Language: Arabic

Ambrosial Wafts: An Interview with A.J. Naddaff

February 10, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Alex Tan

I believe literature is the conduit to the deepest understanding of society.

The first time I corresponded with A.J. Naddaff was after I had read an early issue of his excellent newsletter Untranslatable, devoted to extensive conversations with Arabic-to-English literary translators about their craft. Startled by the sharpness, intimacy, and candour of each interview, I emailed him merely to convey my appreciation for the work he was doing and how fortuitous it seemed to me that he had begun this initiative at the time that I found myself falling in love with the limitless depths of classical Arabic literature. He wrote back, expressing genuine curiosity about my interests, saying: “Connecting with people who share this love makes the world feel a bit smaller and kinder.” That told me all I needed to know about how A.J. makes space for his interlocutors to arrive at such acute insights as “Every poem is a linguistic event which reimagines its entire tradition” (Huda Fakhreddine) and “That joy and pleasure of someone having it on with you is the very pleasure of literature. You know it and yet you still fall for it” (Maurice Pomerantz).

Besides being a gracious person and a master’s student in Arabic Literature at the American University of Beirut, A.J. wears many other hats: he is an award-winning multimedia journalist, translator, and social science researcher. He’s met and reported on people of diverse stripes, from Sufi intellectuals to ISIS extremists, co-translated Hassan Samy Youssef’s Threshold of Pain with Rebecca Joubin and Nick Lobo, and is currently working on a thesis regarding the translation of the pre-Islamic mu’allaqat into English. I was excited to encounter someone with his feelers in so many different worlds and to hear his meditations on the translatability of Arabic literature, the meanings of home, the in-betweenness of negotiating both the journalistic and the literary, and the state of contemporary Lebanese art in the aftermath of trauma.

Alex Tan (AT): In one of the first issues of your Untranslatable newsletter, you quote the brilliant Moroccan literary critic Abdelfattah Kilito, who wrote of how in the classical Arabic literary tradition, the ancients “endeavoured to make their works untranslatable.” What does untranslatability signify in classical Arabic literature? Why did you decide to name your newsletter after a quality that appears to defy the possibility of translation?

A.J. Naddaff (AJN): In my opinion, and this is up for debate, the idea of untranslatability is the wrong framing for understanding tensions that exist when translating Arabic. Alexander Key has proposed that the idea of untranslatability is a modern idea—that the ancients thought mental content (maʿnā) was always transferable between languages, from Persian to Arabic. So untranslatability was birthed out of early modern European notions, and we should push ourselves—as many translators are doing—to reimagine limits when translating Arabic into English.

Shawkat Toorawa takes it even further and believes that it’s possible to translate something sublime, like the Qur’an, into another language and to still convey the cadence, movement, and the beauty of the original, which I’m totally on board with.

AT: Most of the scholars you’ve chosen to interview so far are translators of pre-modern Arabic literature and contributors to the NYU Library of Arabic Literature series. I’d like to ask about your thoughts on the relationship between the pre-modern and the modern in Arabic writing. You work on the Mu’allaqat (hanging odes), but you’re also interested in contemporary Levantine literary production. How do you position yourself between these two worlds? Does your knowledge of pre-modern genres and forms haunt your approach to the modern?

AJN: Coming into my master’s at the American University of Beirut, I carried this notion that bifurcated “old” or classical Arabic literature from “modern.” I remember distinctly telling my teacher Bilal Orfali that I was excited to read old Arabic literature and he politely cut me off and encouraged me to think of literature more as a continuum. I think this is probably how we should think of literature in all traditions, but especially in Arabic.

So now, I position one foot in each world with no problem. I’m not haunted by my knowledge of pre-modern genres and forms besides by how little I know. Salim Barakat, one of the most celebrated modern Arabic authors, claims he only reads pre-modern works. Rachid el Daif’s novels are full of references to “pre-modern” literature: One Thousand and One Nights, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyei, the Kitab al-Aghani, al-Jahiz, Majnun and Layla, and Pre-Islamic (Jahili) poetry all make appearances. Mahmoud Darwish has a famous poem where he draws on elements from the sixth century poet-king Imru’ al-Qays’s final trip to Constantinople to allegorically critique the Oslo Accords. As T.S. Eliot said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did. Precisely, and they are that which we know.”

READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2022

February 2, 2022  |  in News  |  by Barbara Halla, Bassam Sidiki, Caridad Svich, and Lee Yew Leong

Highlights from the Winter 2022 edition, presented by our section editors!

