Language: German

What’s New in Translation: April 2021

April 12, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Charlie Ng, Marina Dora Martino, and Rachel Stanyon

New work from Japan, Denmark, and Germany!

Our chosen texts from around the world this month denote a certain defamiliarization with one’s environment, whether due to an intrinsic sense of alienation, or an enforced strangeness by a world unexpectedly altered. In literature, disparity is a powerful, effective motif for both the urgency of social commentary, and the exploration of the personal psyche, and the works presented here are exemplifications par excellence in both respects. From a collection of short science fiction tales from a Japanese counterculture icon, to a dual text of two poetry volumes by acclaimed Danish poet Pia Tafdrup, and a harrowing tale of exile and forced peripatetics in the immediate fallout of Kristallnacht. Read on to find out more!

terminal boredom

Terminal Boredom: Stories by Izumi Suzuki, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi, and Helen O’Horan, Verso, 2021

Review by Rachel Stanyon, Copyeditor

Terminal complicity. Terminal addiction. Terminal jealousy. Terminal resignation. Terminal self-deception. Terminal love. Any of these could have been the title of Terminal Boredom, this engrossing first collection of short stories by Izumi Suzuki to appear in English translation. Given how prescient and succinct these tales are, it is surprising that they have taken this long to become available in English. With their worlds full of disillusionment and disaffection, youth unemployment and apathy, they will certainly strike a chord for modern readers interested in the emotional and societal effects of late capitalism, along with fans of sci-fi and speculative fiction.

In Japan, Suzuki is better known; there is even a novel (Endless Waltz by Mayumi Inaba, 1992) and a film (Koji Wakamatsu’s 1995 adaptation Endless Waltz) about the relationship between her and her jazz-musician husband, Kaoru Abe (Suzuki’s daughter sued over invasion of privacy at the book’s release, so read and watch as your conscience dictates). Suzuki, born in 1949, had a varied career, working as a key-punch operator, bar hostess, model, and actress, finding success as a writer before committing suicide in 1986, eight years after her then newly ex-husband had died of a drug overdose. These biographical details suggest that she understood intimately the sometimes hapless jobs, dependencies, and loneliness of the characters she depicts.

The scenarios constructed in the collections’ seven stories are varied enough to maintain interest, while the themes of apathy and detachment bind them together. “Women and Women” (tr. Daniel Joseph) describes a world plagued by resource scarcity in which men have been carved out of society and sent to a cunningly translated “Gender Exclusion Terminal Occupancy Zone” (GETO for short). This society is controlled through a sort of Orwellian erasure of history, and maintained by the complicity of the vast majority of its female inhabitants. Although the same-sex relationships are cast sympathetically, and, indeed, androgyny seems to be idolized throughout the collection, the story seems ultimately to condemn this ghettoized, vapid world. There does, however, remain a degree of ambivalence. The narrator soon comes across an escaped boy and “learn[s] the unexpected, dreadful truth about human life” before discovering that her mother was disappeared because she had fallen in love with a man and conceived naturally; in the end, though, our protagonist opts back into ‘normal’ life:

When I returned to my room, I noticed that my anguish was almost entirely gone. Women and women. Just as it should be. (. . .)

And yet . . . I put the pen down again before I was done. Now that I know about that thing, how can I ever be happy? To doubt this world is a crime. Everyone but everyone believes implicitly in this world, in this reality. I and I alone (well, probably not) know the great secret of this existence, and I’ll have to live out the rest of my life keeping it at all costs.

Right now, I have no intention of sacrificing my life for some underground resistance movement. But who knows, it might come to that someday.

The reader cannot, however, help but feel that it never will. READ MORE…

The 2021 International Booker Prize Longlist

April 8, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Sarah Moore

As well as being notable for texts that cross geographical borders, the 2021 longlist features works crossing the boundaries of traditional genres

Last week, the judges of the International Booker Prize announced the 2021 longlist. The prestigious prize is always followed with great excitement by critics, writers, and readers of international literature, and is particularly pertinent to us here at Asymptote. This year’s eclectic list features eleven languages from twelve countries. While we await the announcement of the six-book shortlist on April 22, let this be your guide through the thirteen books on the longlist.

The announcement of the International Man Booker, which celebrates the finest translated fiction from around the world, is always a pivotal event in the year for those interested in world literature. This year’s judging panel, consisting of Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Aida Edemariam, Neel Mukherjee, Olivette Otele, and George Szirtes, has selected a longlist dominated by newcomers and focusing above all on migration.

A welcome inclusion on the 2021 longlist, which is (as always) extremely Eurocentric, is the renowned Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi. Written in Gikuyu, this is Ngũgĩ’s first attempt at the epic form and explores the theme of disability through the story of nine sisters journeying to find a magical cure for their youngest sibling, who cannot walk.

