Essays

Pop Around the World: I Suoni D’estate

June 19, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Florian Duijsens

A Musical Journey to Italy

Celebrating summer though music is best done by letting the outside world mix your playlist. Instead of being bunkered up inside, we best give ourselves over to the choices of others, through song snippets wafting out of open windows and automobiles, that ubiquitous song of the summer blasting at regular intervals from shoe stores and gaudy discotheques, the presets or record collections of your Airbnb hosts, or foreign radio stations in your rental car. If the songs are in another language, the effect is that much more transformative, creating a wonderfully schizophrenic sense of anonymity in incomprehensibility and of endless possibility in the unknown.

Yet it also has to be admitted that there is as much crap music abroad as there is at home. And it will definitely seem to be a much higher percentage at first, because how would you even know where to start, which station to start streaming? It helps when your favorite artists sidestep into a foreign language. Erlend Oye, for instance, a Norwegian singer who makes up half of the much-beloved twee popsters Kings of Convenience (and more recently fronted the now defunct Whitest Boy Alive) last year surprised the world with a rare solo single in Italian. Though the album it was supposed to be a part of hasn’t yet materialized, this first taste is an infectiously strummy tribute to the grand Italian pop tradition of the 1960s and 70s. READ MORE…

Dilemmas of a Bilingual Delhi-ite

June 12, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Mohini Gupta

"I am now coming to terms with the fact that I call myself a literature student from India, without ever having read a novel in my own language."

“Umm. I’ve studied in English… but my mother tongue is Hindi, of course,” I said confidently to my Nigerian housemate, who had asked about my “first language” while I was struggling with my newly acquired culinary skills during breakfast.

In a heterogeneous environment, students collect crumbs of the languages around them, believing they are true connoisseurs of culture. I should have anticipated her next question: “So how do you say ‘Good Morning’ in your language?”

Shubh Prabhat. I had stored it somewhere in my preconscious memory. It’s one of those things that you know you know, but you can’t remember at the urgent moment. That’s forgivable when it’s an uncommon word. But this was “good morning”—probably one of the first phrases one learns while learning a new language. And this wasn’t a new language: it was supposed to be my “mother tongue.” READ MORE…

This is also a Center-Point

May 19, 2014  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by Julia Gronnevet

"Her presence, her voice and her body language when communicating, was the key I had been missing."

I confess: I thought the most interesting thing about Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble was the cover. My edition had an old sepia-toned picture of two children—“the [something] sisters.” One has a boy’s haircut, and looks very unhappy. The other stands sweetly beside her. I found it so much more eloquent than the book itself, which seemed to me denser than a loaf of pumpernickel bread, denser than a steel ingot, denser than a white dwarf star. I don’t think I made it through the preface. If I did, it made the same kind of sense to me as reading À la recherche du temps perdu backwards, in French, while drunk. That is to say: the occasional glimmers of understanding felt fabulous, but it was all so ephemeral.

So when Judith Butler, together with fellow feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti on Monday evening in Oslo, met two members of Russian punk band Pussy Riot for a talk about politics, art and feminism, I was not expecting fireworks. Except for Pussy Riot, of course, who spoke through a balaclava and a voice distorter the last time I saw them. This time, they had ditched the disguises and spoke only through a translator. But I’m getting ahead of myself. And ahead of Judith Butler. READ MORE…

Exposing Kafka’s Hustler

May 14, 2014  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Florian Duijsens

Translating a story out of the closet

It’s a truism to say that translators are an author’s closest readers. They read so closely that they find patterns hidden underneath the text in a manner akin only to psychoanalysis—perhaps more adeptly than a critic or an academic. Coupled with a need to study up on translation craft, this attractive prospect spurred me to sign up for “Kafka in Translation,” a course offered by The Reader and taught by translator Bill Martin in the back of St. George’s bookstore in Berlin.

