Interviews

It’s the Song One’s After: Alexander Booth on translating Friederike Mayröcker

April 5, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Sophia Stewart

You have to listen hard, and long, and then try and carry that listening over.

Early in her lyrical memoir, The Communicating Vessels, Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker has a crisis of faith: “And will anyone even read this . . . ?” she wonders. “. . . I see no goal, everything I touch, take up, after 1 short time seems flat and plain . . .” This kind of mid-project despair should sound familiar to many a writer—when the work feels futile, and the motivation to do it sapped.

But in some respects, Mayröcker had no choice but to write The Communicating Vessels. After the death of Ernst Jandl, her partner and collaborator of nearly half a century, Mayröcker took to the page to process her grief. She didn’t write her way out of pain so much as through it: in Vessels and its companion And I Shook Myself a Beloved, recently compiled together and published in English by A Public Space, the poet documents and reflects on her mourning process, her memories, and her daily life without Jandl.

Mayröcker’s style—unfettered, freely associative—can intimidate some readers. Literary translator Alexander Booth, on the other hand, was immediately captivated. In his masterly translation of Vessels, a work that confidently flouts grammatical rules and linguistic convention, Booth manages to enter Mayröcker’s mind and interpret her raw, cascading thoughts. It’s heartbreaking to witness her anguish and disorientation, while simultaneously astounding to revel in her complete liberation from the confines of language. In the following interview, I speak with Booth about the daunting, rewarding process of bringing Mayröcker to English-language readers. 

—Sophia Stewart, Assistant Interviews Editor

Sophia Stewart (SS): The Communicating Vessels was in fact the first book of Mayröcker’s that you ever read, handed to you by a bookseller in Berlin over fifteen years ago. How did you come to translate Vessels? Did translating this book change at all your understanding of or relationship to her and her work?

Alexander Booth (AB): As with many things, it was a fairly circuitous path! I first encountered Mayröcker’s writing in Jerome Rothenberg’s and Pierre Joris’ anthology, Poems for the Millennium, and was intrigued. But living as I was in the US, finding her books in the original German was somewhat difficult. Then at the end of 2003 I moved to Berlin. I had nowhere to be, nowhere to go. The city was dark. There was snow and it was cold and I was unemployed and sleeping on a kitchen floor. Mostly I wanted to read. And fall in love. What I got was The Communicating Vessels. And so I more or less began to translate bits and pieces as soon as I could—but for myself, mind you, as a means of getting a better grip on what was going on.

Later, unpublished and unknown, I had absolutely no idea how to go about contacting publishers, much less how to approach journals with something in translation. After some not exactly encouraging responses and years of rejections, I mostly gave up. Then, at some point, I began to correspond with Nia Davies, who at that time, in 2014, was editor at Poetry Wales. She ended up publishing a few of the aforementioned bits and pieces in the journal in connection to a piece on Mayröcker—at ninety and being translated into Welsh. Then, in late 2015—more than ten years after having first begun—out of the proverbial blue I received an email from A Public Space inquiring as to whether I had any longer excerpts, and would I be interested in putting together a kind of expose, and it went from there.

I’m not sure that translating this book changed my understanding or relationship that much, no, aging and experience did just fine on their own. But I will say that there are very few writers who will truly change the way you approach reading and writing, indeed change your reading and writing, and whose works will continue to teach you in surprising ways, year after year. There are also very few writers you will remember where you were, when you were, how you were, upon first reading. It is no exaggeration to write that Mayröcker was one of them for me. READ MORE…

The Indeterminacy of the Human: An Interview with Rainer Hanshe of Contra Mundum Press

March 31, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Rachel Allen

. . . we say to read for difference, for dissonance; read not to identify, or to sympathize, but from a principle of fascination.

Contra Mundum is a New York-based independent publishing house expressly committed to Modernist work and principles. Its catalog includes the dramatic writings and theatre criticism of Robert Musil; Celan’s posthumous prose as translated by Pierre Joris; two “pre-heteronymic” works from Pessoa; the generously-illustrated Letters of Otto Dix; and a late film script from Marguerite Duras. Preference is given texts with limited circulation, the under-translated and outré in particular. 

In 2012, for instance, Contra Mundum published Marginalia on Casanova, Tim Wilkinson’s rendering of Volume 1 in Miklós Szentkuthy’s cathedral-commentary-catalogus rerum, St. Orpheus Breviary. Contra Mundum is now five books into its tremendous project, bringing into English an immense cosmophagic-and-collapsing body of prose from a modernist still known as the “sacred monster” of Hungarian letters. In addition to works from the Breviary, Contra Mundum has so far contributed translations of Prae and Toward the One & Only Metaphor (also translated by Wilkinson, who died in October of 2020) and Chapter on Love (translated by Erika Mihálycsa, who will continue as translator for subsequent Szentkuthy works). That CMP should be the publisher to finally give Anglophone readers an adequate Szentkuthy is fitting: press and author share an understanding of zeitgeists alive—in art, in language—across history, unthreatened by chronology or multilingualism. Contra Mundum too experiences its periodic connection to modernism(s) without—or with different—temporal allegiances. In addition to Musil and Pessoa, CMP has published not only Baudelaire and Wordsworth and the Ghérasim Luca of Mary Ann Caws, but also Iceberg Slim, a new Gilgamesh (Stuart Kendall’s), Ahmad Shamlou, Maura Del Serra, and the collected prose of Robert Kelly. Many texts converge around performance, whether onstage, on screens, or in person(ae): CMP has published Elio Petri, Richard Foreman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, Rédoine Faïd, and Carmelo Bene. Adjacent to this swirl of codexical text and idea is Hyperion, CMP’s in-house and aptly subtitled journal: On the Future of Aesthetics.

Rainer J. Hanshe is the founder, editor, and publisher of Contra Mundum Press, as well as the author of two CMP titles, Shattering the Muses and The Abdication, and the translator of its three works by Baudelaire. We spoke recently about the nature of (his) modernism and its role in contemporary literature. Deviation, ambition, and heteroglossia were our major subthemes.

Rachel Allen (RA): How does Contra Mundum understand “modernism”? How do you recognize modernist work when you encounter it? (Is modernism limited, temporally? Geographically? Relationally? Formally? To whom is it available to be modernist?)

Rainer Hanshe (RJH): Although Modernism does occur within a specific epochal moment, I don’t see it as bound to that cluster of time, nor do I see it in absolute or purist terms. There is no kind of totemic Modernism with a unified set of precepts that every modernist abides by. Any kind of doctrinaire, sectarian, or dogmatic form of something cannot be abided. We are advancing modernism more as a kind of mobile act or event, like a type of living roving machine (not in a mechanistic sense but as a generative force) or combustion furnace and monster of energy. It is a question of extracting from any period, any event, any moment, its active, productive elements, like taking an arrow shot by Nature, picking it up where it has fallen, and shooting it in new directions, as Deleuze said of Nietzsche.