Ngũgĩ was previously nominated for the International Booker in 2009 but has made history with this second nomination by becoming the first writer to be nominated for the prize as both author and translator of the same book, and the first nominee writing in an indigenous African language. Given that Ngũgĩ began his writing career in English before resolving to write works in his mother tongue (works for which he was detained by Kenya’s government), this nomination opens the way for much-needed conversations about literature in indigenous languages, as well as about the fascinating practice of self-translation. With the recent controversies surrounding translators of Amanda Gorman’s poetry collection The Hill We Climb, and questions of diversity and visibility of translators, Ngũgĩ’s self-translation adds a new angle to the debate about who gets to translate a text.

Chinese author Can Xue has also been previously nominated for the prize. In 2019, Xue was nominated for Love in the New Millennium, while this year’s nomination is for her first collection of stories, I Live in the Slums (translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping). READ MORE…

It’s the Song One’s After: Alexander Booth on translating Friederike Mayröcker

April 5, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Sophia Stewart

You have to listen hard, and long, and then try and carry that listening over.

Early in her lyrical memoir, The Communicating Vessels, Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker has a crisis of faith: “And will anyone even read this . . . ?” she wonders. “. . . I see no goal, everything I touch, take up, after 1 short time seems flat and plain . . .” This kind of mid-project despair should sound familiar to many a writer—when the work feels futile, and the motivation to do it sapped.

But in some respects, Mayröcker had no choice but to write The Communicating Vessels. After the death of Ernst Jandl, her partner and collaborator of nearly half a century, Mayröcker took to the page to process her grief. She didn’t write her way out of pain so much as through it: in Vessels and its companion And I Shook Myself a Beloved, recently compiled together and published in English by A Public Space, the poet documents and reflects on her mourning process, her memories, and her daily life without Jandl.

Mayröcker’s style—unfettered, freely associative—can intimidate some readers. Literary translator Alexander Booth, on the other hand, was immediately captivated. In his masterly translation of Vessels, a work that confidently flouts grammatical rules and linguistic convention, Booth manages to enter Mayröcker’s mind and interpret her raw, cascading thoughts. It’s heartbreaking to witness her anguish and disorientation, while simultaneously astounding to revel in her complete liberation from the confines of language. In the following interview, I speak with Booth about the daunting, rewarding process of bringing Mayröcker to English-language readers. 

—Sophia Stewart, Assistant Interviews Editor

Sophia Stewart (SS): The Communicating Vessels was in fact the first book of Mayröcker’s that you ever read, handed to you by a bookseller in Berlin over fifteen years ago. How did you come to translate Vessels? Did translating this book change at all your understanding of or relationship to her and her work?

Alexander Booth (AB): As with many things, it was a fairly circuitous path! I first encountered Mayröcker’s writing in Jerome Rothenberg’s and Pierre Joris’ anthology, Poems for the Millennium, and was intrigued. But living as I was in the US, finding her books in the original German was somewhat difficult. Then at the end of 2003 I moved to Berlin. I had nowhere to be, nowhere to go. The city was dark. There was snow and it was cold and I was unemployed and sleeping on a kitchen floor. Mostly I wanted to read. And fall in love. What I got was The Communicating Vessels. And so I more or less began to translate bits and pieces as soon as I could—but for myself, mind you, as a means of getting a better grip on what was going on.

Later, unpublished and unknown, I had absolutely no idea how to go about contacting publishers, much less how to approach journals with something in translation. After some not exactly encouraging responses and years of rejections, I mostly gave up. Then, at some point, I began to correspond with Nia Davies, who at that time, in 2014, was editor at Poetry Wales. She ended up publishing a few of the aforementioned bits and pieces in the journal in connection to a piece on Mayröcker—at ninety and being translated into Welsh. Then, in late 2015—more than ten years after having first begun—out of the proverbial blue I received an email from A Public Space inquiring as to whether I had any longer excerpts, and would I be interested in putting together a kind of expose, and it went from there.

I’m not sure that translating this book changed my understanding or relationship that much, no, aging and experience did just fine on their own. But I will say that there are very few writers who will truly change the way you approach reading and writing, indeed change your reading and writing, and whose works will continue to teach you in surprising ways, year after year. There are also very few writers you will remember where you were, when you were, how you were, upon first reading. It is no exaggeration to write that Mayröcker was one of them for me. READ MORE…

The Indeterminacy of the Human: An Interview with Rainer Hanshe of Contra Mundum Press

March 31, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Rachel Allen

. . . we say to read for difference, for dissonance; read not to identify, or to sympathize, but from a principle of fascination.

Contra Mundum is a New York-based independent publishing house expressly committed to Modernist work and principles. Its catalog includes the dramatic writings and theatre criticism of Robert Musil; Celan’s posthumous prose as translated by Pierre Joris; two “pre-heteronymic” works from Pessoa; the generously-illustrated Letters of Otto Dix; and a late film script from Marguerite Duras. Preference is given texts with limited circulation, the under-translated and outré in particular. 

