Language: Arabic

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

October 14, 2022  |  in Dispatches, New in Translation, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Katarina Gadze, and Rubén López

The latest in literary news from Belgium, Palestine, and Central America!

This week, our editors are introducing the most exciting literary voices with prize winners, debut novels, and familiar favourites. From El Salvador, a millennial writer wins the prestigious Mario Monteforte Toledo Award for a short story critical of the Salvadoran regime; from the Francophone, the latest winner of the unconventional Sade Prize is announced; and from Palestine, a lament as beloved poet Mahmoud Darwish is missed for the Nobel.

Katarina Gadze, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Belgium

This week, we’re taking a look at some of the eagerly awaited literary events that have been making waves in Belgium. Brussels has recently come across a number of interesting literary events: the closing event of Poetik Bozar, with an evening of reading and performances of Warsan Shire and her translators Radna Fabias (Dutch) and Sika Fakambi (French); the upcoming The wonders of multilingualism #3: to translate or not to translate?; as well as the Writers & Thinkers stage at the Bozar centre, a richly filled series of talks and debates welcoming some of the greatest contemporary voices such as Orhan Pamuk, Rachel Cusk, and Ian Kershaw.

A handy digest of the week’s Belgian literary news would also not be complete without mentioning some well-deserved prize winners. After an initial selection of forty books, the Hors Concours prize has revealed its shortlist with only five novels remaining in the running. As a “prize for publishing without a price,” the Hors Concours honors French-language books of fiction published by independent publishers—giving the rarely awarded authors a chance to access a larger audience in the competitive Francophone publishing landscape. Among the five books still in the running for the prize is Belgian writer Veronika Mabardi’s story Sauvage est celui qui se sauve, published this January by Esperluète. Other titles include: Le bord du monde est vertical by Simon Parcot (Le mot et le reste), L’arbre de colère by Guillaume Aubin (La contre-allée), Histoire navrante de la mission Mouc-Marc by Frédéric Sounac (Anacharsis), and Il n’y a pas d’arc-en-ciel au paradis by Nétonon Noël Ndjékéry (Hélice Hélas). The announcement of the winning novel, as well as the honorable mention, will be made on November 28. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2022

October 10, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ah-reum Han, Alex Tan, and Eva Wissting

New work from the Arabic, the Korean, and the Ojibwe language!

In this month’s round-up of the latest in world literature, our editors bring vital texts addressing faith, (false) mythologies, desire, migration, and Indigenous culture to the forefront: a collection of penetrating, prismatic poems from the lauded Egyptian poet Iman Mersal; from South Korea’s Lee Geum-yi, a fiction that tells the long-silenced stories of women crossing the seas to be wed to strangers; and a new collection of poetry, documenting Ojibwe lives, by eminent writer Linda LeGarde Grover. Read on to find out more!

threshold

The Threshold by Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022

Review by Alex Tan, Senior Assistant Editor

Perhaps it begins with a search. The Egyptian poet Iman Mersal returns to her homeland in hopes of procuring a book by Saniya Saleh, an elusive writer no one seems to have heard of. Instead she finds a table, piled with the canonized words of men; nowhere in sight is the person she seeks: a wife, sister, and mother, who can only secondarily be a writer in her own right. “I don’t know how she likes to see herself,” she laments in a wandering essay. Left with the “wasted potential” of what survives, she can imagine only a voice of muted cadence, “a whispered song of mourning which slips through to me amid the din of revolutionaries’ rabble-rousing slogans, of warriors intent on victory, of those broken by defeat angrily denouncing state, dictator and society.”

A similar quality of whispering, of slipping through, inhabits Iman Mersal’s angular The Threshold, a collection of poetry translated delicately by Robyn Creswell in conversation with the poet herself. In the titular piece, a collective biography of sorts charts a path through the streets and labyrinthine hypocrisies of Cairo in the nineties: “one long-serving intellectual screamed at his friend / When I’m talking about democracy / you shut the hell up.” Elsewhere a speaker ventures, “Let’s assume the people isn’t a dirty word and that we know the meaning of en masse.” Yet this momentary compact reveals its own fragility; language with all its alibis and forms of subterfuge seems a poor vessel, too riddled with holes to hold “all the wasted days” and the “nights / of walking with hands stretched out / and the visions that crept over the walls.”

Mersal’s work is unafraid of its own promontories and edges. Often, the writing advances a crepuscular view of the self, ever-partial and shrouded in semi-obscurity, divided from its figurations. The opening poem dryly declares, “I’m pretty sure / my self-exposures / are for me to hide behind.” Her name, which contains the Arabic for “faith” and “messenger,” is too “musical” for “a body like my body / and lungs like these—growing raspier / by the day.” On what map might we locate the trembling contours of that occluded life, “whose existence I’ve never been sure of,” and which appears to “have neither past nor future” in an encounter with a stranger, on whose shoulder she accidentally falls asleep? How unwieldy it feels in its bulk, how relentlessly it has been anatomized, in spite of its wispy resistance to measurement:

This is the life into which more than one father stuffed his ambitions, more than one mother her scissors, more than one doctor his pills, more than one activist his sword, more than one institution its stupidity, and more than one school of poetry its poetics.

