Interviews

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…

States of Alienation: Dana Shem-Ur and Yardenne Greenspan on Where I Am

July 19, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

That’s a major part of translation: to make sure that it’s still the original book.

Our June Book Club selection, Dana Shem-Ur’s Where I Am, is a novel that looks intensely at the dissonances of daily life in the aftermath of migrancy, profoundly reaching below the surface of superficial comfort to read the disassociations and discontents that stem from being not quite in-place. Reaching into the mind of an Israeli translator named Reut who has settled in France, Shem-Ur constructs a map of navigations amidst cultural codes, languages, and physical agitations, drawing out the anxiety of belonging. In this interview, we speak to Shem-Ur and translator Yardenne Greenspan about this novel’s simmering frustrations and the new Israeli diaspora, and how they have both used language to reflect the confounding boundaries of our social fabric.

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. 

Laurel Taylor (LT): Dana, I’d like to ask you about what sparked the creation of this novel—particularly as you’re already a translator and scholar. How did Where I Am come about?

Dana Shem-Ur (DS): I come from a family of a female authors. My mom is a poet, and my grandma wrote over thirty books, so I always was involved in this world. In fact, when I was little, I didn’t even read a lot. I just wrote fiction, and even published a small novella of one hundred pages when I was about twelve.

Then I dropped it because I was engaged in studying history, and I channeled my life of writing into other domains. It was only later on, when I was in Paris for three years for my master’s degree in philosophy, that I just came home one summer and wrote the first few pages.

I think what generated this novel was my certainty that I would remain in France, and I would have a life there. I began writing this story about a woman who is twenty years older than me and lives in Paris, but she’s unhappy, and I think part of it was just a reflection of my fears. What will become of me? Will I become Reut?

LT: It’s almost like speculative autofiction?

DS: Yeah. I didn’t even notice it when I wrote it, but it was also inspired by a lot of characters that I met. No character in Where I Am is a real person, but the salon of people at the Jean-Claude household are all inspired by people I met and by these talks and these Parisian intellects, who I always found very fascinating; they are my friends, but throughout the period I lived there, I felt there was a barrier between us. I was always the observer who was looking at this spectacle, not completely present, like Reut. I’m very fascinated by foreign cultures, so it felt like something I needed to write about. READ MORE…

When Shadows Evade Shadows: Wen-chi Li on Ko-hua Chen and Taiwan’s Tongzhi Literature

July 17, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Queer Taiwanese literature has inherited the motives of escape and exile from its pioneer writers.

Historicising tongzhi wenxue, or gay literature, in Queer Taiwanese Literature (2021), Howard Chiang finds the origins of this political and literary movement in the “changing sexual configurations of the post-WWII era and the militancy and vibrancy of tongzhi 同志 activism in the 1990s.” Since its origins, the writers and texts of this subgenre have been prolific and varied, from avant-garde politico-cultural magazines such as Daoyu bianyuan (Isle Margin) to Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile, Tsao Li-chuan’s The Maiden’s Dance, and Chu Tien-wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man. But what can be considered as the movement’s foundational text is Decapitated Poetry by Ko-hua Chen, a writer, visual artist, and critic who came out of the closet in that historical decade, making him Taiwan’s first openly gay—or tongzhi—writer. With more than thirty books and a body of work that span from poetry, film criticism, novels, paintings, scripts, photographs, and song lyrics, he merges in writing the thematics of Buddhist philosophical thought, science fiction, and porous queer masculinities. Chen, like his tongzhi writer-contemporaries, is living proof of a literature that has been tested by time, fortified by the activism of its believers, and has withstood the police brutality of the state and the skewed conservatism of religious groups. Decapitated Poetry came out in its Chinese original in 1995, and was published last April by Seagull Books in English translation by Colin Bramwell and Taiwanese anthologist, poet, and scholar Wen-chi Li.

