Language: Italian

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2025

January 27, 2025  |  in News  |  by Bella Creel, Meghan Racklin, and Xiao Yue Shan

Reviewing the manifold interpretations and curiosities in our Winter 2025 issue.

In a new issue spanning thirty-two countries and twenty languages, the array of literary offers include textual experiments, ever-novel takes on the craft of translation, and profound works that relate to the present moment in both necessary and unexpected ways. Here, our blog editors point to the works that most moved them.

Introducing his translation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial in 2012, Breon Mitchell remarked that with every generation, there seems to be a need for a new translation of so-called classic works of literature. His iteration was radically adherent to the original manuscript of The Trial, which was diligently kept under lock and key until the mid-fifties; by then, it was discovered exactly to what extent Max Brod had rewritten and restructured the original looseleaf pages of Kafka’s original draft. It is clear from Mitchell’s note that he considers this edit, if not an offense to Kafka, an offense to the reader who has lost the opportunity to enact their own radical interpretation of the work: an interpretation that touched Mitchell so deeply, he then endeavored to recreate it for others.

In Asymptote’s Winter 2025 Issue, the (digital) pages are an array of surprising turns of phrase and intriguing structures—of literature that challenges what we believe to be literature, translations that challenge what we believe to be originality, and essays that challenge what we believe to be logic. I am always drawn to the latter: to criticism, and writing about writers. As such, this issue has been a treat.

With the hundredth anniversary of Kafka’s death just in the rearview and the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Trial looming ever closer, the writer-turned-adjective has not escaped the interest of Asymptote contributors. Italian writer Giorgio Fontana, in Howard Curtis’s tight translation, holds a love for Kafka much like Breon Mitchell. In an excerpt from his book Kafka: A World of Truth, Fontana discusses how we, as readers, repossess the works of Kafka, molding them into something more simplistic or abstract than they are. In a convincing argument, he writes: “The defining characteristic of genius is . . . the possession of a secret that the poet has no ability to express.” READ MORE…

Our Winter 2025 Issue Has Landed!

January 23, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

New forms abound in our bountiful 14th anniversary issue, from Robin Munby’s “parasite poem” to Elsa Gribinski’s absurdist diary entries. 

With Trump’s inauguration, the world’s strange turn continues apace in the new year and the old ways of apprehending reality are struggling, as ever, to keep up. As Olivier Domerg puts it succinctly: “What can language do face to face with the inertia and the power of something?” This pressing question finds an enjoinder in #NewForms, our 14th anniversary issue, featuring never-before-published writing from 32 countries, by some of the most beloved names in world literature—Osip Mandelstam, Natsume Sōseki, Andrey Platonov, Agustín Fernández Mallo, and Damion Searls in our wildcard feature on new forms. Organized in memory of the recently deceased postmodernist Robert Coover, this Special Feature highlights works that transgress the boundaries of the literary form, opening our eyes to new aesthetic and ethical possibilities. From Robin Munby’s “parasite poem” whose hyperbolic language tests the boundary between translation and original authorship, to the laconic and darkly absurd diary entries of Elsa Gribinski’s “A Finger of Blue,” these pieces chafe against the strictures of traditional form (the poem, the journal, the letter) even as they pay homage to the artists who have shaped them.This spirit of formal ambition is by no means limited to our Special Feature. After all, “as the reality of each time changes,” says Fernández Mallo in an illuminating interview, “so does the notion of realism that the works of each era explore.” Thus, Vietnamese poet Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng splices words and fragments into a manifesto for a new writing and both Macedonian novelist Lidija Dimkovska and Syrian author Jurj Salem put their fingers on an unexplored aspect of the contemporary condition—the urge to retreat from society—and envision new ways of being. Elsewhere in Fiction, Johanna Sebauer’s Pickled presents the anatomy of a cancelling in rural Austria, when a journalist splashed by acid pickle juice launches a media crusade against Big Gherkin. Notable among our nonfiction entries is frequent contributor Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s The House of Termites, a slow-burning, lyrical meditation on her “unstoppable nomadism,” which finds an echo in award-winning Singaporean director Tan Pin Pin’s many evolving versions of banjia (Moving House) from the Visual section. Finally, in our Criticism lineup, Tomoé Hill trawls the thrilling concepts—around truth, and storytelling, and immortality—buried in Douglas Penick’s The Oceans of Cruelty, while Samuel notes the arrival of a new wave of talented young Korean poets on the shores of the United States and distills the lessons their work might hold for their Asian American counterparts.

