Interviews

As Close to 600 BC As We Are to Tomorrow: A Conversation with Saudamini Deo

May 8, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Tristan Foster

The role of the translator is to madden a language, drive it insane, do unimaginable things with it.

Writer and translator Saudamini Deo is expanding the English-speaking world’s understanding of Hindi literature, working to translate forgotten works by avant-garde literary outsiders into English for the first time. Several years after she began this series of translations with a collection of short stories by Bhuwaneshwar, the second book in the project, Traces of Boots on Tongue by Rajkamal Chaudhary, is being published by Seagull Books as part of their India List series. 

I first spoke to Deo about her translation project in 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The writers she was interested in were almost totally unknown outside of India, and I was curious to know what it meant to have them recovered, translated, and presented to an English readership navigating life in the twenty-first century. We exchanged questions and answers while both of our countries were in strict lockdowns—her in India, me in Australia. In the fog of fear and uncertainty that had overcome us, I wondered if Deo’s project was a way of coping with the immediate reality of living through something lifted straight from a history book—would it last beyond those early days of COVID-19 or was it a mere distraction?  

Three years later, the project has not only outlasted lockdowns, it has expanded and matured, taking on the shape that Deo had envisioned from the beginning: where Bhuwaneshwar’s stories are dreamy and deeply pessimistic, Chaudhary’s stories face the concrete absurdity and hardships of the everyday head on—their subjects span time and culture. As Deo states in her introduction: “Written more than 70 years ago, the stories sometimes read like they were written just this morning.”

Chaudhary wrote at a time when India was still a young nation, yet its promises of a future filled with hope and opportunity were slipping further and further beyond the horizon; as Deo puts it, it was a “world where there is no longer either god or morality, not even the desire for it.” Maybe, regardless of time and place, we always feel as though the riches we were promised never actually eventuate.

I asked Deo about the act of translation, the direction her translation project will take from here, Chaudhary the writer, and the parallels between his time and the present moment.

Tristan Foster (TF): Your English translation of Traces of Boots on Tongue by Rajkamal Chaudhary is due to be published by Seagull Books. What, in your view, makes Chaudhary significant to a modern English readership?

Saudamini Deo (SD): I think, in the last few decades, there has been some interest in Indian writing and Indian writers in the anglophone world. However, this interest or exposure is, to a large extent, limited to diaspora writers and writing. It’s about time that India is no longer seen or understood as a mere background to its diaspora. It’s not just a reference point or historical source, it’s a living and evolving country where people live fully human and complex lives, and is just as interesting or incomprehensible as anywhere else in the world. Rajkamal Chaudhary takes his readers through this maddening incomprehensibility of the modern Indian existence in the 1950s and 1960s. And India is not just about India much the same way as Europe is not just about Europe. It’s part of the entire world, it’s part of the reason why our present reality looks and feels the way it does. Chaudhary’s work would be significant to anyone interested in arriving at a fuller understanding of the human existence in these mad modern times. READ MORE…

To Save My Own Life With Experimentation: A Conversation with Yan Jun

April 26, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Matt Turner

[I]t's about doing something, anything, or nothing in a mundane environment—and treating it as everything.

 Yan Jun is a poet, experimental musician, impresario, critic—and, notably, a creative driving force in Beijing’s experimental music scene since the early 2000s. In his illustrious career, he has published not only his own poetry and music, but also the work of colleagues who might not easily be seen elsewhere. A local fixture with global presence, he’s been featured journals of both literary and sound culture, played in venues from Beijing to Berlin, and has collaborated with many international musicians. His work stands out for spanning genres and straddling media, and his perspective is important not only as an artist, but also as someone negotiating different traditions.

I first came to know of Yan Jun through his Sub Jam label, and subsequently through his Waterland Kwanyin experimental music night, which featured different musicians every week for improvised performances. Much later, I had the pleasure of co-translating (with Haiying Weng) his 2018 sequence of irreverent poetry, 100 Poems of 10,000 Elephants, and then his new book of prose, Berlin Reflections, a collection of reminiscences and reflections on aesthetics and the function of art. In this following interview, I spoke with him on his various writerly and musical projects, which span intimate experiences of ritualized sound-making to large-scale installations of ambient imagination. 

Matt Turner (MT): To begin, can you say a little bit about your poetry, as well as the relationship of your music to poetry?

Yan Jun (YJ): I started writing poetry when I was thirteen years old, when around half of my classmates were also writing it—it was a bit of a trend in school for a while. Back then, I thought I would be a poet, but I just spent many years pursuing the phantom of being a poet, complete with romantic cliches like being drunk on stage, having a chaotic personal life, that kind of thing.

