Essays

No Sea Left Uncharted: Dante in Japan

July 7, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Hideyuki Doi

What register should be used to translate a work so ancient, and yet so new?

In the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death, his works remain vividly alive. The ongoing stream of translations and editions of the il Somma Poeta, continuing to hold the world in rapture, is evidential of the text’s mutative and evolving qualities as it immerses itself in each discrete language. With this curiosity in mind, we are presenting a new Dante-centric series on the blog, taking a look at the Italian master’s works through the prisms of its variegating, global journey. First up is Professor Hideyuki Doi of Kyoto’s Ritsumeikan University, an accomplished expert on Italian literature. In the following essay, he traces the history of Dante’s presence in Japan, and discusses why the ancient texts continue to fascinate contemporary writers.

In order to understand Dante’s fortune in Japan, we must travel backwards exactly seventy years, when the first volume of Dante gakkai shi—annals curated by the Japanese Dante Society, founded the year before in collaboration with the Italian Dante Society of Rome—was published.

This release represented a validating acknowledgement of Dante Studies, or Italian Studies, in Japanese academia, reborn anew in the post-war period. For a long time, if the figure of Dante represented for the Italians questions of identity, for the Japanese, it posed questions of existence. In contributing to this cultural conception, there is a poem inspired by Dante’s work, composed by Akiko Yosano in the concise style known as waka or tanka:

Hitori ite  hoto iki tsukinu  Shinkyoku no  Jigoku no kan ni  warewo miidezu

Alone I breathe a sigh of relief having not found myself in the Inferno of the Divine Comedy.

This fragment, composed in 1921, restores the ancient form of thirty-one syllables subdivided into five units, and also shows how Dante touched Japanese readers closely. Yosano, today counted among the greatest modern poets, is the highest representative of that Japanese romanticism of the early twentieth century—considered a non-naturalistic aestheticism.

To draft that “Dantesque” poem, Yosano had read the first complete translation of the Comedy, edited by Heizaburō Yamakawa (1914, 1917, 1922), a Christian-inspired man of letters. Yamakawa, like many other Japanese people of that time, was spurred by a worldwide interest in the Florentine poet upon the sixth centenary of his death, as well as a curiosity cultivated by certain writers who had referenced Dante in their own works. For example, the modern novelist par excellence, Sōseki Natsume, in his autobiographic short story London tō (The Tower of London, 1905), described the imposing image of the famous Tower standing in the memories of his years spent studying in the capital—an image compared to that of Dante’s famous gate, which condemns to “eternal pain” those who pass through it. READ MORE…

Within This Language a Home: On the Linguistic Exiles of Minae Mizumura and Jhumpa Lahiri

July 5, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

We seek within language the stable perceptions of identification; we are looking for the words to pronounce ourselves.

Minae Mizumura was born speaking Japanese, adopted English upon moving to America, studied French diligently at the Sorbonne and Yale, then in adulthood, returned to Japan to become a novelist in her native tongue. Jhumpa Lahiri was born speaking Bengali, quickly gained fluency and rose to literary prominence in English, then in the mid-nineties, fell in love with the Italian language, and began a prolific transfiguration of translating and writing Italian texts. In this following essay, Blog Editor Xiao Yue Shan discusses these two accomplished writers in the varying, intriguing ways they’ve travelled through the realm of language, and how the possibilities of exile provide for a rediscovery of selfhood.

The art of self-introduction is a practice in brevity and precision. When I lived in China, I was Xiao Yue—yue as in moon. When my family moved to Canada, I became but you can call me Shelly. Later, when I carved a home-like enclave for myself in Japan, I learned the concise method of mental hyphenation: Shelly-Chinese-Canadian. Such is the way I moved through the world, always in dialogue with its perceptions. The self is not a distinct article of qualities, but a myriad web of associations—one spends a life following its appendix.

When an individual’s place in the world is rendered fluid by border-crossings and trans-oceanic migrations, it serves to learn that identity is not an indefatigable statement of presence, but a tenuous and mutable clay. Names, meant to be cemented by the fact of birth, become vulnerable to the phonetic insistences of other tongues. Language, the intact system by which to categorise the world, becomes scattered and dismembered with interruptions, contrarian rules, and adversarial vocabularies. One learns to see the multiplicities innate in all things—the layers of presence dispersed across the world, evoked by the differences in seeing. What you call that I call mine.

“‘My name is Minae’: how many times did I say this and then feel my mind go blank?” In Minae Mizumura’s novelised autobiography, An I-Novel, she peruses the same delicate network of memories, beliefs, and influences to reach herself. The three-hundred-some pages are held within the bookends of one day and night, perched on the structural lattice of phone calls with her sister, Nanae. The two sisters behold each other in both the comfort of familial intimacy and the strangeness of difference, made bolder by the contrast of similarity. Nanae, accustomed to American patterns, has settled into a life—however precarious—defined by an apartness from Japan, a homeland resigned to being occasionally ached for and remembered. Minae, however, spends the duration of this long, diaphanous day gathering pockets of assurances and assertions so that she may get up the courage to tell her sister about her decision to return to Japan—and their first language—to become a novelist.

