Interviews

The Infinite Potentials Between Korean and the World: A Conversation With Nicole Hur, Editor-in-Chief of the Hanok Review

November 6, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

I consider a solely ethical aim in translation to be unattainable, and one that mistakenly assumes a culturally void image of the translator.

The Hanok Review is a rising journal of Korean literature, publishing Korean-to-English translations, interviews, and original creative writing by authors identifying with Korean culture. At the intersection of contemporary, global letters and the Korean diaspora, the Hanok Review cultivates its unique voice by managing each translation internally, curating Korean-language poetry submissions that speak to a multilingual world of pan-Korean identity, with each editor contributing to the journal’s harmonious chorus of translations. In this interview, I spoke to the founder and editor-in-chief, Nicole Hur, about the philosophy of translation and Korean literature, as the Hanok Review launches their second issue.

Michelle Chan Schmidt (MCS): Nicole, in addition to founding and editing the Hanok Review, you also wear the hats of poet and translator. I’d love to hear your opinion on a wonderful essay by Nicole Wong published in our Summer 2023 issue, “The Terroir of a Single Work: Redefining Scope in Approaches to Translation.” It dissects the techniques of translation with metaphorical heft and eloquent clarity and asks the same question you do: “What is home?” How do you understand Wong’s words on foreignization and domestication in relation to the Hanok Review’s translations?

Nicole Hur (NH): Perhaps because I was a poet before a translator, I naturally came to the process of translation with the textual cues and self-awareness enabled by poetic depth. I see this in what Wong articulates as “foreignization with an appropriate scope,” in which the receptor language takes on a “foreign” or non-standard form in an effort to resemble the particular authorial manipulation of the source language; that is, translation as an act of transferring the various stylistic elements in which an author articulates their world from the bounds of one language to another. I believe this intimate approach to translation yields a natural sensitivity to—or at least awareness of—the source text’s socio-cultural context. This sensitivity enables resisting unfounded projections of foreignization or domestication.

Translation can never be perfect, in the sense that the Korean “eomma” can never fully equate to the English “mother,” even in its literal glory. I often think back to Ocean Vuong’s quotation: “even if I were to write the word ‘the’… that is still an Asian-American ‘the.’ I can’t escape it, so if I can’t escape it, I should tend to my curiosities beyond the identity. Because the identity is already there, it’s embedded into everything.”

I want to emphasize the notion of traversing “beyond the identity.” As Wong asserts that the “translator is not a transparent vessel for the foreign author,” I consider a solely ethical aim in translation (at least in regard to foreignization and domestication) to be unattainable, and one that mistakenly assumes a culturally void image of the translator. Translation can never fully be ethical, nor should it aim to be, so how, then, can we reconcile these innate cultural differences—the difference between a Korean “the” and an English “the”? I propose the medium of poeticism. Through careful and deliberate poetic choices, translators have the opportunity to reimbue texts with their socio-cultural nuances beyond the inextricable murkiness of cultural identities and into the workable scope of literary identity—which is in itself a kind of cultural identity. READ MORE…

Translating the Caribbean

November 1, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Aaron Coleman, C. Francis Fisher, Kaiama Glover, and Urayoán Noel

The translations lead to thinking about what translation makes possible in a critical sense and in a differently shaped and understood archive.

The following conversation took place after a reading as part of “Colloquy: Translators in Conversation,” a series based in New York City and sponsored by World Poetry Books. In April 2023, the Clemente in Manhattan hosted the fifth installment of Colloquy, “Translating the Caribbean” with Aaron Coleman, Urayoán Noel, and Kaiama Glover. After the reading, the curator of the series, C. Francis Fisher, engaged the translators in the following conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length.

C. Francis Fisher (CF): I want to start by asking about the title of this event. I named this evening “Translating the Caribbean” and I’m wondering whether that idea of translating the Caribbean is helpful in terms of the work that you do or whether it glosses over important differences between the cultures, languages, and realities of different islands in the Caribbean. 

Aaron Coleman (AC): I’m glad that you opened with this question because for me “the Caribbean” is just one of the many frames that we can have in mind when translating. I’ll say for me, there are various frames that I try to hold in my mind at the same time. One would obviously be the national, but even within the national, we see the way that blackness sometimes complicates national identities. So, there’s the national and then there’s frames within the national, but then there’s also a regional frame to the Caribbean.

For me, the frame that I’m always searching for and curious about is beyond the national at a diasporic scale. So, we could call this translating the Caribbean, but I was also thinking about translating the African diaspora.

Kaiama Glover (KG): I’m glad you spoke first. I had a hot take. I still have the same take, but now I’ve sat with it for a second [laugh]. I have no problem with that grouping that in some ways elides the borders between the various nation states of the Caribbean because the Balkinization of the islands was based on legacies of colonialism that are still intact and have left us with language that makes it difficult for people who are of the same broad history and related culture to communicate. First, there was the initial break of community, the kidnapping of the middle passage, and then there is the persistence of that breaking through the nation language borders of the Caribbean. So, I love translating the Caribbean outward toward the diaspora. READ MORE…

I Carved A Girl Of Stone: Nuzhat Abbas on Feminist, Decolonial, and Anti-Imperialist Translation

October 23, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

What drives my work at trace is perhaps a desire to destabilize the spaces I was made to enter and reside in . . .

