Language: Danish

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Peter Nielsen

One lives, / or goes feral in other ways.

Moments from the lives of small animals are captured and made into poetry by Peter Nielsen (tr. Matt Travers). In “A Little Understanding” a story emerges from tracks in thick snow. A mouse’s footprints meet those of something larger, and then the footprints disappear. Cooperation is surmised—an unexpected and heart-warming interpretation of the spoor. The titular bench of Nielsen’s second poem peeks out from a thicket of scenes and memories, where we see people together and birds in concert, each spreading messages with their bodies.

A Little Understanding

Animals help each other. It’s not always seen,
but if one goes out when there’s newly fallen snow,
you’ll often be able to follow a trail. You’ll see, for example,
the faint trace of a mouse that has come running.
Further on you may see another larger set of tracks
cross the mouse’s path. Often, you’ll now experience that the big
animal has helped the little animal on its way in the
cumbersome snow, since it’s only the big tracks
that continue. This is how the animals help each other.

A Parsley-green Bench

I anxiously greeted a friend who passed with the car window rolled down.
He registered me fleetingly and proceeded to stop in the middle of the traffic,
but I waved him on. Can you spread a message in any other way? A comforting
letter perhaps? Besides, my masseuse is waiting. And she doesn’t wait. She’s kind of there,
dawdling across the body, finding what the rest of us are looking for shortly before we begin
to search.

The episodes in one’s day like to go along, not across. One lives,
or goes feral in other ways. A bench peeks out from the edge of the forest.
The waders are flying up in formation, passing close together
in a rush over the sandbank. White undersides. After a lightning fast
twist of the body: black-grey. The moment after: white again.

Translated from the Danish by Matt Travers

Peter Nielsen is a Danish poet’s poet. Educated as an administrator in
the local counci’s wages department, Nielsen began to write full-time after earning the three-year Danish Arts Foundation Grant in 1980 for his first major poetry collection ‘Kan sparsommelighed redde proletariatet?’ (‘Can Economising Save the Proletariat?’). Since then, he has been extremely productive writer who has published over twenty poetry collections, half a dozen novels, a set of children’s books and is the Danish translator for several major poets of international repute, including Paul Celan and the Swedish Nobel prize winner, Tomas Tranströmer. He was awarded the Danish Arts Foundation Lifelong Honorary Grant in 1999, and was the recipient of the Adam Oehlenschlaeger, Emil Aarestrup, Herman Bang and Johannes Ewald Fund in 2016. 

Yet despite critical renown, he has also proved extremely reluctant to play along with the literary promotions machine and is consequently largely unknown to the wider Danish reading public. Instead of engaging in public readings of his work, which he believes spoils a reader’s internal understanding of a poem, he lives with his wife in a distant country suburb of Aarhus and divides his time between writing poetry, translating literature and pursing a keen amateur interest in ornithology, with all three activities arguably being a part of a singular overlapping creative practice, as if his poetry is always only out there in the rushes, waiting for their time to take flight.

The poems here come from his later works. A LITTLE UNDERSTANDING comes from his 2003 collection ‘Livet foreslår’ (’Life Advises’, nominated for Nordic Council Literature Prize) and A PARSELY-GREEN BENCH can be found in his most recent 2020 collection ‘Inden årstiderne; Regnlys’ (Before the Seasons; Rainlight).

Matt Travers is a poet and translator whose works have featured in 3:AM magazine, Tripwire Journal, Firmament Magazine, Minor Literature(s), and Mercury Firs, among others. Originally from Huddersfield, England, he now lives and dwells in Aarhus, Denmark.

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Read more from Translation Tuesdays on the Asymptote blog:

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

Literary updates from Greece, Palestine, the UK, and Spain!

The week, we bring more updates from writers around the globe as they continue to commemorate, resist, show solidarity, and contemplate our present moment. In Greece, the literary world remembers the historic Athens Polytechnic Uprising; in the UK, the prestigious Warwick Prize for Women in Translation is awarded; in Spain, an exciting young literary festival brings together some of the best names in Spanish-language writing today, to talk about that eternal subject—time; and lastly, our editor from Palestine expresses gratitude for those around the world who have continued to stand up and show support.

Christina Chatzitheodorou, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Greece

The book Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales was recently translated from English into Greek by Dimitris Koufontinas and published by Monopati Editions. In the collection, editors Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana have gathered and selected stories from Palestine that best exemplify the Palestinian Arab folk oral tradition, and the translation represents an important addition for Palestinian and Arab literature in the Greek language.