The pull that Minae feels towards her birth country has everything to do with a knowledge that she has the power to excavate something profound and secret in the earth of Japanese language, a richness that the stone facade of English does not betray—“. . . the act of writing in Japanese transformed me to someone with knowledge of a rarefied world conveyed through the mix of different writing systems, knowledge inaccessible through English.” The lilting elegance of hiragana enchants her—writing its sweeping shapes embroiders her into the brocade of The Tale of Genji, calling towards a graceful world of balance, beauty, and softness. Even the repetitive, metronomic nature of learning kanji beholds an element of magic, displacing her into the transcendent history of the characters: “I felt like a monk in a temple, his body freezing in the bitter cold of winter, copying a sutra by candlelight.” Language—even beyond its purposes of notation and definition—is a gateway, a stage upon which the fantasies of self may spiral in its complex, infinite choreography. READ MORE…

Emma Bovary’s Adventures in Saigon, Part II

June 3, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Thuy Dinh

Hoàng Hải Thủy’s 1973 Vietnamese translation of Flaubert’s classic complicates perceptions of domestication and foreignization.

This is the second in a two-part series that explores the mixed translation effects of foreignization and domestication, as illustrated by Hoàng Hải Thủy’s 1973 Vietnamese adaptation of Madame Bovary. Read the first part here.

Note: The below version has been revised to reflect important corrections. Lawrence Venuti’s theoretical framework, as reflected in the revised essay, does acknowledge the subaltern’s perspective and show that domestication and foreignization encompass both discursive approaches and their multifaceted effects.

Since the earlier version did not fairly reflect the full implications of Mr. Venuti’s work, the author owes Mr. Venuti an apology and would like to thank him for his forbearance and collegial support.

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Hoàng Hải Thủy’s adaptation showcases his wit, creativity, and lyricism. In Người Vợ Ngoại Tình, Charles Bovary becomes Trần văn Bô, an inspired choice since the name represents both a phonetic and metaphorical rendering (although by Vietnamese convention Trần would be his family name and Bô his given name). Bô is a round, onomatopoeic sound that in Vietnamese evokes a chamber pot, and an idiot’s babbles.

Hoàng Hải Thủy changes Emma’s name to Ánh—which means “shadow,” “reflection,” and “refracted light” in Vietnamese. This domesticating approach nevertheless reflects Hoàng Hải Thủy’s concise and elegant understanding of Emma Bovary. In Flaubert’s original context, mirrors and windows are employed to accentuate Emma’s outsider status—she’s a reflected image, being gazed at by her solipsism, by other men. She is elusive, insubstantial, but also transcendent.

READ MORE…

Emma Bovary’s Adventures in Saigon, Part I

June 2, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Thuy Dinh

Hoàng Hải Thủy’s 1973 Vietnamese translation of Flaubert’s classic complicates perceptions of domestication and foreignization.

This is the first in a two-part series that explores the indeterminate translation effects of foreignization and domestication, as illustrated by Hoàng Hải Thủy’s 1973 Vietnamese adaptation of Madame Bovary. Read the second part here.

Note: The below version has been revised to reflect important corrections. Lawrence Venuti’s theoretical framework, as reflected in the revised essay, does acknowledge the subaltern’s perspective and show that domestication and foreignization encompass both discursive approaches and their multifaceted effects.

Since the earlier version did not fairly reflect the full implications of Mr. Venuti’s work, the author owes Mr. Venuti an apology and would like to thank him for his forbearance and collegial support.

In 1813, Friedrich Schleiermacher, the German translator of Plato, had proposed that a translator has two choices, “either such translator leaves the author in peace as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him; or the translator leaves the reader in peace as much as possible, and moves the author towards him.” The former technique could be defined as foreignization, and the latter domestication. Today translation scholar Lawrence Venuti has expanded on Schleiermacher’s perspective by constructing an ethics of difference in translation. According to Venuti, translations geared toward domestication effects risk perpetuating certain uncontested beliefs in the maintenance of the status quo. As a corrective, he has proposed a meticulous yet adaptable theoretical framework that can illuminate any translation, regardless of language and culture, regardless of their status as dominant or dominated, major or minor. In his view, foreignizing translations can expand the linguistic and stylistic resources of the translating language by broadening the parameters of readability.

If we define foreignizing as a translation approach that creates noticeable effects and variations from the prevalent standard, and domesticating as conforming to pre-existing norms, how do we gauge these effects against a translator’s stated intention, his unconscious bias, inadvertent omissions or errors? My essay attempts to illustrate these questions by discussing Hoàng Hải Thủy’s Người Vợ Ngoại Tình—his 1973 adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

READ MORE…

The International Booker at the Border of Fiction: Who Will Win?

May 27, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

[T]his year’s shortlist . . . is explicitly focused with questions of archives, loss, and narration.

