Language: Bulgarian

Physical Object and Metaphysical Destiny: To the Lake Journeys to the Heart of the Balkans

May 19, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Andriana Hamas

Kapka Kassabova’s English-language travelogue invites readers in the Balkans to consider local culture with a fresh perspective.

On a website called Lost Bulgaria, anyone curious enough can browse thousands of carefully preserved and curated photographs depicting the poignant yet essential ways in which the people, customs, and landscape have transformed or been transformed from the last quarter of the 1800s until 2010. About a dozen of the blurred images kept in this time machine take us back to the first half of the twentieth century and Lake Ohrid, one of the world’s oldest and deepest, which nowadays is split by the border between North Macedonia and Albania. The majority of the visuals reveal everyday life near the shores, the monasteries that dot the mountainous terrain, the traditionally clad locals, or the passers-by who felt the need to extend a prayer to Saint Naum of Ohrid. Kapka Kassabova’s latest travelogue with distinct autobiographical elements, To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace, offers a similar but much more powerful passage through the lake’s past and present.

The book, which reviewers often place in the travel fiction genre, is pronouncedly personal, even though the disclosed memories, both on an individual level and as an outlet for the collective subconscious, undoubtedly remind readers from diverse regions of the globe of their unique roots and unending voyage of self-discovery.

The author (b. 1973) spent her childhood and teenage years in Sofia and later moved with her family to New Zealand, only to finally—or at least for the time being—settle down in the Scottish Highlands. Her extensive travels have informed her writing, which encompasses poetry collections and novels, in addition to literary travelogues. Although Kassabova’s mother tongue is Bulgarian, she writes in English, a practice that evokes the likes of Vladimir Nabokov, Khalil Gibran, and Joseph Conrad and makes her Bulgarian translations all the more fascinating.

Located on the edge of her grandmother’s homeland, Lake Ohrid is where she passed a few of her summer holidays. Once considered the pearl of the Balkans, nowadays it is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site and boasts endemic species and unique prehistoric remnants. Despite this international protection however, its pristine waters are still threatened by climate change and widespread pollution. While making a convincing case for immediate preservation action of global scale, Kassabova’s fictionalized reportage can also be perceived as a continuation to her previous one, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, in which she sets on a quest to comprehend the meaning of the separation points not only between countries, but also between people. In a similar fashion, To the Lake prompts us to tag along as she traces the ancient Via Egnatia and dives into the bloody history of the region, where Bulgarians, Macedonians, Albanians, and Greek are always at crossroads, especially in the aftermath of the two Balkan wars and the ensuing decades under communist rule. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

May 7, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Carol Khoury, and Jovanka Kalaba

The latest news from Bulgaria, Palestine, and Serbia!

This week our writers bring you the latest news from Bulgaria, Palestine, and Serbia. In Palestine, the Sheikh Zayed Book Award winners have been announced, including Iman Mersal taking the Literature Award; in Serbia, a new anthology of Miloš Crnjanski’s poetry has been translated into English; and in Bulgaria, a conference about Bulgarian Literature as world literature was held at the National Book Center. Read on to find out more! 

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

It is an unusually hot spring, Ramadan is in its last third, and the country has been under partial lockdown for a long time, which leaves no reason to wonder that the literary scene in Palestine is suffering from Frühjahrsmüdigkeit (aka springtime lethargy)! One cannot but wonder how people in hotter regions, such as in the United Arab Emirates, not only manage to get through with their days, but also make international literary news.

Seven authors and researchers, from Egypt, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, and the US, as well as a publishing house from Lebanon, have been declared the winners of this year’s Sheikh Zayed Book Award. The winners were selected from a pool of more than 2,300 submissions, the most the annual award has received since it was founded in 2007. The awards will be formally presented via a livestream ceremony on Youtube during the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair (23–29 May 2021).

This year’s Literature Award went to Iman Mersal for her 2019 work of creative nonfiction Fee Athar Enayat Al Zayyat (In the Footsteps of Enayat Al-Zayyat). This look into the life of the Egyptian writer Enayat al-Zayyat, who killed herself in 1963, illuminates the challenges of writing while female, of attitudes toward mental health, and life in mid-20th-century Egypt. It is part detective story, part biography, and part memoir, and unfolds tender and surprising connections. It recently came out in Richard Jacquemond’s French translation as Sur les traces d’enayat Zayyat. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 12, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas and Julia Sherwood

The latest news from Slovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria!