Since its inception in 2019, Tkaronto/Toronto-based trace press has published “literature that illuminates, in complex, beautiful and thought-provoking ways, contemporary and historical experiences of conflict, war, displacement, exile, migration, the environment, labour, and resistance.” Re-emerging after a brief hiatus during the pandemic, their first anthology River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation (2023) assembles emergent and experienced feminist translators, scholars, and writers from Palestine to Uganda, from Indonesia to Kashmir—spotlighted by, among others, Khairani Barokka, Suneela Mubayi, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, and Yasmine Haj. In the foreword, the decolonialist historian Françoise Vergès describes the vestiges of imperialism, the dominance of the languages of Euro-American colonisers, the myths of globalisation, and the “hegemony of national languages” inflicted by neocolonial nation-states. Having read and reviewed the anthology myself, I think of it as a complex re-mapping of literary hemispheres “twisting through the atrocities of literary empires and post-colonial capitalism.”

In this interview, I asked trace press’ founding editor Nuzhat Abbas, a Zanzibar-born writer and critic of postcolonial mobilities and gender studies, about the literary publishing house she has founded; how independent presses can stay true to a transnational, anti-imperialist and decolonial feminist ethos; and writings from her archipelagic birthplace in East Africa and the Indian Ocean.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Having founded trace press, in what ways do the values of decoloniality, anti-imperialism, feminism, and anti-racism occur as concrete practices in translation and in publishing? And what is the opposite of that?

Nuzhat Abbas (NA): I prefer to pose such questions to my writers and translators—to inquire how they, in their practice, think through such challenges, especially in relation to localized tensions and displacements, both historic and geographical. For example, trace is located on a forcibly white-settled and renamed space where Indigenous and Black resistance and creativity continues to resist and respond to histories of profound violence and displacement. As racialized im/migrant-settlers working with non-European literatures and languages, how do we ‘translate’ and write toward Black and Indigenous readers in the Americas, and toward each other, as people from the global majority, scattered around the globe, displacing each of our certainties? This is a question for me, a beginning question, one that can only be answered in practice—and differently—by each of the books we make and the conversations that emerge. Building space for these kinds of ‘after-publication’ conversations is very much part of what I want to create with trace. 

READ MORE…

Between Seeing and Listening: Dias Novita Wuri on Birth Canal

October 19, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Thuy Dinh

For me, it was important to talk about everyone's story and experience with the term “motherhood”.

 In Birth Canal, Dias Novita Wuri masterfully braids disparate storylines of women across various countries and time periods to track the shifting contexts of sexuality, femininity, family, and gender roles. What results is an alternative face of history, from the violence of wartime and colonialism to the contemporary dynamics of sex work and objectification. As our September Book Club selection, this subversive and unflinching text defies generalisation and presumption to consider the many ways a body can be used—and freed. In this interview, Novita Wuri speaks on how the women in her life inspired the novel, sexuality and politics in Indonesia, and the mental anguish that surrounded the writing and reading of this powerful text.

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 USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Thuy Dinh (TD): Could you explain the meaning behind the title Birth Canal?

Dias Novita Wuri (DNW): Birth Canal actually doesn’t have as much significance in English as it does in Indonesian—which you wrote about very well in your review. The term in Indonesian is jalan lahir; jalan means a road, or a way—something one has to go through, and lahir here means birth. You can see it doesn’t really translate very well to English, and my editor and I decided to go with “birth canal”. I wanted a short, impactful title because my first book’s title, Makramé, was very simple. Of course, the birth canal is part of the reproductive system, and I wanted to use a bodily word to symbolise the feminine struggle related to procreation. It’s hard not to talk about birth because it’s a woman’s “duty” to give birth, and I think this term nicely represents the stories of all the women in my story.

TD: Your book doesn’t seem to think there is a necessary connection between fertility and motherhood—as some characters in the book can’t have children but yearn to be mothers. Can you expound on this theme?

DNW: I wanted to talk about a lot of the women that I know in my life, some of which can’t have children, or struggle to have children but want to have children, and others who don’t want children at all. For me, it was important to talk about everyone’s story and experience with the term “motherhood”. I also knew people who got pregnant as teenagers outside of marriage, and that’s why I opened the book by talking about abortion, because abortion is illegal here in Indonesia. It’s very frowned upon—which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

Actually, when I open up to the women that I talk to in Indonesia—my friends and acquaintances—sometimes they would tell me that they have had abortions. It’s a shame that it’s illegal and not talked about, because it’s something that women need. It’s a basic healthcare right. To have such shame and stigma surrounding abortion can only be detrimental to women’s lives in Indonesia. Some of them might be mothers already, but they can’t handle another child or can’t afford another child. Yet, they can’t have an abortion. READ MORE…

With Bones Against Heartbreak: Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek on the Ugandan Acholi Poetry of Exile

October 2, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I have been thinking about . . . how poetry might offer a space to imagine a different world, to challenge power, insist on life . . .