READ MORE…

Shifting Temporalities: An Interview with Bryan Flavin

October 3, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

We should consider an absence not as something that inhibits access but rather as an opportunity to actively discover. . .

Featured in the Summer 2022 issue, “The Ayah of the Throne,” by Habib Tengour, is a lyrical story that explores the French colonial power in Algeria toward the beginning of the Algerian War of Independence. The story centers around how colonial forces shaped the narrator’s experience of education, language, religion, and even how and when one can tell stories. With this vibrant and original account of his childhood, Tengour reclaims the power of storytelling and relays a life-altering moment with humor and compassion.

In his English translation, Bryan Flavin deftly captures Tengour’s voice and introduces Anglophone speakers to an important piece of writing from one of the foremost voices in contemporary Francophone Maghrebi literature. I had the opportunity to speak with Flavin over email about his experience translating “The Ayah of the Throne.” In the following interview, we discuss the intricacies of working with multilingualism, the importance of not explicating in translation, and the complex and interwoven histories of French and Arabic.

Rose Bialer (RB): I always like asking translators how they first began translating. I am even more curious in your case since you work in both French and Arabic.

Bryan Flavin (BF): I’ve always loved the precision and structure in linguistics and language studies, as well as the exploration and plurality of language in literature and creating writing. During my undergraduate education, I studied linguistics and French literature with a specialization in Arabic language and culture and ended up discovering literary translation as a sort of intersection for all my interests. I was lucky enough to take classes on French translation and global literacy toward the end of my studies and started with translating student writing with an undergraduate translation magazine I helped co-found. It was something I continued practicing on my own until deciding to pursue it in my graduate studies.

RB: You mention in your Translator’s Note that you had the chance to work with Habib Tengour during his Fall 2021 residency with the International Writing Program. This program sounds fascinating, and I would love to hear more about your experience, especially collaborating with Tengour in person.

BF: My translation program had the opportunity to pair with one of the residents to produce a translation of their work during workshop sessions devoted to each piece. Both the original writer and translator were present and active contributors during each workshop, and the balance (and sometimes friction, but in a generative way) between the author’s original intention and the translator’s means to produce something independent in the English was uniquely pronounced due to the workshop’s collaborative nature, which made for a great learning experience.

READ MORE…

Announcing Our September Book Club Title: No Windmills in Basra by Diaa Jubaili

September 29, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

[Jubaili] departs from reality and time to scratch at those seemingly eternal themes so often associated with fairy tales.

In this fantastic, sobering, and imagistic collection, Diaa Jubaili uses the folktale traditions of Iraq to reflect newly on war, country, and national history. Unlike traditional legends, where magic lives in the world as phenomenon and circumstance, the characters of these stories defy their grave realities with feats of imagination, in bold and moving demonstrations of how the mind can transcend matter. In humanizing the struggles of Iraq across its conflicts, Jubaili addresses the horrors of war with philosophical wit and metaphysical possibility.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, 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.

No Windmills in Basra by Diaa Jubaili, translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti, Deep Vellum, 2022

On the surface, fairy tales should theoretically be easy to translate (if there is a world in which translation is easy); they’re usually simplistically narrated, lexically limited, and short. But of course, texts that seem simple on the surface can often turn out to be immensely difficult, and in the case of fairy tales, perplexing questions arise almost immediately, because so much of what they impart depends on a reader’s pre-existing cultural knowledge. Can any of us remember a time when we didn’t know the story of Little Red Riding Hood?

The challenges of translation are made even more evident when the fairy tales are intended for adults, as is the case with Diaa Jubaili’s stories in No Windmills in Basra, translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti. In this collection of tales—some less than a page long, some ranging over several pages—Jubaili engages slantwise with the history of Iraq and Basra over the past seventy years. Rather than writing a collection of realist fiction, the author departs from reality and time to scratch at those seemingly eternal themes so often associated with fairy tales.

In the opening story of the collection, “Flying,” for example, a security guard named Mubarak thinks often of launching airborne as he guards the chickens at a poultry plant south of Basra.

. . . he flew twice—not on a plane, or by means of a hot air balloon or parachute, and not even on a giant demon’s wings or a magic carpet as happened so often in the tales from the Thousand and One Nights. Nor was he an admirer of the medieval scientist-inventor Ibn Firnas, who dreamed of flapping wings and soaring heights, since Mubarak knew that with that sort of thing, he would eventually end up a pile of broken bones on the side of the road.