With the announcement of the Booker International 2021 winner around the corner and the shortlisted titles soon to top stacks of books to-be-read around the world, most of us are harboring an energetic curiosity as to the next work that will earn the notoriety and intrigue that such accolades bring. No matter one’s personal feelings around these awards, it’s difficult to deny that the dialogue around them often reveal something pertinent about our times, as well as the role of literature in them. In the following essay, Barbara Halla, our assistant editor and in-house Booker expert, reviews the texts on the shortlist and offers her prediction as to the next book to claim the title.

If there is such a thing as untranslatability, then the title of Adriana Cavarero’s Tu Che Mi Guardi, Tu Che Mi Racconti would be it. Paul A. Kottman has rendered it into Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, a title accurate to its content, typical of academic texts published in English, but lacking the magic of the original. Italian scholar Alessia Ricciardi, however, has provided a more faithful rendition of: “You who look at me, you who tell my story.” This title is not merely a nod, but a full-on embrace of Caverero’s theory of the “narratable self.”

Repudiating the idea of autobiography as the expression of a single, independent will, Caverero—who was active in the Italian feminist and leftist scene in the 1970s—was much more interested in the way external relationships overwhelmingly influence our conception of ourselves and our identities. Her theory of narration is about democratizing the action of creation and self-understanding, demonstrating the reliance we have on the mirroring effects of other people, as well as how collaboration can result in a much fuller conception of the self. But I also think that there is another layer to the interplay between seeing and narrating, insofar as the act of seeing another involves in itself a narrative creation of sorts; every person is but a amalgam of the available fragments we have of them, and we make sense of their place in our lives through storytelling, just as we make sense of our own.

I have started this International Booker prediction with Cavarero because I have found that this year’s shortlist—nay, the entire longlist—is explicitly focused with questions of archives, loss, and narration: what is behind the impulse to write, especially about others, and those we have loved, but lost? Who gets to tell our stories? It is a shame that Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette—as one of the most interesting interjections on the narrative impulse—was cut after being first longlisted in March. The second portion of Minor Detail sees its Palestinian narrator becoming obsessed to the point of endangerment to discover the story that Shibli narrates in the first portion of the book: the rape and murder of a Bedouin girl, whose tragic fate coincides with the narrator’s birthday. This latter section of the book is compulsively driven by this “minor detail,” but there is no “logical explication” for what drives this obsession beyond the existence of the coincidence in itself. READ MORE…

Physical Object and Metaphysical Destiny: To the Lake Journeys to the Heart of the Balkans

May 19, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Andriana Hamas

Kapka Kassabova’s English-language travelogue invites readers in the Balkans to consider local culture with a fresh perspective.

On a website called Lost Bulgaria, anyone curious enough can browse thousands of carefully preserved and curated photographs depicting the poignant yet essential ways in which the people, customs, and landscape have transformed or been transformed from the last quarter of the 1800s until 2010. About a dozen of the blurred images kept in this time machine take us back to the first half of the twentieth century and Lake Ohrid, one of the world’s oldest and deepest, which nowadays is split by the border between North Macedonia and Albania. The majority of the visuals reveal everyday life near the shores, the monasteries that dot the mountainous terrain, the traditionally clad locals, or the passers-by who felt the need to extend a prayer to Saint Naum of Ohrid. Kapka Kassabova’s latest travelogue with distinct autobiographical elements, To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace, offers a similar but much more powerful passage through the lake’s past and present.

The book, which reviewers often place in the travel fiction genre, is pronouncedly personal, even though the disclosed memories, both on an individual level and as an outlet for the collective subconscious, undoubtedly remind readers from diverse regions of the globe of their unique roots and unending voyage of self-discovery.

The author (b. 1973) spent her childhood and teenage years in Sofia and later moved with her family to New Zealand, only to finally—or at least for the time being—settle down in the Scottish Highlands. Her extensive travels have informed her writing, which encompasses poetry collections and novels, in addition to literary travelogues. Although Kassabova’s mother tongue is Bulgarian, she writes in English, a practice that evokes the likes of Vladimir Nabokov, Khalil Gibran, and Joseph Conrad and makes her Bulgarian translations all the more fascinating.

Located on the edge of her grandmother’s homeland, Lake Ohrid is where she passed a few of her summer holidays. Once considered the pearl of the Balkans, nowadays it is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site and boasts endemic species and unique prehistoric remnants. Despite this international protection however, its pristine waters are still threatened by climate change and widespread pollution. While making a convincing case for immediate preservation action of global scale, Kassabova’s fictionalized reportage can also be perceived as a continuation to her previous one, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, in which she sets on a quest to comprehend the meaning of the separation points not only between countries, but also between people. In a similar fashion, To the Lake prompts us to tag along as she traces the ancient Via Egnatia and dives into the bloody history of the region, where Bulgarians, Macedonians, Albanians, and Greek are always at crossroads, especially in the aftermath of the two Balkan wars and the ensuing decades under communist rule. READ MORE…

The Strange—and Strangely Familiar—World of 1800s Science Fiction Novella Les Xipéhuz

April 28, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Andrea Blatz

Rosny suggests that colonialism will eventually end because of a lack of communication.

