Interviews

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…

Asymptote Podcast: Hiromi Itō on “Living Trees and Dying Trees”

December 18, 2020  |  in Interviews, Podcast  |  by Steve Lehman

For our final podcast episode of the year, we sat down with Japanese poet Hiromi Itō, whose essay was one of Fall 2020’s highlights.

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In this episode, podcast editor Steve Lehman chats with acclaimed poet, essayist, and novelist Hiromi Itō about her development as a feminist writer, the importance of the environment in her life, and the moving experience of reading her own work translated into another language. Plus, hear an excerpt from Itō’s essay “Living Trees and Dying Trees,” translated from the Japanese and read by Jon L. Pitt. You can check out the full essay, along with new work from 32 countries, in our Fall 2020 issue.

The Prolific Bricoleur: An Interview with Susannah Rodríguez Drissi

December 7, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sophia Stewart

Imagination works best under certain confines. I like to look around me and see what I can work with. Bricolage is . . . using whatever is at hand.

The past few times that I’ve found myself procrastinating, distracted, and generally blocked creatively, I’ve thought about Susannah Rodríguez Drissi. As of this writing, Cuban-born Rodríguez Drissi has penned a novel, a poetry collection, short fiction, creative nonfiction, literary translations, scholarly articles, book reviews, multiple plays, and a jukebox musical. (By the time I finish writing this introduction, that list is likely to have grown.) Looking at my own untouched to-do list, I think of her prolificacy, of the sheer volume and breadth of her work. Rodríguez Drissi’s curiosity is one that can’t be constrained by genre. She’s multidisciplinary, to put it mildly—an artist and an academic, working across forms with a fluidity that is rare.   

As of late, like most people, my attention span has shriveled, and my energy reserves feel regularly depleted. With much of the city shuttered, my evenings and weekends are mostly vacant. In these moments, disappointed with my own inertia and daunted by the unstructured time before me, I wonder what Rodríguez Drissi might do. Currently, she’s promoting her debut novel, planning the unconventional productions of two original works of theater, and translating a Cuban story collection. In the midst of chaos, she creates. If she felt as I do now, would she snap herself out of inaction through the sheer desire to make something? Would she look at an empty weekend like mine and see its generative possibility?

I had the recent pleasure of speaking with Rodríguez Drissi about her work and upcoming projects. Naturally our conversation spanned celestial bodies, bricolage, and some of our favorite Spanish-language writers. I regret to report that I am still unable to explain how she and I have the same number of hours in a day.

—Sophia Stewart, Assistant Interviews Editor

Sophia Stewart (SS): You are a true multi-hyphenate: a writer, poet, playwright, translator, and scholar. How do you balance your creative endeavors and your scholarly work? Do they ever intermingle, or do you try to keep them siloed from each other? 

Susannah Rodríguez Drissi (SRD): It used to be nearly impossible to practice one while pursuing the other, particularly during graduate school. I had a lot of things working against me, things that might have been understood as incompatible with an academic career: I was a married woman with children. Had I been a married man with children, then things would have been understood differently. You see, I didn’t have a wife’s assistance at home to shield me from domesticity and scattered toys. So, for a time, at least, I was overwhelmed with nursing babies and research.

In academia, intellectual and artistic pursuit tends to tilt more toward one side than the other. But working across genres provides me with a broader understanding of the reasons why we write. For me, genres are always intermingled. The same basic questions that guide my research are the same questions that I attempt to answer from one project to the next. They are just different ways of getting at a problem. A poem or an academic article—they are not much different to me, except for their packaging. Different packaging for different audiences. I write so that I can explain what I don’t understand, so that I figure out the why of something—or, if I already know the why, so that I can snap a picture of it for posterity, for those who might not understand it.

SS: As a scholar, your research focuses on Latin American literatures and cultures, with a special focus on the Caribbean and particularly Cuba. In the many Spanish literature classes I’ve taken, I found Caribbean authors to be consistently underrepresented. Over the course of six years and dozens of syllabi, I recall being assigned only three Caribbean writers: the Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos, and the Cuban poets Jose Martí and Nicolás Guillén. Are there any other writers you feel are overlooked in the Spanish-language canon, and who are some of your all-time favorite Spanish-language writers?

SRD: You can’t go wrong with Burgos, Martí, and Guillén. All three are poets and advocates of their nations’ independence, be it from Spain, as in Martí’s case, or from the United States, as in the case of Burgos and Guillén. With the three of them, you’re in good company. However, we need to make room for other voices. We don’t read enough Lydia Cabrera (if we read her at all), and there are plenty of contemporary writers who don’t get their time in the sun because we insist on the same voices time and time again. Right now, I’m obsessed with Mexican writer Fernanda Melchor and Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez—theirs are heartbreaking, astonishing voices that should be included front and center in every syllabus. We should start first with more women writers, then go from there. READ MORE…

Beyond Human Subjectivity: An Interview with Jon Pitt

December 2, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Mary Hillis

There’s a kind of alchemy in the act of translation, especially with writers like Itō who explore the in-between spaces of cultures and language.