When I began making music around 2003, the way I wrote changed, and I slowly adopted a rather quiet and reflective style. Of course, my music had already been already going that way; eventually, I no longer wanted to scream out in public as either a musician or poet. After some turns musically, I arrived on a new stage—where I no longer concerned myself with reputation, but instead allowed myself to make stupid, or even failed music.

At the time I didn’t know what that meant, but I felt I could be a stupid musician making my own sounds and performing my own way. The poems then, also changed—from feigning a quiet Buddhism to writing from my tiny and odd mind. I’ve been away from the poetry scene long enough that I write only for myself now. It’s really wonderful to give up on being a good poet or a good musician. Of course, I’d still say that my poems deal with my past, and its phantoms.  READ MORE…

Great Material for a Novel: Lucy Jones on Translating Brigitte Reimann

April 19, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Samantha Siefert

The translation is always another chance to improve a piece of writing stylistically, ‎to make it really sing.

In our March Book Club selection, the sharp and passionate voice of German writer Brigitte Reimann paints a tender portrait of post-war Berlin, when the Wall has yet to go up, but lines have already been drawn, and devotions already divided. In an unflinching autofiction that finally sees an English debut after being long-adored in its original language, Reimann uses the materials from her own life to elucidate the deep ruptures carved into family by politics, the bright, early idealism of socialism in East Germany, and the hope that people hold to amidst the most tumultuous times. In this interview with the translator of Siblings, Lucy Jones, we discuss the storied history of Siblings, the political context necessary to this text, and the meeting-place between art and idealism.

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.    

Samantha Siefert (SS): Lucy, Thank you so much for being ‎here to talk with us about Siblings. Can you tell us a little bit more about the road that led you to translation?

Lucy Jones (LJ): It’s probably not a very conventional one. I ‎graduated in German and in German language and literature, and then I actually didn’t do ‎anything with it for a while; I became a photographer. I did photography for about twelve years, and then I ‎came back to translation just after my daughter was born. This is when I went back to the roots of what I started out doing at ‎university.‎

I started by pairing up with a good friend who translates in the other direction; together, we’re Transfiction. She translates from English to German, and I translate ‎from German to English, and we’ve been going since about 2008.‎

SS: You’re known for being a huge ‎advocate for Brigitte Reimann’s work. Can you tell us a little bit about your background with her work in ‎particular, how you came to advocate for her, and eventually translate her?

LJ: Translators often do work as literary scouts or something in-between, and I came across Reimann ‎because I was in a seminar for translators in Berlin. There is quite a good infrastructure here, and ‎in that seminar we were visiting different publishing houses. During one visit, I was given a pile of her work, and it was ‎really warmly recommended to me. When I started reading, I realized—especially when I came ‎across her fiction—that it could have been written now as an historical novel. You didn’t have that ‎kind of patina from, you know, a novel from the past. It was more modern, as though it just happened to be set in the past. I found that really striking. READ MORE…

Traitor to Tradition, Resister to Remorse: A Conversation with Kiran Bhat

April 13, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I want to shift the story before the labels set in; I want to blur the border before it has had time to be constructed . . .

Khiran Bhat is true to what he says he is: a “citizen of the world.” Among other things, he has authored poetry volumes in both Spanish and Mandarin, a short story collection in Portuguese, and a travel book in Kannada. He is also a speaker of Turkish, Indonesian, Hindi, Japanese, French, Arabic, and Russian, and has made homes from Madrid to Melbourne, from Cairo to Cuzco.

In this interview, I asked Bhat about writing across genres, self-translating from and into a myriad of languages, and being a writer who identifies as planetary, belonging to no nation—and thus, all nations at once. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): As a polyglot, a citizen of the world, and a writer “writing for the global,” are there authors (especially those writing in any of the twelve languages that you speak) whom you think were not translated well, and therefore deserve to be re-translated? 

Kiran Bhat (KB): What an interesting question! I’m rarely asked about translation, and since I dabble in translation, I’m glad to see someone challenge me on a topic that speaks to this side of myself. 

It’s a hard one to answer. I would pose that almost all books are badly translated because no one can truly capture what an author says in one language. Every work of translation, no matter how ‘faithful’ it aspires to be, is essentially an interpretation, and that interpretation is really a piece of fiction from the translator. Some people really want ‘authenticity,’ but when I read a translation, I just want something that compels me to keep reading (probably because I’m so aware of the ruse of it all). 

For example, a lot of people prefer the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace, but I fell in love with the Constance Garnett translation. This might have been because it’s easy to find on the Internet and I was reading it on my computer while waiting on a ferry crossing Guyana and Suriname in 2012, but Garnett’s effortless storytelling style really made me fall in love with Pierre and Natasha. I can understand why technically Pevear and Volokhonsky are truer to Tolstoy’s sentences and paragraph structures, but I feel riveted when I read the Garnett version. I want to turn the pages and find out what’s going on, and I think that’s important as a reader: to get lost and immersed in a fictional world.