In this interview, I asked Wen-chi about the history of tongzhi literature, the diverse Sino-specific gendered identities of Taiwan, the dynamics of co-translating Chen’s poetry collection, and the post-Sinophone/Japanophone futures of contemporary Taiwanese literature.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): In the introduction to Decapitated Poetry, you and co-translator Colin Bramwell “felt that it was important to give a sense of the broadness of Chen’s output as a writer,” referring to the poet’s transcending beyond the corporeal-cerebral binary. Can you speak further about your experience in co-translating the aesthetic and thematic expanse of Chen’s oeuvre? How was the selection process of the poems in this collection? 

Wen-chi Li (WCL): When we submitted a translation sample to Seagull Books, we originally chose Chen’s work “Notes on a Planet,” which was composed from 1978 to 1980. One of the editors, Bishan Samaddar, replied to us that he was searching for “explicit poetry” for the Pride List series, and this queer sci-fi might be too lyrical and spiritual. I said to Colin that we could then instead directly focus on the works in Decapitated Poetry. The text was a milestone in queer Taiwanese literature, the first to intentionally expose homosexual lewdness and muscle love in Sinophone communities. We thought its English collection should provide a broad view of Chen’s eroticism, so later works like “Body Poems” were also included in the compilation—but we still could not forget the glamour of “Notes on a Planet,” which intertwines topics of gay exploration and posthumanism in the form of lyrical epic (something so unique in world literature). Colin also thought that putting “Notes on a Planet” in the last part of the English collection created an upward scale from concupiscence to otherworldliness, from corporeality to spirituality. The English collection harmoniously combines such opposite elements.   READ MORE…

The Edge of Understanding: An Interview with Robin Munby

July 12, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

It matters a lot as a translator that you trust in the author, and the writing.

As Charlie Ng writes in her essay, ‘Translating Whale-Song into Human Speech’, the poetic ‘Song of the Whale-road’ embodies the “primordial unity” of humans and nature in the timeless, ahistorical figure of the whale. Published in Asymptote‘s Spring 2023 issue, ‘Song of the Whale-road’ is a series of experimental excerpts from the novel Oceánica by Yolanda González, arranged and translated by Robin Munby. It navigates the ocean not only as a landscape but as a powerful “symbol of the collective unconscious”, juxtaposing the false narrative of human godhood we tell ourselves against the whales’ magnitude in our shared planetary experience of nature and time. In this interview, I spoke with Robin Munby about his role in shaping the gravity and pull of this text, as well as about his piece ‘A New Vocabulary of Translation’, also published in Asymptote‘s latest issue, in which a serpentine glossary helps guide a critic’s review of translations.

Michelle Chan Schmidt (MCS): Robin, you almost seem to have gone beyond the remit of a translator with ‘Song of a Whale-road’. Building on González’s approach to Oceánica, you’ve brought ‘Song of a Whale-road’ into your own experimental realm of language, structure and presentation by compiling the text yourself. What was the creative process behind the piece’s cohesive form?

Robin Munby (RM): The way the piece came about is quite straightforward. I’d read and enjoyed Oceánica and planned to do something with it down the line, but it was the call for the Asymptote animal-themed special feature that gave me the prod I needed. Because I was translating the piece with that goal in mind, it made sense to focus on the intercalated sections running through the novel told from the perspective of a pod of whales, as opposed to working on sections from the novel’s various other strands.

In the context of the novel, the sections which became ‘Song of the Whale-road’ function a little like the Greek chorus. For that reason, I wasn’t sure until I’d compiled them and really until after I’d had a go at translating them, whether they would work as a standalone piece; there’s something a little absurd about presenting the chorus without the play. But I felt there was an internal logic to them and a music that would hopefully come through even outside of their original context. Though translation always involves re-forming and re-contextualizing to varying extents, I’m sure I’d have made different decisions had these pieces been translated alongside the rest of the novel. In particular, the translation of the wider novel would likely have influenced my approach to these sections, and I’d have had to focus slightly less on their internal coherence and more on the points at which they resonate with and speak to the novel’s other strands. I’ll come back with a fuller answer if/when I translate the rest of the novel! READ MORE…

Language Is Not a Means to an End: An Interview with Hajar Hussaini

July 6, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Terézia Klasová

Engaging with texts from Afghanistan is only one pathway toward recognizing our imperialist hearts and colonizing minds. . .