Gathering new work from 43 countries, the Winter 2022 edition might be overwhelming at first. But don’t let that stop you from diving right in! Whether you consume the issue from cover to cover or click on whatever catches your fancy, we just hope you enjoy reading this eleventh anniversary edition as much as our section editors have loved putting it together! Here to tell you more about their lineups are Yew Leong, Barbara, Bassam, and Caridad. If, after reading the issue, you’re inspired to submit work, don’t forget that we welcome submissions all year round; if you are a Swedish-English translator, take note that we’re currently inviting submissions to a paid Swedish Literature Feature, slated for publication in Spring 2022. For guidelines on how to submit, go here.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction, Poetry, Special Features, and Interview Editor:

The statistics are undeniable: With one language dying every two weeks, ninety percent of all languages will go extinct within the next one hundred years. Even as we at Asymptote celebrate another milestone with our most diverse issue yet, loss—specifically that of entire worlds indexed by languages—is never quite far from our minds. In Dear You, translated brilliantly by Samantha Farmer, Croatian author Jasna Jasna Žmak takes us on a playful thought experiment inspired by Barthes: ”What if one word was removed each time a speaker of its language died as an act of remembrance?” Intended as an enjoinder to Eliot Weinberger’s essay published in these very pages one year ago, Yeshua G. B. Tolle’s submission to this issue’s Brave New World Literature Feature examines Aaron Zeitlin’s poetry, written in a language “half of whose speakers had been wiped off the face of the earth” when Nazis invaded his native Poland. “On what world do we gaze,” he asks poignantly, ”when the poet himself believes the world is over?” Whole worlds are rendered believably before our eyes in Matt Reeck’s skillful rendering of Rachid Djaïdani’s 1999 classic of banlieue literature that smashed Parisian tropes, and in Kim Su-on’s atmospheric science fiction brought to us by talented translators Spencer Lee-Lenfield and Lizzie Buehler. My two personal highlights from the Poetry section couldn’t be more diametrically apposite: the first (the Kazakh poet Anuar Duisenbinov) is as light (and alive with defiance) as the second (Spanish poet Pepe Espaliú) is weighted (with clear-eyed acceptance of inevitable death); both are powerful and moving. Rounding up the issue’s stellar lineup, Neske Beks and Charlotte Van den Broeck (in the Flemish Literature Feature I curated) as well as Jamaican-born artist Cosmo Whyte (in the Visual section, which Eva Heisler assembled) make important contributions to the conversation on our collective racial past.

From Barbara Halla, Criticism Editor:

In many reviews, the very act of translation can feel like an afterthought; usually reviewers will include a short line or paragraph to acknowledge the deftness of the translator’s skill, but that will be the extent of their engagement. I can understand why that happens: at times, without some familiarity with the original, it can feel impossible to speak in detail about the translator’s craft—which is why Tom Abi Samra’s review of Huda J. Fakhreddine and Jayson Iwen’s translation of Salim Barakat’s poetry is such a revelation. In his review, the translation features front and center, as Abi Samra investigates how Barakat’s attempt to defamiliarize Arabic is rendered into English, doing an almost phrase-by-phrase analysis of the translation. There are some texts, however, where the reviewer does not have a choice but to engage with the translator, because the very book they are reviewing questions the porous borders between author and translator. This is the case with Catherine Fisher’s fascinating review of Tomaž where Joshua Beckman appears not merely as a translator, but as a co-writer having had a direct hand in choosing how to present Tomaž Šalamun’s poetry into English. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

January 21, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Erica X Eisen, and Julia Sherwood

New festivals, publications, and films from Slovakia, Palestine, and Kazakhstan!

This winter, festivals and events across the globe introduce new literature in translation, while literary magazines and film festival screenings amplify underrepresented voices. In Slovakia, recent works explore sexual identity, the weight of twentieth-century history, and trauma. From Palestine, Arablit and Arablit Quarterly launched its first “In Focus” section, spotlighting Iraqi literature. In Kazakhstan, the film Akyn highlights the political power of writing, acquiring greater significance in the context of recent governmental restrictions on free speech. Read on to find out more!

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Slovakia

In October 2021, Barbora Hrínová was declared the winner of Slovakia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Anasoft Litera. The jury praised her remarkable debut collection Jednorožce (Unicorns) for writing “about otherness without exoticizing or exploiting it, thus enabling us to accept different ways of life or the search for identity.” As the author herself put in a recent interview: “Otherness in Unicorns occurs on two levels; one is literal, where the characters from the LGBTI+ community belong by definition, and the other is universal, all-human; after all, every person is a minority in their own right. I didn’t want to emphasize the element of sexual identity or outward difference in the characters, because I think that such people are part of everyday life and no different from the majority in any essential way. Rather, I was interested in and irritated by the way they are perceived by society, which often reacts very dismissively and critically to even a minor deviation from the norm. I wanted to create a space in the stories where we could also look at the ‘different characters,’ or a variety of shortcomings in a somewhat more human way.” The fact that Hrínová’s collection also won the 2021 René Prize, chosen by secondary school students, testifies to the author’s empathetic handling of a sensitive subject.

November 2021 marked the centennial of the passing of Slovakia’s national poet, Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav. This brief video, recorded for the Slovak consulate in New York City by Columbia University professor Christopher W. Harwood, is a great primer for anyone not familiar with Hviezdoslav’s work. Literature scholar Charles Sabatos gave a captivating Zoom talk on Gejza Vámoš (1901–1956), another Slovak writer not yet widely known in the English-speaking world. Sabatos, who is translating Vámos’s seminal Atómy boha (God’s Atoms), published in 1928 and 1933, focused on issues of language and identity in this book, summed up by one critic as “a novel of heroism and syphilis.”

