Interviews

Publisher Profile: Counterpath Press

October 28, 2015  |  in Interviews, Publisher Profile  |  by Alexis Almeida

"We have absolutely no commitment to translation for the sake of translation."

Counterpath is a publisher, gallery, event space, and bookstore. Counterpath was founded in 2006 and has published nearly 50 titles to date. Its gallery and event space opened in late 2010 in Denver, Colorado, hosting over 160 exhibitions, performances, and events. Counterpath’s new venue, at 7935 East 14th Avenue in Denver, is currently under renovation but will be open to the public in 2015. I recently spoke to Tim Roberts via email. 

Alexis Almeida: How did Counterpath get started? What was your initial vision for the press?

Tim Roberts: That’s an interesting assumption, that we had a vision, or that a press needs a vision. The implications are many: that we, for some reason, saw something we wanted to accomplish, that we believed needed to be done, something to create that didn’t yet exist, or that was outside what already existed. In some way we believed we could operate, by our own decision, in a way separate from what we might already do automatically— separate from a need to make a living, to not get pummeled by the weather, to bring food to one’s mouth. This was just about a decade back, and I’m not sure I’m prepared at the moment to sketch out lines of developmental continuity that might not make any sense next week or next month. I think you could say we did something in the media, at a time when media was shifting. I think you could say we took something with vaguely personal motives and said this is public, impersonal, objectively valuable, in some way, at some demarcation point, by fiat. We set ourselves up to be believed. Like anyone else, we had an idea of how media works, and how it would work for us. We had an idea of what reading was.

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Issue Spotlight: Interviewing Uyghur Poetry Translator Joshua Freeman

October 22, 2015  |  in Interviews, Translations  |  by Ryan Mihaly

"A lot of what's really vibrant and interesting in Uyghur poetry right now is happening primarily on the web, and even on phone messaging apps."

 

Your translation of Merdan Ehet’éli’s poem “Common Night” is Asymptote‘s first piece from the Uyghur. I want to point out two words from the poem: “pig iron” and “hellfruit.” Can you tell us about these words and how you translated them?

The Uyghur word choyun (also chöyün) refers to pig iron or cast iron, and for me it calls to mind something hard and rough. The connotations are much less positive than the words tömür (iron) and polat (steel), both of which are used in Uyghur personal names. In speaking of “a night poured into our spines like pig iron,” Merdan Ehet’éli may be alluding to Tahir Hamut’s well-known poem “Summer Is a Conspiracy,” in which Tahir refers to fear’s “pig iron voice”, which “seeps into the marrow / and hardens.”  READ MORE…

Translator’s Profile: Yardenne Greenspan

October 19, 2015  |  in Interviews, Translator's Profile  |  by Patty Nash

"I also sometimes fantasize about acting or opening a bakery."

Yardenne Greenspan has an MFA in Fiction and Translation from Columbia University. In 2011, she received the American Literary Translators’ Association Fellowship. Her translation of Some Day, by Shemi Zarhin (New Vessel Press), was chosen for World Literature Today’s 2013 list of notable translations. Her full-length translations also include Tel Aviv Noir, edited by Etgar Keret and Assaf Gavron (Akashic Books), and Alexandrian Summer by Yitzhak Gormezano Goren (New Vessel Press). Yardenne’s writing and translations can be found in The New Yorker, Haaretz, Guernica, Ploughshares, The Massachusetts Review, and Words Without Borders, among other publications.

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Who are you and what do you translate?

My name is Yardenne Greenspan, I’m a writer of fiction and essays, a translator of Hebrew fiction, and an aspiring good friend. I mostly translate novels, but also short prose, plays, and even some poetry.

Describe your current/most recent project. Why is it cool? What should we know about it?

I just finished translating a biblical-fiction novel by Israeli author Yochi Brandes, which is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press next summer. The novel offers a subversive reading of the biblical books of Kings and undermines what we know about Kings Saul, David, Solomon, and their families. It was especially exciting for me, having grown up in Israel, where Bible lessons are taught at every school, forming a very specific narrative of “good” and “wicked” kings. This books really turns it around.