READ MORE…

Translating “Aucun homme ne t’a défendue”: A Conversation with Emily Graham

April 12, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Marina Dora Martino

I felt like the words fell into place on their own . . . They have the same brutality and intimacy, just transposed onto a different soundscape.

In Asymptote’s most recent Winter Issue, translator Emily Graham brought Linda Maria Baros’s visceral and enigmatic poem “Aucun homme ne t’a défendue” into English as “No man has defended you.” This “transitional” poem comes from Baros’s collection La nageuse désossée. Légendes métropolitaines (The Deboned Swimmer: Metropolitan Legends), which combines a folkloric atmosphere and militaristic ideas to create a resonant call to action. In the following interview, Asymptote contributor Marina Dora Martino speaks with Emily Graham on her experience bringing the “allure” of Baros’s poetry into English. 

Marina Dora Martino (MDM): “No man has defended you” is a powerful stand-alone piece, but I am curious about how it relates to the rest of The Deboned Swimmer. Can you tell us a bit more about where the poem stands in the collection?

Emily Graham (EG): “No man has defended you” is the final poem in “Tarmac,” the section that opens The Deboned Swimmer. The collection is broken up into several of these sections, all named after areas or details of an urban landscape, like “Walls,” “Roofs,” “Underground.” Each section ends with an italicised piece that is at once part of the section and apart, a moment of transition. And this is what “No man has defended you” is, though the poet decided to lose the italics once the poem was taken out of context. Each of these end-of-section transitional poems goes back to the figure of the enigmatic swimmer. In these poems, there is often a sense of strife and oppression, but there is also a yearning. These swimmers seem to have something that the narrator craves and wants to be a part of, and each italicised poem seems to add to her pursuit in reaching it. “No man has defended you” is very interesting in this sense, as the contrast between this undercurrent of violence and the narrator’s admiration for the swimmers is particularly strong. 

MDM: In your translator’s note, you talk about how there is no gender-specific word for “swimmer” in English, but the nageuses in Baros’s French original are definitely marked as female. How important is it for the swimmers in this poem to be identified as women?

EG: It is very important for the poet—the swimmer figure is explicitly gendered from the very title, La nageuse désossée. There being no English equivalent, it was a little hard to navigate this gender-specific word, and I really had to take it poem by poem and line by line. For instance, I was planning to translate “les vestiaires des nageuses” as “women’s locker room,” operating a choice on which side to bring forward in that line, but when I spoke to Baros about it, she was adamant that the swimmers had to be present in the poem, so I decided on the non-gendered “swimmer’s locker room.” It preserves a certain cohesion of sense and sound, and I thought, better to have a line that sounds right and has a little side note than to mess up with the rhythm and the imagery! 

READ MORE…

Roma Literature and Identity: In Conversation With Radka Patočková And Karolína Ryvolová, Part II

April 6, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Julia Sherwood

Romani literature . . . is always political and never only individual.

Picking up from yesterday’s interview with Radka Patočková and Karolína Ryvolová on the founding of KHER, the only independent publishing house in the Czech Republic to spotlight Roma literature, today we delve further into Roma literature and identity—its history, notable figures, and ethos—with interviewer and Asymptote Editor-at-Large Julia Sherwood.

Julia Sherwood: What are the main themes, genres, and stylistic features of Czech and Slovak Romani literature?

Karolína Ryvolová (KR): Although the themes have naturally changed over time, the dominant feature and vessel of Romani stories continues to be memory. The writers relate their private histories in different contexts (persecution during World War II, post-war migration, successful pre-1989 integration followed by the tempestuous nineties, and so forth) and in that way contribute to the history of their community, which is still largely ignored by mainstream works of history. An important minority stream is feminist topics, pertaining to the traditionally subordinate role of the Romani woman as opposed to her ambitions and dreams, pioneered by Tera Fabiánová in 1970 and since successfully elaborated on by such writers as Ilona Ferková, Irena Eliášová, Erika Olahová, and Iveta Kokyová. The dynamics of the mutual Romani and non-Romani relationships in society is another regularly recurring theme. Most recently, we have seen the emergence of LGBTQ+ themes in Roma literature and interesting attempts at a complete divorce from ethnic narratives and issues.

JS: Traditionally, Romani culture has been predominantly oral––a good example is Elena Lacková’s memoir, Narodila jsem se pod šťastnou hvězdou (published in English as A False Dawn: My life as a Gypsy woman in Slovakia), which was recorded by Milena Hübschmannová (Czech scholar and founder of Romani studies, who is discussed in greater detail in the first interview). Lacková’s life story, providing an insight into the history and the tough realities of growing up and living as a Roma in twentieth-century Slovakia, also demonstrates the close historical links between Czech and Slovak Roma. Yet it wasn’t until 2022 that the book appeared in Slovak, translated by Júlia Choleva Vrábľová and published by BRaK (see Asymptote’s interview with publisher František Malík). What do you think is the reason for this late reception in the country of its author’s birth?