There is no magic in this story—at least not the kind we associate with fairy tales—but that does not stop Mubarak from experiencing a journey from the everyday to the cosmic. In his first experience with flight, As an infantry soldier whose company is targeted by bombing, he is tossed into the air after a detonation, being sent briefly into a world where a man airborne is not shorthand for a fighter pilot honing in for the kill, but instead a miracle that allows for deferred violence and peace accords. Of course, Mubarak’s flight comes at the expense of his company, all of whom die in the explosion. Fairy tales are fantastic things, but they’re also dangerous things, and miracles usually have exacting prices. In fact, in this story, American munitions are the only means by which Mubarak can again take flight. The djinns and magicians of the Thousand and One Nights have been replaced by the darker realities of modern warfare. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

September 23, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Carol Khoury

Literary dispatches from the Philippines, Bulgaria, and Palestine!

This week, our editors on the ground report on the loss of a pivotal figure in the indigenous literature of the Philippines, the Palestinian Book Fair held amidst the politics of occupation, and the Autumn Salon of the Arts in Plovdiv. Read on to find out more.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines

The Philippine literary community mourns the passing of Higaonon Manobo novelist, poet, and translator Telesforo S ‘T.S.’ Sungkit, Jr. Sir Jun, as we fondly call him, also wrote as Anijun Mudan Udan, and his work represented the voice of the Higaonon, one of the eighteen ethnolinguistic indigenous peoples groups collectively known as Lumad, original inhabitants of the southern Philippine supraregional island Mindanao.

Writing in and translating from four languages, Higaonon (sometimes referred to as Binukid), Cebuano Binisayâ, (Tagalog-based) Filipino, and English, Sir Jun received fellowships from the 2005 IYAS National Writers Workshop (De La Salle University—Bienvenido N Santos Creative Writing Centre) and the 12th Iligan National Writers Workshop (Mindanao State University-IIT and Mindanao Creative Writers Group). His first novel, Batbat hi Udan [Story of Udan], came out in 2009 and was considered as the first epic novel from Bukidnon, his home province. In 2007, he won the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) Writers Prize for another novel Mga Gapnod sa Kamad-an [Driftwood on Dry Land] first serialised in Bisaya Magasin and later, self-translated into the English under the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House in 2013. Just this year, a translation of this novel from the Binisayâ into the Filipino secured the Rolando Tinio Translators Prize for the novel category.

Sir Jun’s third novel Ang Agalon sa mga Balod [The Lord of the Waves] bagged another NCCA Writers Prize in 2013, and is forthcoming from the University of the Philippines Press as Panginoon ng mga Alon—self-translated into the Filipino. (An excerpt is available from Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature.) In 2014, another novel Mga Tigmo sa Balagbatbat [Balagbatbat’s Riddles] received a National Book Development Board grant. In most of his short stories and novels, the structure veers away from the generic Western plot, being instead influenced by the nanangen oral storytelling ingrained to the Higaonon people and other Lumad. Other works of his can be read in Kabisdak: Cebuano Literary Lighthouse and BukidnonNews.net, where he once served as literary editor. (You can read his well-anthologised poem “I, Higaonon” from Australia-based Cordite Poetry Review here.) READ MORE…

Will the Present Suffice? On Disappearance in Fiction

September 21, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by MK Harb

It seems that disappearance creates even more presence, focusing around the individual instead of erasing them.

What is absence—this deeply felt substance that is not made of matter, but lack? In texts across time, writers have given form to vanishing and its metaphorical power, studying its mystery and its abjection, its myth and its experience. In the following essay, MK Harb discusses three cases of disappearance in short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Munro, and Danial Haghighi, and how the three authors use the duality of presence and absence to explore the psychology of those who go and those who stay, as well as experiences of class, gender, sexuality, and colonialism.

In a curious poem by the name of “Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage,” the late Larry Levis created, in words blown with the precision of a glassmaker, a philosophical text on life and desire. Beginning with, “It’s a list of what I cannot touch,” Levis narrates the myth of the Cumaean Sibyl, an ancient Greek priestess who, in her quest to ask the Gods for eternal life, forgot to ask for eternal youth. What ensues is a lesson in cruelty, for as time expands and centuries go by, she shrinks and dwarfs until she becomes as tiny as a thumb, upon which she is placed in a jar to “suffocate without being able to die.” As the years churn on, Sibyl eventually finds herself in a birdcage, placed there by an Athenian shop owner for her protection. She emits small bird-like whispers to Athenian boys, who often rattle her cage to ask: What do you want, Sibyl? To this she responds: death. Her voice goes mute as she witnesses an ever-changing Athens through to the Second World War, all the while continuing to be alive, shriveling and aging, yet somehow disappearing from living. Using Sibyl, Levis creates a melancholic irony in which a desire for a prolonged life leads to disappearance.

When I think of disappearance, I think of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and the soul-crushing friendship between Lila and Elena, two intellectual women haunted by the other’s abilities, acting out their insecurities through never-ending disappearances and reappearances within each other’s lives. I think of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1960s film Woman in The Dunes, where a depressive Japanese scientist spends the night with a seductive village woman in a remote sand dune. After their affair, the staircase leading outwards—a symbol of return to urbanity—vanishes, and the most Sisyphean struggle ensues. In such works, disappearance is an allegory for life and time, lost and spent.