What author would you like to see more popular/translated in the first place?

Sayed Kashua, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who currently lives and works in Illinois, writes in Hebrew about the experience of living on both sides, trying to pass as Israeli while remaining faithful to his Palestinian roots, and the entrapment that ensues. Sadly, Kashua recently decided his attempt to bridge the conflict through his writing has failed, but his writing still offers incredible insight into the complicated and heartbreaking way of living that is Israel. His books have been translated by Miriam Shlesinger and Mitch Ginsburg, and I think they should be read by anyone who is interested in a fresh take on the subject that is both touching and hilarious. READ MORE…

Translating Indigenous Mexican Writers: An Interview with Translator David Shook

October 12, 2015  |  in Interviews, Translations  |  by Ryan Mihaly

"I suspect many casual bookstore readers might not know how many languages are still spoken in Mexico. The sheer diversity is astounding."

David Shook is a poet, translator, and filmmaker in Los Angeles, where he serves as Editorial Director of Phoneme Media, a non-profit publishing house that exclusively publishes literature in translation. Their newest book is Like a New Sun, a collection of contemporary indigenous Mexican poetry, which Shook co-edited along with Víctor Terán.

Seven translators in total—Shook, Adam W. Coon, Jonathan Harrington, Jerome Rothenberg, Clare Sullivan, Jacob Surpin, and Eliot Weinberger—translated poets from six different languages: Juan Gregorio Regino (from the Mazatec), Mikeas Sánchez (Zoque),  Juan Hernández Ramírez (Huasteca Nahuatl), Enriqueta Lunez (Tsotsil), Víctor Terán (Isthmus Zapotec), and Briceida Cuevas Cob (Yucatec Maya). I corresponded with Shook over gchat to speak with him about the project.

Today is Columbus Day, a controversial holiday in the United States. Several cities have recently adopted Indigenous Peoples’ Day over Columbus Day, clearly a victory for recognizing indigenous cultures in the United States. Which leaves me wondering: how are the indigenous Mexican writers recognized today in the Mexican literary landscape?

As someone who regularly visits Mexican literary festivals and also translates from the Spanish, I’ve observed the under-appreciation of indigenous writers firsthand. Mexico’s indigenous communities make up 10 to 14% of its total population, and you certainly don’t find anywhere near that percentage of literature being published in Mexico today. READ MORE…

Publisher Profile: Antena

September 24, 2015  |  in Interviews, Publisher Profile  |  by Alexis Almeida

"Language justice is difficult to see. The plight of the invisibility of translation is storied."

 

Antena is a language justice and literary experimentation collaborative founded by Jen Hofer and John Pluecker, both writers, artists, literary translators, bookmakers and activist interpreters. Antena activates links between social justice work and artistic practice by exploring how critical views on language can help us to reimagine and rearticulate the worlds we inhabit. Antena has exhibited, published, performed, organized, advocated, translated, curated, interpreted, and/or instigated with numerous groups and institutions, including Blaffer Art Museum, Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics, and Project Row Houses. I recently spoke with Jen Hofer and John Pluecker over email. 

 

Alexis Almeida: I’d like to start with Antena’s beginnings. It seems collaboration is a key element of everything you do. Can you talk a bit about how your different backgrounds/interests were able to coalesce in this project?

John Pluecker: As I’ve described previously in an interview Nancy Wozny did with Antena in 2014 for Arts + Culture TX, “Jen and I initially met in Tijuana, Mexico in 2006 at the Writing Lab on the Border, a six-week series of workshops organized by Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza. Jen’s ideas and thinking about translation, interpretation and writing blew me away from the very start. After our first meeting in Tijuana, we kept running into each other: as interpreters at the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and the US Social Forum, as literary translators at various gatherings and as poets in readings and events. Over the years, our friendship grew to the point that we decided to join forces.” READ MORE…

Finding Quiet Places: Interviewing Guest Artist Cody Cobb

September 23, 2015  |  in Interviews  |  by Berny Tan

Berny Tan, Asymptote's lead graphic designer, in conversation with the artist behind our July Issue.