Recently, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Athens Polytechnic Uprising (1973), Giorgos Perantonakis wrote an article for Book Press, highlighting the continual legacy that this demonstration—and the dictatorship, the Regime of the Colonels (1967-1974), that it protested—has left on Greek literature, citing important works from poetry and novels to personal memoirs. However, Perantonakis omitted one of the most important anti-dictatorial titles: Ta Dekaokto Kimena (The Eighteen Texts), a collective volume of eighteen writers (including Georgios Seferis, Manolis Anagnostakis, and Stratis Tsirkas) and their political works, which was published in July 1970 by Kedros Publications. READ MORE…

Louisiana Literature Festival: Portraits of Language in the Flux of Loss

Just beyond the white backdrop of the stage, a multiplicity of silent, unspoken languages lingers.

From August 17 to 20, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Zealand, Denmark, hosted the twelfth edition of the annual Louisiana Literature Festival. Since 2010, on the lawns parenthesized between Louisiana’s wings and the Øresund Strait, authors from around the world—including Adonis, César Aira, Olga Tokarczuk, László Krasznahorkai, Mariana Enríquez, and Itō Hiromi—have participated in readings, interviews, and conversations. The festival has also regularly hosted the most exciting names in Danish literature, such as Naja Marie Aidt, Dorthe Nors, and Signe Gjessing. This year, Asymptote’s Assistant Editor Michelle Chan Schmidt was in attendance, and reports now on the festival’s fascinating intersections, discussions, and performances. 

The Louisiana Literature Festival has no theme, and as such, widely varying discussions of language and writing recur across the four days. In this year’s line-up of forty authors, sixteen write in languages other than Danish. Most of them are authors of English or Swedish, and thus there are only a few individuals representing other languages: Haruki Murakami in Japanese, Constance Debré in French, Claudia Durastanti in Italian, Eva Menasse in German, Camila Sosa Villada in Spanish, and Fríða Ísberg and Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir in Icelandic. Despite the limitations of this Euro-heavy selection, the festival’s vibrant dialogues present studies across language—including that of signs, of family, and of binaries in societies marked by syntaxes that divide rather than combine. In an interview, the Irish English-language writer Claire Keegan says that “narrative feeds on loss,” and this idea of loss feeds back across the festival’s symphony of languages in conversation.

Icelandic:

During an interview with her Danish translator, Erik Skyum-Nielsen, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir states that her favorite childhood books were dictionaries. Each letter was a new chapter in a book of thirty-two chapters—a history of a language “in the margins” of global literature. Writers like Ólafsdóttir and Fríða Ísberg, as well as their translators across most European languages (with the addition of Arabic and Turkish in the case of Ísberg’s novel, The Mark), are instrumental in not only the continuance of Icelandic literature, but also in diversifying Icelandic modes of expression in a language anchored in the legacy of the sagas.

READ MORE…

How Tove Ditlevsen Opened the Way for My Life as a Translator

I worked hard on the translation, typing the manuscript three times on my electric typewriter.

In 2021, two publishing giants—Penguin and Farrar, Straus and Giroux—sent Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen’s collected memoirs, The Copenhagen Trilogy, out into the world. A huge hit upon release, readers praised Ditlevsen’s emotional power, her passionate dedication to the life of words, her wry humour, and her uncanny, incisive gift for description. Long celebrated in her home country, Ditlevsen had taken a long time to find the same audience in the English language—and it is largely thanks to the dedication and prowess of her translator, Tiina Nunnally, that we were finally able to meet this brilliant mind on the page. Now, in this essay, Nunnally tells the story of the discursive journey that the Trilogy took to its now-massive Anglophone audience, and how Ditlevsen opened up the way for her to change her life.

At the end of Youth, the second volume of her collected memoirs, The Copenhagen Trilogy, Danish author Tove Ditlevsen receives a copy of her first published book, a slim poetry collection titled Pigesind (Girl Soul). And for her, it’s a revelation:

My book! I take it in my hands and feel a solemn happiness, that isn’t like anything I’ve ever felt before. . . . It can’t be taken back anymore. It is irretrievable. . . . Maybe my book will be in the libraries. Maybe a child, who in all secrecy is fond of poetry, will someday find it there. And that odd child doesn’t know me at all. She won’t think that I’m a living young girl who works, eats, and sleeps like other people. . . .Tonight I want to be alone with it, because there’s no one who really understands what a miracle it is for me.

When I translated those words in 1984 and then, a year later, saw them in print for the first time, it was an equally momentous experience. My translations of Ditlevsen’s Childhood and Youth were issued by Seal Press in one volume under the title Early Spring. It was my first published book, and how it came to be published at all seemed to me a miracle. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2022

New work from Danish, Chinese, and Russian!