In 2012, for instance, Contra Mundum published Marginalia on Casanova, Tim Wilkinson’s rendering of Volume 1 in Miklós Szentkuthy’s cathedral-commentary-catalogus rerum, St. Orpheus Breviary. Contra Mundum is now five books into its tremendous project, bringing into English an immense cosmophagic-and-collapsing body of prose from a modernist still known as the “sacred monster” of Hungarian letters. In addition to works from the Breviary, Contra Mundum has so far contributed translations of Prae and Toward the One & Only Metaphor (also translated by Wilkinson, who died in October of 2020) and Chapter on Love (translated by Erika Mihálycsa, who will continue as translator for subsequent Szentkuthy works). That CMP should be the publisher to finally give Anglophone readers an adequate Szentkuthy is fitting: press and author share an understanding of zeitgeists alive—in art, in language—across history, unthreatened by chronology or multilingualism. Contra Mundum too experiences its periodic connection to modernism(s) without—or with different—temporal allegiances. In addition to Musil and Pessoa, CMP has published not only Baudelaire and Wordsworth and the Ghérasim Luca of Mary Ann Caws, but also Iceberg Slim, a new Gilgamesh (Stuart Kendall’s), Ahmad Shamlou, Maura Del Serra, and the collected prose of Robert Kelly. Many texts converge around performance, whether onstage, on screens, or in person(ae): CMP has published Elio Petri, Richard Foreman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, Rédoine Faïd, and Carmelo Bene. Adjacent to this swirl of codexical text and idea is Hyperion, CMP’s in-house and aptly subtitled journal: On the Future of Aesthetics.

Rainer J. Hanshe is the founder, editor, and publisher of Contra Mundum Press, as well as the author of two CMP titles, Shattering the Muses and The Abdication, and the translator of its three works by Baudelaire. We spoke recently about the nature of (his) modernism and its role in contemporary literature. Deviation, ambition, and heteroglossia were our major subthemes.

Rachel Allen (RA): How does Contra Mundum understand “modernism”? How do you recognize modernist work when you encounter it? (Is modernism limited, temporally? Geographically? Relationally? Formally? To whom is it available to be modernist?)

Rainer Hanshe (RJH): Although Modernism does occur within a specific epochal moment, I don’t see it as bound to that cluster of time, nor do I see it in absolute or purist terms. There is no kind of totemic Modernism with a unified set of precepts that every modernist abides by. Any kind of doctrinaire, sectarian, or dogmatic form of something cannot be abided. We are advancing modernism more as a kind of mobile act or event, like a type of living roving machine (not in a mechanistic sense but as a generative force) or combustion furnace and monster of energy. It is a question of extracting from any period, any event, any moment, its active, productive elements, like taking an arrow shot by Nature, picking it up where it has fallen, and shooting it in new directions, as Deleuze said of Nietzsche.

In that way, art is no different from science in terms of advancements—once a certain insight or knowledge has been developed, there is no reason to abandon it, let alone restrict it to its original moment. Modernism (let’s avoid the term neo-Modernism) is to us protean and metamorphic, an open, indeterminate constellation. Beyond seeing it solely as a specific movement in time then, consider its principal elements as if they were discoveries: a conscious break with tradition (abandoning outmoded elements of classicism); a rejection of historicism and the grand narratives of Western metaphysics, not to speak of its morals and values; the displacement of reason as a ruling force (the curse of the Enlightenment) and fostering in its stead a chiasmic fusion of the rational and the irrational; an abandonment of bankrupt forms of art, such as naturalism and realism (and so representation), which different scientific developments essentially undermined, and Enlightenment-type encyclopaedic projects of totality; related to consciousness and new conceptions of the self and the indeterminacy of the human: interior monologues; stream of consciousness; perspectivalist viewpoints; fracturedness, fragmentation, heteroglossic language, en plus.

It is a literature of incommensurabilities, of a dynamism in signification, of a rejection of absolute truths, of an embracing of dissonance. A literature that is aware of language’s limits, of its fissures, of its cul-de-sacs and cracks, and it vigorously pursues such. Flaubert’s book about nothing; Mallarme’s Le Livre; Beckett’s search for a literature of the unword; et cetera. Modernism understands language as Bakhtin spoke of it: a dynamic entity consisting of an interplay between centripetal and centrifugal discursive forces. The combustive furnace. Heteroglossia. An amalgam of linguistic registers. The Tower of Babel is not a curse. READ MORE…

Twenty Poems and Two Women: Kathrin Schmidt and Sue Vickerman

March 4, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Andreea Scridon

Schmidt is determined to use the most searing images to jolt the reader into the reality she has been forced to live in.

Twenty Poems by Kathrin Schmidt, translated from the German by Sue Vickerman, Arc Publications, 2020

Born in the former GDR and now of Berlin, Kathrin Schmidt is a renowned poet and novelist. Notorious in her native Germany as a competitor of Herta Müller (since beating the celebrated writer for the 2009 German Book Prize), she is a strong and serious voice of what translator Sue Vickerman terms “the left-behind east.” Schmidt, who has worked as an editor and a child psychologist, has published six poetry books and five volumes of fiction in German. A versatile author whose own interior and external experience stands at the base of her writings, Schmidt continually broaches contemporary topics, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to migration in the era of the internet, with relentless perspicacity and humor.