KR: I have no definite answer. On the one hand, I believe that until recently, most Slovaks have been able to read in Czech and vice versa, with reference to the more than seventy years of joint Czechoslovak history, so a Slovak translation has not been necessary. On the other, it seems from what we are hearing from our Slovak colleagues that the field of Slovak Romani literature is still quite scattered, distributed in fairly isolated hubs such as Nitra, Banská Bystrica, Košice, and Prešov, and it is perhaps not easy to develop a joint initiative in support of one of their classics. While Romani is much more widely spoken and present in Slovakia than in Czechia, there is at present no organisation with the visibility and impact of the likes of KHER in Slovakia. However, Alexander Mušinka from Prešov University has been working on rectifying this oversight. In 2021, he released the first volume of a monograph on Lacková, prefaced by a well-researched biographical paper that showed the breadth of the many years of her journalism for the Slovak Romani magazine Romano nevo ľil. READ MORE…

KHER, A Home For Roma Literature: In Conversation with Radka Patočková and Karolína Ryvolová

April 5, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Julia Sherwood

We have to keep exploring the potential of Roma literature so that we are still here in the years to come.

Roma literature has long been suppressed, persecuted, and overlooked in the Central European literary scene, despite its wealth of stories and importance. Founded in 2012, KHER—which means a house or a room in Romani—is the only independent publishing house in the Czech Republic to focus exclusively on the publication and promotion of Romani authors, a homeland for the support and respect of Romani writers’ creative endeavours. In this two-part interview, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large Julia Sherwood has spoken to KHER’s co-founder and director Radka Patočková, and one of its editors, Karolína Ryvolová, first on the founding and development of KHER as a renowned publishing house, and then on Roma literature and identity in the broader literary scene.

Julia Sherwood: It must have taken some courage to found a press focusing exclusively on Roma writers, particularly in the Czech Republic, a country that—as you, Radka, put it in a recent interview—”has a long way to go in terms of its relations with the Roma.“ You went on to describe common reactions you received: “How many Roma authors do we have? Who would buy and read their books? What might the quality of Romani writing be like?” So my question is: What made you embark on this risky enterprise despite all these challenges, and what was the personal and professional path that brought you to this project?

Radka Patočková (RP): Let me start with the end of your question. Since the early days, when we founded the publishing house, our team at KHER has undergone some changes. In those days we were in our thirties, full of youthful enthusiasm and convinced by our previous experience that one could take action and effect change, rather than just talk about it. Had someone told us about everything this would involve over the years, and had we known what we would have to go through professionally as well as in terms of our private lives, we might have become disheartened. Some have gradually drifted away, but they continue to root for us from the sidelines and we are grateful to them for their time and enthusiasm at the start.

We met as students of Romani studies at Charles University, and our shared interest in literature brought us to publishing. Cultural and financial management, on the other hand—the nitty-gritty of publishing, marketing, and accounting—were areas we had to get into gradually. We learned that love of literature, closeness to the Roma people, knowledge of Romani and the realities of the life of the Roma, or friendly relations with authors—all of that is not enough to bring a book into the world. We had to blaze the trail slowly, one step at a time, sometimes going back or hitting a dead end, but now we feel increasingly at home in the vast area of activity that publishing entails. To sum up: in April 2023 we are much wiser but also more realistic than we were when we set up KHER eleven years ago. And that’s a good thing; perhaps too much rational thinking in 2013 could have meant that the idea would have remained on paper and in discussions in cafés.

JS: Since its inception, KHER has published over a dozen books—starting with e-books and later moving to print—ranging from history, biography, memoirs, and fiction to children’s stories, and you have also organised writing workshops and educational activities. How many people are involved in running KHER and how is your work funded?

RP: KHER is an association made up of eleven members, some with a background in Romani studies or economics, and the rest Roma professionals—an IT specialist, historian, journalist, author, and translator. However, the core group that ensures the day-to-day running of the publishing house consists of just five women. So when people want to come to see us, we tell them with a smile that they’re welcome as long as they don’t mind visiting us in our kitchens. That is another thing I think is remarkable: we don’t have an actual office, a space for working, discussing things, and coming up with creative ideas, which can sometimes be a disadvantage. Fortunately, Prague is full of cafés and some are prepared to have our group working there on a regular basis. READ MORE…

Weaving the Intangible into the Concrete: An Interview with Mattho Mandersloot

March 27, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Matt Turner

I tried to let her poetry do its work. That is to say, by trying not to explain anything, but to convey her words in their purest form.