In this month’s of newly released translations, we are featuring works that traverse across landscapes of psychology, politics, perspectives, and coastal enclaves. From a travelogue that corporealizes a vision into reality, a fragmented ghost story that equally interrogates readership with writership, and a psychically dense political fiction that follows the twists of truths into fictions, these works are full of metamorphoses, imaginations, and materializations—all that possible within the realm of the text.

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A Line in the World, A Year on the North Sea Coast by Dorthe Nors, translated from the Danish by Caroline Waight, Graywolf Press, 2022

Review by Samantha Siefert, Marketing Manager

A line extends from Skagen, Denmark to Den Helder, Holland—a complex, jagged, six hundred mile stretch of coast. On a map, it is a fixed mark, something definite and present, representing a real place that exists today: the division between land and sea, a place of dunes and marshes, sweeping tides, surging storms, wind farms, gulls, and people. In A Line in the World, A Year on the North Sea Coast, celebrated Danish author Dorthe Nors asserts her dream for this line to be less static and more flexible, persistently animated, always moving, ever changing, evolving with its points marked in time just as much in time as they are in space. Her line reverberates heritage and memory, holidays, tragedy, Vikings, shipwrecks, disco ferries, and local gossip. In this first work of nonfiction, Nors brings Denmark’s western coast to life in fourteen essays, now available in a beautiful translation by Caroline Waight.

Each essay offers an exquisite, layered exploration of a different stretch of that wild North Sea coast, and the first one begins at the top. Nors is from west Jutland, but she has found herself living in Copenhagen, with a noisy neighbor next door and a hash dealer below, and she comforts herself there with sounds of the sea played through an app on her phone. She did not plan to write a book of essays (she was supposed to be working on a novel), but her publisher was insistent. They asked, and then they asked again.

I said, ‘I’ll have to think it over,’ and I did. Or I dreamt. In the dream, I was setting off across the landscape in my little Toyota. I saw myself escaping several years of pressure from the media by driving up and down the coast. Me, my notebook and my love of the wild and desolate. I wanted to do the opposite of what was expected of me. It’s a recurring pattern in my life. An instinct.

READ MORE…

One Thing After Another: On A Postcard for Annie by Ida Jessen

A Postcard for Annie is a collection of stories in which hope is masked in grief, regret, and yearning.

A Postcard for Annie by Ida Jessen, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken, Archipelago Books, 2022

Where did it come from, this hope of hers? From him. Her hope came from him. Without him she was shapeless. She would never be able to explain it to anyone, not even to herself.

A Postcard for Annie, Ida Jessen’s collection of short stories, opens with a woman named Tove, writing a note to her husband after an argument about herring; “I am not your fucking housewife,” she scribbles. Through the following six tales, Jessen tracks the inner lives of women, whose day-to-day lives in Denmark are as mundane and normal as they are dramatic and devastating. These stories explore what binds these women to the people in their lives against a backdrop as often comforting as it is bitterly harsh, putting into words what the characters themselves cannot.

From the outset of Tove’s anger, we sense that this is about much more than the raw fish fillets she had bought for dinner, and as she embarks on an “excursion” to put distance between her and her husband’s constant derision and judgment—which has rippled through her since the day they met—we become aware of the essential role he plays in her sense of self. Later, when a stranger spontaneously decides to sit at the table where she is dining alone, we quickly realise the approval and presence of this man are more important to Tove than her own discomfort. Without a member of the opposite sex there to notice her, Tove is “shapeless.”

As such, despite a loveless, bitter marriage in which only hostile words are exchanged, Tove never loses sight of her husband, and similar strictures and relationships weave a common thread through these stories. Tine, who feels “doomed at fifty to be a fire that can’t be put out,” doesn’t give up on trying to get her husband to go to bed with her. Ruth finds herself at the hospital visiting her estranged son, who even as a baby would “would squirm from her embrace,” and Lisbet, caught in an enmeshed mother and son relationship that is tense and taut after twenty years of push and pull, cannot—or will not—break free from Malthe:

He turns and strides away, exuding as ever his own will; he cannot tame it, it surges towards her, away from her. He is surrounded by a light so fierce that even a bitterly cold day in a dismal parking lot feels like unrequited love.

READ MORE…

Breaking Down the 2022 National Book Award Longlist

A selection to whet your appetite for translated literature!

Now in its fifth year, this rebooted annual award for translated literature deserves a serious look. How does its newly released longlist compare to the Booker International counterpart?