In that way, art is no different from science in terms of advancements—once a certain insight or knowledge has been developed, there is no reason to abandon it, let alone restrict it to its original moment. Modernism (let’s avoid the term neo-Modernism) is to us protean and metamorphic, an open, indeterminate constellation. Beyond seeing it solely as a specific movement in time then, consider its principal elements as if they were discoveries: a conscious break with tradition (abandoning outmoded elements of classicism); a rejection of historicism and the grand narratives of Western metaphysics, not to speak of its morals and values; the displacement of reason as a ruling force (the curse of the Enlightenment) and fostering in its stead a chiasmic fusion of the rational and the irrational; an abandonment of bankrupt forms of art, such as naturalism and realism (and so representation), which different scientific developments essentially undermined, and Enlightenment-type encyclopaedic projects of totality; related to consciousness and new conceptions of the self and the indeterminacy of the human: interior monologues; stream of consciousness; perspectivalist viewpoints; fracturedness, fragmentation, heteroglossic language, en plus.

It is a literature of incommensurabilities, of a dynamism in signification, of a rejection of absolute truths, of an embracing of dissonance. A literature that is aware of language’s limits, of its fissures, of its cul-de-sacs and cracks, and it vigorously pursues such. Flaubert’s book about nothing; Mallarme’s Le Livre; Beckett’s search for a literature of the unword; et cetera. Modernism understands language as Bakhtin spoke of it: a dynamic entity consisting of an interplay between centripetal and centrifugal discursive forces. The combustive furnace. Heteroglossia. An amalgam of linguistic registers. The Tower of Babel is not a curse. READ MORE…

Pleasantly Odd Prose: An Interview with Translator from the Albanian, John Hodgson

March 29, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Sophia Stewart

When Albania was isolated under communism, Kadare tried to help his readers travel in their imagination.

Throughout Ismail Kadare’s autobiographical novel The Doll, recently published in English by Counterpoint Press, the narrator voices a dilemma that most writers know well: the insufficiency of language. “It was hard to explain because there were no words for it,” he says at one point. “Either I didn’t know them, or they weren’t yet invented.” And later: “No language could describe what I felt in my heart. I needed a different one. The one I had would not obey me.”

So much of the literary translator’s work lies in courting the obedience of language. Translation makes intelligible the previously unintelligible, imagines new words to convey preexistent meaning. John Hodgson knows this well: The Doll is the sixth book of Kadare’s that Hodgson has translated. Considering his outsized role in bringing Kadare’s work to English-language readers, he cuts a modest, unassuming figure. One of the few Albanian-English literary translators working today, Hodgson has translated Kadare’s novels The Three-Arched Bridge, The Traitor’s Niche, and A Girl in Exile, among others. In comparison to the Albanian writer’s previous novels, Hodgson describes The Doll as “a gentle, reflexive, and humorous book” and found “the experience of translating it was correspondingly relaxed.”

Hodgson and I recently discussed his work as an Albanian-English interpreter and literary translator, as well as the inimitable pleasures of “a Kadare sentence.”

—Sophia Stewart, Assistant Interviews Editor

Sophia Stewart (SS): You were born in England and studied English at Cambridge and Newcastle. What initially drew you to the Albanian language, and what led you to pursue Albanian translation professionally?

John Hodgson (JH): In the 1980s, I taught English in several now vanished Eastern European countries: the German Democratic Republic, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. The British Council sent me to the University of Prishtina in Kosovo. I knew nothing about Kosovo when I arrived, but I was enthralled by the life there. Now, during lockdown, I’ve written a short book in Albanian about this time, which I recall with great affection. Soon afterwards I was head-hunted by the United States Government to translate Marxist-Leninist propaganda.

SS: Seeing as you were born in England, and therefore speak British English, do you actively avoid Briticisms in your translations? While there is no such thing as “standard English,” do you attempt to make your English translations as universally intelligible—that is, “unmarked” by dialectical indicators—as possible?

JH: When I worked for the United States government, my computer would bleep whenever I used a Briticism, and this taught me, for instance, not to write the word “whilst.” English is very rich and capacious, so it is possible to write in an “unmarked” style without lapsing into bland UN-speak. Albanian also has a lot of variation, particularly between the north and south, and Kadare writes in a non-regional literary Albanian that is quite a recent flowering, and which he himself has done a lot to shape and infuse with expressive power. Recently he has been consciously reviving old words and creating neologisms. A Kadare sentence in Albanian is quite unlike any other writer’s. I was pleased when a reviewer described the prose of one of my translations as “pleasantly odd.” I thought I had perhaps captured something of this. Dialectical indicators in the original language pose more intractable problems than a translator’s own idiom. So does slang. Kadare hardly ever uses slang, and presents none of the difficulties of, for example, the soldiers’ Bosnian in Faruk Šehić’s Under Pressure.

SS: The author-translator relationship can vary so much depending on the particular project or pairing. Having translated so much of Kadare’s work over the course of more than two decades, what does your working relationship with Kadare look like?

JH: Kadare has had dozens of translators and he can’t spend all his time dealing with us. I have been grateful for the confidence he has shown in me. Generally, after I have completed the first draft of each book in English, the editor and I put together questions for Kadare, which he has always answered conscientiously. He doesn’t use the internet, and I like to respect his privacy. READ MORE…

Breaking the Cycle of Indifference: Véronique Tadjo on Writing and Translating In the Company of Men

March 25, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

My intention was to have that space, which is at the same time recognizable and foreign.

In February, we introduced to Asymptote Book Club subscribers the multifarious, multivocal work of Véronique Tadjo. Her 2017 novel, In the Company of Men, fascinatingly combines document, and oration in a portrait of the West African Ebola epidemic, interrogating in turns how we as humans grapple with illness, as well as how the natural world—with its unseen forces—regards us. A pivotal read during this seemingly unending time of addressing our own pandemic, Tadjo’s unique linguistic style and sensitive artistry has introduced In the Company of Men as a text of both current relevance and long-lasting artistry. In this following interview, Assistant Managing Editor Lindsay Semel speaks with Tadjo on self-translation, personifying the non-human, and the inheritance of literary traditions.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!  

Lindsay Semel (LS): I’m fascinated by the subject of self-translation. You’ve translated some of your own children’s fiction, but this is your first foray into translating your adult fiction. Even though you’ve lived in so many different places, and you function daily in so many different languages, translating your own work is a separate beast. I’d love to hear about, first and foremost, what the process was like for you.

Véronique Tadjo (VT): Yes, I function in two languages, French and English; I’ve been studying English and living in Anglophone countries quite extensively—the longest was in South Africa for fourteen years. So I’m used to speaking both languages.