In J.-H. Rosny’s 1888 novella Les Xipéhuz, strange beings invade humans’ territory and immediately begin to kill them. Communication becomes impossible; translation is useless because the Xipéhuz threaten humanity’s existence. In today’s essay, Andrea Blatz argues that, whilst science fiction purports to tell stories foreign to our own experience, this French book represents an all-too-familiar colonial situation—and crystalizes the relationship between language and imperialism.

J.-H. Rosny—the nom de plume of brothers Joseph Henri Honoré Boex and Séraphin Justin François Boex—wrote during the Third Republic, when France was expanding its empire in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. But the country had also recently lost the Alsace-Lorraine region to Germany after the Franco-Prussian War, and a loss so close to home was a brutal blow to national pride. Borders also shift in Les Xipéhuz, in which mysterious creatures invade the humans’ territory. The French empire claimed that its raison d’être was to bring its civilization to the rest of the world, and one way to do this was to spread its language. Consequently, the Alliance Française was established in 1883 to teach the French language and spread its culture and civilization, as well as to help create a new French identity.

In this context of imperial expansion, science fiction emerged. Belgian author J.-H. Rosny Aîné—the later pen name of elder brother Joseph—was one of the first authors to write science fiction in the French language, along with Jules Verne. In his works, Rosny pushes readers to imagine humans evolving to create a better world, free of colonialism, through science. The protagonist in Les Xipéhuz, Bakhoûn, represents the use of scientific knowledge for human advancement. Although seen as an outsider for his strange habits—for example, he farms instead of hunting and gathering—he is respected, and the nomadic Pjehou tribe turns to him when their methods against the invading Xipéhuz—who may or may not be from another planet—prove useless. Bakhoûn, who is thousands of years ahead of his time, represents modern rationality in comparison to the primitive beliefs of the other members of his tribe. His beliefs are based on logic rather than superstition:

Premièrement, il croyait que la vie sédentaire, la vie à place fixe, était préférable à la vie nomade, ménageait les forces de l’homme au profit de l’esprit. Secondement, il pensait que le Soleil, la Lune et les étoiles n’étaient pas des dieux, mais des masses lumineuses; Troisièmement, il disait que l’homme ne doit réellement croire qu’aux choses prouvées par l’expérience.

First, he espoused the idea that sedentary existence was preferable to nomadic life, allowing man to channel vital forces toward the development of the mind. Second, he thought that the Sun, the Moon and the Stars were not gods but luminous bodies. Third, he taught that man should only believe in things that can be proven by Measurement.

In other words, Bakhoûn bases his conclusions on evidence he has gathered, employing a quantitative methodology to learn about the Xipéhuz. During the weeks he spends observing them, he formulates and tests hypotheses regarding the invaders’ social, educational, and communication systems.

His findings mirror an anthropological study and the importance of science for the spread of the French empire. As the French did with their subjects, Bakhoûn used his newly acquired knowledge to gain a position of power over the Xipéhuz. Scientific advancement was said to measure how advanced a group of people were and thus was used as a tool in imperial expansion. Scientism, which promoted an objective view of the world, became the dominant ideology. To spread science, language also had to be spread. READ MORE…

Literature as Homeland: The English-Language Debut of Tezer Özlü

April 21, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Matt Hanson

[Özlü] attempted to make sense of life and death, and to create an individual by way of literature.

The conspicuous absence of Tezer Özlü’s work in the English language is, to many readers of Turkish literature, a huge oversight. With precise, knowing style and modernist sense of bending convention, the lyrically humanistic nature of her prose propelled her reputation as a writer in deep dialogue with the specificities and absences of her place and time. Now, in anticipation of her Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri, soon to be released as Cold Nights of Childhood by UK publisher Serpent’s Tail, Matt Hanson gives us a glimpse at the themes of Özlü’s oeuvre, as well as how the sensitivities of her writing continue to carry through to present day.

In 1980, a Turkish novel appeared under the name Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri (Cold Nights of Childhood), written by one of the country’s most beloved writers. As the text reached the public, Tezer Özlü had just six years left to live, before breast cancer would take her life at the age of forty-three. Even amidst illness, she continued to influence European literature from its fringes as internationalist writers—entering the late twentieth century—continued to adapt modernist expressionism as representative of individual, universal humanism.

Özlü wrote mainly in her mother tongue of Turkish, yet her style, temperament, voice, and life aligned technically and thematically with the earlier German and Italian writers she admired, from the Joycean experimentalism of Italo Svevo to the singular meta-fictions of Franz Kafka; yet, it was the atheistic loneliness of Cesar Pavese who inspired her to end her last book, Yaşamin Ucuna Yolculuk (Journey to the End of Life)—first published in German two years before her untimely death—in the very hotel room where he committed suicide. Along with the aforementioned, her four books, issued by Turkey’s prestigious publishing house Yapi Kredi, include a collection of letters with fellow lifelong comrade in literature Leyla Erbil, and a complete works edition of a plays, prose, and translations prepared by her sister, Sezer Duru.