Unlike its Booker International counterpart, works from European languages dominated, continuing the trend from previous years. Previous winner (and frequent Asymptote contributor) Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth was one of the only two titles from Asia.

Order a copy of Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani.

As with the 2020 selections, only one title appeared in both the Booker International and the National Book Award longlists, and it was an Olga Tokarczuk novel translated by Jennifer Croft. We hope it will be third-time lucky for this illustrious duo!

Order a copy of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft.

New Directions is the only publisher to have two titles on the longlist. Aside from Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth, Olga Ravn’s The Employees, which our Criticism Editor Barbara Halla chose as her clear winner from last year’s Booker International longlist, is also nominated.

Click here to order a copy of Olga Ravn’s The Employees, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken.

Incidentally, Aitken, who is the only longlisted translator to ever be nominated for his work on different authors, was interviewed in our pages last year. This year, we sat down with Mónica Ojeda, whom interviewer Rose Bialer calls “one of the most powerful and provocative voices in Latin American literature today.” Her Jawbone made the cut:


Order a copy of Mónica Ojeda’s Jawbone, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker.

We hope we’ve whetted your appetite with these selections. Take a look at the full longlist here! Oh, and by the way, we may receive a small commission for your purchase(s), which will go toward supporting our advocacy for a more inclusive world literature. Other ways to sustain our mission include signing up as a masthead member, or joining our Book Club!

A Wanting to Not Forget: An Interview with Autumn Richardson

There’s something about that interstitial state—between one language and another—that is extraordinarily powerful.

In Landmarks (2015), British writer Robert Macfarlane’s meditation on place, he named Autumn Richardson, among other writers, as “particularizers … who seek in some way to ‘draw every needle’ … [with] precision of utterance as both a form of lyricism and a species of attention.” Reliquiae, the journal of landscape, nature, and mythology which Richardson co-founded and co-edits with her partner, composer, writer, and artist Richard Skelton, is guided by this ethos and mode of engagement. In its ten years, Reliquiae has published texts from antiquity: Navajo songs; the Song dynasty poet Wáng Ānshí; magical and medicinal incantations from Catawba, Klamath, Chuckchee, and Winnebago peoples; southern African beliefs in naming stars; fragments from the German Renaissance alchemist-theologian Paracelsus; evocations to Yoruba deities; the Náhuatl poet Nezahualcóyotl; Egyptian spells; and hymns of the now-extinct Eoran language in Australia. The journal has also introduced readers to English translations from, among others, the original Algonquian, Binisayâ, Old English, Ancient Greek, Hindu, Old Icelandic, Iglulingmiut, Old Norse, Scottish Gaelic, West Saxon—along with their source texts.

Speaking to the precision and attention that guides her work, Richardson tells academic journal Studies in Travel Writing, “My own writing is more concerned with movement through landscapes … the vertical, going down through the layers botanically, biologically, geologically, etymologically, historically.” In this interview, I asked about the wondrous archive of Reliquiae, and how she explores landscape, ethnology, (vertical) travel, ecology, botany, and occultism in her own art, writings, and translations.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Personally, I think of Reliquiae—and its disciplinary breadth of landscape, folklore, ecology, esoteric philosophy, animism—as a treasure trove of consequential importance not only to specialists, writers, and translators, but also for a generalist readership. In the submission guidelines, there is emphasis on “beyond plain nature writing.” Can you elaborate on this?

Autumn Richardson (AR): Fundamentally, Reliquiae fills a niche that is shaped by our own unique interests. We couldn’t find a single publication that focused on landscape and the natural world, whilst refracting that focus through the prism of myth, esotericism, magic, occult philosophy, and anthropology. One of the reasons we formed Corbel Stone Press in 2009 was to begin publishing work that connected these disparate but allied disciplines. We began by publishing our own writing, but our goal was always to edit a journal, and 2022 is the tenth anniversary of Reliquiae.

AMMD: Let’s talk about Heart of Winter, your 2016 collection of found-poems assembled from the journals of ethnologist Knud Rasmussen and botanist Dr Thorild Wulff which chronicles the Second Thule Expedition, their 1917 journey through the north-western coastal landscapes of Greenland. When asked about your translation process from the Danish (and Inuit), you responded that, “it was a process of simplifying ever so slightly … [not wanting] to change [Rasmussen’s] words hardly at all … want[ing] to preserve his voice.” As a translator who questions her own discursive presence in the text, does this imply that between the competing ideologies within the translation of myths and folklore, you favour linguistic faithfulness over stylistic realism?