Itō Hiromi is one of the most well-known figures in contemporary Japanese literature, having made her mark with sensational and unabashed poetry, widely ranging essays, and award-winning novellas. In the essay published in our Fall 2020 issue, “Living Trees and Dying Trees,” she brings the reader from California to Kumamoto and back again, observing the changes of her life and nature in tandem—the distinction of which are rendered, at times, indistinguishable.

The most recent edition of the Asymptote Educator’s Guide features a lesson plan for “Living Trees and Dying Trees,” which encourages students to engage with this work in distinguishing intercultural patterns, identifying literary forms, and discussing translation and migration. Educator’s Guides are published alongside each issue of Asymptote, and include teaching ideas for educators who want to bring world literature to their classrooms; each Asymptote piece introduced in the guide is accompanied with contextual information. possible discussion questions, and writing prompts.

Jon Pitt, the translator of “Living Trees and Dying Trees,” is a professor of Japanese Environmental Humanities, and has long studied the intersections between literature and ecology. In the following interview, Asymptote Educational Arm Assistant Mary Hillis speaks with him about the resonances of environmentalism and migration in both Itō’s work and Japanese literature overall, as well as the increasing entwinement between ecology and art in the Anthropocene.

Mary Hillis (MH): I understand that in addition to working on a translation of Itō Hiromi’s Kodama Kusadama (Tree Sprits Grass Spirits), from which “Living Trees and Dying Trees” is excerpted, you are a professor of environmental humanities. How did you initially become interested in the environmental humanities? And how does this field relate specifically to Japanese literature, film, and sound?

Jon Pitt (JP): I became interested in the environmental humanities while I was pursuing my Ph.D. I entered graduate school with the intention of researching representations of city life in Japanese literature, but along the way I discovered that representations of the “natural” were just as compelling and complex. I started thinking about trees and how they appeared in so many of the novels I was reading, wondering what would happen if I took them seriously—as more than mere scenery or background to human action. When reading scientific texts about trees and forests, it struck me how new readings of literature might be possible if put into dialogue with scientific writing. I gradually learned that this kind of interdisciplinary approach was one of the key tenants of the environmental humanities, and that there was a growing number of scholars looking for ways to approach the study of literature or film by decentralizing the human.

Engaging with Japanese literature (or film or sound media) through an environmental lens helps address a paradox that many critics have pointed out over the years: namely that there exists a persistent myth of Japanese culture stemming from a unique, “harmonious,” relationship to the natural world, in spite of serious environmental degradation and resource extraction that stretches back centuries. How can both of these things be true? How have artists helped to promote a certain relationship with nature that may hide darker histories of violence against the natural world? I think the environmental humanities help us better understand these kinds of questions.  READ MORE…

Music, Midribs, and Mexicanisms: Christina MacSweeney on Translating Daniel Saldaña París’s Ramifications

November 26, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Josefina Massot

It’s hard to judge characters as a translator . . . because you’re living with them. They're part of your life.

Our first-ever live Q&A could have hardly gone better: award-winning translator Christina MacSweeney chatted with Blog Editor Josefina Massot for a solid hour, covering everything from voice, rhythm, and expletives in our exquisite October selection to her “unfixed migrant identity” and its effects on her craft. Read on for a taste of this riveting conversation, which Book Club members can request in full—hearty laughs, pensive pauses, and all!

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!

Josefina Massot (JM): Ramifications is largely character-driven, and there are so many elements to the protagonist’s psyche and voice. I was wondering about your experience inhabiting that complexity: were there aspects of it that particularly resonated with you, or that you found especially challenging to tap into?

Christina MacSweeney (CM): One of the things that played into my experience is that I read the first fifty pages of the novel when they were still in the process of inception (Daniel will often send me work at early stages). As I read more—as he progressed and made subsequent changes—the character grew with me, with the reading. And he’s very complex, but what most came through to me was this sense of paralyzed masculinity, a sense of frustration that very much stayed with me. He’s somebody I want to root for in some way, for him to break through all the issues that are holding him back.

I often talk about translation as getting into a character’s shoes and walking around in them, feeling that I can wear them. Daniel’s writing is so beautiful and precise that it helps you get into it. When you’re translating, it’s usually months and months, and the characters’ voices are there with you all along: you wake up with them in the morning, you go to sleep with them at night, they talk to you while you’re washing the dishes. So I think it’s hard to judge characters as a translator; you can’t feel judgmental about them, because you’re living with them. They’re part of your life.

JM: You’ve lived with several of Daniel’s characters, too, since you’ve also translated his first novel, Among Strange Victims. There seem to be some commonalities between both books: the protagonist in Ramifications is in many ways passive, and at the same time, he’s trying to piece together clues about his mother’s disappearance; in Among Strange Victims, Rodrigo could be described as indolent, and Marcelo tries to retrace someone’s footsteps (not his mother’s this time, but an enigmatic boxer-poet’s). Could you point to other continuities? And might there be, in some sense, a “signature” Saldaña París book? I realize two novels are hardly enough to make such generalizations, and they’re also very different in tone, but perhaps you could point to certain tendencies.