This process with In the Company of Men was fairly long, and it was a collaboration. It started with a draft with a friend; we worked quite a lot on the text, but the result was still very close to the French original. Maybe because I’ve done a lot of translation, I could see that myself—that there was something stalling the text. The last stage of the collaboration was with John Cullen from Other Press, a translator with a very good reputation. He looked at the text and finally lifted it up, in the sense that he was able to give it a more oral quality than the first version, which was a little bit wooden. I just didn’t feel that it was flowing the way it should flow, especially because English is a much more direct language [than French]. French tends to go round and round—it takes a bit more time to get there. Whereas English has some sort of efficiency. I think that the original French book was more lyrical, whereas the English translation is more to the point.

LS: Do you happen to have, off the top of your head, an example of a passage that wasn’t quite hitting its mark? Do you remember what changed through those conversations about it?

VT: Very simple things. Like, for example, “He’s a tall man.” You can’t do that in French. You can’t contract. It’s just a small example, but when you look on the page, how the language is written down, it makes a big difference.

LS: There are very clear parallels between the events that you chronicle in this text and what a lot of the globe is experiencing now collectively, and so I wonder if current events contributed to your decision to translate yourself rather than bringing in a translator. What was it like for you to put yourself back into this story?

VT: Yes, I think that because of the pandemic, I had a sense of urgency. I had it in 2017 when I was talking about the Ebola epidemic, but with the translation, it came back. This time, what we had feared was becoming reality, so there was a renewed sense of energy, which compelled me to want to be very involved in the translation—to really put myself fully in it.

There were certain words that came naturally which I sometimes had to resist. For example, there’s a chapter in which a nurse plays an important role. You would be tempted to call her an “essential worker.” But you have to be careful, because “essential worker” is an expression that has taken strength from the COVID-19 pandemic, but I’m not sure we were using it that much before. You see, today you read it differently. I didn’t want to introduce this “foreign language,” which would signal a shift from Ebola to COVID-19. It would not be right. So, although there was temptation to use some of the terms that are being used today, I didn’t want that contamination, in a sense. I had to stay true to the period, the time, and the context. READ MORE…

Raising the Profile of Slovak Translation: An Interview with the Founders of DoSlov

March 22, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Julia Sherwood

In our region, thinking about translation is a constant tension between “fidelity” and “translation shifts”; it is an old-school legacy.

The book market in Slovakia, a small country with population of five million, is dominated by translations, yet the visibility of translators remains low. DoSlov, a recently established translators’ and editors’ organisation has set out to change this by providing support to the profession in the country and improving the working conditions in the industry. Asymptote’s editor-at-large for Slovakia, Julia Sherwood, spoke with two of its founders, Barbara Sigmundová and Gabriela Magová, about the challenges they face and what they have achieved so far (despite the pandemic).

Julia Sherwood (JS): When did you start DoSlov and what made you start your organisation?

Barbara Sigmundová (BS): DoSlov was founded in 2019 by seven female freelance translators. Like many other literary translators and editors in Slovakia, we were dissatisfied with the steadily worsening working conditions and increasingly unfair publishing contracts. For years, there had been no collective attempt to speak out about these problems, to quantify them, and to try to effect change. There was a huge data gap which impeded any chance of improvement. So we decided to take the initiative. We conducted a survey of Slovak literary translators (the first in more than a decade) and found that the situation was even worse than we feared. That was when we knew we had to formalise our “working group” and start DoSlov.

JS: Can you explain the pun behind your organisation’s name? The Slovak word “doslov” means “afterword” but the use of upper and lower case suggests that there is more to it.

BS: “Do” means “into” and “Slov” means “words” so it echoes the idea that translators and editors shape ideas into words, but also the fact that our common working tool is the SLOVak language.

JS: How does DoSlov membership work?

BS: We have full members as well as student members. Without a membership base, our organisation couldn’t aspire to become a relevant partner to have a dialogue with state institutions, grant organisations, or even publishing houses. This has proved crucial during the COVID-19 crisis, as the Ministry of Culture has communicated mainly with representatives of associations, while those freelancers who haven’t managed to get formally organised have been overlooked. The membership fees are symbolic, but help us cover our basic expenses, as well as to co-finance grant projects. In return, our members can create a professional profile on our website, helping them become more visible to publishers.

JS: What are your main goals?

BS: One of the main goals of our NGO is to increase the visibility of literary translators and editors and bring these professionals together to raise awareness of their rights as authors, improve their working conditions, and contribute to their lifelong learning experience. Currently, after little more than a year of existence, we have around fifty members who translate from fifteen languages.

JS: What other institutional support is there in Slovakia for translators?

Gabriela Magová (GM): Since 2015, literary translators have been able to apply once a year for a scholarship from the Slovak Arts Council, for a period of two to twenty-four months. The scholarship, based on the average salary in Slovakia and not subject to tax, is sufficient to ensure an adequate income for translators. Unfortunately, some publishers confuse this support with the translator’s fee even though the rules clearly state that it is not meant to replace the fee. Even so, we are lucky to have this option, which does not exist in the neighbouring countries.

Translators can also apply for a scholarship from the Literary Fund (Literárny fond, litfond.sk) set at up to 350 euros a month, for a maximum of six months. translators have benefited from residencies abroad, but possibilities for literary translation residencies in Slovakia are mostly limited to foreign translators of Slovak literature. READ MORE…

Against Invisibility: Poet Roy G. Guzmán on Queer Identity, Memory, and Honduras

March 18, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

The literary market, films, music, everything tells you, in some way, that no one’s interested in your voice, in your stories, and in your culture.

Roy G. Guzmán (they/them) was born in Honduras, grew up in Miami, lives in Minnesota, and last year, Graywolf Press put out Catrachos, their first book of poems. In February, the book was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Awards in the poetry category, alongside Ray González, Danez Smith, and Torrin A. Greathouse. Roy debuted with authority, potency, rebelliousness, and nonconformity, but also with pain and sensitivity, with empathy and nostalgia and tenderness, with admiration. Catrachos is filled with references to their childhood in Miami and how it was for them, a poor Central American person, to grow up in a hostile environment. In a country that considered them, in their own words, “an afterthought” and “a second-class citizen.” Catrachos, in a way, serves as a testimony for the experience of the Central American diaspora in the United States. But it’s more. Mucho más.

In Roy’s poems we find, yes, family traditions, but also violence, resistance, what it was like for them to grow up as a queer kid. Catrachos is a beautiful and soothing portrait, not devoid of harsh and urgent criticism toward imperialism and racial violence. Roy, in their debut, speaks with curiosity and tenderness, while acknowledging the devastation caused by colonialism. Trailblazing, the gringos might say.

Last year, Roy and I spoke about all this. About Catrachos, their memories of Honduras, their family, their identity, about considering themselves “the other.” We spoke about Rubén Darío, X-Men, and the Pulse massacre—the basis of a poem they wrote called “Restored Mural for Orlando.” We spoke about being a poet, about being queer, Latinx, mestizx, mulatx, indigenous in the United States and in Honduras.