In the last four decades, Özlü has not faded from the literary landscape of young readers. Between her books, the thirty-five printings of Yaşamin Ucuna Yolculuke are only outmatched by the thirty-eight printings for Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri. She is known, adoringly, as the melancholic princess of Turkey by the youngest generation of readers (such as the editor Dilara Alemdar), and as the wild child of Turkish literature by experts (such as NYU Turkish literature professor Sibel Erol). READ MORE…

The 2021 International Booker Prize Longlist

April 8, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Sarah Moore

As well as being notable for texts that cross geographical borders, the 2021 longlist features works crossing the boundaries of traditional genres

Last week, the judges of the International Booker Prize announced the 2021 longlist. The prestigious prize is always followed with great excitement by critics, writers, and readers of international literature, and is particularly pertinent to us here at Asymptote. This year’s eclectic list features eleven languages from twelve countries. While we await the announcement of the six-book shortlist on April 22, let this be your guide through the thirteen books on the longlist.

The announcement of the International Man Booker, which celebrates the finest translated fiction from around the world, is always a pivotal event in the year for those interested in world literature. This year’s judging panel, consisting of Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Aida Edemariam, Neel Mukherjee, Olivette Otele, and George Szirtes, has selected a longlist dominated by newcomers and focusing above all on migration.

A welcome inclusion on the 2021 longlist, which is (as always) extremely Eurocentric, is the renowned Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi. Written in Gikuyu, this is Ngũgĩ’s first attempt at the epic form and explores the theme of disability through the story of nine sisters journeying to find a magical cure for their youngest sibling, who cannot walk.

Ngũgĩ was previously nominated for the International Booker in 2009 but has made history with this second nomination by becoming the first writer to be nominated for the prize as both author and translator of the same book, and the first nominee writing in an indigenous African language. Given that Ngũgĩ began his writing career in English before resolving to write works in his mother tongue (works for which he was detained by Kenya’s government), this nomination opens the way for much-needed conversations about literature in indigenous languages, as well as about the fascinating practice of self-translation. With the recent controversies surrounding translators of Amanda Gorman’s poetry collection The Hill We Climb, and questions of diversity and visibility of translators, Ngũgĩ’s self-translation adds a new angle to the debate about who gets to translate a text.

Chinese author Can Xue has also been previously nominated for the prize. In 2019, Xue was nominated for Love in the New Millennium, while this year’s nomination is for her first collection of stories, I Live in the Slums (translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping). READ MORE…

A Brief Introduction to Nermin Yɪldɪrɪm’s Secret Dreams in Istanbul

March 11, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Ümit Hussein

Secret Dreams in Istanbul is a work of literary fiction, but deals with issues that are very much on the agenda of today’s society.

Secret Dreams in Istanbul is a fascinating Turkish novel by Nermin Yɪldɪrɪm, published at the end of last year by Anthem Press. Before I go any further, I must confess that I am the book’s translator, but I would want to share it even if that weren’t the case. Only very occasionally does one come across a book that leaps out from all others and lodges itself in one’s mind. When that happens, it mustn’t be taken lightly.

March 8 was International Women’s Day, and it strikes me as a very apt time to talk about this novel, given that it draws attention to so many issues that are relevant to the battles women have been fighting for over a century to combat injustice. These themes include domestic violence, forced marriage, feigned virginity, self-induced abortion, physical and social inequality, and, more broadly, the condition of being a victim. In varying degrees, all of the characters in this novel are victims: of their gender, their social class, their biological clock, their complexes, social taboos, social expectations, their physical, intellectual and financial limitations, and of their own family. This is a book in which the weak are oppressed by the strong: it’s about facing up to one’s insecurities and confronting one’s demons; it’s about the age-old problem of sibling rivalry. And running parallel to all of these conflicts is the other key theme in the novel—the role of memory in the human psyche.

To use a somewhat frivolous simile, if you have a diamond necklace, you wouldn’t leave it locked away in a drawer where nobody can appreciate it when it could be displayed for all the world to see. I am a translator in the very privileged position of making it possible for Anglophones to enjoy the literature of other languages, and I felt the need to share this particular gem. For that reason, I decided to translate the book and to now write of why I regard the book so highly, as well as the process of translating it.

I first encountered Ruyalar Anlatɪlmaz (as it is called in Turkish) in 2012 when I was commissioned to translate a section (the first seventy pages). It moved me very deeply; I knew there would be elements of this book that would stay with me forever. But it wasn’t until 2016 that I received the go ahead (at my instigation) to translate it in its entirety.

This is Nermin Yɪldɪrɪm’s second novel. She has since written another five, all of them very fine and more successful than this one. Yet it was Secret Dreams in Istanbul that I felt compelled to translate. Whilst re-reading it, four years after my initial reading, I was taken aback to discover it was almost unnecessary to keep reading because I remembered practically every word. I don’t recall that ever happening to me, either before or since.