AR: That’s a difficult question to answer. I’m not dogmatic in my choices—it’s more instinctual. I’m acutely attentive to the shape, texture, and colour of each word in both languages when I translate. However, I have noticed that provisional, literal translations are strangely compelling. There’s something about that interstitial state—between one language and another—that is extraordinarily powerful. This can often happen, for example, when the word order of the original is preserved, resulting in an unusual word-grouping in the translation. For me, I find this shadow presence of the original language unspeakably rich and evocative, and I always try to retain something of its colour in my work. My concern is always to mirror, as faithfully as possible, the poet’s choice of words, as well as what I perceive to be the emotions and motivations behind the poem or song itself. For example, within the Inuit songs in Heart of Winter, a primary and repetitive motif is the uncertainty of survival, and the consequent gratitude or joy when a new season is witnessed, when nourishment is attained. It was immensely important to me to try to carry these sentiments forward, because, to my mind, these expressions and emotions were the heart and the purpose of the songs themselves.

READ MORE…

Spring 2022: Highlights from the Team

Still don’t know where to start with our latest edition? Here are some more entry points, courtesy of our generous multicontinental team!

I felt that the Spring Asymptote was an incredibly timely and unsettling issue and I hope that broader readers can use it as a lens to think about ongoing dynamics of imperialism, capitalism, and more. I was drawn immediately to Kim Hyesoon’s poems from The Hell of That Star (tr. Cindy Juyoung Ok), with its overwhelming and abundant female presence that kept mutating. In Signe Gjessing’s poems from Tractatus (tr. Denise Newman), I really enjoyed the tension between the abstract and the material—for example, the fact that shampoo is able to exist alongside transcendence. The voice of Nina Yargekov’s “The Obedient Little Girl” (tr. Charles Lee) was immediately disarming! I was delighted by the emphasis on disobedience at the end. Last but not least, I enjoyed reading Agnieszka Taborska’s The World Has Gone Mad: A Surrealist Handbook How to Survive (tr. Soren Gauger). Leonora Carrington is my favorite artist and writer (I actually have a tattoo of one of her paintings); it was exciting to see her mentioned at the conclusion. I also enjoyed the automatic writing components. This is a text I do need to spend more time with and I am so glad that it was included in this issue.

—AM Ringwalt, Educational Arm Assistant

I have a love for Nordic literature in general, there is something about its directness and its simplicity, and yet at the same time its ability to confront existential issues through the details of the everyday. As I live in Sweden and yet am not Swedish, I see literature as a way into understanding the place and society where I am. I was struck by how so many of the pieces in the Swedish special feature confronted the deep hypocrisy that is there in Sweden’s self-presentation as a tolerant, progressive, consensual, and equal society: The uncovering of misogyny and violence against women in the Kristina Lugn (tr. Zach Maher), Lina Hagelbäck (tr. Freke Räihä) and Hanna Nordenhök (tr. Saskia Vogel) (there is a reason that the original Swedish title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was Män som hatar kvinnor [Men Who Hate Women]); or history of institutionalized homophobia in the Jonas Gardell (tr. Elizabeth Clark Wessel); and racism in the Majgull Axelsson (tr. Kathy Saranpa). These all show that there is something deeply troubling in the supposedly comfortable Swedish society that people here live in. And yet, for all this social awareness, these texts are not themselves sanctimonious or worthy. There is a distinct existential edge in each of them, they show how these social issues penetrate deep down into the world of the characters affected by them. Oppression is not an accident or mistake that can be simply rectified or remedied, it is a constitutive fact of the world as it exists and is revealed and experienced: violence, oppression, and torment penetrate and persist right through the world, into each blade of grass, bunch of flowers, childhood memory, or everyday action, and all this writing captures something of that pain and its penetration. This is the world. And it needs to be shown and seen again, recognized for what it is, as it is in this writing; and through the seeing again that this writing provides, it can also be recreated as other than it is.

—Liam Sprod, Copy Editor

Andrii Krasnyashchikh’s As Bombs Fall (tr. Matthew Hyde) made me cry. This account of daily life in Kharkiv made me think of my grandmother living in Rome under Nazi occupation—the immediacy of daily life while the world crumbles around you. Accounts such as this allow us a window into the individual human impact of war that newspaper reportage does not. Johannes Lilleøre’s My Sick Friend (tr. Sharon E. Rhodes) read like prose poetry. I love the way it plays with time: we move through a life, and then once illness strikes, time slows down. The taut, matter-of-fact sentences, with their seemingly throwaway observations and details, evoke not just the immediacy created by bodily illness and suffering, but also convey the pain and helplessness of the narrator. Kate Tsurkan’s interview with Zenia Tompkins discusses so many vital questions, for example: what responsibility do we children of the diaspora have to our homelands? How much is our image of homeland shaped by the trauma of our parents and grandparents?