The Korean poet Choi Jeongrye once wrote: “As you can tell from my poems, memory is both my deficiency and my mind’s ruin . . .” A powerful assertion of the poet’s battle against the intangible, Choi’s work speaks to the formless, the absent, the incoherent, and the hidden. We were proud to publish a selection of her vivid writings in our Winter 2023 issue, and in this following interview, Assistant Editor Matt Turner speaks to the translator, Mattho Mandersloot, about his process, his relationship with the poet, and the universality of these poems. 

Matt Turner (MT): First, let me say how much I enjoyed these poems by Choi Jeongrye from the Winter 2023 issue; your translations conveyed the eye of the author very clearly. It was as if the poems, to paraphrase Zhuangzi, used their language in order to forget their language, and pointed towards something else—the particulars of the world maybe, or maybe the stray feelings that such particulars evoke. This gave me a sense, at least in part, of the author as a person.

One lingering question I had was about Choi Jeongrye’s place—and her poetry’s place—in the world around her, and in the literary community of South Korea. Could you say a little about that?

Mattho Mandersloot (MM): Thank you for your kind words! I think your comment about the poet shining through her work as a person is very accurate, and it is this aspect of her poetry that drew me in from the very start. The way she writes off the back of her own experiences and observations, while simultaneously touching on the world as a whole, really gets to me. Somehow, her work is both personal and universal at once.

As for her place in the literary community, I am fortunate enough to have met her several times while I lived in Korea. We had this weekly ‘poetry exchange’, where she would walk me through her version of the history of Korean poetry, and I would help her—as best I could—with some English poems that she was reading and translating at the time (something in which she took a great interest, given that her translation of James Tate’s prose poetry collection, Return to the City of White Donkeys, was published by Changbi in 2019). During these meetups, which soon turned into my favourite moment of the week, she did not hide her preference for poetic realism as she explained which Korean poets influenced which. She herself greatly took after Oh Kyu-won (1941–2007), who was known for his attempts to deconstruct language and look at ‘naked reality’. To me, Choi’s collection Kangaroo is kangaroo, I am I (2011, Moonji) always brings to mind Oh’s collection Tomatoes are red, no, sweet (1999, Moonji).  READ MORE…

Translating at the Limits of Language: Lisa Dillman on Yuri Herrera

March 23, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Georgina Fooks

[Herrera's] writing is for everyone on an individual level, regardless of education, regardless of language, regardless of national histories.

In Ten Planets, our February Book Club selection, the acclaimed Yuri Herrera made his short fiction debut in the Anglophone, featuring a myriad of worlds and inventions as seen through the author’s signature wit, playfulness, and fierce intelligence. Through the inspired language of his longtime translator, Lisa Dillman, Herrera elucidates the workings of humanity through a series of sci-fi miniatures, engaging with the philosophical queries of contemporary existence as only the writer can—through imagination. In this following interview, Georgina Fooks speaks with Dillman about the narrative-political, how she navigated Herrera’s neologisms and idiosyncratic style, and how such writing continues to push limits.

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.   

Georgina Fooks (GF): Could you tell us about your relationship with the Spanish language and what brought you to translating it?

Lisa Dillman (LD): I’m sort of the poster child for study abroad programs. I was an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego when I went to Barcelona for a year and fell in love with Spanish, and also with Catalan—with the creativity and the ludic qualities I found in these languages. I don’t want to essentialize and say that Spanish is a particularly ludic language, but I found the possibilities for play really enticing.

Honestly, I think my entrance into translation was just the result of returning from studying abroad and having very stereotypical experiences of talking to friends who had not gone—telling a joke or something, and them not finding it funny. And that was frustrating: why is this funny in Spanish and you don’t think it’s funny in English? That kind of challenge was something I found infuriating to begin with, and then fruitful afterwards to try to deal with.

I then ended up going to the UK to study translation at Middlesex, under Peter Bush. I had been in a Spanish literature doctoral program, but the US is really bad with translation programs and courses. There are more now, but none that I knew of at the time. In the UK and most other countries, translation is a proper field which you can study—so that’s what I did. I moved to the UK, I did my masters there, then spent subsequent years, you know, translating a short story, sending it to a journal by snail mail, waiting for five or six months to get a rejection letter, sending it out again, and eventually, finally I got somewhere.

GF: When did you first encounter Herrera’s work? And what motivated you to translate him? As you’ve translated all of his novels into English so far.

LD: I have. And I’m actually working right now on the one that came after Ten Planets. I had a friend who was asked to translate an excerpt for Symposia Way, which is the literary magazine of City of Asylum in Pittsburgh. The City of Asylum has writers in residence who are in exile from their home countries, and they were doing a series in which they asked the writers and residents to select one writer they thought deserved attention. Horacio Castellanos Moya selected Herrera.