An excellent translator doesn’t necessarily have to be a writer, but when an exceptional translator is an exceptional writer in his or her own right, as is the case with poet-translator Sue Vickerman, the experiment takes on a new aura, advancing transcultural dialogue and culture itself. In her introduction to Kathrin Schmidt: Twenty Poems (the author’s first collection in English), Vickerman draws the reader into her own personal experience of translating Schmidt, a project she completed with obsessive attention to detail and superhuman dedication.

READ MORE…

Each Sentence a Dagger: Tim Mohr on translating Alina Bronsky’s My Grandmother’s Braid

March 1, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Barbara Halla

Her world expands beyond the margins; there's the world that she's telling in detail, and then there's all this other stuff just outside the lens.

In our Book Club selection for January, we were thrilled to present Alina Bronsky’s brilliantly comic and irreverent My Grandmother’s Braid, a study of familial dysfunctions that renders its players in all their idiosyncratic fascinations. Now, Assistant Editor Barbara Halla talks with Bronsky’s translator, Tim Mohr, about his intimate connections to Germany and its language, the German tradition of immigrant literature, and the challenges of rendering Bronsky’s surprising and intuitive narration.

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Barbara Halla (BH): You have a longstanding relationship with Alina Bronsky, having translated five of her books. Could you speak a little bit about how you came across her work and what inspired you to translate her?

Tim Mohr (TM): Her first book, Broken Glass Park, was either my second or third translation. It came after I attended a speech at Carnegie Hall, under the auspices of a festival called Berlin Lights. I sat in the audience to watch these ostensible experts speak on the German publishing world, and they claimed there was no tradition of immigrant literature there.

I remember thinking that the last ten German novels I’d read were all by what you might call “immigrant” writers, or writers writing in German as a second language. I was really adamant about working in that field and trying to get more of that material into the U.S. market, so people would be aware that this tradition did exist over there, and that it was booming. And then I came across Alina. I loved her debut novel, Broken Glass Park, and because the translation went well, we wanted to continue working together. I wouldn’t want another one of her books to come out with a different translator.

As far as our relationship goes, I tend not to work closely with the authors when I’m translating, and a lot of them speak really, really good English, so it’s all the more daunting in some ways—I don’t want them to be looking over my shoulder, basically! I’ll email them a few queries sometimes, but for the most part, I’m trying to do it on my own. I am somewhat friendly with Alina, but when we get together we don’t really talk about translation or her books, we just have a cup of coffee or something.

READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2021

February 8, 2021  |  in News  |  by Bassam Sidiki, Caridad Svich, Eva Heisler, Garrett Phelps, Lee Yew Leong, and Sam Carter

Our section editors present their favorite works from our Winter 2021 issue!

Our Winter 2021 issue marks a decade of diving into the languages of the world (our archive now boasts 113 of them!) in all their incredible singularity and variegation. Spanning thirty-one countries, this milestone edition feels like a fitting way to honor a decade of hard work behind the scenes. After hearing from our blog editors last week, let’s pass the mic to the very editors who had a hand in putting together the issue itself.

“Is it a Comedy? Is it a Tragedy?” Thomas Bernhard asks in our debut issue from January 2011. Ten years later, Brazilian author Adelice Souza’s fever-dream of a story (in Padma Viswanathan’s pitch-perfect translation) provides a direct enjoinder: “The play wasn’t a comedy, nor was it a tragedy . . . It was a drama very specifically for those two women.” Just as in Bernhard’s story, the point is not the play at all—we hardly know what the play is about, other than the fact that its two actresses play a lonely woman and her dog, and that tragedy ensues when one demands to switch roles with the other. In contrast to Bernhard, who focuses squarely on the theatre-goer, Souza makes it all about the two actresses whose eight years of traveling with the play to multiple cities have “put them through every type of relationship.” It’s not a story one imagines being plotted out; rather, the work feels like it has been ejected, like toothpaste from a tube, sentence by exhilarating sentence. In the “Brave New World Literature” Special Feature, we also come full circle but in a different way via the return of frequent contributor Jeremy Tiang, who debuted as a translator in our first issue. Combining pop-cultural references with theory, “The World Is Not Enough” is full of quotable gems, but nowhere is Tiang more on-point than when he muses, “Perhaps if the dominant anglophone culture actually acknowledged itself to be part of the world, rather than treating ‘world literature’ as a spice rack to save itself from total blandness, more than three percent of books published in the United States would be in translation?” Finally, anyone who is curious about the workings of a magazine of world literature other than our own will find plenty of food for thought in John Freeman’s riveting piece on how he remade Granta into a global publication.

—Lee Yew Leong, Fiction Editor and ”Brave New World Literature“ Special Feature Editor

Max Rojas is a constant enthusiasm of mine and so I was thrilled to showcase a pretty sizable excerpt from Zane Koss and Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz’s translation—the very first in English—in all its shining, breathless glory. Even though it’s a mere sliver of a doorstop-sized poem, it’s an excellent sample of Rojas’ talent and an overdue introduction for the Anglosphere. The language of Bodies is both baroque and ephemeral, rugged and philosophical, and its tone swings between that of a theologico-political treatise and a declaration of war. It’s some of this last century’s densest and most sophisticated Spanish-language verse, and some of the most woefully unknown.

