the libertines of aristocratic Europe.

But it all turned out differently. Lately I have seen a monster in Dresden—it calls itself das Volk (the People) and thinks it has justice on its side. “We are the Volk,” it yells, shamelessly, and it cuts anyone off mid-sentence who dares disagree. It presumes to know who belongs and who does not. It intimidates those from foreign lands because—in the extremity of their plight—they have nowhere else to go, those who come in search of a better life. I can identify with these asylum-seekers. I was once a person who felt trapped in his country, in his native city. Who wanted to escape from a closed society—precisely the kind some wish we could return to again. Was I an economic refugee, driven by political dissent against the system that had planned my whole life for me, was it a yearning for foreign cultures, or all of these? Who can say?

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Take a look at “Steaua”—Asymptote’s Romanian Partner Journal

February 19, 2015  |  in Essays, News  |  by MARGENTO

An in-depth introduction to Asymptote's newest partner journal, "Steaua"

A few weeks ago, we at Asymptote blog highlighted the importance of vibrant, youthful literary journals—in exchange. In that post, we featured Fleur des Lettres, from Hong Kong, and the fruitful artistic encounters that partnership has yielded.

This week, we highlight another budding intertextual friendship, namely that one between Asymptote and Romanian lit-mag Steaua. Contemporary literature is scarce and relies heavily on exchange. This could hardly be truer than with international literature—where impediments like translation, marketing, and the consumer publishing culture risk obscuring gems we should all be watching out for. Here’s Romanian editor-at-large MARGENTO’s take on what looks to be the beginning of a long and fruitful cross-journal collaboration.   READ MORE…

Editor-at-Large Testimonial: Rahul Soni

February 16, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Rahul Soni

Our India editor-at-large Rahul Soni looks at his Asymptote favorites—and muses on what he hopes to see in issues to come

It’s hard to choose just one piece that I’ve been proud to introduce to Asymptote readers—as editor, aren’t I supposed to be proud of everything selected for inclusion?

But if pressed, I’d perhaps name Banaphool’s Nawab Sahib, translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha. Banaphool (1899-1979) was an extremely prolific writer, with 586 short stories, 60 novels, five plays, an autobiography, numerous essays, and thousands of poems to his credit—apart from being a painter and practicing doctor. And as the story in question reveals, his fame is not simply a matter of numbers—Banaphool possessed a keen eye for structure and pacing, the telling detail, and for human absurdity.

Banaphool was a great literary craftsman who operated in a breathtaking range of registers. Still, though the master of many tones, Banaphool consistently invited his own, unique sensibility into his writing. And he may very well have invented the genre of the very short story—often less than a page in length—a form that is now finding currency under the nomenclature of “flash fiction”. I’m grateful to Arunava Sinha, without whose lovely translations we of the non-Bengali-speaking/reading world may have had to wait much longer to be introduced to this great world author.

Looking forward, I am most excited about bringing to our readers (and an audience of readers worldwide)—a novel(la) by one of the foremost men-of-letters in Hindi named Dharamvir Bharati, called Suraj ka Satvan Ghoda (which translates to The Seventh Horse of the Sun).

Published in 1952, it is what might be called an experimental novel, incorporating elements from “folk” storytelling into a novel-in-variation-form structure (to use, anachronistically, Milan Kundera’s term), and is written in a whimsically and colloquially, with an ironic take on the Marxist politics that has been (and still is) so dominant in Hindi Literature.

Sui generis: it is unique in Hindi literature (and, indeed, it is singular in the author’s own oeuvre as well), a far cry from conventional European modes of novel-writing. In terms of the history of the novel, The Seventh Horse of the Sun stands as a signpost to one of the roads not taken. It was adapted into a movie of the same name by Shyam Benegal in 1993 —one of the most singular masterpieces of Hindi cinema. Shamefully enough, there is but one translation of the novel, one lacking in both quality and distribution. This is clearly a disservice to the text, the author and the readers. It is my hope that I will be able to, some day, secure permission for a fresh translation and present it to our readers.

Larissa and Richard Translate a Menu

February 12, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Matt Seidel

What happens when two of the greats conspire to translate a dinner menu?

“We discuss endlessly and sometimes it becomes a nuisance because we return to it again and again even after the manuscript goes off. But we really don’t quarrel. It would be much more interesting if we did.”