“Dear Dad” is how Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek opens a sequence of letter-vignettes to her late father, the revered northern Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek, who wrote in Acholi and English. The intimate piece, entitled “The Meaning of a Song,” was included in River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation, an anthology of decolonial and feminist politics published by Tkaronto-based trace press. In it, Okot Bitek meditates on her Africanness as someone born to Ugandan exiles in Kenya after the Uganda-Tanzania War of 1978-79: “What is it to claim an African identity? What is it to be African or not? How is it that we’re not reading both Ocol and Lawino as African and imagining that there are far more representations of what it means to be African?” Such poignant examination is also to be found in her award-winning poetry collection 100 Days (University of Alberta Press, 2016), in which she muses on the terrains of history, wanting to know “what is it to come from a land / that swallows its own people”. 

In this interview, I conversed with Okot Bitek on the expanse of Ugandan poetry of exile from Acholiland, African literature as world literature in itself (even and most specially) without translation, and the politico-literary legacy of her father, Okot p’Bitek. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): I want to start this conversation by quoting from your essay “The Meaning of a Song”, anthologized in River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation (2023): 

We were people until we were Acholi, also Acoli, and then we were defined by foreign terminology by the Arabs and written in an even more foreign alphabet by the European colonialists and missionaries.

How is naming vital and significant in the collective sense, specially among the colonised?

READ MORE…

Loss, Subversion and Womanhood: An Interview with Sara Elkamel, Translator of I Will Not Fold These Maps by Mona Kareem

September 27, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Ali Al-Jamri

I really admire Mona’s ability to find harmonious, synchronous threads across eras and geographies.

On the UK tour of I Will Not Fold These Maps by Mona Kareem, translated by Sara Elkamel, Sara met with poet and translator Ali Al-Jamri to dig deep into her process rendering Mona’s work into English. They began by comparing their individual translations of the book’s opening poem, “Perdition,” and what followed was an in-depth discussion of Sara’s process and Mona’s themes as they discuss threads of loss, subversion and womanhood in the works. Both translations of “Perdition” appear at the end of this interview. Elkamel’s translation was originally published as part of her translation of Kareem’s I Will Not Fold These Maps, available in the Poetry Translation Centre’s online store and in all good bookshops!

Ali Al-Jamri (AAJ): This first part of the interview is an experiment—but let’s see if it works? I am very interested in hearing you explain your process and the granular decision-making required in translation. By way of starting this conversation, I’ve attempted my own translation of the opening poem هلاك and I’ve shared my draft with you. I find that contrasts often help us define ourselves, and so my hope is that the contrasts between our translations will clarify your process. I’m interested in any reflections you have.

Sara Elkamel (SE): I found it fascinating to go through your (beautiful) translation attempts. Usually, when I reflect on a translation of mine, I experience a sinking feeling associated with the opportunities I missed out on, as well as a sense of (dare I call it) admiration for some of the choices made—as though they were made by someone else. Looking at your translation of “Perdition” has definitely inspired those two reactions within me.

For instance, you and I have translated the third stanza very differently, and that gap helps me think through my choices. What you translated as “Another ship / short of breath / struggles on the ocean’s throat,” I rendered as “Another ship / asphyxiates / the ocean’s larynx.” I realize now that I have entirely omitted the “shortness of breath” that appears in the original. Instead, I leaned on the sound of the word “asphyxiates” to mimic that breathlessness. I’ve always thought the “x” in that word was like a noose placed in its center.

I think you and I also came to different conclusions about the body running out of breath; you interpreted it as the ship, and I as the ocean. In my reading, I felt that this poem had the tendency to give human bodies to natural phenomena; the sky has a breast, the night wears a choker of stars around its neck, and the ocean has a larynx. I realize now that the fourth stanza, “The moon spills a cloud / into the sky’s breast” was a stretch on my part. The original text does not contain the action of “spilling”—but I think I was keen on extending the poem’s tendency to set up an anthropoid actor, an action, and a subject. For better or for worse, I was trying to stay true to the poem’s intentions—or what I perceived to be the poem’s intentions—not necessarily the language itself. READ MORE…

Inside the Mind That Falls Apart: Aron Aji and Selin Gökçesu on Lojman

September 21, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

"Words by themselves don’t do much in literature; we encounter them inside syntax."

Our August Book Club selection, Ebru Ojen’s Lojman, is a vivid and absorbing novel that traces the depths and illusions of psychic agony, pulled along by a singular, poetic style. Within these flowing, absorbing pages of emotional surges, however, is a representation of how imposed orders and hierarchies can rob the individual of humanity. In this following interview, translators Aron Aji and Selin Gökçesu speak to us on the process of working with this language its rawness and its darkness, the narrative’s subtle political symbols, how it moves on from the Turkey’s social realist movement and its sociolinguistic history.

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 USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Lojman is a book that unleashes its narrative and its characters on us. There are so many uncontrollable elements in it, but what reigns it in is the prose, which is so precise and lyrical. I’m wondering what it was like reading this book in the original Turkish—if there was that similar effect, and if there were stylistic elements you were seeking specifically to preserve in translation.