While this translation awaits publication, two recent works by contemporary Slovak writers appeared in October, inaugurating Seagull Books‘s Slovak list: Boat Number Five by Monika Kompaníková (translated by Janet Livingstone) and Necklace/Choker by Jana Bodnárová (translated by Jonathan Gresty). TranslatorsAloud features excerpts from both books: a bilingual reading by the author and translator in one case and a reading by the translator in the other, while an interview with Jana Bodnárová is available on Trafika Europa Radio.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

January 14, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, MK Harb, and Peera Songkünnatham

From Scheherazade to Avicii, the literary news of the week spans new looks at pivotal figures.

From book fairs to bestsellers, the world of international letters knows no rest. In Qatar, the 31st Doha International Book Fair has launched with an in-person schedule. In Japan, a new project aiming to promote Southeast Asian and Indian literature has published an impressive roster of short fiction, and in Sweden, two beloved figures are immortalized in text. Read on to find out more!

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

Happy New Year from the world of Arabic literature! With Omicron, media frenzies, and restrictions around the world, we could all use some escape. Travel might be limited, but how about an escape to the fantasy world of Arabian Nights? The iconic collection that has inspired countless others around the world, from the Brothers Grimm to Naguib Mafhouz, has received a fresh new translation by Yasmine Seale—known for her riveting new translation of Aladdin. Enter the world of ghouls, mystics, and enchantresses, and enjoy your COVID-free time travel (it has some brilliant images!).

The theme of time travel continues with the launch of the Winter issue of Arab Lit Quarterly! Responding to the theme of folk and featuring great writers such as Palestinian author Sonia Nimr, this issue promises to “cover stories, songs, and poetry from the last millennium, from Andalusia to Yemen, with stops across the cities in between!” You can get your copy here.

That being said, the world is not entirely being relegated to the virtual, as Qatar launches the 31st Doha International Book Fair for the year of 2022, under the theme of “light is knowledge.” Finally, we will visit our first in-person book fair in years, which will host renowned Arabic book distributors such as Samarkand Books from Qatar and Antoine Cachet from Lebanon! READ MORE…

Salvation Written Elsewhere: Mohamed Choukri and Abdellah Taïa at the Limits of World Literature

January 13, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Alex Tan

[T]he works of Mohamed Choukri and Abdellah Taïa narrate points of silence to enact the difficulty of speaking as oneself.

In the first part of this essay, Alex Tan discussed Arab texts that anticipate their own reception in translation or as world literature, and how Mohamed Choukri and Abdellah Taïa—in For Bread Alone and Salvation Army—desacralise the languages of Classical Arabic and French respectively. Here, the discreet elements of these two “autobiographical” works are further analysed, in order to understand how a self can be written into existence amidst erasure, shame, and even the savagery of love.

“All of us already wanted to forget our past, forget last night,
forget the troubles that brought us here and couldn’t be shared no matter who asked.”

—Abdellah Taïa, Salvation Army (tr. Frank Stock)

“And So I Felt Ashamed”: An Affective Education

Caught in between Arabic and Western autobiographical conventions, the works of Mohamed Choukri and Abdellah Taïa narrate points of silence to enact the difficulty of speaking as oneself. Whereas the Arabic tradition is associated with a concealment of the shameful and a preference for collective voices, the Western takes pride in confessing the abject and centering the individual’s coming-of-age. In negotiating one’s place within the collective, the self-portraits in Choukri’s and Taïa’s work inevitably confronts a culture that, to secure deference to authority, forbids people from thinking as individuals.

Both texts are abundantly punctuated with moments of non-verbal expression amidst Moroccan society’s conspiracies of silence. In Salvation Army, the parents of Taïa’s narrator—also named Abdellah—have a “preferred language” of “sex”; here, the father’s silence conveys his desire. Less benignly, Choukri’s surrogate, Mohamed, in For Bread Alone ironises his father’s draconian assertions by addressing him “without speaking”: “O Khalifa of Allah on earth.” Left unelaborated, this phrase evokes the quiet imaginative gestures that the author performs as a mode of survival—as it is known only to himself. It mirrors the larger vocabulary of violence that saturates the book, such as when his father speaks “only in shouts and slaps,” a dialogue of abuse which forms their exclusive mode of interaction.

The narrator grows to be adept at reading signification into embodied cues, like those of Yasmina and an unknown young man whose “eyes tell me” he “wanted something”—the language remaining vague as if to re-enact the man’s reticence. A European woman, catching Mohamed “staring” at her handbag, similarly communicates with “her eyes.” They “seemed to be saying: Aren’t you ashamed? And so I felt ashamed.” The woman’s eloquent silence performs an affective education: Mohamed learns how a white person views someone of his class and race, and realises where and when he should feel shame. Yet in giving language to these moments, Choukri displaces the locus of shame from the personal to the systemic. READ MORE…

Languages of Silence: Mohamed Choukri and Abdellah Taïa Desacralising Adab and Isnad

January 12, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Alex Tan

Nothing about a translated novel—or anything that has warranted the fraught label of “world literature”—can be taken for granted.

Mohamed Choukri and Abdellah Taïa have been celebrated by the literary world as writers defying tradition in their transgressive tellings of migration, sexuality, and selfhood; yet, in the Anglophone sphere, their works have also been exoticised and misappropriated in Orientalist contexts, filtered through the othering perspectives of a western literary hierarchy. In this following essay, Assistant Editor Alex Tan delineates a reading of these two Moroccan writers that situates them in the vehicles of their own language and cultural context, with the unique ways their writing interrogates the borders of being. This essay is part one of two, the second of which can be read here.