This week, our writers bring you news from Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Hungary. In Slovakia, this year marks the centenary of the birth of renowned writer Ladislav Grosman, while Pavol Rankov has made history by winning the European Book Prize 2020; in Hungary, acclaimed poet Krisztina Tóth is being targeted after criticising some books on the country’s school curriculum; and in Bulgaria, George Orwell’s works being released to the public domain in 2021 has sparked a plethora of new translations. Read on to find out more! 

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-large, reporting from Slovakia and Hungary

The beginning of the year marked 100 years since the birth and forty years since the death of Slovak-born writer Ladislav Grosman. Born in the eastern Slovak town of Humenné on 4 February 1921, he moved to Prague after the war where he made his mark as a writer in the 1960s and, following the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, emigrated to Israel where he died on 25 January 1981. Grosman is primarily known for his novel The Shop on Main Street, which he later adapted into a screenplay for the film that won the foreign language Oscar in 1985. His other books, including Nevesta (The Bride) and the 1000-page-long novel Adam remain largely unknown.

With the European Book Prize 2020 for his novel It Happened on the First of September (Or Some Other Time), Pavol Rankov scored a hat trick, becoming the first Slovak recipient of three international prizes (the book won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2009 and the Polish Angelus Prize in 2011). This time a panel of thirteen journalists from the leading European media chose his book as a “a great contribution to researching the memory and consciousness not only of the people of the Eastern bloc but of all Europe.” Reacting to the news Rankov said: “I view the award as more of a recognition of the French translation than of the original Slovak text, which the jury never held in their hands.” Michel Chasteau’s French translation appeared in 2019, and the book is now also available in English, in Magdalena Mullek’s translation.

Slovakia’s literary scene is unthinkable without the colourful figure of publisher Koloman Kertész Bagala. Since founding his publishing house thirty years ago, Bagala has published 500 books by Slovak writers, organised twenty-five rounds of his short story competition Poviedka, and hundreds of discussions, readings and other events, as well as discovering many new Slovak writers. Bagala, sometimes referred to as the “unguided missile of Slovak literature,” has persevered despite several near-bankruptcies and nervous breakdowns. While some authors moved on to more mainstream houses, many have remained fiercely loyal. They include Balla, a past Asymptote contributor, who immortalised the maverick publisher in his novel Big Love. When his narrator bumps into Bagala in a seedy bar in Rotterdam, he observes: “This man looks perfectly at home wherever he is, as if he belongs wherever he happens to be . . . Dishevelled, unkempt, unshaven, frustrated, on the brink of bankruptcy and madness—but right where he belongs.”

And in the week when we celebrate International Women’s Day, we can’t ignore disturbing news from Slovakia‘s southern neighbour, Hungary: Krisztina Tóth, one of most acclaimed contemporary Hungarian poets and writers (and past Asymptote contributor) has become the target of a vicious media campaign after she criticized some of the books in the country’s school curricula for depicting women as passive and submissive (more information on Hungarian Literature Online). Taken out of context, these were presented as calls for the banning of literary classics and she has been subjected to horrendous harrassment, even having dog excrement pushed through her letter box. In an interview with the Czech writer Dora Kaprálová for the Slovak-Hungarian online journal dunszt.sk, Tóth said: “Power has no sense of humour, authoritarian regimes destroy the sense of playfulness and humour, since they assume a variety of points of view. My weapon is irony. But now my weapon has been destroyed and I am bleeding.” READ MORE…

In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

May 23, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Teodora Gandeva

Sweeping up the dust everywhere. Life accumulates dust. So does death, they say . . .

For this week’s edition of In This Together, we present a text from the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov. Translator Teodora Gandeva, introduces the piece:

In the cruelest month of April, under the sky of Berlin, acclaimed Bulgarian poet, writer, and playwright, Georgi Gospodinov (who gained world recognition for his novel The Physics of Sorrow) wrote about the things that save us during the personal and collective pandemic experience of anxiety and grief.

In the chaos and uncertainty, “Only simple things can save us” . . . The poem is reminiscent of one of his first texts about COVID-19, written as a note on the fridge, a list of the things we shouldn’t forget when we get out of our isolation and current state of “islands entire of ourselves”:

“When we get out of here, the only thing we should carry with us will be an invisible survival suitcase with the most important personal belongings, small enough not to accumulate unnecessary rubbish. А small first aid kit for after the end of a world, which we will have to compose again.”