Poet and translator Hajar Hussaini has made her mark powerfully with the debut collection, Disbound, which navigates the distance between her two countries—Afghanistan and the United States—with musical precision and great sensitivity to linguistic friction and spark. Additionally, in her work to bring the texts from her native Persian into English, she is continuing a vital poetic lineage of political urgency, independent voice, and pathways towards empathy—powerfully exemplified in her translation of S. Asef Hossaini’s poems in our Spring 2023 issue. In this following interview, Hussaini discusses her personal statement of a “poetics of abandonment”, the communication channel between nations, and writing from “within” as opposed to “about”.

Terezia Klasova (TK): In an essay you wrote for The Poetry Foundation, you suggest an approach to writing called a “poetics of abandonment.” Is it characteristic only of your writing of poetry, or do you consider it descriptive of most, if not all, of your writing? Do you think it can be applied to other types of writing or other authors, and if yes, how so?

Hajar Hussaini (HH): I intended the “poetics of abandonment” to be a statement on my poetry collection, Disbound, and I’ve described it as the culmination of political and personal losses that manifest in a radical offering of language, sincerity, and understanding—in the hope of creating a (perhaps false) sense of equilibrium between the poet and her reader. I used the Persian concept of Taroof as the central metaphor of this poetics; I understand Taroof, in its essence, as a refusal to become the subject of pity, and through writing about it I came to see it as the only way out of certain intrinsically hierarchical relationships.

As I explained in the essay, writing abandonment is contingent upon the circumstances in which a poet writes. Of course, Afghan poets of my generation share this context, and some may conceive of composing poetry similarly (e.g. in giving one’s all to the poem). But I don’t know if categorizing their works under “poetics of abandonment” is helpful because the poets I translate have a readership in Persian, whereas I write in English. Their readers come from similar sociocultural backgrounds and are familiar with that loss because they share a collective memory, whereas that memory does not have an equivalent currency for my readers because the average English reader of American poetry who would gravitate toward my work is presumably less familiar with my literary and political references. In this way, I have lost something that an Afghan poet writing in Persian has not, but I have also gained readers that they will only have in English if a translator mediates.

It’s important to mention something about being an Afghan who has lived in between Afghanistan and Iran. I write poetry in English, and Persian is my mother tongue; I know both languages very intimately. Like Hossaini and myself, many Afghans have lived in Iran—and those who have not, have read Iranian books, watched Iranian films, and listened to BBC Persian. So, contemporary Afghan literature in Persian is a blend of Kabuli and Iranian Persian.

I think of the poetic statement genre as simultaneously personal and public. The statement traces the conceits of one poet while inviting other poets to similarly conceive. Regarding the influence of writing “abandonment” over my translations, I think it has so far played a role of gravitating me toward sincere and honest texts. READ MORE…

Dipped One in Dusk: Mai Serhan on the Diasporic Memoir and Translating Lyrics and Letters

July 5, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I had a lot I needed to clarify, plenty of stereotypes to debunk, a narrative that was screaming at me to rewrite. . .

Short story writer, poet, memoirist, and translator Mai Serhan was born to a Palestinian father and an Egyptian mother, and raised between the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. Going on to study between Cairo, New York, and Oxford and work in Cairo, Dubai, and China, this mapping of her personal cartography and her transnational lineage transcends the borders of postcolonial nation-states—and so does her forthcoming memoir, Return is a Thing of Amber, which touches among national histories, letters, and the personal essay.