 “The Maghrebin is always elsewhere. That’s where he makes himself come true.”

— Habib Tengour, Exile is My Trade (tr. Pierre Joris)

1998, Cairo. Midway through her Modern Arabic literature class at the American University in Cairo (AUC), Professor Samia Mehrez receives urgent missives from the university administration. Though she does not yet suspect the storm to come, she is compelled to cease the lecture and dismiss the students. Walking over to the administrative office, she is greeted with the news that several parents have complained about the inclusion of “pornography” on her syllabus, sufficiently blasphemous to “corrupt an entire generation.”

What text could claim such power? At the heart of the controversy was Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri’s Al-Khubz Al-Hafi (translated by Paul Bowles into English as For Bread Alone), which would soon precipitate the eruption of a nation-wide culture war over the uses of literature in the classroom.

Fast forward to 2012—El Jadida in Morocco, six years after Abdellah Taïa comes out as gay in the magazine Tel Quel and is hailed as the first Arab writer to be open about his homosexuality. Certain Islamist groups, anxious about moral taint, are clamouring for the outlawing of his oeuvre. Taïa had been invited to speak at a university about his latest work to be translated from French into Arabic; unfortunately, before it could happen, professors and students organised a protest to shut down the event. Slogans such as “don’t spread homosexuality on campus” were intoned.

It has become, by now, somewhat commonplace for the West to fetishize Arab writers and intellectuals who suffer widespread condemnation in their countries of origin—particularly from Islamist quarters—before enshrining them in the exclusive club of world literature. One thinks of works like Sonallah Ibrahim’s That Smell, banned immediately upon its 1966 publication in Egypt, or Haidar Haidar’s A Banquet of Seaweed, which induced accusations of heresy from Al-Azhar clerics and protests by university students against its inclusion on syllabi. At times, it almost seems as if censorship, political oppression, and exile are a rite of passage for international renown—a disturbing reality that signals to us what Anglophone literary markets value in a work from the Arab world. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

January 7, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, José García Escobar, and Suhasini Patni

The latest from India, Central America, and Palestine!

Despite the pandemic, literary festivals and magazines around the world continue to highlight important voices, both emerging and established. In India, the Bangalore Literature Festival presented a series of literary conversations, while the Sahitya Akademi announced the winners of its various awards. In Guatemala, the literary community mourned the loss of the beloved writer and editor, Julio Calvo Drago. In Palestine, the first-ever edition of Granta in Arabic was published. Read on to find out more!

Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

Despite the restrictions COVID imposed, 2021 was a successful year for literature in India, with many virtual festivals and award ceremonies.

In Bangalore, the tenth edition of the Bangalore Literature Festival commenced in a hybrid form at the Bangalore International Center. Featuring authors such as Chitra Divakaruni, Dolly Kikon, Jahnavi Barua, Vivek Shanbhag, and Rijula Das, the festival was spread over two days. In one conversation, sociologist Arshia Sattar and filmmaker Anmol Tikoo introduced a new literary podcast on the life of Kannada playwright Girish Karnad. Titled “The River Has No Fear of Memories,” a line taken from the English translation of the play Hayavadana, the podcast follows the life of Karnad, including his work, inspirations, and personal life.

Sahitya Akademi also announced the winners of its prestigious awards: the Sahitya Akademi Award, Yuva Puraskar, and Bal Sahitya Puraskar 2021 on December 30. Twenty authors writing in different Indian languages were awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award. The award for the Sahitya Akademi in the Tamil language was given to Ambai for her short story collection Sivappu Kazhuththudan Oru Pachai Paravai (A Red-Necked Green Bird). Born in 1944 in Coimbatore, Ambai is only the fourth woman to win the award in her category, in the sixty-six years of the award’s history.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

December 3, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Laurel Taylor, and Mary Hillis

Workshops, festivals, and plenty of new publications and announcements to celebrate in this week's round of literary news.

The “great moon of December” leads us into the final starts of 2021, though the literary world shows no signs of winding down. Let our editors introduce you to classical poetry reawakened, Arab literature awards, star-studded literary events in Tokyo, the latest from the European Literature Festival, and much more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

Once upon a time, the so-called ‘women’s magazines’ of today had a completely different form (though they were never truly intended for women per se). Back in the tenth century, there was a celebrated Shiʻite Muslim Arab court poet, master chef, and polymath called Kushājim; originally from Ramla in Palestine—near contemporary Tel Aviv—Kushājim lived during the turbulent war-ridden period of the Middle and Late Abbasid Caliphates, which led him to move between Jerusalem, Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo before finally settling in Aleppo. During his lifetime, Kushājim was considered the epitome of excellence in literature, and was highly commended by the literary critics of his time, both for his poetic works and intellectual faculties. His canon “vividly chronicles culinary, social, and intellectual aspects of court life [. . .], detailing numerous native and exotic foodstuffs and recipes; the social etiquettes of sharing wine and food; the various musical instruments used at the time to entertain the caliphs and their guests; the harem with its cross-dressing male and female dancers, concubines, and odalisques; the wide variety of plants and geometric designs found in courtly gardens; indoor pastimes and outdoor sports; the art of gift-giving; and the traits of coveted courtiers and boon companions.” What does this resemble but the contemporary women’s magazine?