Selin Gökçesu (SG): Lojman is very immersive, beautiful, and lyrical and Turkish too. I don’t keep up with contemporary Turkish literature as much as I would like to, but within what I’ve seen come out, this book is very in its lyricism—but also its topic and voice. Part of the unruliness of the narrative can perhaps be attributed to the Turkish editing style, which is definitely more open than in the American publishing industry; different voices will enter and come out barely edited—which has its drawbacks. The final translation, after Aron put the final touches on it, is a lot more polished in English then it’s in Turkish, but it still has the spirit of the original.

But I will say that Lojman’s forcefulness and gushing and uncontrolled quality, the very untamed writing—some of that is a product of how open the Turkish publication system is. They’ll allow people in, and they’ll publish things with very little editing or external control. So you get these really raw, powerful stories in different voices. Turkish contemporary literature is maybe less middle-class than American literature, so the class boundaries of allowing different voices in is a little bit more flexible, resulting in such unique products. I’m so glad we came together and caught Lojman amidst so many books being published in Turkey. It’s really serendipitous that this landed where it did.

Aron Aji (AA): I agree with everything Selin said about Ebru’s voice and writing style. To add to that, I was in Istanbul with Ebru this summer—she just finished her new novel. It’s being edited, and hopefully will be coming out in the next couple of months. It’s an entirely different novel. The form is entirely different, the language is incredibly elevated, but there was something very, very similar to the way she built the main character. I asked her to tell me what she was trying to do, and she mentioned how people always talk about the author as the witness of a character’s life and an author as the witness of her time. Then she said, “I want to put the reader in a position of witness, and the way I can do that is by pushing the reader as far into the mindset of the main character as possible.”

As you know, the characters in Lojman are very damaged, to say the least; your review also shows how that damage becomes pervasive. Ebru really is a writer that doesn’t want to stand in the way of the reader, so she writes with this incredible euphoria. There is another Turkish author, Aslı Erdoğan (also published by City Lights), who writes with euphoria, but it’s a lot more controlled, oddly enough. What we have in Ebru is really the rawest possible witnessing of a mind falling apart.

So by choosing to do this as a co-translation, we actually mixed two voices and two consciousnesses into the process—the splitting of voices. I should also say that Elaine of City Lights was incredible in her later editing. And the more voices and consciousnesses we incorporated, the more we were able to crystallize the language, but also retain its rawness. READ MORE…

Lucid Silence: An Interview with Fiona Sze-Lorrain

September 18, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Tsering Yangzom Lama

The phrase I know is an illusion to me.

Dear Chrysanthemums is a haunting debut novel by celebrated poet and translator, Fiona Sze-Lorrain. Covering an interconnected web of women, the novel begins during the tumult of early twentieth-century China and spans decades of displacement and exile across the world. At once brutal and tender, this novel of women’s lives has the power to move and complicate our understanding of the long shadow cast by revolution as well as the inextinguishable longing every person has for beauty, love, art, and selfhood. This spring, I had the opportunity to interview Sze-Lorrain about her powerful novel.

Tsering Yangzom Lama (TYL): There’s a dark irony and melancholy to your work. Symbols of beauty and luck frame stories of profound ugliness and misfortune. For instance, the title of your novel references a celebrated flower in China, but one of your characters, Mei, is tasked with picking chrysanthemums for Mao Zedong as part of her reform labor. Tell us about the juxtaposition between such auspicious symbols and the unsettled lives of the women in your novel.

Fiona Sze-Lorrain (FSL): I don’t believe in absolutes or polarities. There is no joy without sadness and vice versa. Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez: “I live in shadow, filled with light.” Chrysanthemums are symbolic flowers in Asia. I view them as both auspicious and ominous. A florist friend in Hong Kong once told me how she saved her freshest pink, white, and yellow chrysanthemums for a funeral wreath every other day.

In Chinese traditional ink wash, chrysanthemums are one of the “four noble gentlemen.” I’ve been painting chrysanthemums since I was a student yet find them the most elusive. How to make these flowers less figurative? That’s the question. At the same time they seem so perfect and delicious in each detail . . . If only they could speak.

I grow, cook, read chrysanthemums. I think of their psychic wholes. I too live with orchids and floral essences. Years ago, I came across a witchy chrysanthemum in a mokuhanga art by an old woman artist from northern Japan. I asked her how this larger-than-usual chrysanthemum might taste in a medicinal soup. She shook her head. The creature-like image followed me home. Those petals resembled fingers and squid tentacles. So erotic. How knotty. They pulled me in, then disquieted me. That distance—the vulnerability to the plant rendered its inner strength even more unyielding. This tension conjured in itself a story of survival. When I began to work on the heroines in my novel, I pictured them allegorically as chrysanthemums, each of a kind and from different seasons. And how they heal, apologize, or make amends when something goes wrong in life. READ MORE…

My Absence In Those Words: Yogesh Maitreya on Anti-Caste Publishing and the Dalit Memoir

September 14, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

The metaphorical liberation of the oppressed lies in being the voice, the author, and the producer of their stories . . .