At the time, it was just a short excerpt of  Kingdom Cons, which they published in their magazine, and I was thrilled to do it because it was immediately apparent that Yuri’s style is just so rich and nuanced and does so many different things at the same time. It struck me as incredibly poignant and beautiful, and very different from anything I had read. READ MORE…

Where the Poems Live: In Conversation with Katherine M. Hedeen and Olivia Lott

March 2, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by M.L. Martin

There’s a rawness, an honesty, and an urgent need of poetry that is both captivating and heartbreaking. Queerness is at the center of that . . .

Last fall, Katherine Hedeen and Olivia Lott published Almost Obscene (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), a wide-ranging selection of poems from Colombian poet Raúl Gómez Jattin (1945–1997), introducing English readers to the poet for the first time. 

Gómez Jattin’s poetry defies the contemporary impulse to categorize a book of poems or its poet in any straightforward fashion. A Colombian poet of Syrian descent, born in Cartagena, Gómez Jattin wrote from the margins of his literary culture on topics ranging from mental illness to homosexuality to drug use to Greek mythology; the distance between the poet’s life and his subject(s) often seems imperceptible. 

I recently had the chance to interview both translators over a series of emails, during which we discussed the collaborative process of translating this book together, as well as the “deceptively simple” queer poetics of Gómez Jattin, and exactly where in the body his poems ‘live.’ 

M.L. Martin (MLM): Thank you, Katherine and Olivia, for making time to discuss this powerful and important book, Almost Obscene, which is out now with Cleveland State University Poetry Center. I’m always curious about how translators find and connect with their translation projects. How did you first encounter Raúl Gómez Jattin’s work? And what aspects of his work—and his biography as a marginalized queer Colombian poet of Syrian descent—did you wish to share with English readers?

Katherine M. Hedeen (KMH): I first heard of Raúl when I traveled to Medellín, Colombia in 1997 to attend the International Poetry Festival. He had been a good friend of Cuban poet Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, whom I was traveling with, and he had just died. It was big news at the festival. Raúl was a controversial figure in Colombian poetry, as you can imagine, and the rebel rouser organizers of Medellín’s poetry festival had supported him. I got to know his work through Víctor; which I found both compelling and heartbreaking. He had been on my list of poets I wanted to see in English translation. Fast forward to 2012. Olivia was a student in my literary translation course at Kenyon College. Back then, I’d assign each student a poet to translate, normally one who hadn’t been translated yet. I assigned Raúl to her. She loved the work and eventually her manuscript became her honors thesis in Spanish at Kenyon. At this point, the project was all hers. I had only been involved as her thesis advisor. 

Olivia Lott (OL): Just as Kate says, Raúl was the first poet I translated, as part of her literary translation course and then honors thesis. The project took me to Colombia, where I taught English through the Fulbright Program and spent weekends and holidays traveling around the country to meet poets. My year there gave me time to read a ton of Colombian poetry and to get a sense of the literary scene. I always kept Raul’s work in mind. I was struck by how he was often excluded from national anthologies, and how even in Cartagena (the city where he lived most of his life) his work was difficult to track down in local bookstores. Through this experience I began to translate other poets, but I never abandoned the Raúl project, in part due to the possibility of “righting” his legacy through giving his work a second life in English-language translation. 

READ MORE…

Writing Against Tradition: A Conversation with Stênio Gardel and Bruna Dantas Lobato

February 23, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

I’d like to think that when people read my book and looked at that environment, they could perhaps question their own privileges and prejudices.

In his debut novel, The Words That Remain, Stênio Gardel’s draws out the sublime transformations that language enables. Written in the vivid mind of Raimundo, an illiterate, gay man from rural Brazil, the novel depicts the after-effects of violence, the burden of shame, the pain of unrequited love—and movingly, how learning how to read and write in his old age has transformed all these experiences. We were proud to present this one-of-a-kind novel as our January Book Club selection, and in this following interview, Gardel and his translator, Bruna Dantas Lobato, talks to us about underrepresentation of Brazil’s northeastern region, queer literature, and combating prejudices with writing. 

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. 

Rachel Stanyon (RS): Firstly, I’d like to congratulate you on this wonderful debut novel. Could you tell us a bit about your paths here?

Stênio Gardel (SG): I started really dedicating myself to writing at the end of 2016. Before then, I’d only had a strong desire, and was storing everything I’d tried to write in computer files or drawers. I had carried this desire for a very long time—since I was twelve or thirteen years old—but never had the courage or the initiative to start, nor the dedication required to become an author. Then, at the end of 2016, I started taking classes with the writer Socorro Acioli, and everything changed from there. I learned a lot from her, and that was where The Words That Remain started.