Ancient Exchanges, an online journal at the University of Iowa devoted to literary translations of ancient texts, has recently published four gastronomic poems by Kushājim—on asparagus, mushabbak, khushkanaj (both desserts), and pomegranates. Translated from classical Arabic by Salma Harland, the four poems are run bilingually, accompanied with art by ArabLit Quarterly art director Hassân Al Mohtasib.

In her translator’s note (which includes a teaching guide), Harland explains that “although the original poems were written in accordance with the fixed feet and rhyme schemes often used in classical Arabic poetry, I have chosen to prioritize aesthetic grace and readability over meter without completely eliminating musicality.”

One is invited to take a seat at Kushājim’s table, set by Harland, and to take in a feast by a master who “not only details the preparation methods and ingredients needed for certain dishes but also the impact that their elegant presentation has on the banquet guests. Mouths water and eager hands cannot keep their distance”; even “[a] sedulous ascetic would break his fast / and yield before such a repast.” READ MORE…

Intelligentsia Under Dictatorship: Karen McNeil and Miled Faiza on The Italian

November 25, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

The story [of The Italian] is beautiful; it’s the story of my generation, that I myself witnessed when I was a student.

Shukri Mabkhout’s The Italian, an epic tale of romance and revolution in the tumult of 1980s and 1990s Tunisia, won the prestigious International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2015, making it the first Tunisian novel to achieve this accolade. As our Book Club selection for the month of October, Mabkhout’s wide-ranging novel gives an intricate look into the inner workings of young idealism under dictatorship, with all the brilliance and hardship that comes with hope. In the following interview, Rachel Stanyon spoke live to the translators of The Italian, Karen McNeil and Miled Faiza, on their working process, the representation of women in a literary scene dominated by men, and working towards a greater representation of Tunisian literature in the Arab world.

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. 

Rachel Stanyon (RS): I’ve read in an interview on Arablit.org that your translation strategy involves Miled first doing a quite literal pass, and Karen then revising the draft for idioms, flow, etc. Did your translation of The Italian also involve a dialogue with the author, Shukri Mabkhout?

Karen McNeil (KM): Yes, it did, and that was really Miled’s role throughout the project. During both the translation and revision, we contacted Shukri a lot. There were sometimes words that we had no idea about! Miled was killing himself looking for this one word in every dictionary imaginable, and it turned out it was just this particular word that Shukri’s family uses, and probably no one else in Tunisia does. There are always these little idiosyncrasies. All the translations I’ve done have been in circumstances where we could work with the author—I almost can’t imagine it otherwise; there are just so many difficulties that require follow-up questions.

Miled Faiza (MF): Shukri was very supportive, which was really nice. I don’t think there are many passages that are difficult in the novel; we just wanted to be as accurate as possible—even with small things, such as recipes. I am from the central east of the country, and he’s from the north, the capital. Tunisia is a very small and culturally homogenous country, but there are a few small things that Shukri probably grew up with: what they cooked at home, or the clothes they wore, or things that are very specific to Tunis, the capital. He was very helpful with my queries about those specific questions.

I was able to find the word Karen mentioned in an Arabic dictionary; Lisan al-Arab, one of the oldest and largest dictionaries in the world, has an entire passage on it. But the meaning didn’t work in the context, so it was driving me crazy. I sent him a message, and he told me: “Oh, I’m sorry, that is a French word that my father used to say.” So it was a word very specific to his family, and he just threw it in there.

RS: The language of The Italian tends to be quite descriptive, and involves a lot of very detailed information on things like philosophy, Tunisian cuisine, or the process of publishing a newspaper. Miled, I’m particularly interested in how you, as a poet, found translating what I found sometimes to be quite dry, academic passages. Did these aspects of the translation pose any problems for either of you, and, in general, what were the biggest challenges for you in translating this novel?

MF: Our great friend, Addie Leak, edited this book and worked with us very closely—it’s really important to always mention her because she is amazing. I asked her: “How did you find the novel? What do you feel about the section on the political history of Tunisia?” She told me she loved it, which was a little surprising. Certain sections, especially those with a lot of details about the union and the different branches of Tunisian student activists, I found dry—and maybe it would have been possible to just summarise and get rid of a lot of it. But that’s my point of view as a Tunisian. I was more interested in the story of Abdel Nasser and Zeina, with the background of everything going on in Tunisia. I thought the very small details—of every congress and every meeting, important dates from Tunisian history—were not that interesting; they were a little bit dry for me.

KM: I think the parts when Abdel Nasser is at university, and especially the philosophical points, are actually even drier in Arabic. It was very challenging to make that flow in English, because it’s very much like a lecture or a philosophy textbook. It was difficult to render that in English without doing harm to the integrity of the original. Even though it was painful while I was doing it, though, with a little perspective I think I can appreciate why it goes on for so long. In the structure of the novel, that activism was Abdel Nasser’s whole life, but once he graduates from university, one realises that all the things the university students are doing, thinking that they’re changing the country—none of it really matters. I think it captures Abdel Nasser’s viewpoint of it being very important. READ MORE…

A Translator’s Humility: An Interview with Leri Price

November 17, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

[C]onfronting biases you didn’t realise you had is a lifelong exercise, and it’s painful but necessary, especially in work like this.