Indian Dalit writer, translator, and publisher Yogesh Maitreya believes in the freeing impulse of literary translation: “a conscious and political decision and process [which can] reclaim the humanness of an oppressed person and make him a free man in the imagination of readers.” He problematises, however, the Anglophone literary production in India, denouncing the Brahminical hegemony that governs it. It comes as no surprise, then, that in Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India (Princeton University Press, 2022), Akshya Saxena sketches Maitreya’s poetry as “self-defense,” operating on “an imperative to write in English” that emphasises language’s function in class and politics. Such writing pursues a continual question: how can the liberated Dalit writer exist within the linguistic imaginary of their former colonial rulers, the British, and the current neoliberal one, the Brahmins? “In writing in English, Maitreya not only takes ownership of a language but also enters a hegemonic discourse that has excluded him,” Saxena adds. It is in this very material condition that Maitreya established Panther’s Paw Publication in 2016, an anti-caste press specialising in original writings in English and translations from Indian languages—especially Marathi and Punjabi, based in the city of Nagpur, Maharashtra. 

In this interview, I conversed with Maitreya on his latest book, Water in a Broken Pot: A Memoir, out this year from Penguin Random House India; his translations of essays and poetry by Marathi-language Dalit writers; the centuries-old oral tradition of shahiri as music, cultural criticism, and poetry; and the archaic ethnopolitical ideologies of India’s caste system, epitomised in literature, literary translation, and publishing. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): I love what you pointed out in your essay on the Dalit poet-filmmaker Nagraj Manjule: that the world sees India through the lens of writers from the Savarna upper-caste, such as Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Agha Shahid Ali, and Pankaj Mishra. For those of us non-Indians in the global literary community, can you tell us how caste is deeply rooted in the Indian worldview and way of life—especially in literary, cultural, and knowledge production?

Yogesh Maitreya (YM): Well, so far, the writers from India who have been writing in English and who are known to the world come out of a class that represents 2 or 3 percent of the total population of India—the Brahminical class, who have had the advantage of being with the British administration and their cultural programs from the beginning. Hence, their command over English as both language and literature is overwhelmingly hegemonic. In their English writings, with borrowed sensibilities from the West, they undeniably percolate caste values, which is rooted in denying many people fundamental human rights and ascribing to a few individuals a superior position in society from the moment they are born. India is a linguistic rain-forest, and English, within it, is the most aspirational season to be in, for several decades now. 

English was an aspiration for me, too. However, I eventually had to consider that if my life—lived and imagined—is missing from this language, then I am essentially either not present in it, or I must have been erased. How come the Indian writers I had read for close to a decade did not communicate any sense or sensibilities of the life that was happening around me in their literature? I thought about it for a while—and then I realised that language is also a matter of confinement, in which some are allowed and made into a subject of intellectual contemplation and fascination, and others are denied their right to exist. This happens when the language is subjected to the practice of a certain class, where the majority of society is not present. As caste always gave privileged position to the Savarna class in cultural, literary, and knowledge production, it has been obvious that they have utterly failed to produce the sensibilities of the masses in their works of arts or literature. In fact, they could never do so because theirs is a life in total contradiction with Dalit-Bahujan masses. There is no desire in a caste society for assimilation. English literature from India by a Brahminical class is the most prominent example of it. 

AMMD: Given the current hegemonies haunting the literary landscape in India, in what ways has the anti-caste press you founded—Panther’s Paw Publication—been an answer? 

YM: Back in 2016, when I had thought of establishing a publishing house from my hostel room in Mumbai, I had a simple vision: to translate Marathi writers into English and publish them. Because Marathi is the language in which I have grown up, it was obvious for me to think of it with English, which came to me as an aspirational language of class, and also an indescribable form of freedom because I had read and seen people (mostly whites) being portrayed as “free” and “intellectuals” in it. I wanted to be both those things, and you can say that I also wanted to see my people, my history, and my emotions as being “free” in English from everything I was taught in caste society. English, excluding the writings of Brahmins and Savarna writers from India, felt much more respectful towards me, my history, and my people—hence why I chose it. I remember the first time I had written and read and recited my emotions in English, I felt a certain amount of separation from the drab life around me, and imagining or translating my life and the history of my people into English felt like a touch of liberation to me. 

READ MORE…

On Translating Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine: An Interview with Conor Bracken and Jake Syersak

September 7, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Khalid Lyamlahy

Khaïr-Eddine is not ready to be relegated to the annals of history. He still has history to make.

In recent years, the work of Moroccan poet and writer Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine (1941–1995) has received increasing attention, both in Morocco and abroad. One of the cofounders of Souffles/Anfas, the influential journal of culture and politics established in 1966, Khaïr-Eddine played a major role in the renewal of Moroccan and North African literature. His practice of what he called “linguistic guerrilla warfare” is based on the distortion of French language and the use of unconventional and subversive imagery. Some major features of Khaïr-Eddine’s unruly prose and poetry are generic hybridity, acerbic political critique, anti-authoritarian spirit, and the celebration of his native Amazigh (or Berber) land and culture. Most of his works, published with Editions du Seuil in Paris in the 1960s and 1970s, have long been out of print.