CM: If we think about the two books, but also Daniel’s poetry and the non-fiction pieces that he writes, he is exploring masculinity. But in fact, in Among Strange Victims, the main character is Beatriz, the woman who is in Mexico with the boxer-poet at the beginning of the twentieth century. Rodrigo’s mother is also a very strong figure in his life. In that respect, the books are very different, because Among Strange Victims has a much clearer female presence. In Ramifications, you still have the mother figure (the absence of the mother) and the narrator’s sister, who is also an influence in his life. But they’re ultimately quite different. I don’t think Daniel is ever going to be the kind of writer of whom you can say, “This is a Saldaña París book,” because his writing is constantly changing—his point of focus changes, the angles from which he views things change. READ MORE…

Wild Women: An Interview with Aoko Matsuda and Polly Barton

November 23, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sophia Stewart

Metamorphosis is about possibility. I wanted to show the possibility of change in ourselves and society through . . . stories of transformation.

One of my favorite pieces of writing by Aoko Matsuda, translated by Polly Barton, is a story called “The Woman Dies,” which appeared in a 2018 issue of Granta. “The woman dies,” it begins. “She dies to provide a plot twist. She dies to develop the narrative. She dies for cathartic effect. She dies because no one could think of what else to do with her.” The first half of the story is divided up into corresponding sections: “The woman gets married”; “The woman gets pregnant”; “The woman miscarries”; “The woman is raped.” Matsuda’s argument echoes that of many American feminist critics, like Laura Mulvey and Alice Bolin, but the story’s formal inventiveness and fierce narration distinguishes “The Woman Dies.” With piercing precision, she takes to task that most insidious and ubiquitous narrative crutch, where women are nothing more than receptacles for pain and trauma.

Matsuda’s short story collection, Where the Wild Ladies Are, recently published by Soft Skull Press and translated again by Barton, offers a sort of corrective for the female suffering that has always pervaded storytelling. Through a series of interlinked stories, Matsuda blends existing legends with new stories to give women the agency and power that they often lack in our traditional narratives. In revisiting and reimagining centuries-old tales, she draws connections between the past and present, emphasizing the ways in which history is never really over.

The stories of Where the Wild Ladies Are have an explicitly feminist bent; against the backdrop of Japanese ghost stories, Matsuda tackles issues like glass ceilings and workplace discrimination, as well as patriarchal expectations for women: that they be hairless, that they don’t outshine their male counterparts, that they contain their rage (even when it’s merited). She is just as outspoken a feminist in conversation as she is on the page. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Matsuda, who is both a writer and literary translator (she’s translated work by Carmen Maria Machado and Karen Russell). Polly Barton also joined us and shed light on her work as Matsuda’s frequent collaborator. The three of us talked about Starbucks lattes, translating “Britishisms,” and the wonderful friendship that has blossomed between Matsuda and Barton.

 —Sophia Stewart, Assistant Interviews Editor

Sophia Stewart (SS): The stories in Where the Wild Ladies Are draw inspiration from traditional Japanese ghost and yōkai tales, and the book includes a complete list of references and outlines of these original works in a section called “inspiration for the stories.” Aoko, how did you choose these specific tales as inspiration, and why did you want to bring these traditional narratives and contemporary stories into conversation with each other? 

Aoko Matsuda (AM): Most of them are stories I’ve known since childhood. My favorite at that time was the ghost story of Okiku, because I also am from Himeji, where Okiku’s Well actually exists on the grounds of Himeji Castle. Summer is the season for kaidan—Japanese horror stories—and I used to watch the story of Okiku, along with other kaidan stories, on TV over and over. While watching her story, I found myself shouting to Okiku inside of my head: “Die Okiku, die quick, so that you can become a ghost with superpowers and have your revenge!” In my eyes, female ghosts in the kaidan stories looked so much livelier than living people, and were so much more fun to watch.

As I became an adult, I also realized how these old stories reflected and encouraged people to internalize misogynic views towards women, since most of the time those stories were written and told by men. So although I loved them very much, I’ve always had mixed feelings about them, and in writing Where the Wild Ladies Are, I wanted to create a space where all the female ghosts can enjoy themselves and find new lives. After I started to write the book, I did some research to find new stories I didn’t know of. One of the stories I was fascinated by was “Neko no Tadanobu,” which I rewrote as “The Jealous Type,” in which a jealous woman appears. The woman doesn’t have a big part to play in the story, and nobody feels sorry for her even though her husband is cheating on her. So in my story, I made her a main character and let her be as jealous as she wants.  READ MORE…

From Two Solitudes to Quattro Books: An Interview with Bilal Hashmi

November 18, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Moses

Quattro will . . . shift the discussion so it’s no longer . . . English and French, but the multilingual nature of Canadian writing.