—Amaryllis Gacioppo, Newsletter Editor

READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2022

Introducing our favorites from the latest issue!

Featuring work from thirty-four countries, the Spring 2022 issue is once again charting new territory across the landscape of world literature. From Hermann Hesse to Kim Hyesoon, as well as coverage of Ukrainian poetry and exceptional Swedish works in our Special Feature, these wonderful inductions into the English language are full of discoveries. Not sure where to begin? Read on for our blog editors’ curated selections!

Through the brutal scorchings and flighty erasures of passed time, Greek tragedies have endured—as though stone, and not words, were their material. Near as our own stories, ancient as storytelling itself, and inextricable from the passions they depict, the characters that had suffused the fifth-century Athenian air with their spectacle defy temporality, continuing to walk and rage within the immediate theatre of our world. In the betrayal of fathers and the names of flowers, in funerals and weddings, in any force that could be mistaken for fate. By the logic of the tragic’s pervasive mutability, their untimely timeliness, one is made to think of the ways cycles are kept and broken, if whether the knowledge of something coming has ever been enough to stop it.

On the mitigative potential of the tragedies, Brian Doerries (the founder of Theatre of War, a production company which stages performances for communities confronting urgent social issues) had posed a question: “What if tragedy is a form of storytelling that was designed . . . to wake us up to the slim possibility of human agency, of making a choice that averts imminent disaster before it’s too late? What if tragedy is as refined of an advancement as architecture or the sculpture, law, government of 5th century BCE . . . a form of storytelling that arose out of a necessity of nearly eighty years of war, to communalise trauma, give citizens permission to access and express their emotions, and help heal the city?” To conceive the life of these plays as not to instruct but to change, what emerges is how the devastation of tragedy offers us, by way of its lapidary endings, the opportunity for transcendence. In José Watanabe’s Antígona, translated with an impeccable ear by Cristina Pérez Díaz, Sophocles’ Antigone is given fluid, elemental form, a series of poetic rooms built for one actress to walk through, inhabiting their rhythm as she inhabits time. Written beneath the dense terror of civil conflict in Peru, Watanabe’s distilling of chorus into a single rivulet of speaking is to run a thin-wire sieve through the voracious appetite of mass violence and statistic, provoking the wide overarch of trauma into open intimacy, into something that is suffered individually, in bodies united by the likeness of experience but ruthlessly alone in bearing it. The voice is torn with the tension between thinking and knowing, between feeling and narration, spreading itself amidst the leaves of time:

The sacred eye of daylight does not penetrate that far
nor the cries of friends and relatives. In that silence,
death, laborious, enfolds the girl
in a dense cocoon of shadows.

READ MORE…

The International Booker Comes Home

There is much to be said about the (fleeting) feeling of accomplishment in seeing a favorite longlisted.

With the upcoming announcement of the Booker International shortlist on April 7, our in-house Booker expert is here to take you through the impressive longlist, discuss the intersection between closed-door judging and fervent public online discourses, and the increased visibility of the translator in bringing these vital titles into the English-language sphere, Read on to find out more!

The International Booker Prize, like a number of other British literary prizes, has become a unifying topic amidst a very active online community. Twitter is the kind of place where bubbles of connections and affinities naturally form, but participating in this nexus simultaneously fosters a detached sense of irony that makes any earnest acknowledgment to it a touch mortifying. I am willing to take the risk of too much earnestness today because, for the sake of honesty, my relationship to the International Booker would not be the same without this community.

I became a regular follower of the prize after attending a meeting with the judges at Shakespeare and Company in Paris back in 2016 (a discussion I left certain in the knowledge that Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith, was going to win, as it did). But it was entering in conversation with other readers and translators through Twitter that made the International Booker an event that I await impatiently every March. We make a friendly race out of reading the entire longlist, and debates about the merits of each selection get unreasonably heated, as we work to change the minds of others about the books we love—or even loath at times. Not to mention that I would be very happy not to have the “what constitutes nonfiction” debate again in my lifetime, which was in full swing both last year, with the longlisting of In Memory of Memory and The War of the Poor, and in 2019 when The Years was shortlisted.