In this interview, I asked Serhan about her book in the landscape of the larger Arab memoir from the diaspora; the languages and genders that thrive in the liminalities of modern Egyptian literature; state censorship in publishing and the consequent rise of the literary blog; and translating the songs of Egyptian composer Sayyed Darwish as well as the letters of Palestinian activist Ali Shaath. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): The language of contemporary Egyptian literature, de facto, is Modern Standard Arabic—but there are writers who write in colloquial Egyptian Arabic and Ṣaʽīdi Arabic, echoing the lived reality of Egyptians in a gamut of dialects. Can you tell us the lingual milieu you write from—and how your decision to write in English come in? 

Mai Serhan (MS): Let me first map my geo-genealogical gamut. I was born to a Palestinian father and Egyptian mother, and carried a Lebanese passport for most of my life, since it is where my father’s family moved after 1948, and Egyptian mothers did not have the right to pass their nationality down to their children until 2009. When the Lebanese Civil War broke in 1975, my paternal grandparents moved to Cyprus where they waited for the war to end for fourteen years. It is there that I spent all my summers and Christmases as a child and teenager. The rest of my Palestinian family would fly into Limassol from all corners of the world—Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, the UK, and the US—and I spent all my formative years exposed to these different registers around me. After university, I joined my father in China where he worked in the export business, and I got to help him until the final year of his life. We travelled far and wide there, meeting with many of his Arab clients. After his death, I moved to Lebanon briefly, then Dubai where I worked as an English copywriter, then to New York where I studied screenwriting at New York University, eventually ending up in Oxford for my Creative Writing degree. All these places have deeply informed my upbringing—which is quite an international one.

I write in English because I went to a private British school, then to American and British universities. It’s the language I have been formally trained in all my life, both academically and professionally. I know how to express myself very well in Arabic, but the written word is definitely more present to me in English; it’s the language that has housed my scholarly and creative pursuits the most. That said, I am able to slip between Arabic and English with total ease and I am the bicultural product of both the East and West—and pretty much everything in between as well.

If we were to speak of my memoir, Return is a Thing of Amber, specifically, I would say the choice to write in English was a political one first and foremost; I wanted to address the English-speaking world, to debunk its many myths about land and people, and to promote awareness, compassion and understanding when it comes to Palestine and Palestinians. READ MORE…

A Pointed Atemporality: Mui Poopoksakul on Translating Saneh Sangsuk’s Venom

June 22, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Barbara Halla

He's very aware of the rhythm and musicality of this text . . . he said it should take something like an hour and thirty-seven minutes to read.

In our May Book Club selection, a young boy struggles with a snake in the fictional village of Praeknamdang, in a tense battle between beauty and cruelty. In poetic language that is nostalgic for the world it describes without romanticizing it, Saneh Sangsuk creates a complex and captivating world. In this fable-like story there are no simple morals, in keeping with Sangsuk’s resistance to efforts to depict a sanitized view of Thailand and to the idea that the purpose of literature is to create a path to social change. In this interview with translator Mui Poopoksakul, we discuss the role of nature in the text, translating meticulous prose, and the politics of literary criticism.

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.   

Barbara Halla (BH): How did you get into translation, especially given your law background?

Mui Poopoksakul (MP): I actually studied comparative literature as an undergrad, and then in my early twenties, like a lot of people who study the humanities, I felt a little bit like, “Oh, I need to get a ‘real job.’” I went to law school, and I worked at a law firm for about five years, and I liked that job just fine, but it just wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. 

So, I started thinking, What should I be doing? What do I want to do with myself? I had always wanted to do something in the literary field but didn’t quite have the courage, and I realized that not a lot of Thai literature been translated. I thought, If I can just get one book out, that would be really amazing. So, I went back to grad school. I did an MA in Cultural Translation at the American University of Paris, and The Sad Part Was was my thesis from that program. Because I had done it as my thesis, I felt like I was translating it for something. I wasn’t just producing a sample that might go nowhere.

The whole field was all new to me, so I didn’t know how anything worked. I didn’t even know how many pages a translation sample should be. But then I ended up not having to worry about that because I did the book as my thesis.