To briefly summarise the plot, Pilar, the novel’s Spanish protagonist, returns from work one evening to discover that her husband, Eyüp, has suddenly and inexplicably disappeared from the home they share in Barcelona. She learns from the police the following morning that he has boarded a plane for Istanbul, the city of his birth that he has not visited since he left it almost two decades previously. Mystified as to what could have provoked such uncharacteristic behaviour, and assailed by her own insecurities, she decides to follow him there and bring him back. Packing a tiny bag with just a few clothes and the dream diary that Eyüp’s psychologist has asked him to keep (in an attempt to get to the bottom of what has been disturbing his sleep), she sets off for Istanbul, where she will embark on a journey of painful discovery. Meeting Eyüp’s dysfunctional family, from which he has been as good as estranged since before she has known him, and his friends, and seeing for the first time the city where he grew up, she pieces together the clues to uncover the horrifying truth about what drove Eyüp away. READ MORE…

Ernesto Calzavara: Between Dialects and Words

March 3, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Marina Dora Martino

Calzavara had left Italian behind, a language “in which he could never raise his voice.”

In 1966 the poet Ernesto Calzavara, born in Treviso in the northeast of Italy, published e. Parole mate, Parole pòvare (And. Mad words, Poor words). This collection of poems written in the trevisàn dialect became the emblem of Calzavara’s rebellion against the disappearance of local idioms in favour of the Italian language, but it was also his first step breaking away from the Neodialettali poets and the rural themes and settings of traditional vernacular poetry. The puns and wordplay in this collection are irretrievable in the Italian language—they are part of Treviso as the landscape is, or the weather—but Calzavara believed that dialects had an inherent linguistic power, and only by tapping into that power could they break free from their condition of dying languages. In this essay, Assistant Editor Marina Dora Martino, looks at Calzavara’s poetry in the context of Italian local languages in danger of fading away forever, and considers what it means to remember and forget a language, a place, and a way of life.

Growing up, I absorbed the notion that speaking in dialect was vulgar and inadequate, especially at school. I am not sure where or when my first encounter with the local dialect even occurred—my family (originally from Naples) didn’t speak it, the schools didn’t use it, and most of my friends practiced it only with their grandparents, if at all. Treviso, my hometown, is an ancient city in the northeastern plains of Italy, whose local variation of the Veneto dialect is known as trevisàn—the Veneto dialect being a sort of regional language understood everywhere in the Veneto region, from the mountains to the sea. Excluded from school and spoken rarely among friends, Veneto lingered somewhere at the edge of my life for a long time. It was only by chance, picking up a secondhand book at the town market, that I found out about the existence of local poets, and an entirely new literary world opened to me. This is how I met Ernesto Calzavara’s poetry and realised that I had to rethink everything I knew about the dialects of my country.

It is widely known that Italy has many regional dialects, but not everybody knows that they are more than a bit of an accent and the occasional slang word. Far from being only a distortion of standard Italian, dialects are complex and ancient ways of speaking—in some cases languages in their own right—and they have been around since long before standard Italian even existed. They were known as “volgari,” from vulgo (a.k.a. not Latin but the languages that most common people spoke in their daily life) and they had started emerging from Latin itself as early as the eighth century, transformed by virtue of contact with pre-roman local languages (Etruscan, Osco-Umbrian, Messapic, and the like) but also, throughout the years, by the influence (or invasion) of tongues from other lands, such as Gaulish, Spanish, French, and Arabic. The volgari were generally considered inadequate for the high expressions of the mind, so it was normal praxis for intellectuals to write and discuss their work in Latin. This was until Dante and Petrarch came around, bringing their Tuscan dialect to the forefront of poetic innovation and proving once and for all that volgari could take on the most exalted topics (the Sicilian school of poets had prepared the ground in this sense) as well as the lowest. Indeed, in De Vulgari Eloquentia Dante went even further and made the argument (in Latin, so that it couldn’t be ignored by the intellectuals) that the mother tongue was more noble because it was learnt from infancy, and non-mediated by grammar. Which makes it all the more ironic that his fourteenth-century Tuscan (and Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s) would later be picked by sixteenth-century intellectuals as the basis for standard Italian, as the result of an educated debate on which of the peninsula’s many languages should become its lingua franca; in reality, a debate of intellectuals for intellectuals that had little or nothing to do with the life of the vulgo. In 1861, the year of Italian unification, 78% of Italians were illiterate, and most of them spoke only their regional language. The unionist phrase “we made Italy, now we must make Italians” shows the uneasiness of a young country whose people couldn’t communicate with each other from region to region, which led to standard Italian being made the language of education, politics, administration, and entertainment in the attempt to “italianise” Italy. Despite this, by the 1950s and ’60s the gap between the official role of Italian and its place in the life of people, particularly in rural areas, was still shockingly wide. With the arrival of television the nation found its most powerful tool for counteracting illiteracy: TV programs like Telescuola and Non è mai troppo tardi (it is never too late) are believed to have taught half a million Italians how to read and write.