The recent (and long-awaited) surge of interest in Khaïr-Eddine’s oeuvre is due in large part to the work of dedicated and passionate translators, including Conor Bracken and Jake Syersak. The former translated Khaïr-Eddine’s first poetry collection Scorpionic Sun (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2019). The latter co-translated with Pierre Joris Khaïr-Eddine’s masterpiece Agadir (Lavender Ink / Diálogos, 2020) and translated three of his other works: I, Caustic (Litmus Press, 2022), Resurrection of Wild Flowers (OOMPH! Press, 2022) and Proximal Morocco—  (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023). The following interview explores their relationship with Khaïr-Eddine’s work and illuminates the context, process, and challenges of their translations. It also addresses their most recent and future translation projects. 

Khalid Lyamlahy (KL): What was your first exposure to Khaïr-Eddine’s work and why did you decide to translate it?

Conor Bracken (CB): I first encountered Khaïr-Eddine’s work in 2015, in Poems for the New Millenium IV: The University of California Book of North African Literature (2013). Pierre Joris recommended I look through it when I asked him where I might find francophone poetry to translate, and when I read the poems of Khaïr-Eddine’s in there, I felt an unmistakable urgency, a fierce need not just to get out whatever was inside the mind behind these poems but to communicate with someone. It was like I’d been grabbed and shaken. Up to that moment I hadn’t found that in francophone or French poetry, which felt stately or methodical or cerebral, but this struck me. Not like an idea flashing in the mind’s sky, but like I was a door that needed to be opened. I wanted to translate that sensation.

Jake Syersak (JS): I first discovered Khaïr-Eddine’s work through the few translations that Pierre Joris had included in the same volume. At the time, I was a PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. It was 2016 and looking more and more likely that the extreme right was going to successfully worm its way into the United States presidency. It was distressing, to say the least. I remember sitting in the library there, thumbing through volumes of contemporary French poetry, searching for a translation project that I could make part of my exams. All of them seemed to me like such white noise in the current political climate. I wanted to find a meaningful project—one that might, in whatever meager way, contribute to the struggle against the rising tide of GOP-fueled populist xenophobia.

Khaïr-Eddine’s poems were exactly what I needed in that moment: laced with vitriol, unwilling to compromise, fiercely anti-authoritarian, and stretching the utopian limits of imagination. Everything clicked into place from there. I had spent the bulk of my academic career up to that point studying avant garde and experimental poetics, with an emphasis on Surrealism and its revolutionary potential. Khaïr-Eddine’s work opened me up to a whole new class of writers who saw that potential and applied it with all their strength.

KL: What was your level of familiarity with Moroccan/Maghrebi literature and politics before embarking on the translation? Did you use any resources to help you prepare the translation?

JS: Very close to zero. I think I had read some Abdellatif Laâbi here and there. And of course I knew of the Négritude poets, to whom Khaïr-Eddine and others of his ilk are indebted. Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio’s Souffles-Anfas anthology (Stanford University Press, 2016) was essential to a speedy contextual education.

CB: My level of familiarity with the literature at that point was low, though I had some familiarity with the political and cultural history of Morocco and the Maghreb writ large—my family lived in Rabat for a few years, and I visited and traveled several times, so had some experience with Moroccan places, landscapes, people, and culture. While I worked on Khaïr-Eddine’s book Scorpionic Sun, I read up on him as much as possible. I also delved more deeply into “les années de plomb”/King Hassan II’s rule, and read a lot about Souffles/Anfas, the journal founded by Abdellatif Laâbi that, coupled with various political actions and protests, led to the exile of Khaïr-Eddine, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and others, as well as to Laâbi’s long imprisonment. An invaluable resource was the critical anthology, edited by Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio, on Souffles/Anfas.

KL: Conor, what was the translation process of Khaïr-Eddine’s 1969 poetry collection Soleil arachnide like? Did you work on each poem separately and/or move back and forth between the poems?

CB: Though the poems in Soleil arachnide aren’t what anyone would call straightforward, the process of translating it generally was. First I transcribed it into a Word doc, in part to be able to ctrl-F my way through it, but also to get a feel for the poems themselves—how they moved on their own, how they gained power and definition when placed side by side. Once I finished that, I translated linearly, working until a poem felt like it was in a good place before moving to the next. I repeated this process five more times, going front to back each time, over three years. Doing it this way gave me clear boundaries about where to start and where to stop, though translating longer poems like “Le roi” (“The King”) or “Soleil arachnide” (“Scorpionic Sun”) was challenging. If we think of translating as a kind of reconstruction, dismantling a building to rebuild it on different land, then doing that for these poems was like rebuilding a whole town. But it was valuable, as a translator, to feel the poems’ relentlessness, the incredible ferocious vigor that erected them and somehow had them balancing in the precarious air through sheer force. READ MORE…

Upending Literary Hierarchies: An Interview with kotobli, a SWANA-Focused Book Discovery Platform

August 30, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alex Tan

“It shouldn’t be this hard,” we thought. So we decided to make it easier.

kotobli is a book discovery platform dedicated to amplifying cultural and literary production from the Southwest Asia/North Africa (SWANA) region, with a special focus on independent publishers and marginalized writers. Curated with care according to geography, genre, and even theme, kotobli’s lists create opportunities for readers to encounter their next great read based on affinity and interest. I corresponded with the largely volunteer-run team behind kotobli on their conceptualisation of the website; in the process, I learned a lot about the difficulties underlying literary circulation in the Arab world, and the groundbreaking, creative ways in which small SWANA-based presses navigate them.