Where do we find shelter and consolation from the constant reminders of our sudden mortality? When the future and the present have been cancelled, as Gospodinov wrote, we are left with our past. But are we welcome there? These are also the questions he asks in his third novel. A few weeks ago, during this unprecedented crisis, the novel was published in Bulgarian under the title Time Shelter. Just in time. When I wrote to Georgi Gospodinov about this series in Asymptote’s blog, he was already following it and was glad to ask me to translate one of his last poems, written especially for In This Together.

What Is the World Doing While Waiting For the End?

by Georgi Gospodinov

Cleaning its windows. To see more clearly what it is losing.
Arranging books in the library. Taking them out one by one. Starting to read. Then putting them back again.
Sweeping up the dust everywhere. Life accumulates dust. So does death, they say . . . dust to dust, and so on.
Turning on the vacuum cleaner—while it is wailing, you can let loose and wail, too. Just clean and cry, like my mother used to do.
What else is the world doing . . . READ MORE…

Idiomatic Agony and Collective Vision: Izidora Angel on Bringing International Literature to the Forefront

October 3, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Timmer Harvey

I want to convince all publishers that putting the translator’s name on the cover of the book is the right thing to do . . .

Chicago-based Izidora Angel is one amongst only a handful of translators working to bring Bulgarian literature to English-language readers. Her experiences as an emerging translator working in an under-represented language prompted Angel to seek the support and knowledge of her peers, and what began as an informal workshop with fellow translators Lucina Schell and Jason Grunebaum has evolved into an international network of literary translators who seek to share resources and mentor each other, in addition to bringing literature in translation to a wider audience. Third Coast Translators Collective co-founder Angel spoke with Asymptote about forming the collective, the importance of community, activism, and her best translation practices.

—Sarah Timmer Harvey, August 2019

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): Can you tell me about Third Coast Translators Collective and how it came to be?

Izidora Angel (IA): When I joined the group in early 2016, it wasn’t yet the Third Coast Translators Collective (TCTC), it was still more or less an informal group gathering of Chicago-land translators started by Lucina Schell, who translates from the Spanish, and Jason Grunebaum, who translates from the Hindi. But people kept wanting to join, and we all had this great chemistry, so we thought, why not make it official? Have a proper name, a mission and vision, a website, a digital presence, readings. Now there’s over thirty of us; it feels like a powerful entity.

STH: Why is being part of a collective important to you?

IA: Community is essential, regardless of what it might be that is bringing you together. Humans are social animals, and we need that connection for life. As translators, especially if we are translating from at-risk or vulnerable languages like I am, belonging to a group like this is integral for collaboration, workshopping, and knowledge sharing. Including minority languages like Bulgarian helps to shape the mission of a group like TCTC in a really important way. READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2019

April 29, 2019  |  in News  |  by Ah-reum Han, Caridad Svich, Ellen Jones, Eva Heisler, Joshua Craze, Lee Yew Leong, Sam Carter, and Victoria Livingstone

Special selections from our Spring 2019 issue!

If you have yet to read our spectacular Spring 2019 issue, what are you waiting for? Maybe for our Section Editors to give you their favourites so you can get off of the right foot—well, we’ve delivered. From the poetry by the hand of acclaimed fiction writers, to century-traversing tales, to contemporary criticism on the role of the translator, here are the highlights, straight from those who have devoted themselves to perfecting this issue.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction and Poetry Section Editor:

This issue’s fiction lineup is bookended by two Argentine authors (born in 1956) who grapple with Jewish identity in their work. With The Planets shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award in 2013, Sergio Chejfec is much better known to Anglophone readers, but Daniel Guebel is not exactly an unknown entity—recently the publisher Beatriz Viterbo released an anthology of essays contributed by such writers as César Aira celebrating Guebel’s work. Via “Jewish Son,” Jessica Sequeira’s perfectly pitched translation, English readers are introduced to bits of a weltanschauung that include pilpul (aka spicy thought, a method of interpreting the Talmud), tango singers, readings of Kafka and The Aeneid, all taking place in the last act of a father-son relationship. Yet, it is also very emotional—despite, or perhaps all the more so because of, the philosophical exposition. As with the best fictions, Guebel gestures toward a gestalt beyond the text. I can’t wait for more of this heavyweight to appear in English.