BH: You mentioned even just one book, but did you have any authors in mind? Was Saneh Sangsuk one of those authors in your ideal roster?

MP: I wouldn’t say I had a roster, but I did have one author in mind and that was Prabda Yoon, and that really helped me get started, because I wasn’t getting into the field thinking, “I want to translate.” My thought was, “I want to translate this book.” I think that helped me a lot, having a more concrete goal. 

READ MORE…

A Small Darkening Sky: Huda J. Fakhreddine on the qaṣīdat al-nathr, the Arabic Prose Poem

June 19, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Every great poem is a rebellion. . .

Working within the vast world of Arabic poetry, writer, translator, and professor Huda J. Fakhreddine has done much to elucidate the movements of literary forms throughout history, the necessity of constantly interacting with tradition, and the inner universe of poems as they communicate and exchange with one another. Through her extensive knowledge and sensitivity to the capacities of poetic language, Fakhreddine has demonstrated powerfully that, as in a piece by her father that she translated: “Poetry is the deepest sea, distant yet more urgent than surf breaking on rocks.” Here, in this wide-ranging interview, Alton Melvar M Dapanas speaks to her on the importance of form and meter, the necessity of removing Arabic poetry from reductive study, the ongoing engagement of reading and translation, and the intimate way she came to love and feel safe in the world of a poem.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Certain paradoxes and ironies made an impression in me after reading your latest book, The Arabic Prose Poem (2021): that the Arabic free verse, or the qasīdat al-tafīla, is not “free” in the way  of its Anglophone (free verse) and Francophone (vers libre) counterparts, and that Arabic free verse poets like Nāzik al-Malāʾika and later on, Ahmad ʿAbd al-Muʿtī Hijāzī, are, surprisingly, the fiercest opponents of the prose poem. 

Huda J. Fakhreddine (HJF): Meter is the marker of poetry in the Arabic tradition, even if symbolically and not fundamentally. It is the fence that separates poetry from other forms—even those that have strong claims to the poetic. The modernist movement of the 20th century was the first organized and theorized effort to jump the fence of meter; this doesn’t mean that the fence was not jumped before, only that it was not done so in such a collective and deliberate manner. The Arabic free verse poem was the result of that formal experimentation or innovation. 

But a more accurate label than “free verse” is qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla. The tafʿīla is the single foot or metrical unit, and a pattern of tafʿīlas makes up a meter in classical prosody. The modern poets no longer committed to the meters in their full patterns, but simplified them or reduced them to their building units (the individual tafʿīla), and often in qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla, the poem is built on a single metrical unit and its variations. The term free verse (al-shiʿr al- ḥurr) is thus confusing and not very accurate, since such poems still adhere to metrical considerations. The use of the term free verse is a testament to the influence of translation in the formative years of the Arabic modernist movement—though, as I argue in the book, translation was not that most decisive influence. I think the conversation with the Arabic poetic tradition, even when antagonistic and fraught, is really at the core of that movement, and is the real springboard to its most significant contributions. This is also why the term qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla is the most reflective of the movement’s intervention in form and its thinking about the role of meter. 

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Internal and External Dialogues: PEN Grantee Isabella Corletto on Being Multilingual and Coming to Translation Through Publishing

June 14, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Isabella Corletto and José García Escobar

Constantly switching back and forth or speaking in Spanglish, gave me a lot of flexibility with the way I use language and approach the world.

Earlier this year, PEN America awarded the 2023 PEN Grant for The English Translation of Italian Literature to Isabella Corletto, a young Guatemalan translator based in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The grant awards $5,000 to an individual working on translating an Italian literary fiction or nonfiction text into English, and with it, Isabella will complete the translation of Giorgia Tribuiani’s Padri (Fazi Editore), a novel whose prose, according to her, “blurs the lines between narration, internal dialogue, and external dialogue”, built around “the tension between the mundane and the extraordinary”.