Photographer Cody Cobb is Asymptote’s guest artist for the July issue. His poignant snapshots—a departure from the breathtaking landscape imagery that defines his practice—grace nineteen of our texts in the Fiction, Nonfiction, Drama, and Multilingual Writing feature sections. I interviewed him about his artistic motivations, his affinity for landscapes, and his experience contributing to Asymptote.

Berny Tan: I’d like to start with a question about your own photography practice. You describe your photography as “attempts to capture portraits of the Earth’s surface, devoid of human interaction and interference.” What motivates and informs this approach?

Cody Cobb: Finding quiet places to be alone on a planet with over 7 billion humans is my motivation. This seems to be getting harder, so I end up trekking way out into the mountains and forests. READ MORE…

The Uncanny Listener… (Part 2)

September 21, 2015  |  in Interviews, Multimedia, Podcast  |  by Emma Jacobs, Marjorie Sandor, and Sally Decker

More stories from the shadows, featuring Franz Kafka, Yoko Ogawa, Dean Paschal and Mansoura Ez-Eldin.

The Uncanny Listener: Stories from the Shadows (Part 2)

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We’re back with a second portion of scary stories! Following on from last month’s episode, part two of our audio anthology ventures even further into the dark and dingy corners of world literature. This installment features haunting tales from Japan, Egypt, America, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with writing by Franz Kafka, Yoko Ogawa, Dean Paschal, and Mansoura Ez-Eldin. Along the way you’ll find a hallucinatory giant, a doll with a mind of its own, a hideously disfigured carrot, and the Statue of Liberty as you’ve never seen her before. Plus there’s a conversation with cultural critic Adam Kotsko about the epidemic of creepiness on our TV screens, from Happy Days to Mad Men to the Burger King commercials. Join us as we continue exploring the questions: What is the uncanny? And why do we enjoy it so much?

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Translator’s Profile: Natasha Wimmer

September 14, 2015  |  in Interviews  |  by Katrine Øgaard Jensen

Q&A with Roberto Bolaño-translator Natasha Wimmer.

Natasha Wimmer‘s translations include The Savage Detectives and 2666, by Roberto Bolaño. She lives in New York City. 

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Who are you? What do you translate?

In an attempt to avoid the obvious, I’ll borrow the 25-things-people-don’t-know-about-you meme from years ago. Except let’s make it five, and keep it translation-specific.

1) The first word I ever spoke in Spanish was ”hola”—except that I pronounced it ”olé.” 2) I learned lots of Spanish from watching dubbed versions of Highway to Heaven (Autopista hacia el cielo) and Murder She Wrote (Asesinato Escribió). 3) My first translation project was Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s Dirty Havana Trilogy, which stretched my skills to the breaking point with its Bukowskian cool and scatological sex scenes. 4) I was once given the wrong draft of a novel and had to go back over every word of the translation to make sure it matched the proper version. 5) My working title for the translation of The Savage Detectives was The Wild Detectives.  6) (bonus point) I was convinced that American readers would respond better to The Savage Detectives than to 2666—the popular success of 2666 in the U.S. was a total surprise (to me, at least).

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Publisher Profile: Ugly Duckling Presse

August 27, 2015  |  in Interviews, Publisher Profile  |  by Alexis Almeida

"I think there’s an interest among the editors in finding new translators, allowing the work of new translators to shine."

Ugly Duckling Presse is a nonprofit publisher for poetry, translation, experimental nonfiction, performance texts, and books by artists. Matvei Yankelevich is the co-founder and co-executive director of the press, and Rebekah Smith is an associate editor who spent the summer in Buenos Aires. We chatted over Skype about the press’s origins, as well as two of its translation series: EEPS (the Eastern European Poets Series) and Señal, which Rebekah and Matvei both curate. 

Alexis Almeida (AA): I want to first ask about Ugly Duckling’s origins. I read recently that you started as a zine and over time evolved into a small press. Can you highlight a few major transformations that the press went through during in this time? What were you goals for the press initially, and how have they changed over the years, especially as you expand to include more collective members and publish new kinds of books?