In the poetry section, which I also assembled, two highlights (also bookending the section) are Raymond Queneau, co-founder of the now-international formalist Oulipo movement, and Georgi Gospodinov, acclaimed for The Physics of Sorrow, showing that they have as much talent as poets as they do as fiction writers. An especially exciting discovery is Gertrud Kolmar, nom de plume of Gertrud Käthe Chodziesner, advocated by cousin Walter Benjamin, but only now celebrated as one of the great forgotten poets. Characterized by mystery, the taut but dreamlike poems channeled with elan by Anna Henke and Julia Gutterman are fueled by an “ache unnamed”; “a glimmer burning out its flame.” 

READ MORE…

Our Spring 2019 Issue Has Landed!

April 18, 2019  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Our brand-new issue features Dubravka Ugrešić, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Raymond Queneau, and a Special Feature on Translation!

Trace “Cosmic Connections” in Asymptote’s Spring 2019 edition, including 27 countries and 17 languages from every corner of our beautiful globe! Start with our double-whammy interviews with Viet Thanh Nguyen and Dubravka Ugrešić, or dance upon our “big old blue sphere” with the illustrious co-founder of Oulipo, Raymond Queneau. And don’t miss this quarter’s Special Feature, spotlighting creative reflections on the art of translation!

Translation can transport us to exotic locales—near or far. Daniel Guebel travels the lost world of Jewish pilpul, or “spicy thought,” an ancient method of interpreting the Talmud, while reconciling with the fact that the sages’ dialectical complexities cannot heal his dying father. Yet a life isn’t a mere journey from beginning to simple end: “All roads lead anywhere,” sings acclaimed Bulgarian poet Georgi Gospodinov, “not only to death.” For Mohsen Namjoo, the road must lead beyond nostalgia for hallowed national pasts to address the problems of the present. READ MORE…

Spring 2016: Going Places

September 21, 2018  |  in 30issues30days  |  by Eva Heisler

You [write] to orchestrate what it is about the world that hurts you.

92,400 words—if an Asymptote issue could be held in your hands, it would be a book with 92,400 words and 368 pages (based on the typical range of 250-300 words a page). And it would be a free book, since, to catalyze the transmission of world literature, we don’t charge for access and hope it always remains that way. That’s 92,400 words that have to be solicited, considered, selected, edited, uploaded, formatted to both our house style and the satisfaction of contributors, and then fact-checked and proofread by four to six pairs of eyes. Out of the 44 articles that these 92,400 words constitute, eight might require extensive footwork for rights, ten commissioned from scratch, and as many as 18 illustrated by a guest artist. Then newly appointed chief executive assistant Theophilus Kwek obtains this figure of 92,400 (for the English text alone) “by copying the entire [Winter 2016] issue into a word document, and rounding off to the nearest 100 for footnotes [he] may have missed.” The occasion for this? We have been invited to submit an application to a grant administered by Singapore’s National Arts Council (NAC), and one of the requested data is wordcount. How this comes about after five years of no official contact between Asymptote and NAC goes like this: In February 2016, back in Singapore to visit with family over Chinese New Year, I send out a batch of solicitations. One is addressed to Vivian Balakrishnan, Singapore’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, who played a major role in facilitating the June 2018 Kim-Trump summit, the costs of which (twelve million USD) the Singaporean government willingly absorbed. On 14 February, 2016, I receive a call at 8 a.m. by someone from Balakrishnan’s office encouraging me to take up the matter with NAC instead. I mutter something about NAC being unsupportive, and put the phone down quite quickly. The next day, someone more senior—an actual spokesperson from the Ministry—calls. Charmed by her diplomacy, I agree to “allow [myself] to be approached.” On February 16, an email entitled “funding for Asymptote,” pops up in my inbox. Negotiation takes a protracted seven months, during the course of which my case is rotated between four different officers, and in the process of which hopes are raised only to be dashed—with even the acting director of NAC’s literary arts sector development admitting to me that they had changed their mind (i.e., that it is not a matter of one officer’s stance being discontinuous with another). The long and short of it is that funding is allotted to Singaporean writers and translators of Singaporean work only; support for literary editors only extends as far as sponsoring workshops or mentorships. This was NAC’s policy in 2011 (and one I was well aware of); if it hadn’t changed, why make contact? She sends me off with a one-time grant to the tune of 8,800 USD, tied to publication of Singaporean content on Asymptote platforms in the fourth quarter of 2016. In April, at the invitation of AmazonCrossing and with partial support from the Translators’ Association of the Society of Authors in the UK, I speak at a London Book Fair panel on “Discovering Stories from Asia, Africa, and Turkey”; despite the geographical reach of the subject matter, I am the only person of color represented on the panel. Unlike, say, an all-male panel, this goes unremarked, underscoring a troubling diversity problem in publishing that I’ve tried to counter with my own magazine by appointing section editors from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Here to introduce the Spring 2016 edition—that I launched from the couch of my college friend Vanessa’s apartment in Brixton, London—is Visual editor Eva Heisler:

Revisiting the Spring 2016 issue, I am struck by how far-ranging and innovative the work is—and how moving. Through the inspired efforts of Asymptote’s translators, I am transported across cultures and geopolitical contexts as I gain access to poems, stories, drama, creative nonfiction, and criticism originally written in Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Filipino, Nahuatl, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, and Thai, to name just a few of the languages represented in this issue.