–José García Escobar

José García Escobar (JGE): First, I wanted to ask you about leaving Honduras and growing up in the U.S. I’m curious about the Central American communities in the U.S. You reference your childhood much in Catrachos, but I feel like it’s often indoors. Were there many Hondurans where you lived?

Roy G. Guzmán (RGG): Miami often gets talked about as this cosmopolitan city, as sort of Mecca of Latin America, right? The Miami that I grew up in was very different than sort of what you see in Texas, what you see in California, where there’s much more solidarity not only among Central Americans but also between Mexicans and Chicanxs people. That’s something that I did not grew up with in Miami. Miami, at least in the nineties, it was much more Caribbean. I grew up with a lot of Dominicans and Cubans. And I think that when it came to the Central American diaspora, many more Nicaraguans. We saw many more Nicaraguans because they were considered political refugees. This is important. There were many Cubans, and they were seen as political refugees. There were Nicaraguans, and they were also seen as political refugees. Then there was us. We were basically seen as immigrants that had made this transition because of economic instability, and so I felt like a second-class citizen. I was less desirable than the political refuge. The other thing was that many Hondurans I grew up with were undocumented. Add that to the equation. This means that our communities were very disconnected. So, I grew up in a place that treated me as an afterthought. It wasn’t until I left Miami and I moved to Chicago, for my undergrad, that I was exposed to a very different kind of resilient. There are conversations that I never had in Miami and suddenly I had, the minute I left. And off course years later when I ended up coming back to Miami, after my master’s, to teach, I was incredibly aware of the power dynamics, the imbalance, the issues with, not just representation, but visibility and invisibility. I was able to understand shame, internalized racism. I was able to understand things like white privilege. I was able to understand anti-Central American discrimination.

JGE: You arrived to Miami in the mid-nineties, right? This was before Hurricane Mitch devastated a large part of Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua as well. After Mitch, did you see more Central Americans arriving to your community?

RGG: Not as many. But I did live the impact of the hurricane. My family, obviously, as part of the diaspora, one of the things that we do as Central Americans in the U.S. is we send money back to our families. So, after the hurricane we had to make sure that our family had a consistent form of funding, so they could get by. Our family would also tell us that they would see bodies left and right, bodies floating in the rivers, or people’s businesses completely destroyed. READ MORE…

The Dangers of Complacency: An Interview with the Founders of Sandorf Passage

March 10, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Moore

. . . there are a lot of mental borders that writers and translators are crossing every day. I think publishers also have to do that.

Sandorf Passage is a new independent nonprofit publishing house, whose first titles have been launched this month. Its founders, American Buzz Poole and Croatian Ivan Sršen have both previously worked as editors and obtained EU funding to bring works from the former Yugoslavia into English. Sandorf Passage focuses on “writing inspired by both conflict zones and the dangers of complacency.” Their first title, From Nowhere to Nowhere, by Bekim Sejranovic was published at the beginning of March. Now, with their second, Vesna Maric’s The President Shop released yesterday, and two more books due for release next month, Blog Editor Sarah Moore spoke with the founders of Sandorf Passage about the importance of translated works and what to expect from their titles.

Sarah Moore (SM): How did you both come to editing?

Buzz Poole (BP): I was a lifelong reader, studied literature in college as an undergraduate and then graduate student at San Francisco State University, where I got involved with a handbound letterpress literary journal called Em. At the time it was a hotbed of indie lit journals. I moved to New York, got a job as editor at Mark Batty Publisher (MBP), and moved on to be Managing Director of Black Balloon Publishing, which is now an imprint of Catapult—that’s where my story and Ivan’s started to merge. We had met at the Frankfurt Book Fair when I was at MBP and hit it off. Ivan was there as an agent and translator, and at the time we thought that we might try to do something, though it never quite worked out. Then fast forward to Black Balloon. I saw Ivan and said, “Hey, I’m acquiring fiction now—what have you got?” And he had Robert Perišić’s Our Man in Iraq, which was critically acclaimed and unlocked the floodgates in terms of our continuing collaborations.

Ivan Sršen (IS): During my studies I started working in a small bookstore that was owned by a small publishing house in Zagreb. I was just a twenty-year-old student, watching all these great authors and translators coming into our small bookstore. Being part of that collective was very important for me and shaped my view of the business of publishing and what editing really is. It’s a lot about communication: knowing the people, what they are looking for, what they have to offer, and where their horizon is spreading. I was lucky enough to get a job as an intern editor working on music books, which launched me into the world of creative publishing—a small scene but very diverse, with the legacy of former Yugoslavia. Many big writers came from Yugoslavia, like the Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andrić, and I wanted to pursue a literary editing career. So I worked with a few publishers until, in the end, I realised I would have to start something on my own. That’s how I started Sandorf in 2008—basically without any savings and on the verge of the world economic catastrophe! So those were interesting years, but that’s the time when I met Buzz. I always knew that I wanted to go beyond the borders. Not just national borders, but all kinds of borders—imaginary, mental—and in working with books there are a lot of mental borders that writers and translators are crossing every day. I think publishers also have to do that.

SM: So how did Sandorf become Sandorf Passage?

BP: We’re very similar and we both have the desire to be as self-sufficient as possible and to do things the way we want them done. The Our Man in Iraq project was the first stepping-stone in this becoming something more official. Ivan was representing Robert as his agent and the book had already been published in a UK English-language edition so I had the benefit of being able to read it. When I read it, I liked it, but immediately said—with my editor’s cap on—that it needed to change and could become so much better. Robert and Ivan were open to that, and that’s the reason why the book got as much attention as it did; it’s a better book now, having received a more thorough edit than it had received originally in the Croatian or in the UK edition. This opened the door to its potential. Then Ivan and Robert were given funding from the Croatian Ministry of Culture to start a literary festival called Lit Link, which still exists. We started being able to invite international writers and editors to Croatia to meet Croatian authors. For the first project, Journey to Russia, Ivan was able to secure some funding for a Croatian domestic English-language edition that I worked on with Ivan and Will Firth, the translator. Then at an ALTA conference in Minneapolis three years ago, Ivan and I were both there. Sandorf had gotten to a very good place so we thought, what if we did a US imprint? And here we are. We got a grant from the EU to provide subsidies for bringing writing from the former Yugoslavia into the English-language market.

IS: Yes, having these four books that are now coming out, buying the rights for them, and discussing them with Buzz marked the beginning of Sandorf Passage. I already had the rights for late Bekim Sejranović’s novel From Nowhere To Nowhere. Then Vesna Maric sent me her new manuscript, The President Shop. And we had Journey to Russia, already translated by Will Firth and published by Sandorf in Croatia in English. So with these three main books in English, we agreed that we had to continue—we couldn’t say no! It’s great when you start a new independent publishing project because you can really enjoy the books and dedicate your time to each title. That’s what it’s all about in publishing: having time to work on the books, to take care, and to discuss them with the author. READ MORE…

Each Sentence a Dagger: Tim Mohr on translating Alina Bronsky’s My Grandmother’s Braid

March 1, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Barbara Halla

Her world expands beyond the margins; there's the world that she's telling in detail, and then there's all this other stuff just outside the lens.