Alex Tan (AT): How did you begin to conceptualise kotobli? What distinguishes it from other book recommendation/discovery platforms like Goodreads, or even Bookstagram and Booktok accounts?

kotobli (k): A couple of years ago, we were getting frustrated with how difficult it is to look for good books about the Southwest Asia/North Africa (SWANA) region online. We found them to be badly categorised and difficult to sort through—and if we were looking for books in Arabic, they were almost impossible to find with only keywords and a topic in mind. Without knowing which titles to look for, we could hardly discover books worth reading.

On a brief visit to Lebanon in spring 2021, one of our founders, Omar, was determined to find Layla Baalbaki’s Ana Ahya, which he had discovered through an academic paper on feminism in Lebanon. After unsuccessful online searches and hopping from one bookstore to another, he finally found a used copy.

“It shouldn’t be this hard,” we thought. So we decided to make it easier. kotobli started as a platform to help readers find interesting books from the SWANA region, by topic, genre, geography, the identity of the authors, and through our curated reading lists. We named it kotobli—written in all lowercase letters as a nod to its Arabic origin “كتب لي”—which means “books for me”.

Throughout the process of collecting book information to populate our platform, we noticed deeply entrenched weaknesses in the publishing landscape of Arab countries: many publishers, especially smaller and older ones, do not have any digital presence; as such, many readers, especially in the Arab diaspora, are missing out on incredible books just because they would never show up in internet searches. This is where our project “Daleel el Nashirin” (Publishers’ Guide) started. With a grant from Culture Resource, we’ve been digitising the metadata for thousands of books and more than a dozen publishers in the Levant and North Africa. We’ve also been building virtual tools with publishers and authors participating in the process, giving them a free webpage on our website that they can fully control through a simple and safe content management system. Additionally, the publishers themselves have access to statistics that show how many readers look up their books on kotobli. READ MORE…

Translating Multiple Dimensions: Sarah Timmer Harvey on Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About

August 24, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Daljinder Johal

Life isn’t one-dimensional; it’s a blend of emotions, absurdity, and different tones. . .

Jente Posthuma’s striking, moving novel, What I’d Rather Not Think About, delves into the aftermath of an unthinkable loss: the death of a twin. In tracing the patchworked life of a narrator who has long thought of herself as one-half, Posthuma explores the complexities of our most intimate relationships with evocative reflection and unexpected humor. This distinct work and our July Book Club selection has been translated beautifully by Sarah Timmer Harvey, resulting in razor-sharp prose that navigates the most intricate aspects of our selfhoods—how we are with one another. In this following interview, Harvey speaks about her discovery of this novel and her translation process, as well as the intricate journey of following this book’s many thought-paths and references. 

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 USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Daljinder Johal (DJ): I’m curious about your background and your journey into translation. I read that you’re Australian-born but ended up living in the Netherlands, where you began reading and occasionally translating Dutch fiction and poetry. Was there a particular work that played a significant role in sparking this interest?

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): Of course. Back then, while learning Dutch, I relocated to the Netherlands at nineteen with the intention of staying for a year. That single year evolved into a fourteen-year stay. During this time, I was working at a university, which eventually led me to translation as a second career. It happened somewhat unexpectedly. I strove to read while learning Dutch, focusing on more accessible books such as Hermann Koch’s The Dinner and even Harry Mulisch’s The Discovery of Heaven—which, while not mainstream, deeply resonated with me.

READ MORE…

Writing from the Ghosthouse: Maria Stepanova on Postmemory and the Russian Skaz

August 16, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Now I understand that catastrophe is never a one-time event; it’s a sort of a pendulum, destined for a comeback.

Maria Stepanova’s award-winning work, In Memory of Memory (2021), translated into English by Sasha Dugdale from the Russian original Pamiati, pamiati (2017), seamlessly blends transnational history, private archives, and memoir-in-essay—an oscillation beyond autofiction that the nonfiction reader in me had previously thought impossible. Also embedded in the novel are texts from various sources—from Phaedrus to Paul Celan, Heraclitus to Thomas Mann’s diaries, Orhan Pamuk to Nikolai Gogol—blended smoothly in Stepanova’s sinuous prose.

Already an author of ten volumes of poetry, Stepanova’s debut was described by Dmitry Kuzmin as a display of “brilliant poetic technique and a purity of style.” Now, known as a chronicler of her Russian-Jewish lineage, Stepanova had written: “I would become a stranger, a teller of tales, a selector and a sifter, the one who decides what part of the huge volume of the unsaid must fit in the spotlight’s circle, and what part will remain outside it in the darkness.” She is now widely regarded as both an important and popular contemporary writer—or in the words of Irina Shevelenko, “one of the most original and complex poets on the literary scene in Russia today.”

In this interview, I asked Maria about the genre-defying In Memory of Memory, political poetry since the Silver Age of Russian literature, and the literary tradition of folktales.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): In a previous interview, you spoke about being an eyewitness to a generation of writers who “were traumatized by the crash of the Soviet system of literary education and literary work,” stating: “You could live for three years after publishing a book, but it had to be a bad book, because it was the result of an inner compromise.”