As editor of Asymptote’s visual section, I am interested in featuring artists who explore issues of text, narrative, linguistic identity, translation, or voice. One work that explores language as shifty, always on the move, is Bad Language, a collaboration between translator Laura Marris and video artist Matt Kenyon. The video, which documents Marris’s process of translating a poem by Paol Keineg, presents the poem as a moving entity animated by possibilities, the page rippling with adjustments and substitutions. This “moving translation” is particularly suited to Keineg’s French since the writer, who was raised in Brittany, often integrates Breton vocabulary. As Marris explains, “I wanted to translate in a way that could accommodate shifting linguistic loyalties, rather than delivering one authoritative version.” READ MORE…

Winter 2015: We Almost Didn’t Make It

September 17, 2018  |  in 30issues30days  |  by Victoria Livingstone

Asymptote was giving—and continues to give—voice to languages and regions across the globe without ever lowering the curatorial bar.

If you’re just joining us, we invite you to revisit our first 16 issues via our #30issues30days showcase here. In honor of our milestone 30th edition, we’ll shortly be launching a contest giveaway with a top prize of $200, so watch this space!

2015 was a milestone year for Asymptote: We won a London Book Fair award and partnered with The Guardian. But only Asymptote staff back then know we almost didn’t make it past January. On 15 December 2014, despairing of the lack of progress in fundraising, I wrote the following (lightly edited) email: 

“Hello team, I’ve been reassessing the situation. It seems I underestimated the support for the magazine and it doesn’t look as if we’re going to hit our campaign target by December 19. Therefore, we’ll be extending the deadline to January 29, 2015. Our January issue will be pushed back to January 30, the very date of our debut in 2011, four years ago, so that we’ll have come full circle. If we don’t hit the target on January 29, we will announce in the editorial that the Jan 2015 issue will be our very last. Social media and blog activities (including the podcast, very sadly) shall cease with effect from 1 Feb. The magazine will fold. Planning for all activities after January should be halted with immediate effect. Please respect this. Section editors, please do not communicate any more acceptances, and please be prepared to rescind your acceptances for anything after the January issue on the event of our closure, if it does come to that. As promised, we will break for the holidays. (I’ll hold the fort on social media during this time.) In January, we will prioritize work on the January edition as well as the two January events. As for those who are willing to help, we will keep publicizing the IndieGoGo campaign and sending out appeals. We’ll see if the magazine can be saved. (During a recent discussion with the senior editors, the question did arise about whether to shield all of you from the hard reality in front of us. But I don’t think it’s good to keep mum, for morale’s sake; also, I would not be so cruel as to ask you to continue working on projects that may not see the light of publication, or events that have to be cancelled. The reality is that I am simply out of funds, and also depleted in other ways. If we don’t hit the IndieGoGo target, I would prefer to end on a high note and move on.)”

Here to introduce our Winter 2015 issue, released one day after 287 supporters brought us past the finish line of $25,000, please welcome Assistant Editor Victoria Livingstone. 

“I am always trying to push the market very hard,” David Damrosch told Asymptote contributing editor Dylan Suher in an interview included in the Winter 2015 issue. The Harvard professor of comparative literature explained that he strives to bring so-called minor literatures into the canon of world literature by translating, anthologizing, and teaching works from underrepresented regions and languages.

Asymptote has been similarly pushing against the market since Lee Yew Leong founded the journal in 2011. When the Winter 2015 issue was published, I was finishing my doctoral work, which focused on connections between political contexts and translated literature. As I was immersed in the work of critics such as Damrosch, I was also reading Asymptote, and I recognized then that that the journal was doing something different. Rather than reproducing the inequalities of what Pascale Casanova calls “the world republic of letters,” Asymptote was giving—and continues to give—voice to languages and regions across the globe without ever lowering the curatorial bar.  READ MORE…