In our first class, we looked around the folding table curiously as enthusiasts and translators at various professional stages introduced themselves. Some were lucky-ass native speakers, others relative newcomers to the German language, but all of us shared an attraction to the Kafkaesque. Going around the group to share our thoughts, it was strange to be thrown back into a student state so many years after graduating, and I annoyingly immediately found myself in wise-ass mode, ceaselessly sub-clausing and cracking gay jokes. READ MORE…

Untranslating Children’s Nonsense Poems

May 5, 2014  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by M. Lynx Qualey

"The Bengali literary mafia would say: 'This is untranslatable.'"

When Indian author Sampurna Chatterji was growing up, she lived between several languages. Her father taught English, while her mother taught Bengali. In Chatterji’s own schooling, the instructional language was English, but she also learned Hindi and Sanskrit.

“All this creates a sort of strange cacophony in the head,” Chatterji said at a professional seminar at this year’s Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, held from April 30 to May 5.

But this “cacophony” also creates wonderful opportunities for linguistic connections. As she developed as a writer, Chatterji decided not to write in Bengali. “The burden of being Bengali was too much for me,” she said. Her teenage rebellion was not to go off and smoke, but to write in English. READ MORE…

Pop Around the World: Rising Sun Blues

April 24, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Florian Duijsens

There is a house...

It’s hard to say just how your favorite songs become your favorite songs, but it shouldn’t be hard to understand that sometimes our favorites are also immensely popular. We are not unique snowflakes, at least not when it comes to pop music, and sometimes (as previous iterations of this column have tried to show) we aren’t even that different from people across borders, seas, and continents.

A good song travels at the speed of radio waves, taking up residence in ears wherever, whenever.  Folk songs have traveled best of all, passing from porch to porch or from prayer-bench to prayer-bench, until the likes of Alan Lomax and the Greenwich Village folkies recorded and spread these tales like acoustic wildfire. READ MORE…

Gatsby in Translationland, Part II: between Words and Films

April 17, 2014  |  in Essays, Reviews, Translations  |  by Julia Sherwood and Olga Katafiasz

"Jacek Dehnel’s translation of the The Great Gatsby reveals, above all, the impotence of words as characters try to take control of their lives."

Asymptote Blog is celebrating The Great Gatsby’s 89th anniversary with two essays dedicated to Gatsby, translated: What does a seminal work of 20th-century Americana look like outside the tight nexus of American lit? This essay, second in a two-part series, takes a look at four very different Gatsbys, in translation and onscreen. Read Part I here.

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“Alcoholism, insomnia, anxiety, depression”: this is the diagnosis that appears in the medical record of Nick Carraway, protagonist of Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film “The Great Gatsby.” Luhrmann’s is the fourth filmic Gatsby, published on April 10, 1925, and one of the first works tackling the mythic American Dream. READ MORE…

Gatsby in Translationland: A Polish “Gatsby” in the 21st Century

April 10, 2014  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Jacek Dehnel and Julia Sherwood

"We have to bear in mind that Demkowska was working under very different circumstances: behind the Iron Curtain and without access to Google."

Asymptote Blog is celebrating The Great Gatsby’s 89th anniversary with two essays dedicated to Gatsby, translated: what does a seminal work of 20th-century Americana look like outside the tight nexus of American lit? This essay, first in a two-part series, focuses on rewriting Gatsby in 21st-century Poland. 

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Exactly half a century divides the first (and, until recently, the only) Polish translation of The Great Gatsby by Ariadna Demkowska that saw several editions from my new version (a second translation, by Jędrzej Polak, was issued only once). Until now Poles unable to read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work in the original had only Demkowska’s translation to rely on. I myself read the book as a teenager when it first appeared in Czytelnik’s Nike series.  READ MORE…

Imagined Bridges: On Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge Over the Drina

April 8, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Sarah Robinson

What does medieval Bosnia have to do with a destroyed-and-rebuilt Italian bridge? An architect responds.