As a translator working with multiple source languages, Isabella also translated from Spanish into English Amalia Andrade’s Things You Think About When You Bite Your Nails (Cosas que piensas cuando te muerdes las uñas) in 2020, and currently works at Indent Literary Agency (home of authors like Leila Guerriero, Dolores Reyes, Oscar Martínez, and Guadalupe Nettel) and Words Without Borders as their 2022-2023 editorial fellow.   

A talented polyglot born in Guatemala City but with access to an international education, she has been formed by a myriad of languages: Spanish, English, Italian, and Portuguese. In her work, she sees no borders between them. “The more language and literature classes I took, the more interested I became in reading exophonic and multilingual writers, many of whom I realize now are also translators,” she said.

Recently I had a chance to talk to her about her craft and being multilingual. We discussed growing up bilingual, working in publishing, the authors that shaped her as a person and reader, and the need and importance of translating more Guatemalan and Central American authors into English.

 José García Escobar (JGE): I feel like we can ask translators the following question a limited number of times before it gets redundant. So, I’d like to take advantage of the moment. What drew you to translation?

Isabella Corletto (IC): I’ve always loved reading and writing, and I grew up bilingual—yet I never really thought much about translation growing up. While I always knew it was a useful skill and was grateful for it, I think I took speaking both fluently for granted, to a certain extent. Probably because most people around me growing up also spoke both languages. I always knew I wanted to write and work with books, but I never considered literary translation as a possible career path.

Learning Italian made me realize how much I love learning and working with multiple languages. For the first time, I had to think about all of the grammatical and idiomatic particularities of a language I was learning, but also of the two I grew up with.

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Forceful in Fury, Forceful in Beauty: An Interview with Alex Braslavsky on Translating Zuzanna Ginczanka

June 7, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Piotr Florczyk

She is incredibly important to the Polish tradition and, at the same time, I believe she is a world’s poet.

Zuzanna Ginczanka is a name that poetry readers will soon become very familiar with—if she hasn’t enraptured you already. In thrilling, Dionysian verses of musical, mythic, and magical beauty, the young Polish poet astounded her contemporaries during her brief lifetime, and is now being introduced to a new generation of readers with the same powerful lyricism and sensual joy. We were delighted to feature some of Ginczanka’s poems in our Spring 2020 issue through the electric translations of Alex Braslavsky—who has since published a bilingual edition of Ginczanka’s selected poems, On Centaurs & Other Poems, with World Poetry Press.

In the following interview, Piotr Florczyk talks to Braslavsky about how translations can encourage active engagement with the source language; the sensoriums, pyrotechnics, and complex metaphoric mechanisms at work amidst Ginczanka’s words; and what makes this poet a necessary inclusion within the Polish—and the global—canon.

Piotr Florczyk (PF): If I’m not mistaken, On Centaurs & Other Poems is your first book-length translation. Could you talk a little bit about how you got started as a translator and, secondly, how you came to this project?

Alex Braslavsky (AB): As an undergraduate, I took a poetry workshop in which we read Tomas Tranströmer and Wisława Szymborska’s work in translation, and I remember being really struck by the intimacy I felt in Clare Cavanagh’s English versions of Szymborska—that was when I fell in love with Polish poetry. When I went on to pursue my master’s in the United Kingdom, I had the opportunity to start learning Polish. I also started attending Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation seminars run by Kasia Szymańska.

I shared my interest in poetry with Kasia, and she informed me that a full volume of Zuzanna Ginczanka’s poetry had just been released in Poland in the fall of 2019. I had never heard of the author, but I am really indebted to Kasia, because I remember that on the first day she and I sat down to read Ginczanka’s poems, I recognized it as some of the most sophisticated poetry I’d ever laid eyes on, and I also realized that my sensibilities could mesh with Ginczanka’s; I had the urge to translate her work.

PF: Your book is the first of at least two volumes of Ginczanka translations to be released this year. How do you account for this sudden and growing interest in her work?