Matvei Yankelevich (MY): Well, it’s important to say first that the press has very little to do with what the zine was, although the name stuck. When I moved to New York, I kept using the name for new collaborative projects with people I met. When we decided to actually do something more substantial, in the late 90s, we were just a group of writers, artists, and theater people. It wasn’t necessarily going to be a publishing house, but we decided to keep the name, Ugly Duckling Presse. What united us, or gave us the idea of working together, was that we were making books with each other, or for each other, so books were a common language. And the original idea was that we would publish things, maybe have a space, have performances and shows, but that was very difficult in late 90s New York. READ MORE…

Translating Borges into Trees: An Interview with Book Artist Katie Holten

August 20, 2015  |  in Interviews  |  by Katrine Øgaard Jensen

"I think of the book as an archive of human knowledge filtered through branches of thought."

Katie Holten is an Irish artist. She represented Ireland at the 50th Venice Biennale. Solo museum exhibitions include New Orleans Museum of Art (2012); Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane (2010); The Bronx Museum, New York (2009); Nevada Museum of Art, Reno (2008), and Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2007). Committed to social causes, especially as they pertain to environmental issues, Katie is fascinated with the inextricable relationship between man and the natural world in the age of the Anthropocene. She is the artist behind About Trees, the first book in Broken Dimanche Press’s new series Parapoetics: A Literature Beyond the Human. Her artwork can be found at katieholten.com.

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Asymptote: How would you describe About Trees to someone who hasn’t heard of the project?

Katie Holten: About Trees is a book about trees written in trees. It’s a collection of texts about trees, about the notion of trees, and a constellation of tangential tree-related things. Everything is translated into Trees, a new typeface that I made especially for the project. At the core of the book is a Tree Alphabet with trees replacing each of the 26 letters of the standard English/Latin alphabet. These characters were transformed into a font, the typeface called Trees. READ MORE…

Translator’s Profile: K. E. Semmel

August 19, 2015  |  in Interviews, Translator's Profile  |  by Katrine Øgaard Jensen

Q&A with K. E. Semmel, translator from the Danish and 2016 NEA Literary Translation Fellow.

K. E. Semmel is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in Ontario Review, Washington Post, World Literature Today, Southern Review, Subtropics, and elsewhere. His translations include books by Naja Marie Aidt, Karin Fossum, Erik Valeur, Jussi Adler Olsen, Simon Fruelund and, forthcoming in winter 2016, Jesper Bugge Kold. He is a recipient of numerous grants from the Danish Arts Foundation and is a 2016 NEA Literary Translation Fellow.

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Who are you? What do you translate? 

First, thank you for asking me to do this interview. I’ve started an interview series with the Santa Fe Writers Project (SFWP) called “Translator’s Cut,” in which I travel the globe, so to speak, interviewing translators about their work. So I’m more used to being on the opposite side of an interview.

Who am I? I’m a literary translator and writer, working from Danish to English (though I’ve translated some Norwegian and would do it again if the right opportunity presented itself). My educational background is in History and Literature, and my professional background is in the nonprofit world. For the past couple years, however, I’ve been translating full time. Like with any translator, I suspect, my primary reason for translating is that I love books and literature and want everyone to experience some really fantastic books that I happen to be able to render in English. READ MORE…

Translator’s Profile: Susan Bernofsky

August 13, 2015  |  in Interviews, Translator's Profile  |  by Katrine Øgaard Jensen

Q&A with Susan Bernofsky, translator from the German and Director of Literary Translation at Columbia University.

Susan Bernofsky directs the literary translation program in the School of the Arts MFA Program in Writing at Columbia University. She has translated over twenty books, including seven by the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Hesse’s Siddhartha and, most recently, The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck. Her many prizes and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship this year, as well as the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize and the Hermann Hesse Translation Prize. She blogs about translation at www.translationista.net.

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Asymptote: Describe your current/most recent project. Why is it cool? What should we know about it?