The word bridge comes from the words log and beam; the earliest bridges were trees that fell over and connected two opposing banks. The wood beams that make this bridge, the Ponte Coperto in Pavia, Italy, are exalted in the vault, their circumference larger than any neighboring tree. The columns that support this vast lid were exhumed from a mountain of granite, their chisel marks and eased edges the distilled labors of a multitude of hands. Up close, they are heavy, rutted, imperfect—but from a distance the columns stand delicately, twenty-four strong on each side of a thickened waist. The roofed colonnade is held by four arches that touch the river in three places below. The sense of solidity underfoot is echoed overhead, shelter and possibility both made new in the connection.

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The Joys and Dangers of Translating Asian Dictionaries: Part III.

April 7, 2014  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Eric Gurevitch

"If the king organizes the Mānasollāsa, he is also organized by it."

Click back to see Part I and Part II of this series. Or you can enjoy this post all on its own!

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The translation of the language of things into that of man is not only a translation of the mute into the sonic; it is also the translation of the nameless into name. It is therefore the translation of an imperfect language into a more perfect one, and cannot but add something to it, namely knowledge.

—   Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”

In my previous posts I discussed the dangers of reading Asian encyclopedias by discussing two fictional representations of Asian systems of knowledge. Today, I return to reality by looking at a very real, very dear-to-me Indian encyclopedia, the Mānasollāsa of the 12th century South Indian king Someśvara III. It is the first general accounting of the various forms of scientific knowledge we find in pre-modern India. Topping 8000 verses, it is monumental, true to Aude Doody’s definition: “a grand-scale reference work with retrieval devices.” Because of its massive scope, it has not yet been fully translated into English or any other language (though sections have been translated into Kannada).

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But will translators scare the children?

April 3, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by M. Lynx Qualey

"My sons can handle knowing their Calvino was translated."

My first literary entanglement—or the first one I remember—was with folktales. While Danish and German tales were undoubtedly my introduction to the form, by the time memory kicks in, I am scouring local libraries and filling Christmas wish lists with requests for Greek myths, Norwegian sagas, Chinese tales, Italian fairy stories (yes, the Calvino), and any others that an intrepid relative might find.

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My l’esprit de l’escalier and Croatian literature abroad

April 2, 2014  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by Anda Bukvić

"Should I be firm and show attitude, or rather go with the soft, constructive approach? I chose the second, and I made a grave mistake."

January and February marked a celebration of the third anniversary of a valuable international volunteer project: a journal dedicated to literary translation going under the unexpectedly mathematical name of Asymptote. Literary evenings and panels were organized in London, New York, Boston and Zagreb on this occasion (the birthday party lasts throughout April as well, venturing to Philadelphia, Shanghai, Berlin, Buenos Aires and Sydney). READ MORE…

The Joys and Dangers of Translating Asian Dictionaries: Part II.

March 24, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Eric Gurevitch

"An encyclopedia already performs one dangerous act of translation: it translates the language of things into that of man."

When last we left off (read part I here!), I was discussing an imagined translation of an ordering system devised by a (fictitious) king of Siam in the mind of the (very real) W. Somerset Maugham. This time, I will jump to a different author.

Jorge Luis Borges, like Maugham, takes us once again to a land East of Eden, more precisely, somewhere East of Suez (where the best is like the worst, where there aren’t no Ten Commandments). In his essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” Borges introduces us to “a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled ‘Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge’” that was discussed by one “doctor Franz Kuhn.” Borges writes:

In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.

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RIP: Roberto “Freak” Antoni

March 17, 2014  |  in Essays, Multimedia  |  by Antony Shugaar

"One good thing about getting sick, really sick... was that it made him give up drugs."

Roberto Freak Antoni died just short of age sixty on February 12 this year. One good thing about getting sick, really sick, he noted, was that it made him give up drugs. Antoni—or Freak, his moniker among legions of both young and aging fans—was by no means a role model, but  a rock star and poet, and above all a deeply subversive figure in Italian literature and pop culture.

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