Quattro Books was founded in 2006 by Allan Briesmaster, John Calabro, Beatriz Hausner, and Luciano Iacobelli, with the aim of publishing established and emerging authors who represent the linguistic and cultural diversity of literature in Toronto and across Canada. As such, from the start, Quattro Books has sought to bring out works originally written in English alongside those translated from the multilingual voices of Canadians who have arrived in the country as immigrants or refugees. The press’s recent acquisition by Bilal Hashmi, president of the Association des traducteurs et traductrices littéraires du Canada / Literary Translators’ Association of Canada (ATTLC-LTAC), and a translator himself—from French, Urdu, Persian, and Hindi—has led to a shift in focus that favours the latter. This is evidenced by Quattro Books’s first catalogue since Hashmi took over as Executive Director and Publisher. Due out in the fall of 2020, it will feature English translations of Canadian works spanning six languages. Asymptote’s co-Editor-at-Large for Argentina, Sarah Moses, met with Hashmi in Toronto to discuss Canadian literature as international literature, works in translation as partnerships, and how he’s shaping Quattro Books into a translation-focused press.

Sarah Moses (SM): I’d like to begin by asking you about your involvement with the ATTLC-LTAC. How has it led to Quattro becoming what you’ve described as a translation-focused press?

Bilal Hashmi (BH): Beatriz Hausner is central both to the ATTLC-LTAC and Quattro. She’s one of the founding members of Quattro and was the president of the ATTLC-LTAC in 2017, when I joined. I had the privilege of being mentored by her in translation and advocacy work, and the one thing we all sort of agreed on is that there should be more international works in translation available in Canada. So the movement from the ATTLC-LTAC to Quattro was, in a way, organic—the work at the former led to the idea: now we have an opportunity, let’s see what happens. That’s the way I thought of it. I started off as membership secretary in 2017 and I’ve been the president since June. We continue to work through some of the same issues that we’ve dealt with in the past: translator visibility, proper recognition, and so on—these remain our goals. But I think what Quattro will possibly do in the future is shift the discussion so it’s no longer necessarily the “two solitudes” of English and French, but the multilingual nature of Canadian writing that comes through.

SM: Is this primarily how you see Quattro Books fitting in among publishers of translation in Canada and internationally—as a press that moves beyond translations between English and French?

BH: In our first catalogue we have translations from French, Serbian, German, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, and then two titles that were written in English. We’re not going to do exclusively translation, but that’s the focus, which I think is unique in Canadian publishing. Whether or not that continues is something we’ll have to determine. We’re really hoping to find out if publishing majority translations is a viable activity.

Working with translation has involved a very international cast of characters, which is really what I find most exciting about Canadian literature as international literature. I think those who are very skeptical about translation’s profitability or potential for success kind of forget that you do have access potentially to other markets. Typically, Canadian books are marketed internally for Canadian consumption and the expectation is that Canadians will buy fellow Canadians. It doesn’t always work that way. My hope is that these books will be seen as Canadian literature, plus whatever other literature they’re referencing—let’s say the Portuguese-Angolan return novel, of which there’s now a sizable and critically acclaimed subgenre in Portuguese fiction. So the hope is that they’ll cross over into other markets, beginning in the US.

The catalogue started as kind of an exercise in fantasy, which I think I shared with you a couple of summers ago. It was an exercise in what works within the funding paradigm. Readers of Asymptote should know that in Canada the main translation activity is English-to-French, French-to-English, but the official requirement for funding from the Canada Council for the Arts is that the author be Canadian. There’s no limitation on the source language so long as the work is translated into French, English, or an indigenous language. I did a little bit of a research and I found a list of about twenty or so Canadian writers who brought in different literary histories with them. All of these works are technically eligible for Canada Council for the Arts grants, and we’re very lucky and grateful to the Canada Council for funding all six, which may be a first in Canadian publishing for one season, and probably unique in this part of the world. So that’s how it started. I think we have another half dozen languages already in the pipeline if not already under contract, also all Canadian authors. My hope is really to explore this lesser-known part of Canadian literary history, which tends not to see that much exposure in the current framework.

In the first couple of years, the focus will be on Canadian content, but we’re also starting to acquire from outside, including translations. That’s a challenge since I will insist that everyone gets paid at the Canadian rate, which is the determining factor. Because if it’s a five-hundred page novel and there’s no funding for it, then we’re probably not going to be able to pay the eighteen-cents-per-word rate—that’s the rate for prose. I believe the per-word rate remains at twenty cents for theatre and twenty-five cents for poetry. READ MORE…

Tectonic Shifts: An Interview with Montenegrin EUPL Winner Stefan Bošković and Translator Will Firth

November 5, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Jovanka Kalaba

. . . the Balkans are cultivated as a space of trauma, as an eternal misfortune in which everything is further emphasized.

In both literature and art, the Balkan countries are still tackling themes and topics issuing from the 1990s Yugoslav Wars. Although coming to terms with a nation’s disintegration is an ongoing process, one assumes that a thirty-year distance would have produced a more substantial corpus of literature, capable of integrating remaining traumas into burning contemporary matters—corrupt Balkan political elites, organized crime, simmering nationalism, and the slow but steady disappearance of the middle class as a carrier of democratic change.