Disappearance has long been a hallmark of serious prose, a thematic thread throughout literature of all variances. In three short stories set in Canada, India, and Iran, this allegorical device operates at the narratives’ center. The first is Jorge Luis Borges’ “Man on the Threshold,” which follows the tradition of narration through memory, telling us of the writer’s childhood friend, Bioy Casares, who brings with him from London to Buenos Aires a strange dagger. This object triggers another story from a friend sitting with them, Christopher Dewey, who served in the British colonies of India. READ MORE…

A Guest of its Originality: An Interview with Ghazouane Arslane

September 19, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Alex Tan

What matters here is that translation implies both bifurcation and multiplication. Bilingualism splits in two opposite directions, but enriches.

A highlight of the current Summer 2022 issue, Abdelfattah Kilito’s “Borges and the Blind” stages an erudite inquiry into the classical Arabic underpinnings of Jorge Luis Borges’s famous “Averroës’s  Search,” traversing the proximities and distances that triangulate between writers, readers, and texts across disparate literary traditions. As a reflection on the innumerable angles from which one might approach—with varying degrees of blindness and insight—the mirror of the text, Kilito’s essay is nothing if not a testament to the fundamental questions of translation that mediate each of our relationships to language and culture. Ghazouane Arslane’s English translation interposes yet another layer in this mise en abyme, deftly capturing the labyrinthine turns of Kilito’s thought. I had the honor of corresponding with Ghazouane over email; our conversation ranged over vast swathes of terrain, from the difficulties of rendering the polysemy of Arabic literature, the ethics and politics of the “original copy,” the hospitality involved in any act of translation, to more specific (but no less essential) lingerings over the evocative scene of prayer in Borges’s story alongside Kilito’s singular talent for discerning “the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the strange.”

Alex Tan (AT): So much of Kilito’s piece revolves around the specific positionality of the reader. I thought we could start there, with how you exist in language. You speak, in a recent essay, of how English eludes the contested politics of language connected to Algeria’s postcolonial anxieties. While a Ph.D. student in Britain, you grasped English as “a way out of everything inherited.” In contrast, Arabic became something you had to “[translate] yourself back into,” a language that you inhabited as “both host and guest.” How do your differing relationships to these two languages inflect the way you approach translation and, more specifically, your decision to translate this essay of Kilito’s?

Ghazouane Arslane (GA): English, I must say, has furnished me with a space of expression and self-articulation that is deeply personal and, at the same time, inevitably political. If it somehow escapes the complex politics of language in postcolonial Algeria, it is nevertheless lurking in the background. I am referring here to the rivalry between English and French as imperial languages in the last two or three centuries, a rivalry that saw English triumph for reasons everyone is familiar with. But for me, English meant going beyond the linguistic world of Algeria—a window to another world, beyond Algeria, but also a window through which I can look back into the world that Algeria has always represented for me, into myself, and, above all, into the languages that formed me.

It was thanks to Kilito, in part, that I became even more conscious and fascinated by language, by languages, by what they do to you. To speak more than one language is to turn in multiple and often opposite directions, enabling one to be a translator in the manner of Musa ibn Sayyar al-Uswari—an interpreter of the Qur’an that al-Jahiz describes as “one of the wonders of the world,” being eloquent in both Arabic and Persian. Al-Uswari, al-Jahiz tells us, “would sit with Arabs to his right and Persians to his left. He would recite a verse from the Book of God, explain it in Arabic to the Arabs, then turn toward the Persians and explain it to them in Persian.” All of this I learnt in Kilito’s Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language, my first encounter with his work. What matters here is that translation implies both bifurcation and multiplication. Bilingualism splits in two opposite directions, but enriches. To be both host and guest is better than being either—in the sense that it is more demanding, more exhausting, thus more rewarding (the pleasure, like the pain, is doubled). To wander and get lost in the labyrinth of languages—I can’t say labyrinth without thinking of Borges!—is to find oneself in the real world, whose frontiers you can only cross via translation. In this sense, therefore, I was led to translation as necessity, not choice. After reading Kilito’s essay, I told myself it must be translated. And, of course, from Arabic into English—the same crossing I had already made. Needless to say, there are considerations of visibility and readability, but the main drive is the quality of the essay—which means its translatability in Walter Benjamin’s sense. Perhaps even the multiple directions it takes you to. Kilito’s essay is a journey through Borges, Averroës, Kafka, al-Ma’arri, and others, into blindness and insight. Distances collapse. Time is insignificant. Here, indeed, is world literature. That, I must say, is what drove me to translate the essay. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 9, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Areeb Ahmad, José García Escobar, and Nestor Gomez

Literary news from India, El Salvador, and Guatemala!