Perhaps more importantly, being part of this community has shaped the approach I take the reading (and reviewing) the list. Thanks to it, I am constantly aware of the labor that goes into each book, not merely the translation but the efforts by the translators themselves, often acting as both agent and publicist. For instance, when Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights won the International Booker in 2018, Jennifer Croft had spent a decade advocating for it to be published. Furthermore, participating even somewhat actively in the discussion happening on places like Twitter is to be aware of the uneven dynamics of the publishing world. Much has rightfully been said about the International Booker’s Eurocentrism (which this year’s longlist provides a refreshing break from), but at the same time, as an online participant in these communities, you see in real time that the Booker is probably replicating trends that exist within publishing at large. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

In which we discuss the International Booker Prize longlist and bring you literary news from Poland and Uzbekistan!

This week, our editors from around the world discuss the 2022 International Booker longlist (released just yesterday), the Polish literary world’s reaction to the war in Ukraine, and literary nationalism in Uzbekistan. Read on to find out more!

Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief, on the 2022 International Booker Prize Longlist

The longlist for the 2022 International Booker Prize landed yesterday and we’re chuffed to see so many of our past contributors (20!), former team members (five!), and Book club titles (two!) on it! We’re especially thrilled for Anton Hur, who debuted in a big way by making the cover of our Fall 2016 edition with his translation of Jung Young Su’s “Aficionados” (we are proud to have played a small role in ”changing his life,” as he himself attests). Hur has not one but two titles on the 13-book list—a feat which, as far as we know, has never been accomplished before in the (admittedly short) history of the International Booker Prize. You can find his very smart metafictional essay on translating Bora Chung from our Winter 2021 issue here (accompanied by a translation into the Korean by Chung herself!); Hur also facilitates Rose Bialer’s interview with Sang Young Park here (both Chung and Park appear respectively with Cursed Bunny and Love in a Big City).

In stark contrast to last year’s longlist, which saw only one work from Asia included, this year was a bumper year for Asian representation, with five titles—among these, nominees Norman Erikson Pasaribu and translator Tiffany Tsao also first appeared together in Asymptote (read their debut in English here). We extend our warmest congratulations to editor-at-large David Boyd, whose co-translation, with Samuel Bett, of Mieko Kawakami’s Heaven—Kawakami’s inclusion this year makes up for the glaring omission of Breasts and Eggs last year—is also nominated. Before we let you check out the list on your own, we note, with no small measure of delight, that Phenotypes, our Book Club pick for January 2022, and After the Sun, our Book Club pick for August 2021, were also selected for the longlist, proving that joining our Book Club is one of the best ways to encounter tomorrow’s prizewinners today. Find our interviews with the two respective author-and-translator duos here (Paulo Scott and Daniel Hahn) and here (Jonas Eika and Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg). Best of luck to all nominees—and may the worthiest pair (or trio) win!

Erica X Eisen, Blog Editor, reporting on Uzbekistan

The month of February saw celebrations in honor of the 581st birthday of the poet Alisher Navoi, a key figure in the history of Central Asian literature who was born in 1441 in what was then the Timurid Empire. While festivities occurred in several countries of the former Soviet Union, they were most pronounced in Uzbekistan, where Navoi’s work is seen as foundational for the country’s national literature. In various parts of the country, admirers of the poet held readings of his ghazals and reflected on his life and legacy.

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Something is Rotten—But What?: On The Dolls by Ursula Scavenius

“The Dolls” leaves you with a simple, haunting feeling—what is enough for a life?

The Dolls by Ursula Scavenius, translated from the Danish by Jennifer Russell, Lolli Editions, 2021

Ursula Scavenius has created an inexplicable environment in The Dolls, a collection of four stories that render the common traditions of narrative into cerebral mystery. Perhaps our characters are in Denmark, but what iteration of Denmark is it? She does not seem to call upon any particular reality or time period in which to place her characters; even the mention of actual years or eras, be they 1888 or 1999, don’t seem to hold much meaning. Amidst this ambiguity, you might say something is rotten in the state of Denmark. The epigraph of the text, deftly translated from the Danish by Jennifer Russell, reads: “I’ll tell the story, even if no one is listening.” While not necessarily a unique sentiment, it aptly sets up a book that comes to us in English translation, which has found itself a new set of readers who are ready to listen.

Fittingly, this book is part of Lolli’s New Scandinavian Literature series—and it does seem to live within that hint of reinvention, avoiding any stereotypically Danish or Scandinavian elements. There’s no hygge—that adulated brand of upper-middle-class coziness—here: everyone is decidedly uncomfortable. Nor can they be categorized under the beloved genre of Nordic noir—no outright crime exists in these stories. Instead, we have paranoia, dread, perhaps some doomsday prep, but no hardboiled investigation or detective work. Although Scavenius may not explicitly belong to the traditions of Scandinavian literature, you could thread her particular type of psychological penetration and sense of displacement with the likes of Clarice Lispector, Wuthering Heights, perhaps Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss or Amparo Dávila’s The Houseguest and Other Stories (translated by Matthew Gleeson and Audrey Harris), taking part in a global narrativization of women who find themselves in archaic or alternative lifestyles, or otherwise alone—either by their own accord or against their will. A timeless situation.