Susan Bernofsky: I’m working on a gorgeous and bizarre novel about polar bears by Yoko Tawada called ETUDES IN SNOW. It’s a three-generation story inspired by the short, tragic life of Knut, the baby polar bear born in the Berlin zoo in 2006, but that’s just the jumping-off point for her novel. It’s really a book about identity (national, species, etc.) All the main characters in the book are polar bears, and are described in their physicality as polar bears, but at the same time they move in human society, without any acknowledgment that there might be a contradiction here. The grandmother character, born in the Soviet Union, becomes a writer. As an author of polar bear extraction, she’s an ethnic minority. She later emigrates to Canada, from where her daughter returns to Europe, landing in East Germany, where she takes a job at a circus and experiences the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s a funny, sad, moving book.

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Defying Sameness: A Conversation With Danny Lawless of Plume

August 10, 2015  |  in Interviews  |  by Alex Cigale

An in-depth look at Plume Poetry and Plume Anthology with Danny Lawless, editor-in-chief.

Alex Cigale: “Le jardin reste ouvert pour ceux qui l’ont aimé.” Plume’s motto is the concluding line of Jacques Prévert’s “Vainement.” Could you connect for us Plume’s literary influences with the spot you see Plume inhabiting on the poetry journal literary map?

Danny Lawless: Michaux, Prevert, Follain, Parra, Ponge. These, and so many others, are transformational apparitions from a world beyond my provincial one, growing up in Louisville, Kentucky.

There was Breton, of course, the most famous name, whose poetry I now think did not prosper in the shade of his political and artistic manifestos that descended into fiats and excommunications. But one proceeds by allusion, right? A sort of overhearing. So in the course of taking in all of Breton—I was persistent—I made the acquaintance of Desnos, Reverdy, Char.

The book that all but exploded in my hands was Benedikt’s The Poetry of Surrealism: An Anthology. And so I read these people for years and years—over four decades, and when it was time to begin work on what would become Plume, there was no question regarding what its “aesthetic” would be. And, I suppose, making Plume was an act of conservation, for these poets had fallen out of fashion, if they were ever in it, in the United States.

I wanted to introduce these voices to other readers, to connect with those who knew and loved them as I did. I thought if future contributors had read as I had (and I discovered many had), then we would be of like minds, sharing certain affinities and antipathies—that their work would be what I liked and admired, and that publishing it would be a pleasure. READ MORE…

Translator’s Profile: Alyson Waters

August 3, 2015  |  in Interviews, Translator's Profile  |  by Katrine Øgaard Jensen

Q&A with Alyson Waters, translator from the French and managing editor of Yale French Studies.

Alyson Waters’s translations from the French include works by Louis Aragon, René Belletto, Eric Chevillard, and Albert Cossery. She is the 2012 winner of the French-American Translation Award for her translation of Chevillard’s Prehistoric Times. Waters has received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, a PEN Translation Fund grant, and residency grants from the Centre National du Livre, the Villa Gillet, and the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. She teaches literary translation at New York University and Columbia University and is the managing editor of Yale French Studies. She lives in Brooklyn.

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Asymptote: Describe your current/most recent project. Why is it cool? What should we know about it?

Alyson Waters: My current project is a translation of Jean Giono’s Un roi sans divertissement for New York Review Books. The title comes from one of Pascal’s Pensées:  “A king without diversion is miserable; and therefore we see a great number of people constantly about the king whose sole task it is to amuse and avert the thought of the king from himself.” It’s an amazing book, a kind of existential mystery/roman noir. It has a very complicated structure, moving back and forth from the time of the telling of the story to the time of the events, and told in several narrative voices in an almost oral style. There’s a great passage in the book (among many) where the main narrator (or Giono?) inserts in the middle of his story the following:

“Obviously there exists a system of references comparable, for example, to the economic understanding of the world and in which Langlois’ blood and Bergues’ blood have the same value as the blood of Marie Chazottes, Ravanel, and Delphin-Jules. But there exists, encasing the first, another system of references in which Abraham and Isaac move logically, one following the other, toward Mount Moriah; in which the obsidian knives of the priests of Quetzalcoatl logically drive deep into selected hearts. And we are informed of this by beauty. One cannot live in a world where one believes that the exquisite elegance of the guinea fowl’s plumage is pointless. This is just an aside. I wanted to say it, and I did.” READ MORE…