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Anti-Revolutions: How Nicanor Parra Predicted His Country’s 2019 Uprising, Part II

February 11, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Tim Benjamin

[M]aybe Parra is himself Hamlet, paralyzed with doubt about the truth of things and his own role in doing something about it.

Tim Benjamin continues his exposition of the collaboration between revolution and poetics in the  work of Chile’s notorious antipoet, Nicanor Parra. In Liz Werner’s witty translation of his verse in the brazenly titled Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great, cynicism, humor, silences, and brutal critique manifest in turns; the deep truths are gathered and reckoned with in the spaces where they collide. Read the first part of this essay here.

Revolts have their actual front lines, of course, and in the case of Chile, these were the columns of students, artists, and veterans of the “Penguin” movements of the early 2000s advancing toward increasingly hostile, increasingly anxious walls of police and military forces employing tear gas and rubber bullets. Recently back in Santiago, after the plebiscite had already been decided, a Colombian friend of mine gave me a tour of the uprising’s hot spots, where he went each evening in solidarity with his adopted country’s awakening. He described scenes of shifting pockets of absolute chaos which had popped up here and there, before dispersing with the wafting, seemingly intentional clouds of tear gas and booms of deterrent rounds. Walking down Alameda Ave, he pointed out to me all the landmarks that were forced to close during the uprising. That afternoon, he and I attended one of the Friday protests, which have continued to this day; as we walked down an Alameda Ave closed off to traffic, I noticed the small crush of people lining the street, not doing much except being there—in conversation with friends, smoking, or staring south to where, before a small plaza, a scuffle began. It wasn’t long before the gas came in one expansive burst, and the people in front of the plaza began to disperse. We thought we were far enough away, but a breeze brought us the invisibly searing burn—and a series of Good Samaritans hopping to with spray bottles of sodium bicarbonate and lemon juice, offering temporary relief. “You get used to it,” my friend said, as we turned back toward Lastarria and its street vendors and mid-scale restaurants. “You build up a tolerance.” And for some reason, through the sandpaper-burn in our cheeks and eyelids, we laughed at this. I don’t know why. I couldn’t imagine getting “used to it.”

Somehow, though, the pain felt justified—the concrete consequence giving body to a concept which I was only partly cognizant of. But it wasn’t the kind of pain that gives legitimacy to criticisms of the government, whose force (normally) seeks justification even after the fact. In other words, it wasn’t a political pain, which is reserved, fair or not, for the majority who hang back from the clashes, repeating the language of revolt that the front line incarnates. After the country’s President, Sebastian Piñera, declared the country “at war” with itself, other friends I spoke with said they would work during the day and go directly to Santiago’s main square after getting off every night, and it was these rear-guard protests that increasingly took on an air of intense jubilation—veritable revolutionary parties in streets fogged in tear gas and the volleying booms of urban warfare, as if the certainty of the success of the cause was enough to start the celebrations a priori. The reaction of those in charge were typically evasive, or offensive. One government minister casually suggested that instead of revolting in the streets, people should wake up early to avoid the increase in public transportation fares; others suggested “alien agents” descending on the country to induce chaos, which social media and protest signage quickly meme-ified.

While lack of shame and self-awareness is the realized utopia of the modern politician, it seems the uprising’s jubilance shared in Parra’s strangely unpretentious counter-narrative to it. More than a few of his poems might work as semi-mystical memes; take the poem “No president’s statue escapes,” whose three verses follow from the title to form a simple, declarative meditation on history’s losing struggle with time: From those infallible pigeons / Clara Sandoval tells us. / Those pigeons know exactly what they’re doing. Both the pigeons and the topless protesters straddling these same statues are definitive symbols of the “certainty” mentioned above, both moving into that rare space where parody becomes something more eternal than mockery.

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Anti-Revolutions: How Nicanor Parra Predicted His Country’s 2019 Uprising, Part I

February 10, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Tim Benjamin

On a fundamental level, Parra’s antipoetry culminates at that point where parody and devotion coincide.

Chile and its writers are no strangers to the conjugation between revolution and poetry, having long applied the ardent and inciting potentials of well-elected words to fortify and give lyric to its people’s desires for social change. Amongst the most powerful letters of the country’s struggles, the language of Nicanor Parra possessed especially an indomitable power, with its colloquial, irreverent nature lending an imitable voice to the static nature of words. Though Parra passed in 2018, his verse continues to establish itself in the public expressions of dissent, most recently revealing their prescience in regard to the severe 2019–2020 protests. In the first part of this essay, Tim Benjamin puts the poet’s legacy in relation with the social fabric of both his time and ours. Stay with us for the second part, to be published tomorrow. 

I had already left Chile before the country’s 2019 uprising, but I was still living there when Nicanor Parra became a centenarian. The grand misanthrope of Chilean letters had conquered his personal century, and in a country known for wine, political troubles, and writers, there was considerable respect payed to the antipoet’s gesture toward immortality. TV and newspapers dedicated front-page space to a sort of celebratory pre-obituary, and on the night of, I went out for drinks with friends, who talked a little about Parra’s work but mostly about the idea that the old, disheveled fuck seemed to have made it to such a ripe old age just so he could take the piss out of death, like he’d done to poetry sixty years before. Death returned the favor a little under two years before the uprising, but as the introduction of Liz Werner’s overlooked 2004 “antitranslation” of his later work, Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great makes clear, Parra took his joke further than anyone before him.