In our Book Club selection for January, we were thrilled to present Alina Bronsky’s brilliantly comic and irreverent My Grandmother’s Braid, a study of familial dysfunctions that renders its players in all their idiosyncratic fascinations. Now, Assistant Editor Barbara Halla talks with Bronsky’s translator, Tim Mohr, about his intimate connections to Germany and its language, the German tradition of immigrant literature, and the challenges of rendering Bronsky’s surprising and intuitive narration.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Barbara Halla (BH): You have a longstanding relationship with Alina Bronsky, having translated five of her books. Could you speak a little bit about how you came across her work and what inspired you to translate her?

Tim Mohr (TM): Her first book, Broken Glass Park, was either my second or third translation. It came after I attended a speech at Carnegie Hall, under the auspices of a festival called Berlin Lights. I sat in the audience to watch these ostensible experts speak on the German publishing world, and they claimed there was no tradition of immigrant literature there.

I remember thinking that the last ten German novels I’d read were all by what you might call “immigrant” writers, or writers writing in German as a second language. I was really adamant about working in that field and trying to get more of that material into the U.S. market, so people would be aware that this tradition did exist over there, and that it was booming. And then I came across Alina. I loved her debut novel, Broken Glass Park, and because the translation went well, we wanted to continue working together. I wouldn’t want another one of her books to come out with a different translator.

As far as our relationship goes, I tend not to work closely with the authors when I’m translating, and a lot of them speak really, really good English, so it’s all the more daunting in some ways—I don’t want them to be looking over my shoulder, basically! I’ll email them a few queries sometimes, but for the most part, I’m trying to do it on my own. I am somewhat friendly with Alina, but when we get together we don’t really talk about translation or her books, we just have a cup of coffee or something.

READ MORE…

Idle or Charged: An Interview with Soeun Seo and Jake Levine

February 24, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Zach Savich

. . . if you allow yourself to be moved, a translated poem can grasp and bewitch you.

Kim Min Jeong’s Beautiful and Useless, translated by Soeun Seo and Jake Levine, was recently released in the US as part of Black Ocean’s Moon Country Korean Poetry Series. The title poem ends with a rocky thud: “I guess love is / when we put our heads together / to figure out how to use this rock.” These lines highlight some key dynamics in this thrillingly wide-ranging collection. There’s the shrugging boldness of “I guess love is”; the way “this rock” reverberates both to the poem’s main subject—a stone that is variously like “two crab legs emptied of meat,” a “snowman’s torso,” an egg, a phallic emblem of “dull manliness”—as well as to the shared stone of two skulls coming together. It’s also a fitting metaphor for the translators’ conversational methods. As Seo and Levine discuss in this interview, this edition of Beautiful and Useless emerged from a lively process reflective of the poems’ own flights among smells and literature and “banal birdsong,” comedy and ambient dialogue.

In a recent interview with the translators, Kim Min Jeong described contemporary Korean poetry as “fragments fragmenting and fragmenting and fragmenting” away from set ideas of order, so that “all the stars in space shine every which way.” Beautiful and Useless is similarly resplendent.Its translators—recent recipients, with Hedgie Choi, of the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and the National Translation Award for their co-translation of Kim Yideum’s Hysteria (Action Books, 2019)—emailed with me about resisting transactional metaphors for translation, the value of serious play, and idiom and attitude in Kim Min Jeong’s poetry.

Zach Savich (ZS): I know your process can include a lot of joking around. How did that playfulness contribute to this project?

Soeun Seo (SS): In an essay in Korean Literature Now, Kim Hyesoon describes Kim Min Jeong’s language as “the language of young girls prattling at the back of a bus, the language of married women gathered in a yard, all worked up to slander someone.” I think chatter, idle or charged, is a key part of KMJ’s poetry. That’s what makes her poems so organic, inviting, warm, intimate, fun. As Kim Hyesoon writes in the same essay, “Kim Min Jeong’s poetry stands at the paradoxical point where the poetic attitude of being unself-conscious about the genre of poetry becomes what is poetic instead.” Translating with Jake feels a lot like shooting shit and chilling. When we catch up or chat, we’re cracking jokes constantly, and when we get to work, we don’t exactly switch gears. We bring our playful attitude straight into work, which is especially easy with Kim Min Jeong’s poems, and ideas we first present as jokes work their way into the poem.

This happened for one of my favorite poems in the book, “Mass Shipment of Spring Greens.” We were dealing with the pun on 냉 naeng, a homonym for shepherd’s purse—a common ingredient for Korean food—and vaginal discharge. There was no way we were going to make this work in English. It was so clear that we would have to give up a direct way of translating this pun, so, already having given up on it, I jokingly said “pussyjuice.” Jake fucking loved it. It was very funny. But after discussing a few more non-viable options, “pussyjuice” seemed much more so. Considering shepherd’s purse, mugwort, wormwood are real names for edible plants, “pussyjuice” is a believable plant name. Like the poem says, “If you say it, you name it.” So we made up a plant name. We chose to include the Korean spelling and the definition of shepherd’s purse to make it clear what the pun is in Korean, but I think having the word “pussyjuice” in there really brings the original poem’s casual/sexual tension to life.

Jake Levine (JL): The decision to include the Hangeul 냉 in the poem and the idea to go with the word “pussyjuice” were magical moments. I like Ricoeur’s idea of thinking about translation as an invitation to invite the foreign into your house, and we ended up with “pussyjuice” for the English but we also invited the Hangeul, 냉, into the English poem (I think Soeun and I literally spent like ten hours working out this pun—between text messages, and chatting, and going over and over it to feel it out). Process in translation is often boiled down into the language of transaction and economy, but I think it is more like an ecology. We need space and time and laughs and cries and lots of feelings. This includes a lot of unconscious activity. Even when we’re talking and hanging and doing things that seem to have no relationship to translating poems, we are translating poems. READ MORE…

To Make Sense, Against All Odds: An Interview with Connie Palmen, Author of Your Story, My Story

February 15, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Sophia Stewart

In writing you unwittingly expose your most intimate voice, your soul. It’s beyond control.

There’s something about Sylvia Plath—the brevity of her life, the tragedy of her death, the haunting work she left behind. In the nearly six decades since her passing, she has remained an imposing figure in literary culture, romanticized and politicized and psychoanalyzed to excess. Plath’s relationship with English poet Ted Hughes, whom she married in 1956, has also endured as an object of public fascination. Their partnership was tempestuous—strained by Plath’s mental illness, Hughes’s infidelity, and the demands of the writing life. Yet on the outside, they were two beautiful, talented writers, bound by love and poetry.  