Bruna Dantas Lobato (BDL): Like Stênio, I was also born and raised in the northeast of Brazil, but when I was about seventeen, I got a scholarship to go to a boarding school in New Hampshire for a while—I had the colonized dreams of speaking French and Latin—and then ended up going to college in New England. I stuck around, went to grad school in New York, and somehow became an immigrant in America.

I’d wanted to be a writer since I was a child, but it was when I found myself as a foreigner for the first time that I realized I was also already a translator; I didn’t really get to choose it. There were so many books I loved that I wanted to share with the people around me in my new life, and I was also continuously writing, so translation—translating Brazilian literature—felt like a way to be my full self again. I was an English major and then a comparative literature major, but it was still very Western, and it felt like I had renounced this huge part of myself. To feel like my full self again, I started translating a bunch in my free time, and took translation classes.

That’s what eventually brought me to Stênio’s work. I was committed to translating books from the northeast of Brazil, which is so underrepresented both in Brazil and abroad, because obviously writing from the big metropolises like São Paulo and Rio always gets a lot more attention. I really wanted to bring the kind of life I knew into the life I live now and into the English language. It’s an honor to translate a book like this one. READ MORE…

Poetry Beyond Words: An Interview with Patrícia Lino

February 8, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa

. . .the traditional academic essay will never be able to say so clearly what the “infraleitura” does not say.

In this whirlwind and evocative interview, Asymptote contributor Alan Mendoza Sosa sits down with poet and professor Patrícia Lino to discuss just one of her many innovative approaches to poetry critique and response, the “infraleitura.” Based in expanded poetry, in which the word is not the ultimate form of expression, the “infraleitura” bypasses text to reach a visual, sonic, and tactile dialogue between poetic works as well as between poets. The “infraleitura” is ultimately a work of community; here, we are brought into the dialogue with a call to—in Lino’s words—“use it and transform it endlessly.”

Alan Mendoza Sosa (AMS): Could you tell our readers who are unfamiliar with expanded poetry what it is? 

Patrícia Lino (PL): On the one hand, the association of the terms “poetry” and “expanded” is paradoxical. Poetry, since its beginnings, has always been expanded and has been linked to the idea of ​​making something both corporally and intermedially. On the other hand, the association between “poetry” and “expanded” contradicts the logocentric and occidental tendency of modern poetry and reminds us, at the same time, of the importance and validity of the plural, unoriginal, and infinite qualities and possibilities of the poem, which, in addition to being verbal, can be visual, audiovisual, three-dimensional, performative, interactive, olfactory, gustative, or cinematographically conceived—as is the case for the poem in comics. In other words, the expanded poem is a composition contrary to the hierarchy of expressions, in which the word traditionally (and colonially) occupies the top, and image, sound, or gesture are relegated to, respectively, second, third, and fourth places.

AMS: You coined the term “infraleitura”; what does it mean and how does it relate to expanded poetry?

PL: The analytical tools of traditional literary criticism, which developed in the context of the aforementioned logocentric inclination, do not, by focusing primarily on the word, account for the various dimensions and materials of the expanded poem. The “infraleitura” arises, against interpretation, to respond to the absence of a bodily and decolonial way of reading poetry. It could be defined as an-impossible-to-define form of intermedial and creative essay, in which, as well as the poet’s body that expands to make the poem, the essayist’s body expands itself to understand. This other method of comprehension considers not only the word, but also any other useful means to grasp the poem in analysis. It is about reading with the whole body.

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My Literature, My Voice: A Conversation with Max Lobe and Ros Schwartz

January 26, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Carol Khoury and Laurel Taylor

I’m always travelling, travelling, travelling, to preach the gospel of literature, of my literature, of my voice.

In our December Book Club selection, Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside?, Swiss writer Max Lobe paints a vivid psychic landscape of migration, queerness, and class. Centred around an incredibly intimate mother-son relationship that crosses from Cameroon to Switzerland, Lobe addresses the politics of a contemporary, itinerant existence with humour, wisdom, and frankness. In this following interview, Laurel Taylor speaks to Lobe and translator Ros Schwartz about the concept of a “national literature,” textual musicality, and what it means to belong somewhere, nowhere—or everywhere. 

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): Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? is a novel with an immigrant at its center, and the book has been described as a contemporary story of alienation, that feeling of belonging nowhere catalysed by migrancy. Max and Ros, how do you think the concept of belonging fits in this book? Where does the nature of belonging fit overall in books that speak of migration?

Max Lobe (ML): The fact of belonging nowhere is something that really speaks to me. I was born in Douala, [Cameroon,] and then I moved from Douala to Lugano, which is in the Italian part of Switzerland. Today, I live in Geneva, and most of the time I’m always travelling, travelling, travelling, to preach the gospel of literature, of my literature, of my voice.