Leri Price commands language, and—similar to the narrator in Syrian author Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay—does so with a prowess for invention. Furthering Price’s accomplishments as an award-winning translator of contemporary Arabic fiction, her translation of Planet of Clay was recently named as a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. The novel is a haunting exploration of the Syrian civil war, as seen through the eyes of fourteen-year-old girl named Rima. At a checkpoint one afternoon in Damascus, Rima’s mother is killed, leaving her and her older brother alone to survive. To escape from the surrounding horrors, she turns to reading, drawing, and daydreaming—creating her own magical universe à la her favorite book, The Little Prince. Though an unflinching account of war, Planet of Clay is, in many ways, a hopeful novel: a testament to the power of our own imaginations in the alleviation of suffering. In the following interview, Price graciously shares her thoughts on the importance of translator visibility, the nuances of translating from Arabic, and the books that have changed her life.

Rose Bialer (RB): Last month, Planet of Clay was announced as a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature—just two years after your translation of Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work was a finalist for the same prize. How has your journey as a translator been up to this point? Have you noticed any changes or shifts in the literary translation field?

Leri Price (LP): It’s genuinely an honour to be counted among such amazing colleagues on the longlist and shortlist. Like most people in this industry, literary translation is not my only field of work, so it has been hard at times to maintain—especially when holding down full-time work in a completely different area. I’ve been so lucky that I have been able to translate authors like Khaled Khalifa and Samar Yazbek; a translator is a reader first of all, and having the chance to engage so deeply and intimately with a text is a privilege when it comes to writing like theirs.

My first translation was ten years ago, and I would say there has certainly been a shift in the field since then, in no small part thanks to translator/activists like Anton Hur and Deborah Smith. Among translators from Arabic, you have people like Sawad Hussain, Yasmine Seale, Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, and Lissie Jacquette (among many others) who all advocate for the incredible richness and variety of texts written in Arabic. Prizes like the National Book Award in the U.S. and the International Booker in the U.K. acknowledge that a translated work of literature requires recognition of the translator (without whom the work would not be accessible to English-speaking readers). There are more presses devoted to translation and more acceptance among others that translated literature is something that people are interested in reading. Maybe it’s part of the broader social movement to seek out and amplify voices that have been overlooked in the past—I certainly like to think so.

I also think that current conversations about the visibility of translators is long overdue— not (just) because translators deserve more credit for their craft, but because readers deserve to know how the text came to be in their hands. For instance, given how influential editors can be in the final version of a text, I actually think they should also be noted prominently. The final book is the result of so many people’s work, so much discussion and negotiation, and I wish that was recognised and celebrated more often. Jennifer Croft recently made excellent points about this issue.

RB: What was your relationship like with Samar Yazbek? Was there a collaborative element to the translation?

LP: I always consult with authors where possible; I think it’s vital to get author input, but personally speaking, I need to have a strong sense of how I see the text first. It’s much easier to go back and revisit things after a conversation with the author than having two or three versions of scenes or characters in your head while drafting the English version. (Of course, that can happen anyway, especially in a text like Planet of Clay!) I tend to consult authors after I have a draft in fairly good shape, and then again during the editing process, as many times as needed. So I don’t know that I would call it a collaboration as such, but I would never feel comfortable producing a translation without consulting the author as long as I have a chance of doing so. Samar and I had two or three long phone calls, as well as email exchanges, and they all took place in a sort of mishmash of Arabic, English and French, which was fun. READ MORE…

The 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature: Who We’re Betting On

November 15, 2021  |  in Essays, News  |  by Darren Huang and Xiao Yue Shan

Our blog editors take you through the shortlist!

The announcement for the National Book Award for Translated Literature is right around the corner; the 72nd ceremony is due to broadcast live on November 17. On the shortlist are five varied and individual titles: Elisa Shua Dusapin’s Winter in Sokcho, translated from the French by Aneesa Abba Higgins; Ge Fei’s Peach Blossom Paradise, translated from the Chinese by Canaan Morse; Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West; Nona Fernández’s The Twilight Zone, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer; and Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price. Whom will the judges smile upon? Read more for our take.

A friend, not too long ago, once told me that he feels guilty whenever he reads fiction. Just seems a bit indulgent, he said. Yes, I admitted in turn, when pleasure and beauty mix, it feels incredibly indulgent. It was early autumn, dawn was a glorious thing, and we were talking about the first novels we loved—ones I remember for their intelligent presences, their human authority, but most of all, for the distinct, almost secret, pleasure they brought. The indulgence of excellent fiction feels luxurious precisely because of this intimacy: a sense of understanding passed via that most hidden method, of mind to mind. It seems to me that when pleasure and beauty mix, we allow the precocious lies of fiction to move through us, and become truths.