Dutch author Connie Palmen’s latest novel, Your Story, My Story, translated by Eileen J. Stevens and Anna Asbury, uses Plath and Hughes’s ill-fated marriage as a vehicle for larger questions about lust, loyalty, and grief. Palmen wrote the novel as she mourned her husband’s death, and explored her pain through the character of Hughes, who narrates the novel while grappling with the death of his own wife. Palmen, Stevens, and Asbury have achieved remarkable success in bringing Hughes’s literary voice to the page; reading Your Story, My Story feels like reading straight from Hughes’s diary. The prose is lovely, the emotions raw. But the novel’s existence also poses interesting ethical questions.  

Originally published as Jij zegt het in 2015, Your Story, My Story is written from Hughes’s perspective, Palmen’s intention being “to tell Ted’s side of the story.” As a narrator, Hughes explicitly posits that he has been unfairly vilified in contemporary discourse (“She was the brittle saint, I the brutal traitor,” reads an excerpt on the front flap. “I have remained silent. Until now.”). This is possible. But Plath’s recently discovered letters, in which she makes allegations of assault and abuse against Hughes, tell another story. Jij zegt het was published before these letters were made public; still, what is there to be gained by ventriloquizing the dead? 

Between Palmen and I there is a divergence of opinion regarding the ethics of this endeavor. The fictionalized Hughes condemns “the mudslide of apocryphal stories, false witness, gossip, fabrication, and myth” that shaped the couple’s legacy, but Palmen adds to this mudslide by producing a work of fiction that promises to deliver “the truth of [the Plath-Hughes] marriage” and “forever change the way we think about these two literary icons.” Turning a historical figure’s life into fodder for fiction is another form of speculation, but Palmen seems unbothered by the irony. And regardless of Plath’s credible allegations (the veracity of which Palmen doubts), the business of writing a whole novel to vindicate Hughes—who in the book weathers Plath’s erratic outbursts and volatile temperament with saintly patience—feels fraught. 

Nevertheless, Your Story, My Story is an engrossing and often elegant novel. Palmen, Stevens, and Asbury replicate Hughes’s writing style with startling authenticity, and Palmen deftly draws out internal conflict in her characters. The premise may be questionable, but the craftsmanship is undeniable. I enjoyed the novel most when I read it as a mesmerizing portrait of an imagined relationship, rather than as an assertion of Hughes’s innocence or a historical corrective, as it seems marketed to be. I recently spoke to Palmen about her writing process, artistic choices, and stance on biographical storytelling.

—Sophia Stewart, Assistant Interviews Editor

Sophia Stewart (SS): Your very first novel De wetten came out in 1991. It went on to be translated and published in twenty-four countries, including the United States, where it was released as The Laws in 1993. Rarely do debut novelists find this kind of immediate international success. Were you surprised at all by the reception of your first novel? How did its success influence your writing and the books you wrote in the years after?

Connie Palmen (CP): It may, and most certainly does, sound arrogant, but I wasn’t overly surprised. I knew I had written a novel that was new and different, and that I wrote about a very twentieth-century coming-of-age of a woman. It has only been a short time since the search for identity has been regarded as not just a male quest, and in my novel this quest is also connected to knowledge, to stories. Women could recognize themselves in their struggle to learn and to find some kind of autonomy, and men would recognize their desire to define the world and the women in it. The novel has its roots in the literature of rebellions, as in the saga of Faust, who sells his soul to the devil to become a great artist. My main character Marie lets herself be defined by the men she meets till she has the courage and independence to tell her own story. A first novel is crucial, because it is an encounter with yourself as a writer. The book is a meeting, it discloses your style, your themes, your thinking, your idiosyncrasies, not just to the readers, but mainly to yourself. Only your first novel does that. From that moment on, you know. READ MORE…

A Quivering Disquiet: Karim Kattan Interviewed by MK Harb

February 1, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by MK Harb

Time coalesces again into something dense; something, perhaps, boring at times. It’s a real pleasure, to feel time again.

Karim Kattan is a writer and researcher who lives between Bethlehem and Paris. In 2014, he cofounded el-Atlal, an international residency in Jericho for artists and writers. His first collection of short stories, Préliminaires pour un verger futur, was published in 2017 by Elyzad. His first novel, Le Palais des deux collines, is forthcoming in January 2021.

Karim’s writing is like a rupture. He has the ability to discuss uncanny and often uneasy topics with a literary beauty. It would be limiting to categorize him solely as a “fiction writer,” as his writing spans across genres from nonfiction to academic, with works published in The Funambulist, +972 Magazine, and The Maine Review. I first discovered his writing on The Paris Review, in an essay about an abandoned and haunting yellow building on the road from Jericho to the Dead Sea. In it, he blurs the lines between fiction and reality, all while intertwining elements of storytelling and oral history. Karim weaves worlds together, creating a tapestry of ideologies that often seem on the verge of colliding, yet somehow converge. For Karim, the personal can be political, and he often skillfully uses oratory and intergenerational stories to address the fraught subject of erasure. A particularly alluring quality to his writing is his ability to play with transience, often expanding brief moments into larger and absorbing experiences.

The craft of writing is of tantamount importance for Karim. He often talked to me about the importance of humility both in writing and in general practice. He holds a devotional importance to editing and crafting sentences that both have a purpose while retaining an aesthetic beauty to them. He approaches the written text like a precarious manuscript that needs to be made relevant. In this interview, we discuss the craft of writing, desert landscapes, and the language of belonging.

—MK Harb, Editor-at-Large for Lebanon

MK Harb (MKH): Karim, tell me more about your writing process. How do you navigate writing for multiple audiences? You once said your PhD training has positively influenced your writing as a novelist. How is that? I view literary writing as expansive and breathable, while academic writing as compact . . .

Karim Kattan (KK): The best academic writing I have encountered is both compact and expansive. I used to be worried that academic writing, specifically the long-term process of a PhD, would have a negative impact on my fiction—that it would dry it up, as it were . . . Perhaps it has. But I don’t see a contradiction between the two, except insofar as they fall within different professional fields or industries.

Academic writing is a beautiful thing: at its best, it is concise, straightforward, and elegant. My fiction writing tends to be rather rambling, a bit all over the place. I think the discipline of academic writing has helped shape this into something that is at least readable.

It’s true that academic writing seems to have bad press in some circles (circles that, themselves, tend to value nonsensical, elitist writing—in much of the art world, for instance), as if it were an oppressive force or something, when it is the exact opposite of that. It is a process of liberation. Academic writing should make thought available to all, hence its simplicity and its demonstrativeness. Now, the university as an institution—especially the North American for-profit model—surely is oppressive in many ways. But not research.

Now the question of audiences is different; it has more to do, in my opinion, with the languages that one chooses to write in. I do not write the same thing for an English-speaking audience than I do for a French-speaking one. Especially as a Palestinian, I know that, whether I want it or not, my writing will be taken as representative of Palestinians in general (It’s not! It shouldn’t be!). For instance, I usually steer clear from some subjects when I write in French, because I know how they can be recuperated. However, that is a whole other debate. READ MORE…

The Fine Wind Between Truth and Fiction: An Interview with Yun Ko-Eun, Author of The Disaster Tourist

January 25, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Sophia Stewart

Dystopia is the story of the present—the same present that we’ve been experiencing for a long time.