Our team of editors across the world is back with the latest literary news as summer winds down. In India, the recently released longlist for a major literary prize has put translations  center stage. In El Salvador, a newly published book of poetry interrogates the concept of terrorism in Central America and the United States. In Guatemala, the city of Mazatenango played host to an international book festival. Read on to find out more!

Areeb Ahmad, Editor-at-Large, reporting on India

First awarded in 2018, the JCB Prize for Literature is India’s biggest literary prize and is given every year to “a distinguished work of fiction by an Indian author.” It is one of those rare prizes that gives equal attention to books originally written in English and translations from other languages, without putting them into separate categories as the Booker does. In a first for the prize, there are six translated titles out of the ten that comprise the 2022 longlist, which came out on September 3. This far exceeds the previous record of three longlisted translations. Two of this year’s longlisted books were translated from Urdu, and the rest were translated from Hindi, Malayalam, Bengali, and Nepali. One notable exclusion is Nireeswaran by V.J. James, whose novel Anti-Clock (translated from Malayalam by Ministhy S., who also translated Nireeswaran) was shortlisted last year.

Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, needs no introduction. After winning the International Booker Prize earlier this year, its chances of taking home the JCB Prize are high. Another promising title is Sheela Tomy’s Valli, a work of eco-fiction translated from Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil. Kalathil’s translation of S. Hareesh’s magical realist novel, Moustache, won in 2020 , meaning three of the prize’s four past winners were originally written in Malayalam.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 26, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Nestor Gomez, and Peera Songkünnatham

The latest literary news from El Salvador, Thailand, and Palestine!

This week, our editors from around the world report on a new poetry anthology promoting peaceful coexistence in El Salvador, new translations of Arab women authors, and discussions of magical realism and the Isaan dialect surrounding the Thai winner of a grant from English PEN. Read on to find out more!  

Nestor Gomez, Editor-at-Large, reporting from El Salvador

On August 5, Otoniel Guevara presented a new anthology titled Peace Isn’t Achieved Just With Desire at the Casa Morazán in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. In the anthology’s prologue, Guevara describes the project as a compilation of poems in defense of human rights, peaceful coexistence, and respect for life on the planet. He also characterized the anthology as a criticism of regimes that promote fanaticism, hatred, lies, totalitarianism, and disrespect for life in all its manifestations.

Inspiration for this project began several years ago when, in Guevara’s words, “a new religion was maturing in El Salvador, encouraged by a surge in journalism for sensationalism and blatant fake news in support of political projects empty of content, but rich in images and superficial concessions, especially to the youth. This populism, packaged to preserve and strengthen ignorance and ahistoricism, was rapidly coating a layer of corrosive mold: fanaticism.” Publication of the anthology was delayed because of the pandemic and the love affair that many Salvadorans established with the current ruler of El Salvador. However, supporters of the project continued to grow among friends and cohorts.

READ MORE…

The World in Transformation, The Poem in Translation

August 11, 2022  |  in News  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

A guide to translated poetry through our archives!

If you happen to be participating in The Sealey Challenge, wherein the literary community is encouraged to read a book of poetry everyday for the month of August, then the following is a guide to translated collections that might help you meet your mark, curated through Asymptote‘s annals of world literature. And if not—consider picking up one of these authors or text anyway, for within these works are brightnesses of spirit and sensuality, ranging journeys through landscapes and psychologies, and the courage of witness and words. These bold and wondrous works show that if you want to know a language, you should seek the knowledge of its poets.

We read widely to nurture our wonders—this much is true for all of literature, but is underlined especially when reading poetry. As the particular challenge of translating this tempestuous and evasive craft continues to unfold across the pages of poets and translators around the world, the growing numbers of collections that come to meet our shelves and hands are a testament to an endless dialectic of what Kenneth Rexroth called “imaginative identification”. The translation of a poem starts with wonder, with the identification of a gleam at the centre of the words, and a fierce urge to protect it. When this intensity then survives the removal of its own language and finds an exacting home in another, the result is just as wondrous. So much is left behind in translation, this much is true and shall always be true, but what remains constant is this sense—of awe, of the sense of something having opened up, of breathlessness in front of beauty, in front of truth. It arrives with a different music, in a different voice, but it was struck with the same spirit.

In the many poets and collections that we’ve covered at Asymptote, the work always identifies with the precise tenet of poetry to be close to its language. In German poet Kathrin Schimdt’s Twenty Poems, translated by Sue Vickerman, reviewer Andreea Scridon describes how “the two poets meet in their exigency and perspicacity, their quintessentially European writing towards a determined and defined idea.” Similarly, in Chinese poet Yi Lei’s collection, My Name Will Grow Wide Like A Tree, reviewer Marina Dora Martino notes translators Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi’s efforts to “open Yi Lei’s private world to the possibility of dialogue.”