The five titles that make up the finalists for this award are all, in their own respect, remarkable emblems of fiction’s capability to create truth through duplicity. They achieve this through vivid, personal recollections—as in Planet of Clay—or through intensive research—as in When We Cease to Understand the World—or perhaps in what Borges described as “magic, in which every lucid and determined detail is a prophecy”—something I suspect to be at work in The Twilight Zone. The worlds for which these works contribute their imagination are various, wonderful, horrible, and mercilessly true; it makes me think something else about this triangulation of pleasure, beauty, and truth—that it is in the conciliation of the latter two where the incomparable pleasure of fiction is found.

Beauty is not reliably something one can stand to look at for long, but it always leaves something searing. Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay—the most lyrical and poetic of the five selections—is gorgeously written, and its translation by Leri Price is a definitive work of art, but it feels sick to talk about the pleasures in reading this story of Rima, a young, mute girl in Syria, as she loses one solid fact of her life after another amidst the atrocities and miseries of war. Instead, Yazbek’s prose is a holding thrall, channelling the child’s voice which springs between stark lucidity and dappled abstraction. Elegantly hanging in the balance between the wounded reality and the salve of her reveries, Rima draws an excruciating impression of the pain she experiences and witnesses, intensifying the horror with an unsparing visuality: “I am afraid of the meanings of things when they turn into words, as it is hard for me to understand bare words without turning them into pictures.” The coarse red of blood, the acrid taste of poison gas, the dusty pallor of a face in death—the words of Planet of Clay are both pictures of unflinching witness, and figures of breathtaking reverie. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2021

November 8, 2021  |  in In This Together, New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Fairuza Hanun, Georgina Fooks, Shawn Hoo, and Suhasini Patni

New titles this month from the Philippines, Indonesia, Syria, and Slovakia!

This month, our selection of translated titles traverse the battlefield and the surfaces of paintings, lonely post-Communist apartment blocs and conservative spaces housing queer, radical instances of love. In language described by our editors and reviewers as potent, provocative, capacious, and full of longing, these four titles present an excellent pathway into the writers who are bringing the immediacies of experience into powerful socio-cultural commentary on our reality: Martin Hacla, Norman Erikson Pasaribu, Ramy Al-Asheq, and Monika Kompaníková. 

angels

There Are Angels Walking the Fields by Marlon Hacla, translated from the Filipino by Kristine Ong Muslim, Broken Sleep Books, 2021

Review by Shawn Hoo, Assistant Editor

Words happened. Cow became
Cow. The word milk gushed in every throat.

From this seemingly deflationary announcement that opens one of Marlon Hacla’s poems—“Words happened.”—an entire landscape is animated and given breath at the very juncture of utterance. Not only do ears of corn and a crown of birds begin to stir, so too does the speaker, finding himself transported by the magical properties of language: “I uttered the word joy / And I was once again playing a game / As a child with my friends.” Read as the collection’s ars poetica, we might say that in Hacla’s debut poetry collection, words do not simply refer to things. They move things, and each marks an occasion in the world; they sing the world into movement.

There Are Angels Walking the Fields—first published in 2010 under the Ubod New Authors Series by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts in the Philippines—opens with a lilting “Invocation,” its unbroken anaphora incanting the world of inanimate things (“In the name of the rock. In the name of the lily blossom”), of unarticulated desires (“In the name of burned / Letters from a concubine”) and of those who have been cast into the margins (“In the name of wives / Abandoned by their husbands. In the name of gay fathers”). Who could believe more in language’s ability to intervene in the world than the one who uses them in supplication? In opening the collection with this list, Hacla immediately throws his lot with the downtrodden and the forgotten—those who may not have the ability to speak—and soothes them with the divine balm of words. In her translator’s note, past contributor Kristine Ong Muslim justifies her sharpening of the poem’s decisiveness in order to heighten the quality of invocation. Thus, a line more literally translated as “In the name of hands / Not touched” becomes “In the name of hands / Never held.” Might we also consider the translator as one who practices the art of invocation—except rather than calling out in prayer, the translator calls inward, to be possessed by both languages? Where, in order for words to perform the magic of the original—for cow to become cow—something first has to happen to them? In Muslim’s translation, Hacla’s lines are screwed tight; each enjambment turns brutally, and every line sweats with a potent lyricism, as how this opening poem rollicks to an epiphany by the end:

[. . .] In the name of faces hidden.
By a black veil. In the names of ears
That had not known the sound of a violin. In the name of a flower
That bloomed in the morning and wilted by nightfall.
In your name, you who would someday die and fade away.

READ MORE…

Announcing Our October Book Club Selection: The Italian by Shukri Mabkhout

November 1, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

The novel lends itself to debates on more universal themes such as power, corruption, the idealism of youth, gender equality, and abuse.

In his seminal work on colonialism and subjugation, The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon asks: “how do we get from the atmosphere of violence to setting violence in motion?” Shukri Mabkhout liberates this idea into story gracefully in his debut novel, The Italian. Delineating the fermenting revolutions in late twentieth century Tunisia through the scope of one young man, Mabkhout paints a vivid reproduction of the oppressive conflicts between nationalism and religion, love and lust, ideology and action. We are proud to present this vivid text, and its detailed contours of individual life in the wider contexts of country, as our Book Club selection for the month of October.

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. 