— Larissa Volokhonsky, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal

Over the last several decades, the married translation team of Richard Pevear (native English speaker) and Larissa Volokhonsky (native Russian speaker) have proceeded through the masterworks of Russian literature from Dostoyevsky to Pasternak with ruthless efficiency, skill, and finesse. But one morning, the couple embarked on an audacious new project that threatened to tear them apart: that of the Sandovar restaurant. (What follows is wholly invented, of course.)  READ MORE…

A Message from Space

February 4, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Matthew Spencer

In his latest installment from The Orbital Library, Matthew Spencer tackles translation and alien communication

Since the beginning of the genre, science fiction writers have speculated on what it would be like to communicate with beings from another world. For the most part, these scenarios don’t depart much from how we humans communicate with each other. Both literal and literary devices are introduced to smooth over differences. Someone sets up a machine, usually called a universal translator, which seamlessly renders alien speech intelligible. A galactic lingua franca—some sort of space English—is another related convention.

These are efficiencies, meant to push along the plot or prevent awkward assumptions on the part of the reader, such as aliens speaking English or Hebrew or whatever language in which the story happens to be written. In the days when the genre consisted primarily of short fiction, such quick and dirty means were also necessary to shepherd the reader as quickly as possible into the adventure, without too much digression into the subject of linguistics.

Advances in machine translation, such as Skype’s new instantaneous voice-to-voice translation service, have borne out, at least in part, the speculations of the hack magazine writer. But universal translation hasn’t always seemed plausible. Writing in 1960, Kingsley Amis called it “blatant pseudoscience.” In his survey of science fiction, New Maps of Hell, he makes an apology for the reliance on UT as a plot device, believing that its use might stretch the credulity of the general reader to the breaking point. Scenarios of faster-than-light travel were much more feasible, Amis thought—and with good reason, writing as he did in a time when aerospace was the vanguard technology.

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A Big Thank You From All Of Us At Asymptote!

January 30, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Asymptote

Your $25,276 will help us fight for world literature another day

We are bowled over! Our crowdfunding campaign just closed on the gorgeous number of  $25,276 and we made our target (just in time!). Thanks to 287 AMAZING donors, we will be able to continue our passionate work in world literature. Thank you, 谢谢, dankjewel!!

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Our 48hr Liveblogging Continues With Hungary EaL Ágnes Orzóy!

January 29, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Ágnes Orzóy

230 donors have now stepped forward. Won't you join them in support of world literature, with just 24 hours and $3,000 to go?

Ágnes Orzóy (editor-at-large, Hungary): Looking to the past: when Borbély’s voice was recorded for the July 2013 issue of Asymptote, we couldn’t know that the 50-year-old poet would be dead within a few months. Except that the demons of death had been hovering around him for a long time—as Gábor Schein put it so eloquently in his obituary on Asymptote blog. Readers may get a glimpse into the unique world of Borbély (whose oeuvre was just beginning to be appreciated outside Hungary when he committed suicide) from an interview in our forthcoming January issue. There are not many interviews in which the gory details of a brutal murder stand together with well-reasoned and sensitive ideas on evil and the human condition, as well as on how ancient literary traditions may become proper vehicles for the account of modern experience.

And looking forward: The Stuffed Barbarian by Gergely Péterfy was hailed by critics and readers alike as the best Hungarian novel of 2014. Told by the wife of Ferenc Kazinczy, the leading figure of the Hungarian-language reform of the 18th century, the novel is centered around the figure of Angelo Soliman, a black slave who rose to become a prominent member of Viennese society. An extremely erudite person and a high-ranking freemason, Soliman was skinned and stuffed after his death and exhibited in a museum. The motifs of Kazinczy’s own story are echoed in that of his friend Soliman: both strived to transcend their circumstances by adhering to high ideals, and both failed because, no matter what they achieved, they always remained strangers and outcasts. A fascinating and well-crafted story, Péterfy’s novel sheds a new light on some of the harrowing dilemmas and suppressed conflicts at the root of modern Western civilization.

So that we can continue beyond our January 2015 issue and introduce Gergely Péterfy and other Hungarian writers in our pages one day, please consider joining 230 donors in support of our Indiegogo campaign now! With 24 hours left to close the remaining gap of $3,000, the situation is urgent. Thank you so much!