Some translators work closely with their poets, in constant exchange and negotiation. Filip Noubel notes how in Taiwanese poet Amang’s Raised by Wolves, translator Steve Brandbury was careful to consult the author, ensuring that she “understands the various options I have for representing that in English.” Their collaboration defied limits, resulting in “a humorous approach to these seemingly insurmountable obstacles.” Other translators do not possess such luxuries. Alexander Dickow and Sean T. Reynolds, the translators of Swiss poet Gustave Roud’s Air of Solitude and Requiem, had to work without insight from the originating mind, the poet having passed in 1976. Nevertheless, reviewer Sarah Moore exalts the work as a “powerful, superb translation from one of Switzerland’s greatest poets of the twentieth century.”

So much of the importance in these texts lies in introducing the works of vital figures in movements that changed the world. In Alice Paalen Rahon’s Shapeshifter, translated by Mary Ann Caws, we see a collection that sheds light on a multi-faceted Surrealist, whose literary output had previously been overshadowed by her achievements in visual art. As reviewer Georgina Fooks states: “. . . with the arrival of Shapeshifter, we can gain valuable insight into this remarkable poet who was one of the best of the Surrealists, despite the lack of wider recognition.” Another Surrealist giant, Giorgio di Chirico, is revived in poetry by way of translator Stefania Heim; in his collection, Geometry of Shadows, reviewer Garrett Phelps identifies “a visual mind orienting itself toward the written word: a promiscuous use of strong imagery, and waves upon waves of metaphors at the expense of a more nimble and protean style.” Also defying any singular definition is Russian sculptor and founder of Russian Conceptualism, Dmitri Prigov, whose defiant and liberated poetics have reached the Anglophone by way of Simon Schuchat and Ainsley Morse in Soviet Texts. READ MORE…

Summer 2022: Highlights from the Team

August 8, 2022  |  in News  |  by Andriana Hamas, Caridad Svich, Daniel Naman, Ellen Elias-Bursać, Liam Sprod, M.K. Harb, M.L. Martin, Meghan Racklin, and Thuy Dinh

Don’t know where to begin with our latest issue? We’re here to help!

The most striking piece in this issue was Abdelfattah Kilito’s “Borges and the Blind” (tr. Ghazouane Arslane) for informing me of Borges’ deep affiliation with Arabic literature (something I wasn’t aware of before)—it opened my eyes to another dimension of Borges’ works as well as highlighted the blind spot of critics and readers of translation who might not be privy to the multifaceted aspects of the text behind the text. Cao Kou’s “The Wall Builder” (tr. Chen Zeping and Karen Gernant) is a truly wonderful and chilling fable on the idea of border, i.e., a porous wall between insider and outsider, individual and the collective in a repressive society. Anna Felder’s “Unstill Life with Cat” (tr. Brian Robert Moore) is a lovely, fully immersive tale from a cat’s point-of-view. The translation is magical, wondrously immediate. I love Rose Bialer’s perceptive questions and the resulting interview with Maureen Freely for revealing how Turkey’s political situation might affect the relationship between an author and his translator, and how there are so many layers of “the other” in Turkish society.

—Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora

Kelsi Vanada’s translation is itself a reflection of Andrea Chapela’s long meditation on the meaning and mechanics of mirrors, with all the inevitable subtle distortions and complex reconfigurations that Chapela elaborates on. This extended reflection employs myriad angles of vision‚ philosophy, science, toys, personal narrative, literature, and history, from which to view the significance of mirrors, the act of looking at oneself, and the act of constructing a self-image, with and without the fragmented and inevitably distorted images that mirrors provide. Juan Calzadilla’s poems from Dictated by the Pack (tr. Katherine Hedeen and Olivia Lott) are virtuosic translations—the complexity of the diction and rhythms as well as the subtlety of how the language accretes are very challenging to carry over into English without disrupting the balance between sense-making and surprises in the language. The lines shift across the page, like waves lapping onto the shore, as if the rhythms of thought have been recorded faithfully in their syncopated arrivals, gaps, and runnings-over. Almog Behar’s long poem “First We’ll Speak Many Words About God” (tr. Shoshana Olidort) is a meditation on religion and god, but also an interrogation of our conception of god, an interrogation of the faithful as well as the faithless. It’s subversive and yet hopeful. Sa’eed Tavana’ee Marvi’s ”The Open Tome” (tr. Khashayar Kess Mohammadi) is set in a post-apocalyptic, interplanetary, post-Earth world. The voice of the poem shifts‚ from an unnamed speaker, to a television set, to an ”Oceandweller,” to an unnamed speaker again. The experimental formatting of the poem allows the reader to shift between these different lens ratios. As such, the reader experiences a telescoping which perhaps informs the experience alluded to in the poem‚ by a visionary which either documents the future, or foretells the otherworldliness of the present moment. I really enjoyed Rose Bialer’s interview with Maureen Freely, which touches on the craft of translation, the challenges and the advantages of translating through the prism of race, gender, sexuality, etc., and what it’s like to navigate a translator-author relationship that spans two very different cultures, especially when the author in question is famous, and at certain points even infamous.