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Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from All the Birds in the Sky by Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild

Before the big fire, they had roosted in the houses on land, but now most houses are at sea.

Published on the day Denmark entered lockdown, Danish writer Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild’s award-winning novel All the Birds in the Sky follows a young, nameless protagonist who—in the submerged wasteland of a post-apocalyptic world—has to find her bearings in this strange landscape alone. The excerpt we are featuring this Translation Tuesday poignantly depicts a moment of aphasia that our narrator experiences as she attempts to grasp the language of her new world in all its ineffability. In a prose style that captures both the stillness of its depopulated setting and the urgency of our human desire for home, Haslund-Gjerrild’s voice is a unique one in the pages of climate fiction today. Equally pertinent is how, as co-translators Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell show us, this novel demonstrates the role that words and translation can have at a time when the ground we stand on has never been more uncertain.

All the Birds in the Sky begins with the wind reaching into a house and touching all the things inside—creating a sort of inventory, like a finger which points and names: knife, shovel, blankets, shoes, pails of grain, leaves. This taxonomizing wind awakens the main character, a young girl who is, we come to understand, the last human left on earth. It is a word that pulls her out of the murky depths of her slumber: why—a word that demands an answer, an explanation, a story. She uses word chains and associations to try to hold on, making up new terms for the ones she has forgotten. 

As translators, we too search for words. In a work about losing language, our task was to find a vocabulary for and recreate the voice of a girl who was losing hers. The words themselves were important, of course: Haslund-Gjerrild’s language is much like the wind in this novel—simple and unadorned, it functions to reach out and touch, to grasp and hold. But even more central to this endeavor was the musicality of the text—its rhythm and movement. The girl’s journey in these first pages is felt as the steady beat of walking, the fluidity of thought, the slippage of memory, the momentum of searching. Much of the translation therefore came together not on the page, but by being spoken aloud. We read out the text, letting its sound and rhythm guide our choices—this word or that, a comma here or there, one sentence or two.”

—Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell

Something darts past her, quick. Then again. Like a twitch in her eyelids. When she opens her eyes, the blue is full of black knives that draw lines between the houses. There’s a shrieking in her ears, a squealing, like knives being whetted, that’s how sharp the tongues and wings of the black cloud are, now drawing circles and figure-eights above her. Below her, the gentle thumping of the sea.

She lies there a little longer and tries to remember what Um called those birds. Their flat, metallic cries ring in her ears. A flock of flying birds that can say only one thing, which they repeat, again and again and again. She has always wondered what could be so important for them to say that a single word, almost just a scream, could suffice for an entire life. She can’t imagine what it might be. Maybe here-here-here-here.

Other birds prefer to fly alone, like the heron, which just is as it is. A quiet and precise bird. If she sees a heron staring at the water, she stops too and waits motionlessly with her net in hand. The heron is so still it stops time, not a single feather quivers. Only the rings of the raindrops in the water reveal that time is passing as usual, but then, a loud splash, and the next second the fish is in its beak. It swallows its catch whole and resumes its waiting. When it finally does say something, it speaks with the same precision with which it waits; a few hoarse calls that echo between the houses before it falls silent again.

Meanwhile, the little shriekbirds, maybe that’s what she should call them since she can’t think of the word, fly ceaselessly and cry ceaselessly. They always fly together, never alone, so there’s really no need for them to constantly call each other. Perhaps they’re not calling, perhaps they’re just shrieking us-us-us, for joy of flying together as one.

The shade is deep and the street is narrow, but apart from the quick, black slashes of birds, the strip of sky above her is blue. She stands and folds up the blanket. One of the birds shoots past her ear while she winds the tether around the door handle. Carefully she poles out onto the street, into the little birds’ morning frenzy. Um loved them, real city birds, Um said. Before the big fire, they had roosted in the houses on land, but now most houses are at sea. They lay their tiny eggs in nests of seaweed, grass and feathers in the houses’ cabinets and drawers, fly up and down the streets and over the rooftops, around and around until they crash into the windows. Sometimes the glass breaks and the bird hurtles into the house like a soft rock, but most often the glass holds and the bird tumbles into the water. READ MORE…