—Garrett Phelps, Poetry Editor READ MORE…

We’re Reached Our Milestone Tenth Anniversary! 🎉

January 28, 2021  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

And we’re celebrating with a new issue (and some very big names in world literature)!

Dear reader,

I’m thrilled to present “Brave New World Literature,” our special milestone edition marking ten full years of curating the very best in contemporary letters. Highlights include an exclusive last interview with James Salter conducted before he died in 2015, new translations of Alfred Döblin and Alain Mabanckou, as well as a trio of essays by intellectual heavyweight Eliot Weinberger, former Granta editor John Freeman, and frequent contributor Jeremy Tiang—all suggesting a “culturally multidirectional” way forward for the next decade.

In addition to featuring a “writer’s writer” (the aforementioned James Salter), we’re proud to debut in English a “true poet’s poet” (the Mexican Max Rojas) in a roster that also includes poet superstars Najwan Darwish and Carlos de Assumpção. Elsewhere, fellow Brazilian writer Adelice Souza and Hungarian author Anna Mécs give us a pair of stunning fictions in which women perform (or postpone) their deaths, while our first nonfiction lineup under new Nonfiction Editor Bassam Sidiki sees a fascinating pseudo-scientific colonial document answered with a modern memoir of Egyptian politics. In light of the recent protests by Navalny supporters all across Russia, Artur Solomonov’s drama—also about enacting death, while portraying the machinery of state propaganda—could not be more timely: The play was in fact considered so politically inflammatory that it has only ever been staged underground. All of this is illustrated by talented guest artist the Australia-based Naomi Segal. READ MORE…

Announcing Our January Book Club Selection: My Grandmother’s Braid by Alina Bronsky

January 27, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla

My Grandmother’s Braid . . . takes the idea of dysfunctional to a whole new level.

The intricate latticing of a family’s dysfunctions can provide ample material for any writer, but that is no indication that the material is easy to render in its full complexity. In our Book Club selection for January, however, we are proud to present a text that explores the peculiarities of familial relations to tremendous result. My Grandmother’s Braid, written by acclaimed author Alina Bronsky, tackles the subject(s) with equal parts biting wit and generous compassion, culminating in a subtly sensitive portrait of what happens behind the closed doors of households, and the closed minds of our loved ones. 

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

My Grandmother’s Braid by Alina Bronsky, translated from the German by Tim Mohr, Europa Editions, 2021

Over the years, I have grown weary of that infamous Tolstoy adage that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Mostly because it seems to me that the sources of our unhappiness tend to be often so ordinary (and thus far more common that we’d like to admit); evil can lack imagination, and even the worst of pains can soon turn into dull aches as we get used to almost everything. Dysfunctional families, however, are another story, and the family at the center of Alina Bronsky’s My Grandmother’s Braid, translated by Tim Mohr, takes the idea of dysfunctional to a whole new level. Despite its relative slimness, this book takes the reader on a journey with so many twists and turns that I kept staring at the pages in disbelief.

At the age of six, our narrator Max immigrates from the Soviet Union to Germany with his maternal grandparents, taking shelter in a refugee home. The verb “immigrate” is technically correct, although there is a sense that Max and his grandfather, Tschingis, didn’t immigrate as much as they were dragged to the unnamed German town where the story takes place by Max’s grandmother, Margarita Ivanova, or Margo.

Margo is the driving force behind this story and almost everything that happens in Max’s life (and not only Max’s). Worried that Max’s health is too precarious for Russia, she exploits the family’s threadbare Jewish heritage to gain refugee status. Once in Germany, she seems to suffer from what can potentially be described as Munchausen syndrome by proxy: she is certain that Max is too fragile to live as a normal child would—that he is afflicted by a number of inexplicable maladies. She hauls Max from doctor to doctor, all of whom continually refuse her diagnosis as she grows ever more certain of their incompetence. She feeds Max only steamed vegetables and unseasoned barley and oats and refuses to let him go play with other children. When Max starts first grade, she insists on being seated at the back of his classroom and interrupting his lessons with her often-wrong advice on how to solve his math assignments. The dullness of Max’s school life eventually becomes too much for her, and it is only when Margo grows bored that Max is able to gain a little bit of freedom and agency. And it is here that the narrative begins to speed up, and the years slide by to the point where reader loses track of how much time has passed. READ MORE…

The Queen’s Argot: The Language of Chess Around the World

January 21, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Allison Braden

Players worldwide understand the pieces . . . but our understanding . . . depends in part on what we call them.

Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit illustrated the international culture of chess. As it turns out, the game’s spread around the globe is a story of translation. In this brisk and brainy rundown, Editor-at-Large Allison Braden tackles its evolution through time and space, setting up a board in which pawns can be farmers, bishops can be fools, and queens can be counselors.