—M. L. Martin, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

I have a distinct affinity for Mitteleuropa miserablism, and this edition contains two quintessential instances of this literary tendency: Elfriede Jelinek (tr. Aaron Sayne) and Thomas Bernhard (tr. Charlie N. Zaharoff). It does not get much more central European than Austria, and the Austrians seem to have an affinity for misanthropy, self-loathing, destruction, perversity, and psychosis, but all expressed in the most perfect prose, poetry, painting, and music. Part of my love for these two writers in particular, however, is their pushing, bending, and breaking of the formal rules of language. Perhaps this formalism is my own perversity, since, as a copy-editor, I should be forcing such language back into its grammatical and syntactical straightjacket; but as much as I know and can enforce such rules in a professional manner, I thrive and find a thrill in breaking them. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2022

August 1, 2022  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Erica X Eisen, and Xiao Yue Shan

This issue deeply reckons with fixing selves that have been lost, falsely performed, and fractured.

The Summer 2022 Issue is our forty-fifth edition, featuring work from thirty-one countries! From newly translated fiction by luminaries such as Elfriede Jelinek and Thomas Bernhard, to our special feature highlighting Swiss literature, and to probing essays that interrogate the adoption of new languages, these intricately linked writings feature characters who are thrown into abysses both personal and political but discover moments of solace, communion, and revelation. To introduce you to another rich, wide-ranging issue, our blog editors discuss their favorite pieces.

In Elisa Shua Dusapin’s 2021 National Book Award-winning novel, Winter in Sokcho, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins from the French, the unnamed narrator, a young French Korean woman living on the border between North and South Korea, experiences an ongoing crisis of identity due her inability to be seen, displacement, and strained relationships with her domineering mother and absent boyfriend. In the novel, the narrator seeks to recover a self that has been rendered invisible. One of Dusapin’s most fitting metaphors for this reassembling of the self is the narrator’s constant search for her reflection in the mirror of the guesthouse where she works. Similarly, the search for a true reflection emerges as a central theme in the introspective Summer 2022 issue. It is apt in these precarious times when the stability of the self is being shaken by forces of displacement and politics that this issue deeply reckons with fixing selves that have been lost, falsely performed, and fractured. The building of the self is literalized by Lu Liu’s playful yet melancholy cover art, in which two boys nervously construct a sand tower out of words, alluding to the Tower of Babel made personal in Jimin Kang’s moving essay, “My Mother and Me.”

The mirror is the object of Andrea Chapela’s kaleidoscopic, multidisciplinary self-inquiry, “The Visible Unseen,” elegantly rendered by Kelsi Vanada. It adopts the fragmentary form of a series of failed beginnings, in the manner of Janet Malcolm’s famous essay on David Salle, Forty-One False Starts. Chapela’s variation of the form represents the difficulty of locating the self in one’s reflection. By extension, Chapela argues that at a given time, the self can never be completely isolated; rather, it can only ever be seen through a particular type of mirror, at a certain angle, beneath a certain light, yielding a fragment of the whole. Just as Chapela scrutinizes the mirror through a variety of perspectives—scientific, literary, philosophical, memoiristic—so must we be as comprehensive yet fragmentary when we search for ourselves. As Chapela writes, “Little by little, I start to accept that each new beginning of the essay is just one piece of the full picture.”

READ MORE…

Finding Salvation: An Interview with Najwa Barakat

June 27, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Reem Joudi

I was among the first authors to tackle the theme of cruelty and violence, long before the Arab world witnessed its various collapses.

In turns spellbinding and labyrinthine, psychological and philosophical, tragic and bright, Najwa Barakat’s Mister N marks the triumphant return of the Lebanese author to writing. Through the story of an aging author who wanders the streets in shifting boundaries and realms, Barakat paints a painful, fearless portrait of contemporary Beirut. We were honored to present this powerful novel as our Book Club selection for May, and in the following interview, Reem Joudi speaks with Barakat about her fifteen-year hiatus, the ghosts and pariahs of Lebanon, and the “beautiful dream” of Beirut.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, 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.

Reem Joudi (RJ): You wrote Mister N following a fifteen-year break from writing. Could you describe your journey back, and why you chose to return with the story of Mister N?

Najwa Barakat (NB): I cannot say that I was completely cut off from writing during these fifteen years, but my literary activity was suspended for a short while of my own volition—and not because I was struggling with writer’s block. I had reached a certain juncture in my narrative journey and in my writings, which had materialized in the publication of three novels (The Bus, Oh Salaam!, and The Secret Language). These works addressed themes of violence, cruelty, and the ordinary human being’s capacity to commit evil in specific moments or contexts. I wanted to take a “break” to think about my next steps, what the title of my forthcoming literary chapter should be, as well as to focus on my permanent writing workshop, which is dedicated to helping young Arab writers develop their storytelling projects. Thanks to the workshop, twenty-three novels have been published thus far by renowned Arab publishing houses, and some of these works have received distinguished literary awards.