Though there are few works of note that have managed this coherence, a novel that has succeeded is this year’s Montenegrin winner of the European Union Prize for Literature, Ministar (Minister), written by the dramatist, scriptwriter, and prosaist Stefan Bošković. The story follows nine days in the life of Valentin Kovačević, a fictional Montenegrin minister of culture, immediately after he accidentally kills an artist while participating in a performance. Initially oblivious of the heavy burden of guilt resulting from the act, Valentin goes on with his life entangled in a web of shady political deals, strained familial and conjugal ties, and dead end shortcuts he takes to get himself out of a situation of impending doom. The novel has not yet been translated entirely into English, though Will Firth—a literary translator from BCMS (Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian), Russian, and Macedonian into English—has translated a fifty-page excerpt, which was published by the EUPL team along with translated excerpts from the other prize-winning books.

In this interview carried out with both Stefan Bošković and Will Firth, we discuss primarily the challenges of engaged writing that aims at the essence of contemporary sociopolitical developments in the Balkans, and the place their translations take—or don’t take—within the dominant narratives of today’s world literatures. The interviews were conducted separately, and have been edited to be presented here as one.

—Jovanka Kalaba, Editor-at-Large for Serbia

Jovanka Kalaba (JK): Stefan, aside from your primary job as a screenwriter, you also write prose. How do your two forms of expression inform and influence one another? 

Stefan Bošković (SB): Writers often distinguish between the work they produce through different media—in my case, prose and screenwriting. I have been writing scripts for a long time, and it is inevitable that they have influenced my prose, as is the case with the prose that unknowingly becomes influenced by journalism. All influences are of secondary importance to me, because I view different expressions as a set of tributaries to a huge, confused mouth that flows into the same matter. And all the time it’s a game of digging, merging, bringing in connections. Literary talent—the ability to defamiliarize language—is crucial for writing prose, whereas a gift for storytelling is necessary for writing a good script. The organization of the novel is a very important segment, because that way, the sentences contribute to the fundamental accuracy of what is being told.

JK: Will, in terms of translation, the Serbo-Croatian language as well as Macedonian turned out to be your main interest, although you have a degree in German, Russian, and Serbo-Croatian. What drew you to the Balkan cultures and literatures?

Will Firth (WF): What fascinates me about South Slavic languages and literatures is their richness and diversity, and their home in a complex region with a twentieth-century history of Partisan struggle, multiculturalism, and a remarkable experiment in Bloc-free socialism. That’s the “positive” side; the West’s lack of real interest in these languages and literatures today fills me with a spite and a mission, which is perhaps the “negative” side of my motivational coin.

JK: The epigraph at the beginning of Ministar are Giorgio Agamben’s words: the modern is the one who looks at his time, and being modern is, first of all, a question of courage. Yet it seems that inclusion of certain issues originating from the civil war of ex-Yugoslavia—poverty, emmigration—are still always expected from artists in the region.

SB: I don’t know if the West is asking from us to present ourselves through stereotypes, or if we are so immersed in anachronistic and worn-out literature in this area that we have completely forgotten to keep track of where the world is going. It seems to me that one conditioned the other, and the problem does not only stem from the writers and the messages they think they should get across. The majority of this region’s literary scene (including editors and critics) has contributed to the preservation of uninteresting and calculated literature; there are certainly great novels in this rather conservative canon, but this dominant ideology has produced a line of soldiers who are happy to occupy a place in the mainstream, and the prestige of being translated into foreign languages has cemented their position.  READ MORE…

Asymptote Podcast: Michele Hutchison on Curating Our Dutch Literature Special Feature

October 29, 2020  |  in Interviews, Podcast  |  by Steve Lehman

Our podcast returns helmed by our new podcast editor Steve Lehman!

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In tandem with the release of our milestone 40th issue, new podcast host Steve Lehman speaks with the Booker International Prize-winning translator Michele Hutchison about her work on Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening, curating this issue’s Special Feature on Dutch literature, and more. Plus, a poetry reading by contributor Mustafa Stitou in the original Dutch, followed by a reading in English by the translator David Colmer. You can find Mustafa and David’s work, and that of many other authors, poets, and translators from around the world, in our glorious Fall 2020 issue here.

Shunning Stereotypes: Emma Ramadan on Translating Meryem Alaoui’s Straight From the Horse’s Mouth

October 22, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Allison Braden

It’s about Morocco, but not the cliched version . . . It’s a wild Morocco that is both more devastating and more fun than anyone might expect.

In her recent review of our fabulous September Book Club selection, Editor-at-Large Allison Braden praised the book’s candor, humor, and heart, as well as its fresh take on Moroccan culture. Below, she revisits these and other topics in conversation with award-winning translator and former Asymptote member Emma Ramadan. Straight From The Horse’s Mouth, they agree, defies our preconceptions of Morocco, its women, and the makings of great literature in translation.

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!

Allison Braden: I want to start by asking how you found this book. What attracted you to the story?