In December of last year, Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit smashed viewership records for a limited-run series on the site. In the show’s first month of streaming, over 62 million people around the world tuned in to the story of a young woman who overcomes several challenges in her quest to become a world chess champion in the 1960s. The series was based on Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel of the same name, and like readers before them, viewers rooted for plucky chess prodigy Beth Harmon. Her eventual triumph was, for many, a bright spot at the end of a long and difficult year.

You won’t become a grandmaster by watching the series. (In fact, one of the only aspects of the show that pro chess players took issue with was the speed of the games. In a concession to viewers, they were faster paced than matches at real tournaments.) But The Queen’s Gambit is a crash course in the culture of chess. It’s fiercely competitive, requires visual and strategic intelligence, and remains extremely male dominated (despite studies showing men aren’t inherently better at the game). Chess is also truly universal—and where there’s an international pastime, there are translators.

In the show, Harmon travels to Mexico, France, and the USSR. As her skill grows, her competitors increasingly hail from foreign countries, and as it becomes clear that the ultimate test of her ability will come in Moscow, she begins to study Russian. In the heady final scenes, commentators relay her moves in a variety of languages for listeners around the world. After The Queen’s Gambit was released, interest in chess boomed. One of the most popular ways to play is online. Chess.com boasts users from dozens of countries, and they can all play one other. Like many sports, chess transcends language; in a way, it is its own language. Players worldwide understand the pieces: the king’s hesitance, the queen’s might. The bishop, which can only move diagonally, speaks his own sideways tongue. READ MORE…

Different Ships on the Same Ocean: Jennifer Croft in conversation with High as the Waters Rise author Anja Kampmann and translator Anne Posten

January 13, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Jennifer Croft

. . . one needs to be very sensitive towards this structure, which is both a structure of memory and time as well as emotion.

In the fall of 2018, translator Anne Posten told me about a German book she had fallen in love with, about oil rig workers, male intimacy, the nature of memory, and the cost of freedom. I begged her to send me the pages she had translated that same night and was bowled over from the very first sentence. Two years later, I had the honor of publishing at Catapult Anja Kampmann’s debut novel, High as the Waters Rise, in Anne’s translation, which promptly became a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award in Translated Literature.

High as the Waters Rise is the story of Waclaw, a man who grew up in a German mining town and has been working on oil platforms across the world for twelve years. When Waclaw loses his closest companion in an accident on the rig, he must embark on a journey of grief and reckoning. 

Of course we all depend on the oil industry, even if the workers who run it are invisible to us. This novel makes that exploitation not only visible but intimate and personal. It is a politically urgent story, exploring the problems of a globalized capitalist society. But more than anything, it is the story of one man who stands at the margins of that society, asking what his life is worth.

Before we published it here, High as the Waters Rise had already been well received in Germany, where it won several awards and was nominated for the German Book Prize. But international literature in English translation, particularly by debut authors, must find passionate champions in order to succeed. We were thrilled when the novel found such a champion in author, critic, and translator Jennifer Croft, who alongside author Olga Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Flights. 

Below, Jennifer discusses with Anja and Anne the translation process, its challenges and intimate nature, and what it means to translate a person into another language. I hope that their conversation might inspire you to read High as the Waters Rise, which Jennifer Croft has said contains “prose with the brightness of poetry, in a splendidly lucid translation.”

—Kendall Storey, Editor & Foreign Rights Manager, Catapult

Jennifer Croft (JC): How did you two meet and come to this project? How did you decide to work together? Anne, maybe you could also speak a bit about how you generally choose your translation projects.

Anja Kampmann (AK): Anne and I met years ago when I was a fellow at the International Writing Program in Iowa. We’ve been in touch ever since, as she developed her professional career as a translator and I wrote a book of poetry and High as the Waters Rise. But I never expected her to do the translation for High as the Waters Rise, just because I respect her so much in her own work. I couldn’t believe it when Anne told me that she had fallen in love with the novel and wanted to translate it. Her translation sample was wonderful and she caught the spirit and rhythm of the book right away.

Anne Posten (AP): In a way, High as the Waters Rise has been a long time in the making. Anja and I met in 2010. I had just moved to New York to start grad school at Queens College and still felt a bit like a country mouse in the big city. A mutual friend knew Anja wanted to come to New York after her time at the International Writers’ Program in Iowa and asked me if I wouldn’t mind hosting her. I said yes. Luckily, Anja and I became fast friends, and we still cherish memories from that time when we were both discovering the city and getting to know each other. We’ve kept in touch ever since, and over the course of these ten years, I fell in love with and started translating Anja’s poetry and visited her several times in Germany. In that time she published her first poetry collection and I my first book-length translations, and then Anja’s debut novel Wie hoch die Wasser steigen came out, to great success in Germany. I was thrilled for her, and entranced by the text. It was amazing to be so familiar with Anja’s poetry and then see, like magic, that same voice and style turned into a novel. I did a sample translation and wrote a long report on the novel, which I sent out to almost all of the editors I know, plus some I didn’t. There was a lot of initial interest and then, much to my surprise and dismay, radio silence. I was feeling pretty frustrated when I ran into Kendall unexpectedly on a trip to New York in November 2018 and heard that she’d started working for Catapult. When we met for drinks, Kendall asked if there was anything I might want to pitch her. I told her about the book and she was immediately intrigued. I sent her my sample and report, and the rest is history. I can still hardly believe it all worked out so perfectly—getting to work on a book I care so much about, written by a friend, and edited by someone I respect, like, and trust so much as Kendall.