In Cameroon, back in the day, I couldn’t feel at home because I didn’t fulfill the criteria of being a man. I was very girlish. And you see me with the red lipstick now because I’ve come to terms with who I am. Then, when I moved to Switzerland, there was another problem, because I discovered that I was black in our classroom at Università della Svizzera italiana, the Lugano university.

In those three years, I thought to myself: “Where is my place?” I think that we, or I, can make anywhere our own place, but you need to want it. You need a willingness if you want to belong to a place—with courage, with humour, with lots of passion. Today, I think, “Everywhere I go can be my place.” That is what I wanted to communicate in this book.

Ros Schwartz (RS): I think this idea of belonging both in this book and in other books written by migrants, is that being granted citizenship does not automatically create a sense of belonging. Mwana, the narrator, is constantly reminded that he’s an outsider—through the Black Sheep anti-immigrant campaign. At first, he doesn’t even realize it’s directed against him, and then his lover—Ruedi—goes with his family to the famous Grütli Meadow, which the book describes as: “the very one where the Swiss Oath had been signed at the end of the thirteenth century, while we Bantus were still walking barefoot in the forest among the animals.” So, there is this continual reminder of being other.

I think in books that speak of migration, it’s a thread that runs through generations. The children of migrants are continually looking at both countries through a lens of otherness; they don’t feel completely at home in their parents’ country of origin, or they don’t feel completely at home in the adoptive country. People are expected to come down on one side or the other.

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Resisting Death, Inanimateness, Silence: Mohammed Sawaie on Palestinian Poetry

January 11, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Eric Calderwood

It is only natural, in my view, to introduce to English-speaking readers authentic voices representing Palestinians. . .

Earlier this year, Mohammed Sawaie, a professor of Arabic at the University of Virginia, published a new anthology of Palestinian poetry, The Tent Generations: Palestinian Poems (Banipal, 2022), including poems by sixteen Palestinian poets from diverse backgrounds. I recently had a chance to interview Sawaie over email about this work. Our correspondence ranged over several topics, including the inspiration behind this translation project, the criteria Sawaie used to select the poems in his anthology, the choices he faced in rendering different rhetorical devices into English, and the place of the anthologized poems in Palestinian literary history and in the Palestinian struggle.

Eric Calderwood (EC): Talk to me about the inspiration behind this project. Why did you think that now was a good time to publish a new anthology of Palestinian poetry?

Mohammed Sawaie (MS): The genesis of the project began with reading the poem “He is calm and so am I” (“Huwa hadiʾ wa-ana ka-dhalik”) by the renowned Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish with two of my assistants, while directing a University of Virginia language program at Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan in 2012. It occurred to me then to translate this poem—and the comments on the translation led to a Eureka moment! Following that summer, I started to think seriously about compiling a list of Palestinian poets and their poems to make their translation available to English readers, who, outside specialists, are generally not informed about Arabic literature, let alone Palestinian literary production—especially poetry.

As Palestinians continue to struggle for their home country and their own independent state, they are continually faced by a strong adversary that controls every aspect of their lives. In their struggle against Israeli occupation, the daily violent acts culminate in flareups, devastating wars, invasions of homes, killings, imprisonments, and so on. Such events often go unreported in the Western media, unless there is a large-scale war. Nevertheless, due to the wide use of social media, more and more people are becoming increasingly aware of the injustices experienced by Palestinians. It is only natural, in my view, to introduce to English-speaking readers authentic voices representing Palestinians—the female and male poets of varied generations—who are best qualified to tell their stories, their history, their suffering, their alienation in their diasporic places of residence, and their aspirations for a safe home to return to, to identify with, and to build, on par with other fellow human beings.

EC: In the anthology, there are Muslim and Christian poets, poets with varying levels of education, as well as poets born at different moments of the twentieth century and who lived through the major events of modern Palestinian history—from the period of the British Mandate in Palestine (1920–1948), to the Nakba of 1948, to the present. Could you discuss your selection process for this anthology?

MS: Readers may not be aware that Palestinians enjoy one of the highest levels of education in the Arab world despite their nakba, their expulsion from their indigenous homeland, and dispersal in the world. Poetry is often believed to rise and develop because of adverse situations; consequently, there are innumerous poets among the fifteen million or so Palestinians worldwide, poets of varying degrees of quality and recognition by readers in the Arab world.

Perhaps this is an appropriate time to say a word about the style of Arabic poetics. Prior to the 1940s, Arab poets—Palestinians included—largely composed in the classical mode of composing poetry, which means adhering to one meter and the same rhyme throughout the poem (regardless of length). Around the mid to late 1940s, many Arab poets forsook this classical style and adopted a new mode of writing poetry, called al-shiʿr al-hurr, free verse, in which the monometer and monorhyme were abandoned.    READ MORE…