He didn’t coin the term. At least two poets—Vicente Huidobro and the Peruvian Enrique Bustamante y Ballivián, who published a book titled Antipoemas in 1926—had used it before him. But the concept will forever be etched alongside his name in whatever circle of the literary pantheon he comes to occupy. Parra would pass away in 2018 at the very anti-climactic age of 103, just under two years before the country’s most significant political movement since the “NO” campaign rejected Pinochetismo in 1989. And despite—or maybe because—of his reputation as the antipoet, it seems safe to say that dying before the Revolution was the kind of providential malfeasance he would have at least tried to have some fun with. Indeed, Werner’s “How to Look Better & Feel Great,” chosen in apparently intimate collaboration with Parra, is one of those disembodied parodies that exist somewhere between a wink and a groan. But it also points the way toward the mentality of a country, which, despite the crackdowns and a global pandemic, has hung a definitive asterisk onto South America’s “economic miracle.”

Parra was born in 1914 in southern Chile to a bohemian father and a mother who shows up often in his poetry as the folksy sage “Clara Sandoval.” He was the brother of the legendary folk singer Violeta Parra, whose song, “La carta” was covered by Mon LaFerte during the uprising (The letter arrives to tell me / that in my country there’s no justice / the hungry ask for bread / the military gives them lead). He studied engineering at the University of Chile, physics at Brown, and cosmology at Oxford, which may or may not have contributed to the often sideways transgressions from formalism which defines much of his output—though Werner does emphasize Parra’s occasional use of an algebraic x and shorthand descriptions of relativity. He began publishing poetry marginally in 1938, but made his name in 1954 with the publication of Poems and Antipoems. As Werner’s introduction notes, one Chilean critic wrote that Parra’s book “Returned us . . . once again! [To the fact that] everything could be said in poetry.” Camus would make a similar point a couple of years later in The Rebel, claiming that an artist’s “rebellion against reality” affirms the same motivation as that of the revolt of the oppressed. Poems and Antipoems would go through multiple editions, and the 1967 English-language version would count among its translators Allen Ginsburg, who had joined Parra in an increasingly paranoid Havana two years earlier to give out the Casa de las Americas Prize. READ MORE…

A Tribute to Antonín J. Liehm

February 4, 2021  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Aleksander Kaczorowski and Julia Sherwood

I couldn’t have wished for a more ideal guide to Czech history and culture than A.J. Liehm.

Czech journalist Antonín J. Liehm was a leading public intellectual who passed away on December 4, 2020, aged ninety-six. One of the movers and shakers of the cultural and political ferment of the Prague Spring, he left the country after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, and it was largely thanks to Liehm’s tireless work in exile that essays by Václav Havel and many other Czech authors reached readers in Western Europe and the United States before 1989. To help bridge the gap between the East and the West, he founded the ground-breaking journal Lettre International, which in its heyday appeared in thirteen different countries and languages. In this essay, Polish writer and journalist Aleksander Kaczorowski pays tribute to his mentor.

In the spring of 1992 my wife and I went to Sofia for our honeymoon. Don’t ask why, of all places, we picked Sofia: it was a random choice, yet one resulting in one of the major discoveries of my younger years. It was there, in the Bulgarian capital, at the Czech Centre, that I stumbled across a book that I bought and virtually devoured before our holiday was over.

The book, Generace (A Generation), was a collection of interviews with Czech and Slovak writers that was finally able to appear in Czechoslovakia, after a twenty-year delay. It featured many authors whom I had already come to love and whose books had enticed me to study Czech language and literature at Warsaw University: Milan Kundera, Josef Škvorecký, and Václav Havel, as well as many others whose work I would get to know only later, like Ivan Klíma and Ludvík Vaculík, or the great Slovak writer Dominik Tatarka. Many of them had joined the communist party in their youth, and in these interviews conducted by Liehm between 1963 and 1968, they take a critical look at their own involvement, as well as the contemporary social and political situation in Czechoslovakia. They called for political changes (many of them did indeed play a key role in the Prague Spring of 1968) but what interested me most was what they had to say at the time about literature, the sources of their literary inspiration, and their own plans. In particular, the interview with Kundera—whom Liehm had met when they were both young, their friendship lasting nearly seventy years, until his death—was full of extraordinarily interesting biographical details that are hard to find in later interviews with the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Following the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the book became unacceptable to the censors. Instead of Prague, it first appeared in Paris in 1970, together with a lengthy preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. German, English, Spanish, and Japanese editions soon followed. Over the next twenty years, several of the writers featured in the book achieved world-wide fame. However, until I encountered in Sofia the reissued Czech edition of A Generation published in 1990, I knew next to nothing about the man who had conducted the interviews: the Czech exile journalist Antonín J. Liehm. READ MORE…