AK: Yes, it felt like a perfect match. Also, it was great to have a friend by my side for the American translation, after almost five years I spent writing the book. READ MORE…

The Shrouded Force of Fate: Anja Kampmann’s High as the Waters Rise

December 10, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

High as the Waters Rise fills the great blank canvas of loss with a precision that nourishes the fine contours of emotion.

High as the Waters Rise by Anja Kampmann, translated from the German by Anne Posten, Catapult, 2020

In the rich silt into which Titusville, Pennsylvania sinks its foundations, there was only one spot where it was possible to strike oil at the extraordinarily shallow depth of sixty-nine feet. On August 27, 1859, a small group of men, at the last-ditch orders of one Edwin Laurentine Drake, sank their pipes into the ground—guided by that unknown intuition which, in retrospect, looks terribly similar to fate—and black gold flowed forth. It is how the world flows forth from a single life, from one man’s fortune to a new forever, a radically altered world.

The idea of fate, its shrouded force, is perhaps the only abiding salve for the more devastating consequences of self-awareness. We look back on our times to construct an architecture of experiences, arranging fragments by our available logic to see what structure rises from the flood—what materializes in the aftermath to become that one reference by which we can define, or justify, our lives. For some reason, we always urge towards a singular narrative, despite sharing in the overarching suspicion that the life one leads is not one, but always many. The salvaging of this steadfast, solitary lesson is a comfort—that it indeed has all been for something. Without it, there would be only darkness, that eternal torrent, that deafening collapse.

Because Anja Kampmann begins High as the Waters Rise with an ending, we arrive at the temporary space between the shock of happening and the proceedings of salvage. Waclaw and Mátyás are longtime companions working on an oil rig, sharing in a rare and profound intimacy that dissipates the customary subscriptions of male camaraderie. When Mátyás vanishes from the ship in an incident so abrupt and absurd that it seems almost mystical, Waclaw is stirred into a potent, hypnotic grief—a grief that necessitates the sea, the infinity it conjures, which Kampmann calls upon in the vignette that opens the text: “There would only be sea, piling up and up. There would be no north or south. The water would swallow even the cries of the storm, which no ear would hear.” In the midst of these tides—which overwhelm the daily rituals of work, care, and thought—is the solitary island of memories, visions in which Mátyás is frayed at the edges by recall. Only these mirages anchor Waclaw: these small footholds of before, in the vast midnight of after.

READ MORE…

From Two Solitudes to Quattro Books: An Interview with Bilal Hashmi

November 18, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Moses

Quattro will . . . shift the discussion so it’s no longer . . . English and French, but the multilingual nature of Canadian writing.

Quattro Books was founded in 2006 by Allan Briesmaster, John Calabro, Beatriz Hausner, and Luciano Iacobelli, with the aim of publishing established and emerging authors who represent the linguistic and cultural diversity of literature in Toronto and across Canada. As such, from the start, Quattro Books has sought to bring out works originally written in English alongside those translated from the multilingual voices of Canadians who have arrived in the country as immigrants or refugees. The press’s recent acquisition by Bilal Hashmi, president of the Association des traducteurs et traductrices littéraires du Canada / Literary Translators’ Association of Canada (ATTLC-LTAC), and a translator himself—from French, Urdu, Persian, and Hindi—has led to a shift in focus that favours the latter. This is evidenced by Quattro Books’s first catalogue since Hashmi took over as Executive Director and Publisher. Due out in the fall of 2020, it will feature English translations of Canadian works spanning six languages. Asymptote’s co-Editor-at-Large for Argentina, Sarah Moses, met with Hashmi in Toronto to discuss Canadian literature as international literature, works in translation as partnerships, and how he’s shaping Quattro Books into a translation-focused press.

Sarah Moses (SM): I’d like to begin by asking you about your involvement with the ATTLC-LTAC. How has it led to Quattro becoming what you’ve described as a translation-focused press?

Bilal Hashmi (BH): Beatriz Hausner is central both to the ATTLC-LTAC and Quattro. She’s one of the founding members of Quattro and was the president of the ATTLC-LTAC in 2017, when I joined. I had the privilege of being mentored by her in translation and advocacy work, and the one thing we all sort of agreed on is that there should be more international works in translation available in Canada. So the movement from the ATTLC-LTAC to Quattro was, in a way, organic—the work at the former led to the idea: now we have an opportunity, let’s see what happens. That’s the way I thought of it. I started off as membership secretary in 2017 and I’ve been the president since June. We continue to work through some of the same issues that we’ve dealt with in the past: translator visibility, proper recognition, and so on—these remain our goals. But I think what Quattro will possibly do in the future is shift the discussion so it’s no longer necessarily the “two solitudes” of English and French, but the multilingual nature of Canadian writing that comes through.