Emma Ramadan: Other Press came to me and asked if I wanted to translate the book, and I read it through and loved it. What I really like about it, and what I have tried to look for in other translation projects I’ve pitched, is that it’s by a Moroccan writer and it’s about Morocco, but not the cliched version of Morocco that can get neatly packaged to American readers. This happens with a lot of countries where there aren’t that many English translations already in existence: there’s an expectation that they will read a certain way, or that they will educate us about a certain aspect of that country or culture, as if that were the only thing those literatures were supposed to do. I like that this book doesn’t really provide the view of Morocco that English-language readers might have in mind, or that publishers might want to sell to them. It’s a wild Morocco that is both more devastating and more fun than anyone might expect. I love Jmiaa’s story, and I love her voice, and I love that she’s allowed to have a painful existence as a sex worker but also a radical transformation into a famous movie star. It’s a really fun book, and we don’t get a lot of those from certain countries.

AB: I noticed on Twitter that you said you often wish for more fun and funny books in translation. I’m curious about why you think there aren’t as many of those.

ER: I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I’ll sum them up by saying that I think there’s a certain pressure when you’re pitching a translation, or when publishers are acquiring a translation, for it to be a big, important, prize-worthy book; it’s very expensive to do translations, and there’s this idea that they don’t sell very well, so to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth, there needs to be some important hook or payoff in the form of big reviews or awards. These more fun, funny, light books that have a lot to say—that definitely have their readers and an importance of their own—may not seem as appealing or worthy in that way, but I would really disagree. Sometimes you just want to translate a book because it’s really good, and good doesn’t necessarily mean heavy and political and invested with all this cultural capital about what it means to live in a specific place. Sometimes it can just be a great book. And that should be, and is, enough.

AB: You’ve also translated some very serious Moroccan literature—I’m thinking of Ahmed Bouanani’s The Shutters. Did translating that inform your translation of Straight From the Horse’s Mouth, even though it’s such a different tone and genre?

ER: It did inform my translation insomuch as I got to know Morocco very well through that project, living there as I was working on it. So then, in translating this other book that’s very much set there, I was able to say, “Okay, they’re going to this town, I know what that town looks like.” It was deeply informative in that way, even if it’s a very different kind of book. There are other comparisons to be made, too: Bouanani uses some language that resists being translated, and in Straight From the Horse’s Mouth, Meryem Alaoui uses Arabic words in her French text that I left in Arabic, so both authors are writing from a culture that uses multiple languages. The challenge for me there was letting all those voices come through and not forcing them into some kind of neat English. READ MORE…

The Making of the Murakami Industry: An Interview with David Karashima

October 14, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by David Boyd

Nobody expected Murakami to become the international phenomenon he has become.

In Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami, author and translator David Karashima examines the emergence of Haruki Murakami as a global literary phenomenon, bringing together an incredible amount of information surrounding this towering figure of contemporary Japanese literature—including a conversation with the man himself—and putting his eye for detail to excellent use as he seeks to uncover everything that went into the establishment of the “Murakami industry” in the 1980s and 1990s. Through this meticulous work—first published in Japanese in 2018 and now in English by Soft Skull Press—Karashima sheds light on the mysteries of Murakami’s translation into English (including an answer as to why, for example, dozens of pages were cut from the published translation of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World) and demonstrates the extent to which the process of bringing an author from one language to another involves countless decisions and a small army of agents, publishers, editors, and—of course—translators.

In this interview, conducted by Editor-at-Large for Japan, David Boyd, Karashima discusses Murakami’s translators, a potential re-translation of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and how Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami found its way into the English language.

David Boyd (DB): In your book, we meet all the major players in Murakami’s orbit, but it’s clear that the stars of your story are the translator Alfred Birnbaum and the editor Elmer Luke. Why did you choose to focus on them?

David Karashima (DK): In my mind, at least, the individuals that take center stage in the book are Birnbaum, Luke, and Jay Rubin, although I do feel that all of the dozens of people who speak in the book have important episodes to relate. There are perhaps two main reasons that Alfred Birnbaum and Elmer Luke stand out in the book. First, I decided—at least for this first book—to focus on the years when Murakami’s work first began appearing in English (1985 to 1998), because this was a period that relatively little was known about; Birnbaum and Luke played important roles as trailblazers during this time. I remember a staff member of the Murakami Office telling me that these (especially the eighties and early nineties) were the “black box years” for them too. The story of the quarter-century since Murakami began to really break through—with the publication of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle—would have a different cast of central characters, although Jay Rubin would still be one of them. I also think that Birnbaum and Luke perhaps come to life in the book because it has been many years since they were involved in what Murakami himself calls the “Murakami industry” and are therefore in a position to reflect more openly on their experience. Many people—including Murakami himself—were kind enough to talk to me for the book, but most people’s responses (quite understandably) tended to be more measured.

DB: When people talk about Murakami’s translators, they usually focus on Birnbaum and Rubin. People describe them as opposites—Birnbaum the Bohemian and Rubin the Academic. In your book, you quote Murakami: “My style has changed from around 1990. My prose has become more meticulous, so it’s a problem if Alfred translates it freely. I want my work to be translated properly . . .” What importance do you assign to “the changing of the guard”? What does that moment mean to Murakami in translation?