AB: There has been a lot of push in Poland for Ginczanka to get her due recognition. Over the past decade, she has entered the canon of Polish poetry. Although she was long overlooked by Polish poets and scholars, she is now included in the prominent textbook, the Nasiłowska History of Polish Literature. Several monographs have also been written about her work over the last decade, and in 2020, Izolda Kiec’s biography of Ginczanka, Nie upilnuje mnie nic (Nobody Will Police Me), was published—then adapted into a play. Artists like Krystyna Piotrowska have also exhibited artwork paying homage to her. There is a pressing urge on the part of many to make sure Ginczanka’s life and work is thrown into high relief on the international literary stage. Mine is one of, I believe, four different translations of Ginczanka’s work to be released this year, all by female translators, and it is a special moment because her work is so brilliant. She deserves this array of renderings to her name.

PF: Although born in modern-day Ukraine to a Russian-speaking Jewish family, Ginczanka chose to write in Polish. Can you speak to what might have influenced her decision to do so?

AB: Although Ginczanka was a Nansen passport holder (never being granted Polish citizenship because she was Jewish), she felt throughout her life that she was Polish and was closely connected to the Polish poetic tradition. Her parents left her with her grandmother in Poland when she was still an infant, and she was raised in Równe, Poland (now Rivne, Ukraine). She went to Polish school, attending the prestigious Tadeusz Kościuszko State Gymnasium from the age of ten, and though she spoke Russian at home, she elected Polish as the language of her pen. READ MORE…

A Weird Alchemy of Taste and Determination: Speaking with Taylor Bradley of Honford Star

May 25, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

That’s what is cool about Specters—it tries to explore how government censorship affects the world of art.

South Korean author Hwang Yeo Jung’s scintillating, multi-layered novel, The Specters of Algeria, was our Book Club selection for the month of April; in a narrative that holds fictions inside facts, facts inside fictions, Hwang brilliantly builds and unravels with the double-speak and intimate language of life under authoritarian governance. This invigorating book has come to us by way of the East Asia-centric publisher Honford Star, a small press that has continued to undertake the vital and thrilling work of bringing groundbreaking writers to English-language audiences. In this following interview, Laurel Taylor speaks with the co-founder of Honford Star, Taylor Bradley, about their process from obtaining rights to publication, their mission and goals, and why The Specters of Algeria is such a special title.

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.  

Laurel Taylor (LT): It’s been six years since Honford Star’s founding. What led you and your co-founder Anthony Bird to form this new publishing house?

Taylor Bradley (TB): Anthony and I had known each other since 2008, when we were both English teachers at the same school in Korea. Fast forward to 2015, my wife and I were on our honeymoon in London, where we met up with Anthony and his wife for a pint at this 300-year-old pub called the Chesire Cheese. Charles Dickens was a regular there, and perhaps feeling the inspiration of the Ghost of Literature Past, Anthony and I talked about how nice it would be to have a publishing company. I continued on my honeymoon and didn’t think about the conversation again until a few months later, when Anthony messaged saying he wants to publish the classic Korean author Kim Dong-in and asked me if I want in. I said yes.

Our purpose for starting a new publishing company was to bring a broader range of East Asian stories into English. At the time, we felt the types of books being published were from an extremely narrow band. For example, there hadn’t been much, if any, Korean sci-fi translated into English. We hoped to bring things from areas like classic literature, sci-fi, and queer fiction into English. Fortunately, I think that the translated field has changed a lot in the past eight years, thanks to the efforts of indie and university presses.

LT: You and Anthony were both already working in the publishing sphere prior to Honford Star’s founding, but I’m wondering if there been any unexpected challenges along the way? Unexpected rewards?

TB: We did have experience with printing and publishing, but we had never been in charge of doing an entire book. So finding good translators, editors, artists, printers, distributor, publicists, and sales team has been a journey of trial and error. We’ve been fortunate that our network has really grown into strong group of collaborators, and we have a great printer in Korea that can make the most gorgeous books. Our sales team are a group of wizards, and the distributor is very reliable.   READ MORE…