According to FEMA, there are four phases of disaster management: prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery. But in Yun Ko-Eun’s recent novel, The Disaster Tourist (translated by Lizzie Buehler), there can also be a fifth—monetization. At the center of The Disaster Tourist is Jungle, a travel company that turns disaster sites into “disaster destinations” for tourists to explore and enjoy. Yona, the novel’s protagonist and a Jungle employee, brags that the company boasts such packages as “earthquakes, typhoons, volcanoes, avalanches, droughts, floods, fires, massacres, wars, radioactivity, desertification, serial killers, tsunamis, animal abuse, contagious diseases, water pollution, asylums, prisons and more.”

As a programming coordinator, Yona’s job requires her to assess the profitability of various packages—that is, she must figure out how to sell horrific disasters to interested interlopers. “The packages Koreans like are those with something exotic,” she says, “the spirit of adventure.” Early in the novel, Yona is sent to the island of Mui, where Jungle hosts a six-day “desert sink-hole trip,” which promotional materials promise to be “frightening and grim.” But once she arrives, she discovers Mui isn’t what it seems to be.

Though Counterpoint Press published the novel’s English translation in August 2020, The Disaster Tourist was originally released in Korea in 2013. Despite its age, the novel is prescient, to put it mildly, in its handling of issues that have gained traction on account of the MeToo movement and the current Covid-19 pandemic—questions, for instance, of workplace sexual harassment and high-risk “essential” work.  

In the past few years, Korean literature has gained international traction, with authors like Yun, Han Kang, Bae Suah, Ha Seong Nan, and Hye-Young Pyun—notably, all women!—making significant waves with the English translations of their novels. The Disaster Tourist is Yun’s first novel to be translated into English, a compact and propulsive dystopian thriller that stands out as one of 2020’s best works of translated literature. With translations by Buehler, I talked with Yun about dystopian fiction, touch starvation, and why she never makes any compromises when it comes to writing.

—Sophia Stewart, Assistant Interviews Editor

Sophia Stewart (SS): You’ve said that “translation isn’t a neutral delivery of information, it’s a new creative experience” and compared the process of translating The Disaster Tourist to “writing the book a second time.” Can you talk more about the experience of having your work translated, and what the relationship between you and translator Lizzie Buehler looked like during the translation process? (And perhaps even what it looks like now!)

Yun Ko-Eun (YK): Lizzie Buehler sent her first email to me in March 2017. She was translating three of my short stories for her senior thesis as a comparative literature major at Princeton University. I still have the files that she sent me then—they were three stories from my collection, Table For One, the English translation of which is forthcoming this year from Columbia University Press. This sparked regular email correspondence between me and Lizzie over the past several years, and finally our names came together as author and translator on the cover of The Disaster Tourist. Lizzie paved the way for the novel’s publication in English; she allowed it to reach English readers. One of my favorite books is Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Night Flight, and in one sense it feels like Lizzie was a mail pilot blazing a trail through the dark night.

After years of communicating only through email, Lizzie and I were finally able to meet in Seoul in the summer of 2019. I remember that day well, because it was so hot and humid. There weren’t very many people downtown. As everyone else tried to conserve their strength by staying inside, Lizzie and I walked through Seoul like we were bewitched. We explored alleys, drank tea, ate noodles, ate bingsu, and visited the time capsule plaza and department store roof that were the settings to two of my short stories—all as we showered ourselves in sweat. That day, I was amazed to realize that even though Lizzie and I are different ages and from different cultural backgrounds, we have so many similar characteristics. We have similar fears, and we’re curious about many of the same things. As we stood at a sunbaked crosswalk, I asked Lizzie about the title my novel that she’d translated. “The Korean title of the book is Travelers of the Night, but the English title is The Disaster Tourist. What do you think about that?” She answered that the original title was more poetic and metaphorical, while the new title was a bit more direct. We shared a similar feeling about the title change; in the English publishing market, we thought, The Disaster Tourist would attract more attention.

One year later, when the book finally came out in the summer of 2020, we were in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. If not for the pandemic, I would have gone on a book tour in the UK and the US. Disappointed that we were still limited to exchanging messages by email, I decided to mail Lizzie a gift—Korean cosmetics and a pen engraved with her name. This went wrong, too, when the package was lost in the mail. I was all too upset about it (since then I’ve been afraid to send international mail), but Lizzie’s reaction breathed fresh air into the situation. “So I guess someone is using a pen with my name on it?” she messaged me, the day after the package was confirmed to be lost. As soon as I heard those words, a new story started to take shape into mind. I asked Lizzie if I could write about what had happened. And that was the beginning of another story. READ MORE…

An Architect of Words: Mahmoud Rezvani on the Decade-long Translation of Golestan

January 18, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Siavash Saadlou

All we can do is do a better job translating our poets instead of picking on others for what a poor job they might have done in the past.

For all its punishing workload, translation can be a thankless task, and translators are often the unsung heroes. This is especially true when it comes to breathing fresh air into a work of medieval literature wherein the translator perseveres with a bygone zeitgeist that challenges his artistic and literary prowess alike. To say that writing and translation are inextricably linked is to state the obvious. Sometimes, however, the translator needs to reexamine the history through the lens of literature and vice versa. The most ingenious translators aren’t the ones who faithfully rewrite the original work in the target language, but those who creatively reimagine it as well. In doing so, they might have to gingerly zigzag their way through a stilted language drenched in obsolete words that nevertheless communicate timeless ideas. In one such case, Mahmoud Rezvani, an Iranian scholar, teacher, and literary translator, has been able to do exactly that—bringing Sa’di’s Golestan, a work of classic Persian literature, to life in all its austere grandeur by preserving the rhyme in the poems and the musicality in the rhymed prose in ways never done before.   

Abu-Muhammad Muslih al-Din bin Abdalah Shirazi, better known as Sa’di, was a thirteenth century Persian poet whose plangent poetry and compassion for humanity once received effusive encomium from the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Even the oft-quoted opening lines of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—I celebrate myself, and sing myself / And what I assume you shall assume / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you—have arguably been inspired by Sa’di’s timeless bani adam poem.

Rezvani is sixty-six now, with a salt-and-pepper handlebar mustache and a gregarious affect. He first began teaching in 1971 at the age of seventeen, and has since taught through such turbulent times as the Islamic Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, and now the COVID-19 pandemic. “I still remember the very first air strike in Tehran during the war,” he says, “and I even remember what exactly I was teaching that day.” Still, Rezvani has never relinquished his sanguine attitude over the years. In the classroom, he is well known for his exuberance, oratorical bravura, and improvisational teaching style. Beyond that, his Renaissance-man bona fides—he has had serious grounding in math, Persian calligraphy, awaz (traditional Persian singing), literature, and martial arts—are also worth noting, most of which have served him well in his preparation for translating Sa’di.