DK: Birnbaum, Rubin, Philip Gabriel, and Ted Goossen are all terrific translators and I have a lot of admiration for the work that they do—not only translating Murakami, but introducing other Japanese (and in the case of Birnbaum also Burmese) writers to English readers, both as translators and editors. Murakami says that he has trouble distinguishing between the translations by his different English-language translators, but his American editors have suggested that each translator has his (and people have pointed out to me that, unlike with other languages, all of Murakami’s English-language translators have been men) own style. I imagine people compare Birnbaum and Rubin for two reasons. One, because they were the first two translators into English of Murakami’s book-length works (although Gabriel and Goossen both translated a few short stories early on). And, two, because they’ve translated a number of the same or similar works that many readers feel very attached to, such as Norwegian Wood and parts of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. The “Birnbaum the Freestyling Bohemian versus Rubin the Meticulous Academic” dichotomy seems to have first captured people’s imaginations when Murakami tried to give credit to his translators in interviews he gave in the US and the idea has been explored by others since. It’s catchy, and there must be some truth to it, but I wonder if it doesn’t impede understanding of the complexity of each translator’s approach and the different contexts in which they were undertaking their translations. READ MORE…

The Visceraless State: An Interview With Cristina Rivera Garza

October 8, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

[W]riting is a community-making practice . . . intimately, necessarily connected to the communities in which we live and which, ideally, we serve.

Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza is a foremost voice in contemporary Mexican literature. Known for her frequently dark subject matter and hybrid styles, her work focuses on marginalized people, challenging us to reconsider our preconceptions about boundaries and transgression. She has won major literary awards and is the only author to have twice won the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award (in 2011 and 2009). Her latest work to be translated into English, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, has just been published by Feminist Press and is a hybrid collection of journalism, crónicas, and essays, that explore systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the US-Mexico border. To coincide with its much-anticipated release, Asymptote’s Assistant Managing Editor Lindsay Semel spoke with Cristina Rivera Garza about the ideas behind this compelling work.   

“Let me just bring some tea, and I’ll be right back!” Cristina Rivera Garza dashed out of her Zoom screen briefly before settling back into her chair and adjusting her glasses with a warm smile, her air of familiarity challenging the oppressiveness of the geographical and technological distance to which we’ve lately become accustomed. In the following interview, we discuss Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, the striking latest collaboration between Garza and translator Sarah Booker. She reflects upon the demands that she makes of syntax, the enigmatic character of reality, the importance of solidarity and imagination, and how she and Booker coined the term “The Visceraless State.” Very much of the borderland between Mexico and the United States, her work meets the global, contemporary moment not despite its specificity, but because of it.

 —Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

Lindsay Semel (LS): You’ve stated in interviews, and it’s apparent in your work, that you intentionally test the limits between what language normally does and what it can do in order to discover new experiential possibilities between writer, text, and reader. I wonder if you could point to places in the text where you tested and stretched the limits of Spanish but were not able to do so the same way in English and vice versa. How do Spanish and English need to be challenged differently?

Cristina Rivera Garza (CRG): Every single project has to challenge language in specific ways. It always depends on the materials that I’m exploring, affecting, and letting myself be affected by, and there are specific ways that you can do that both in English and in Spanish. I tend to write longer sentences in Spanish and more fragmentarily in English, for example. When I am getting too long-winded in Spanish, I try to convey that thought with the directness and economy I associate with my relationship with English. At times, I try to use the semicolon in English, just because it is more common in Spanish and I want to see what happens to both sentence and sense. Constantly borrowing from English and borrowing from Spanish and taking traces and echoes from one language into the other, trying to honor and replicate the tension and friction that maintains them together where I live and how I think, has been almost a natural way of continuing to challenge both.

Sarah [Booker, translator of Grieving] is such a deft translator and we now know each other quite well. She’s been translating my work for a number of years and we have a very open, fluid conversation as she goes into the translation process: less a process of moving language from one context to a another, and more a search for similar effects based on the affective capacities of host and receiving languages. I work closely with syntax, especially if I’m exploring issues such as violence and suffering. Pause, breathlessness, all those aspects of a body going through tremendous pressure or pain inflicted—in terms of keeping both form and content responding to the same challenges, it is important that syntax and semantics are somehow reflecting and embodying that experience. That’s when writing occurs.

I think of translation as a creative process too. I see Sarah as my co-author and her work as a way through which I receive my book back anew. I think she’s a poet at heart. I don’t know if she knows that, but all those experiments with language, that’s something she’s very deft at. READ MORE…

Not Strictly a Serial Killer: An Interview with Carlos Busqued

October 5, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Samuel Rutter

A “monster” is made of the very same stuff as people who are, in theory . . . normal. We’re much closer to being monsters than we’d like to admit.

In September of 1982, Ricardo Melogno murdered four taxi drivers in Buenos Aires. The crimes happened in close physical proximity and over a short period of time, but to this day, neither the perpetrator nor the many teams of experts who have treated Melogno have been able to discern a motive. Writer Carlos Busqued spent over two years interviewing Melogno and compiling the material that would eventually become Magnetized, published in English for the first time in June 2020 by Catapult.