Can you speak on that moment in time—when literary bureaucracy and censorship was prevalent, when Social Realism and traditional genres and forms were requisite, and at the same time, artists thrived?

Maria Stepanova (MS): Well, it was not exactly a good time from an artist’s point of view, as practically all the significant writers—not even mentioning the really big names—were pushed into the margins by this system. Some of them were killed, some jailed, some scared into silencing themselves, some forced to start writing in a “normal” realistic mode. And there are a couple of individuals who were appreciated by the Soviet system; though heavily censored, they were published after a lifetime of fear and loss, like Akhmatova—whose first husband was killed, third husband died in jail, and only son spent years and years in the concentration camps. It was long before the 1990s, but the Soviet utopia of Writer’s Unions, those big honorariums and that enormous audience, was actually shaped in the 1930s, over the backdrop of so many deaths, and it never transformed into anything that would allow arts or artists to thrive. Even later on, when the times became more or less vegetarian, there was an enormous split between independent culture and the official, “publishable” one that appeared in state-funded exhibition spaces or in bookshops. If you were willing to make an official career out of writing, you had to prepare yourself for the lifetime of compromises—to agree that your writing would get cropped and reshaped according to the Party line. But, of course, the benefits were significant, and the life of an underground author was not the easiest—still, the most interesting poetry and prose being written in Russia in the twentieth century were produced by the authors who had chosen such a life, who were writing “v stol”: unpublishable books that were kept in the desk.

It’s important for me to say it, banal as it is, because lately, one might hear people referring to the Soviet times with some weird sort of nostalgia; as if the books we are able to read and quote now were a result of that system, and not a desperate attempt to resist it. The very names of the writers who had perished or were silenced in the 1930s (or remained in danger and unpublished in the 70s and 80s, until the Soviet empire crashed) are used as showcases for how an oppressive society might produce great works of literature. It somehow reminds me of the way ducks are tortured to produce foie gras: the amount of pain involved in the process is unjustifiable, whatever the results are. READ MORE…

Compound Vision: In Conversation with Catherine Xinxin Yu on Translating Wu Ming-yi’s “Cloudland”

July 31, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alex Tan

Blurring this boundary [between speech and thought] almost creates an overlap between the human self and the personhood of the landscape. . .

Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-yi’s short story, “Cloudland”, makes use of grief’s overwhelming ranges to set out a narrative of exploration, dream-making, and the multiplicity of life. After the death of his wife, the bereaved Shutter begins a journey to write the ending of a tale that she had not be able to finish, and on his way, he finds the wondrous methods that landscape and animals have long used to express and communicate, offering a way of thinking and feeling that his technologically dense, hurried world does not allow. A gorgeous, lush story that introduces Wu’s sensitive ecowriting, “Cloudland” merges the richness of language with the richness of the natural world. In this interview, Alex Tan talks to the translator of “Cloudland”, Catherine Xinxin Yu, about the operation of images in her methodology, the trick of incorporating definitions into the prose, and making use of a textual reality.

Alex Tan (AT): Technologies of perception populate this excerpt from “Cloudland”: the night-vision cameras placed in the forest by Shutter, the Rift in the Cloud constituting a virtual catalogue of a life, the mediatised footage of the train bombing, and most fundamentally, the unfinished story of Shutter’s wife—which of course precipitates his grief and the quest for the elusive clouded leopard. There’s such an ambivalence to some of these forms of knowledge-making, as Wu also seems to be commenting on the ubiquity—and the risks—of digital surveillance. I wonder how you navigated the interplay between the visual and the textual, when you approached this work as a translator. Did it stylistically inflect your translation in any way?

Catherine Xinxin Yu (CXY): I remember interviewing Wu Ming-yi for my MA dissertation, which included a translation and commentary on “Cloudland”, focusing on eco-conscious ways to translate nature-oriented writing. I asked him why he decided to stop using Facebook and other social media from 2019 onwards, upon which he talked about his apprehension exactly of the ubiquity of digital surveillance that you mentioned.

Both in real life and in the collection that “Cloudland” is from (Kuyuzhidi 苦雨之地, which I tentatively translated as Where Rain Falls Amiss), digital traces are so fine-grained and invasive that they can piece together the most secret aspects of individuals. According to Wu, it is both frightening and cruel to be forced to see a loved one’s dark depths; I think that is a crucial part of the pain that pervades “Cloudland”: not only losing a spouse and a wild species, but also discovering how little one knew about them: seeing that “rift’’ and realising there is no way to remedy it.

Many of his works contain a multiplicity of perspectives, where vision functions as a means and a metaphor for perceiving, conceiving, and knowing. Reality (or its shadow) shapeshifts from the visual to the textual. As a photographer myself, I identify with this and I know how an entire narrative can be encapsulated in one gaze. Short of actually visiting and seeing the landscape where the story is set, I looked at a lot of images and videos while translating Cloudland, so it wasn’t just a text-to-text translation, but also image-to-text. Visualisation allowed me to embody the text and then perform it in English. I suppose the result is that, by describing the visual rather than simply transferring words from one language to the other, the translation ends up being more vivid and immediate. Or so I hope. READ MORE…