The Italian by Shukri Mabkhout, translated from the Arabic by Miled Faiza and Karen McNeil, Europa Editions, 2021

Shukri Mabkhout’s The Italian, winner of the 2015 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, was first published in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Perhaps with some suggestion of history repeating itself, it is set during another period of political upheaval in Tunisia—the 1980s and 1990s, which saw a ‘bloodless coup’ led by Ben Ali, the leader who was to be deposed in 2011. Intricate and detailed, heavy with politics, philosophy, food, and sex, the novel is an insight into Tunisian history and society, human relationships, and the often politically motivated and self-interested inner workings of institutional power.

The novel opens with its own violent outbreak and fallen patriarch. At his father’s funeral, the protagonist, Abdel Nasser—nicknamed el-Talyani (the titular Italian) for his Mediterranean good looks—attacks the local imam. The family and wider community are shocked and shamed, but also perplexed; as the narrator, one of el-Talyani’s childhood friends, tells the reader, grief over his father’s death “didn’t fully explain it.” Abdel Nasser’s family members offer various explanations—the “corrupt books” he read as a child, his university classmates, the personal circumstances of his divorce, or the “deep-rooted corruption” of his morals. While the broader community simply consider him the black sheep of the family, none of these explanations seems to satisfy the narrator. Jumping back in time, the novel thus sets out to unpack what might have motivated Abdel Nasser’s outburst, and, along the way, also details much of the political history of Tunisia during these tumultuous decades.

Abdel Nasser has a complex and somewhat distant relationship with his family, and in particular with his brother, Salah Eddine. Salah Eddine left Tunisia as a young man, and is now an “esteemed academic and international finance expert” living in Switzerland—in other words, he is the epitome of cosmopolitanism and institutional economic liberalism. When Salah Eddine leaves Tunisia, Abdel Nasser assumes the throne as the de-facto eldest son—which Mabkhout explains endows a special status and freedom within the Tunisian family. He also takes up residence in his elder brother’s room, which provides him with an intellectual awakening through books and records, and in which he also experiences a sexual awakening: he is groomed by the family’s significantly older neighbour, who—by no means coincidentally—is his brother’s ex-lover. The room eventually also becomes a political hotbed where Abdel Nasser discusses philosophy, politics, and Marxist economics with select classmates, for he is set apart from others not only by his good looks, but also his astute mind and leadership skills. He goes on to study law at university, where he acts as a leader and recruiter in an activist student organization. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2021

October 25, 2021  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Our blog editors pick their favourite pieces from the Fall 2021 issue!

Asymptote’s Fall 2021 issue is here, featuring new work from thirty countries and nineteen languages! To help guide you through the latest issue, our blog editors are offering their top recommendations. 

The Fall 2021 issue transcends the boundaries of culture and time through foreign encounters, explorations of personal and cultural memory, and novel ways of approaching the act of translation. One of the themes that emerges from this wide-ranging and deeply probing issue is the transformative potential of speech, song, and music. In the title story of Ham Chŏngim’s 2015 story collection, “After Dinner,” music, whether sung, played, or imagined, stirs memories of joy and loss for the central character, Sunnam, a blocked writer hosting a dinner party in Pusan with the death of her close mentor, P., on her mind. The piece is elegantly translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, who capture the author’s hushed yet lyrical tone, while eruditely rendering this piece’s many intertextual and cross-cultural references to Western authors and music. Like James Joyce’s The Dead, which is aptly referenced at its start, the symphonic piece interlaces multiple threads of memory like different strains of melody within Sunnam’s roving mind while she prepares for the dinner party. These threads are related through their transformative encounters with music, moments of intimate connection, and losses of beloved people from her life. Her meditations suggest the fickleness of memory—both the ways it disappears and the ways it lingers. The fleeting quality of memory is evoked when Sunnam reflects on the first time she used her candlesticks for a party: “The memory of that first time comes tantalizingly close and then poof, it’s gone. But finally it comes back . . .” Through the intricate paralleling of narrative threads, Chŏngim maps Sunnam’s vast interior world across time and place, conjuring a textured history of love and loss within just the few hours before her party. 

The transformative possibility of speech and song is also central to Caitlin Woolsey’s intimate account of translating spoken and sung poetry in “If my heart were a stone, it would drop down to meet you”: Bedouin Oral Poetry and Translation as Reciprocity, a featured piece in this issue’s edition of “Brave New World Literature.” Woolsey describes her experience translating and documenting Jordanian Bedouin oral traditions, while living with an extended family from the Zawaideh tribe in the village of Disah. The genre-bending piece combines memoir, critical analysis, and meditations on the practice of translation to form an illuminating inquiry into Bedouin oral traditions. Woolsey is perceptive yet culturally sensitive in her readings of these poems—noticing, for example, the poems’ practice of employing generalized descriptive language and recurring symbols and characters. She does not dismiss this practice as repetitive or uncreative, but links it to the communal function of the poems, which are recited and must therefore participate in certain descriptive traditions to be understood and retold by its listeners. In this manner, Woolsey performs important critical work by situating this historically overlooked literature within its people’s culture and history. One of the most moving aspects of this piece is the way that oral poetry functions not only as a means of personal creative expression, but as a vital repository for these tribes’ memory and history, a method of preservation for a “historical and cultural record” in the face of erasure by time and modernization.  READ MORE…