The novel’s translator, Samuel Rutter, exchanged a series of emails with the author that touched on the writer’s process, the singularities of Ricardo’s case, and life in Buenos Aires under quarantine.

Samuel Rutter (SR): How did you first learn about Ricardo Melogno, and is his case still well-known in Argentina today?

Carlos Busqued (CB): No, quite the opposite actually—it was quite a sensation when it first happened, but the news cycle at the time didn’t cover it for long. Ricardo committed the murders right at the end of the last military dictatorship—two months after Argentina lost the Falklands War—so his crimes were quickly buried under an avalanche of news and exposés that were even more macabre.

I was a kid at the time of the murders and never heard about them back then—I lived in Chaco, a province in the far north of Argentina, so we didn’t read the press from Buenos Aires so much, and we only got some of their TV channels. So it was many years later that I stumbled across Ricardo’s case by chance. I got to know someone who worked on his treatment team, and I noticed that on the occasions I joined the team for after-work drinks or a birthday party, they tended to speak of Ricardo with empathy and curiosity. Every now and again they’d speculate about one or another detail of the crimes, which piqued my interest right away.

SR: What drew your attention to the case as a writer? Was there something in particular that inspired you to write about it?

CB: It was the strangeness of the whole thing, the fact that there really was no motive. Even today there is very little understanding of crimes with no known motive, and barely any research on the subject. A person who commits four identical murders is not acting randomly, but even so, neither Ricardo nor the numerous teams of specialists who examined him have been able to come up with a motive. Broadly speaking, when someone kills, they do it to survive. How that applies to Ricardo’s mindset when he committed the murders remains a complete mystery. READ MORE…

Sadness Has No End, Happiness Does: An Interview with Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

September 21, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Serena Solin

I’m okay with “hybridity” and “identity” in the sense that they are procedural, but not to the extent that they are arrivals and conclusions.

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi is an artist working across mediums, from poetry and translation to net art, film, theory, and performance. Her work explores the relationship between politics, aesthetics, and phenomenology, with a particular focus on the vacillating potential of the internet as a public and personal space, equal parts diary and mechanism of empire. I first encountered her work in Algavarias: Echo Chamber (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016), a translation of Syrian-Brazilian poet Waly Salomão. Gharavi renders Salomão’s “poems of ideal architecture” in all their immense complexity, as humorous as they are solemn, as splintered as they are universal. 

Serena Solin (SS): Something that intrigued me throughout Algaravias: Echo Chamber was the fragmentation of image. I’m thinking particularly of this quote from the poem “CARIOCA STREET 1993”: “clippings, replicas, reshowings, free samples, clots without blood, prostheses of the fantasmagoric Soap Street.” Virtual realities and “handycams” are also represented. As a contemporary artist, is fragmentation or reflection across multiple screens something you think about? Do you believe there is now, or ever was, an unbroken space for art?

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi (MMG): I think that Waly Salomão was certainly ahead of his time in writing that poem in the early nineties. Naming a poem “.doc” before we had AOL and Hotmail accounts is especially interesting for an artist in South America who was attuned to the burgeoning virtuality of how we see each other and ourselves.

One of the things I’ve been doing under quarantine is watching period dramas. If I were just living my ordinary, non-quarantine life, I wouldn’t be watching Vanity Fair and The Age of Innocence, but it’s fascinating to think about the idea that there was ever a time when the whole could be contained. We have a fantasy of ourselves as contemporaries, being post-everything, and to some extent there may be truth to that; our tools have shaped us to be different than Martin Scorcese’s characters. But watching period dramas and experiencing a different visual repertoire from my own, I’m struck by how much virtuality and narrativizing of lives and selves there was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Maybe we as contemporaries are so hungry for control that we have an impulse to find containers for everything. I think control is part of the artistic impulse, as well as a directive under quarantine—to not lose your mind, to think about the very few things within your control. I don’t know that I can draw a ready line to virtuality, but often our tools give us that sense of control. At the same time they are not just tools; they shape us.

SS: With regard to period dramas, I thought quarantine might be a good time to read Anna Karenina for the first time, and I was enthralled by the way the plot is reflected through characters who weren’t actually present for an event but heard about it from someone else—in other words, gossip as narrative style. Perhaps the conclusion is that there’s nothing new under the sun—not virtuality, not narrative fragmentation.

MMG: Anna Karenina was actually on TV the other day, dubbed into Portuguese, a real experience. Postmodernism is maybe the most boring topic ever, but the first thing to be given that word in literary theory was that moment in Mrs. Dalloway when multiple spectators are watching an airplane. That refractory self and the breakdown of representative, directive viewership is where postmodernism starts to exist historically. But I think we can go further back, and wider culturally.

At the same time, I think we are living something different. I live in the time of Uber. It’s significant that we know the technology we rely on is working when it’s most erased, which is profoundly interesting and understudied—we would have to give more attention to that to fully understand ourselves. READ MORE…