SM: Is this primarily how you see Quattro Books fitting in among publishers of translation in Canada and internationally—as a press that moves beyond translations between English and French?

BH: In our first catalogue we have translations from French, Serbian, German, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, and then two titles that were written in English. We’re not going to do exclusively translation, but that’s the focus, which I think is unique in Canadian publishing. Whether or not that continues is something we’ll have to determine. We’re really hoping to find out if publishing majority translations is a viable activity.

Working with translation has involved a very international cast of characters, which is really what I find most exciting about Canadian literature as international literature. I think those who are very skeptical about translation’s profitability or potential for success kind of forget that you do have access potentially to other markets. Typically, Canadian books are marketed internally for Canadian consumption and the expectation is that Canadians will buy fellow Canadians. It doesn’t always work that way. My hope is that these books will be seen as Canadian literature, plus whatever other literature they’re referencing—let’s say the Portuguese-Angolan return novel, of which there’s now a sizable and critically acclaimed subgenre in Portuguese fiction. So the hope is that they’ll cross over into other markets, beginning in the US.

The catalogue started as kind of an exercise in fantasy, which I think I shared with you a couple of summers ago. It was an exercise in what works within the funding paradigm. Readers of Asymptote should know that in Canada the main translation activity is English-to-French, French-to-English, but the official requirement for funding from the Canada Council for the Arts is that the author be Canadian. There’s no limitation on the source language so long as the work is translated into French, English, or an indigenous language. I did a little bit of a research and I found a list of about twenty or so Canadian writers who brought in different literary histories with them. All of these works are technically eligible for Canada Council for the Arts grants, and we’re very lucky and grateful to the Canada Council for funding all six, which may be a first in Canadian publishing for one season, and probably unique in this part of the world. So that’s how it started. I think we have another half dozen languages already in the pipeline if not already under contract, also all Canadian authors. My hope is really to explore this lesser-known part of Canadian literary history, which tends not to see that much exposure in the current framework.

In the first couple of years, the focus will be on Canadian content, but we’re also starting to acquire from outside, including translations. That’s a challenge since I will insist that everyone gets paid at the Canadian rate, which is the determining factor. Because if it’s a five-hundred page novel and there’s no funding for it, then we’re probably not going to be able to pay the eighteen-cents-per-word rate—that’s the rate for prose. I believe the per-word rate remains at twenty cents for theatre and twenty-five cents for poetry. READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2020

October 26, 2020  |  in News  |  by Ah-reum Han, Garrett Phelps, Lee Yew Leong, Michele Hutchison, and Sam Carter

Our Section Editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2020 issue!

This year’s events have made us all a little rusty in the art of travel, so hopping across our fortieth issue’s thirty-two countries may feel equal parts thrilling and daunting. Luckily, our section editors (including our Dutch Literature Special Feature curator, International Booker Prize co-winner Michele Hutchison) are happy to lay out a road map. Read on for literary duos on life and love in the Netherlands, a Norwegian’s popular fury, a Mexican novelist’s elusive but lasting influence, and a German author’s and Iranian poet’s exquisite study of silence.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction and Nonfiction Editor:

Not quite as stunningly “out there” as The Haunting of Bly Manor’s episode five, Paweł Sołtys’s deeply moving “The Kiev Sea” (translated with great aplomb by Eliza Marciniak) nevertheless reminded me of it: we are in such close third-person mode that even the reading material that the protagonist uses to while away time seems to be directly absorbed as consciousness while operating as pivotal mise en abyme. Memories and regret flit through this consciousness, “maintain(ing) the other me within the present me,” even as everything is “already slipping towards an invisible edge.” In truth—as we follow the protagonist down the rabbit hole of nostalgia—the slippage began much earlier: “it seemed that since he’d turned forty, he could only discard things. Friends, women, memories even.” What is the sum of life then? How much can we hold on to? On this fateful October day of reckoning, this fictional protagonist is reminded, via fiction, as we all are perhaps, of how removed and frightfully impersonal existence finally is: “It really happened, all of it, but it’s as if it were a story, told not to me but to someone nearby, in the noise of a bar or during a fight, a proper one, when the sound of the blows drowns out the wailing.”

From Michele Hutchison, Guest Editor of Dutch Literature Special Feature:

Good fortune would have it that I was working on the selection of Asymptote’s Dutch special when my translation of The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld was awarded the International Booker Prize. Perfect timing for sharing these stunning new Dutch voices with you, coinciding with the spike in interest in our national literature. (I wrote ‘our’ without thinking: I’m a defected Brit, resident in Amsterdam.)

To be honest, Dutch literature has long had plenty to offer, and there have been other recent successes. Think of Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin (translated by David Colmer) winning the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award ten years ago, and think of the great reception Gerard Reve’s classic The Evenings (translated by Sam Garrett) and Tonke Dragt’s The Letter for the King (translated by Laura Watkinson, recently a Netflix series) have had in English. We haven’t exactly been hiding our light under a bushel. Nevertheless, it was wonderful to put together this selection of Dutch talent to entice you to read further. READ MORE…