To tell you the truth, I felt an aversion to what was being published, consumed, and promoted as literary works of a high caliber—works which, in reality, are lacking the minimum standards for quality writing. Add to that the horrific changes that my home country, Lebanon, was experiencing, as well as the many wars, tragedies, and revolutions that countries of the Arab region were facing, all of it produced and propagated a dreadful cosmic chaos. Together, these factors presented silence as the best option during turbulent times: choosing silence, observing [what is around me], and attempting to find the meaning and purpose of literature amid all this destruction. Mister N encapsulates this experience in all its dimensions. It describes the labor of writing and the difficulty of belonging to a reality that resembles quicksand, capable of swallowing you whole at any moment. The novel also mends my relationship with Beirut, a city I returned to in 2010 following a long absence in Paris. Since then, I’ve witnessed the transformations and defeats that foreshadowed the city’s current state of collapse and decay.

RJ: There are many ghosts that haunt Mister N’s memory—Luqman, the former warlord and protagonist from one of your earlier novels Oh Salaam!; his mother and father. . . What do these multiple, multifaceted ghosts signify, and which of them do you think has the strongest pull on Mister N’s mind and spirit?

NB: Mister N is a writer with a heavy past and a troubled present. He is battling the ghosts of his childhood and the ghosts of his current tragic reality, where parts of Beirut—namely the neighborhoods he stumbles upon and begins exploring by chance—have transformed into the gutters of society. Luqman’s ghost, as you mentioned, is a person who committed atrocities during the Lebanese civil war; Oh Salaam! takes places in Beirut, in the wake of the war and at the beginning of the so-called transition to peace, and Luqman is killed by his friend’s mother after she discovers the horrors that both men committed against innocent lives. The same Luqman will reappear twenty years after the events of Oh Salaam!, very much alive and running an Internet cafe in one of Beirut’s working-class neighborhoods. A manhunt thereby ensues between him and Mister N, who, while he fears Luqman and seeks to escape him, is also drawn to him by a mysterious and obscure thread.

All this is to say that the people who committed the horrors of war are not dead, but living peacefully among us, a situation that Mister N—a writer who treads the thin line separating reality from fiction and truth from illusion—can neither tolerate nor comprehend. For Mister N, reality turned out to be more tragic than he could have ever imagined—harsher, darker, and more cruel. What could literature do in circumstances such as these, and where does a writer, worn down and defeated by reality, find their salvation? In fact, Mister N’s suffering captures my own struggle vis-à-vis all that was unfolding around me. I was among the first authors to tackle the theme of cruelty and violence [in my novels], long before the Arab world witnessed its various collapses. I intuited them, so to speak, then was terrified to face a reality which shook me to the core—one that heralded even harsher, darker, and more violent truths.  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

June 24, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Nestor Gomez, and Peera Songkünnatham

New poems, book fair discussions, and online publications from Thailand, El Salvador, and Palestine!

This week, our editors from around the world report on an international poetry volume in support of human rights, an author talk between two Salvadoran poets, and an online exploration of the history of Jerusalem that includes a wealth of Palestinian literature. Read on to find out more!

Peera Songkünnatham, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Thailand

Five Thai poems got a chance to shine in the company of poems in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Swahili. On June 15, the Human Rights Defenders Poetry Challenge, organized by Protection International together with its partners from ProtectDefenders.eu and the University of York, concluded with an awards ceremony and a booklet launch. As part of the #StayWithDefenders campaign, the challenge called on “all creatives, activists and advocates for human rights” to submit poems honoring those who “have suffered, succeeded, fought and fallen.” The top three winners were announced from a pool of thirty finalists, five from each of the languages. You can read the booklet here; every poem not originally in English is accompanied by an English translation. How nice it is for poets to slip through the political and poetical confines of their countries into an ad-hoc international space, at least virtually on Zoom and in translation.

“To be a poet in this country is like being in a cage,” stated Mek Krueng Fah about Thailand upon winning third place overall. His poem “Remember, we’re all by your side” (โปรดจำไว้.. เราต่างอยู่ข้างเธอ) manages to console even as it stares into an unrelenting bleakness: “On the road of fighters that will know no end, / The ones who came before lie dead, uncovered; / Their bodies caution ‘watch your step, my friend,’ / And nightly, to protect, their spirits hover.”

First place went to “The Full Truth” (Ukweli Kamili) by Martin Mwangi from Kenya. The poem deftly impersonates the flippant attitudes of shrewd politicians who speak in half-truths: “Welcome, it is here that we will give you vegetable rice while we eat pilau rice / then if you complain we’ll say be thankful at least you ate. / However, for how long shall you live with these half-truths of at least? / I don’t know, answer that yourself.” Second place was awarded to María del Campo from Uruguay, whose “To Those Afraid of Windmills” (A quienes les temen los molinos) will make human rights defenders—“those who slip through the cracks and pose a threat to the wall as bridge, brick, step, door”—feel seen and touched. READ MORE…