Starting in 2008, the translation took Rezvani ten good years to finish. In March 2016, in an interview with Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation, he cited “love” as the most important driving force behind his labor. That same month, he gave a first public reading of his translation at the University of California, Berkeley. Among the attendees were former US poet-laureate Robert Hass and his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, both of whom applauded the decade-long effort. Since then, Rezvani’s translation has been endorsed by UNESCO and published—quite apropos to Sa’di’s hometown—by the University of Shiraz.

Our conversation took place on two separate occasions, and with diametrically opposite vibes. For the first part of the interview, I met Rezvani at his office after his last online class of the day which had ended around 10 pm. He was characteristically lively and rather voluble in his responses. For the second part, however, a somber mood was on full display during our discussion, following the death of Grand Maestro Mohammad-Reza Shajarian—Iran’s most internationally recognized awaz songster—who happened to be Rezvani’s longtime and beloved friend.

Siavash Saadlou (SS): How did the decision to translate Golestan come about? Why did you begin in 2008 and not sooner or later? 

Mahmoud Rezvani (MR): I considered translating Golestan several times, but I was too afraid to give it a shot. Part of this had to do with my perfectionist nature, and part of it had to do with the enormity of the task. But an interesting incident gave me the belief that I could translate Golestan after all. About twenty years ago, Mohammad Hoghooghi, the late poet and literary critic, had a niece living in the United States who was getting married. He had written a letter in Persian for the wedding, and he needed someone to translate it into English, since his niece understood very little Persian. The letter was filled with purple prose, and Mr. Hoghooghi couldn’t find the right translator for the job. One day, he came to my language institute and asked if I could translate the letter. When I did translate the letter, it became somewhat of a sensation in small literary circles in the US at the time. Flash forward six months, Mr. Hoghooghi invited me to a get-together where many renowned Iranian translators were present. The moment I entered, he introduced me to everyone as “the one who translated the impossible,” and this served as a huge confidence-builder for me. That was the first time I seriously considered translating Golestan.

You asked me why I didn’t put off the translation until later, and I can only think of Sa’di’s own words from one of his poems, about how none of us can be sure if we would still be here in this world when the next spring comes around. That’s why I told myself, there’s no time like the present, and began to translate the book. When I first started working on Golestan, I never thought it would take me a decade to finish it. I still teach full-time, so I can’t solely focus on translation. When I was working on Golestan, I mostly translated on Thursday afternoons sitting in my office. Sometimes I used to translate as many as ten or twenty lines at a time, and other times I struggled with one particular page, even a single word, for days.  READ MORE…

Different Ships on the Same Ocean: Jennifer Croft in conversation with High as the Waters Rise author Anja Kampmann and translator Anne Posten

January 13, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Jennifer Croft

. . . one needs to be very sensitive towards this structure, which is both a structure of memory and time as well as emotion.

In the fall of 2018, translator Anne Posten told me about a German book she had fallen in love with, about oil rig workers, male intimacy, the nature of memory, and the cost of freedom. I begged her to send me the pages she had translated that same night and was bowled over from the very first sentence. Two years later, I had the honor of publishing at Catapult Anja Kampmann’s debut novel, High as the Waters Rise, in Anne’s translation, which promptly became a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award in Translated Literature.

High as the Waters Rise is the story of Waclaw, a man who grew up in a German mining town and has been working on oil platforms across the world for twelve years. When Waclaw loses his closest companion in an accident on the rig, he must embark on a journey of grief and reckoning. 

Of course we all depend on the oil industry, even if the workers who run it are invisible to us. This novel makes that exploitation not only visible but intimate and personal. It is a politically urgent story, exploring the problems of a globalized capitalist society. But more than anything, it is the story of one man who stands at the margins of that society, asking what his life is worth.

Before we published it here, High as the Waters Rise had already been well received in Germany, where it won several awards and was nominated for the German Book Prize. But international literature in English translation, particularly by debut authors, must find passionate champions in order to succeed. We were thrilled when the novel found such a champion in author, critic, and translator Jennifer Croft, who alongside author Olga Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Flights. 

Below, Jennifer discusses with Anja and Anne the translation process, its challenges and intimate nature, and what it means to translate a person into another language. I hope that their conversation might inspire you to read High as the Waters Rise, which Jennifer Croft has said contains “prose with the brightness of poetry, in a splendidly lucid translation.”

—Kendall Storey, Editor & Foreign Rights Manager, Catapult

Jennifer Croft (JC): How did you two meet and come to this project? How did you decide to work together? Anne, maybe you could also speak a bit about how you generally choose your translation projects.

Anja Kampmann (AK): Anne and I met years ago when I was a fellow at the International Writing Program in Iowa. We’ve been in touch ever since, as she developed her professional career as a translator and I wrote a book of poetry and High as the Waters Rise. But I never expected her to do the translation for High as the Waters Rise, just because I respect her so much in her own work. I couldn’t believe it when Anne told me that she had fallen in love with the novel and wanted to translate it. Her translation sample was wonderful and she caught the spirit and rhythm of the book right away.

Anne Posten (AP): In a way, High as the Waters Rise has been a long time in the making. Anja and I met in 2010. I had just moved to New York to start grad school at Queens College and still felt a bit like a country mouse in the big city. A mutual friend knew Anja wanted to come to New York after her time at the International Writers’ Program in Iowa and asked me if I wouldn’t mind hosting her. I said yes. Luckily, Anja and I became fast friends, and we still cherish memories from that time when we were both discovering the city and getting to know each other. We’ve kept in touch ever since, and over the course of these ten years, I fell in love with and started translating Anja’s poetry and visited her several times in Germany. In that time she published her first poetry collection and I my first book-length translations, and then Anja’s debut novel Wie hoch die Wasser steigen came out, to great success in Germany. I was thrilled for her, and entranced by the text. It was amazing to be so familiar with Anja’s poetry and then see, like magic, that same voice and style turned into a novel. I did a sample translation and wrote a long report on the novel, which I sent out to almost all of the editors I know, plus some I didn’t. There was a lot of initial interest and then, much to my surprise and dismay, radio silence. I was feeling pretty frustrated when I ran into Kendall unexpectedly on a trip to New York in November 2018 and heard that she’d started working for Catapult. When we met for drinks, Kendall asked if there was anything I might want to pitch her. I told her about the book and she was immediately intrigued. I sent her my sample and report, and the rest is history. I can still hardly believe it all worked out so perfectly—getting to work on a book I care so much about, written by a friend, and edited by someone I respect, like, and trust so much as Kendall.

AK: Yes, it felt like a perfect match. Also, it was great to have a friend by my side for the American translation, after almost five years I spent writing the book. READ MORE…