For all the world really. The lessons that Samuel comes away with apply just as well to those not writing from a hegemonic position but who have to pitch themselves to a readership unfamiliar with their culture. It’s a conundrum we know all too well, having been the first point of contact between countless authors and readers in our fourteen years’ of work in world literature. If you’ve personally benefitted from the “Asymptote effect” (which former President of ALTA Aron Aji cited in 2017 as one of the key factors contributing to the ever-growing reception of international literature in translation), we hope you’ll consider standing with us as we enter our fifteenth year. The best way to support us is to sign up as a sustaining member from as little as USD5 a month. If you are able to afford it, come aboard as a masthead member, as wonderful readers like Yann Martel have done. Finally, if you would like to be part of an upcoming issue or even our dynamic volunteer team, check out our submission guidelines (Korean translators, take note: submissions to our upcoming paid Special Feature, organized in partnership with LTI Korea, closes Feb 15) and our latest recruitment drive (we’re on a lookout for a new Nonfiction Editor, among others; deadline: Feb 2). Thank you for your readership and your support, which have made this all worthwhile.

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What’s New in Translation: January 2025

January 13, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan, Christopher Higgs, Henry Gifford, Jordan Silversmith, and Xiao Yue Shan

Discover new work from Palestine, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Greece, Italy, China, Sweden, Germany, Chile, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo!

In the first month of 2025, the offerings of world literature are as rich as ever. To help you on your year of reading, here are ten titles we’re most excited about—a new translation of a stargazing Greek classic; the latest from China’s most lauded avant-gardist; a rediscovered Chilean novel of queer love and revolution; a soaring, urgent compilation of Palestinian voices; surrealism and absurdism from an Italian short story master—and many more.

arabic between love and war

Arabic, Between Love and War, edited by Norah Alkharashi and Yasmine Haj, Trace Press, 2025

Review by Alex Tan

 Addressing itself to the subtle but immense interstice between the Arabic words for ‘love’ and ‘war’, which differ by only one letter, Trace Press’s community-centric poetry anthology is as much a testament to beauty and survival under the conditions of catastrophe as it is a refusal to perform or fetishize suffering for a white gaze. The bilingual collection is, further, an intergenerational gathering of voices: canonical luminaries like Fadwa Tuqan are assembled alongside contemporary lodestars like George Abraham.

Throughout the volume, language gives in to its fecundity, at times carried by a voice that “condenses history to the depths of silence”, at others seeded within a word that “alone was enough to wither a tree”. The whispered syllable, across utterance and inscription, temporarily suspends the cruelties of the real: “I love calling you habibi / because then I feel as though they haven’t destroyed our cities.” In shared intimacy, an interregnum emerges, fragile as the stroke of an ر.   

But how far can one measure the ruin and the specter of love in sentences? “I write rose and mean nothing,” the poet Qasim Saudi ventures, as if refuting the possibility of romanticism. The surveying ego can also be a trap—“my I wounding me”. Many of the writers here disclose a longing for dissolution, for blunting the edges of the self so that a liquid, collective consciousness might emerge in its stead. In Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s idiom, “you never saw it coming, this cleansing, / how we have become this ocean”. Nour Balousha’s plangent question echoes, “Who told the wind that we were leaves?”  READ MORE…

Fall 2024: Highlights from the Team

November 13, 2024  |  in News  |  by Georgina Fooks, Joseph McAlhany, Julie Shi, Mary Hillis, Michelle Chan Schmidt, Sauvryn Linn, and Thuy Dinh

Looking to dip your toe in the new Fall edition but don’t know where to start? Check out these recommendations from our team!

The Fall Asymptote was a particularly special issue not least because of the focus on the ‘outsider’; many pieces resonated with the topic of alienation. In turn, the featured writers and translators—including many Asymptote colleagues—responded with sensitivity and care to questions of inclusion, liminality, and bordering. The most vital piece in the issue for me was colleague and editor-at-large for Palestine Carol Khoury’s translation of Bothayna Al-Essa’s The Gazan I Relate to. The translator’s note makes clear the stakes of translating even the title, and throughout the piece questions the limits of gestures of solidarity, especially when it is only the randomness of fate that means we are born in different nations, bounded by different borders, on one side, or the other. Al-Essa insists on the vitality of empathy but also the limits of solidarity; it is a piece that I am proud to see in the latest issue and I hope it spurs others to remember, reflect, and act.

He Wun-Jin’s short story “Guide Us, Chicken Booty!” (tr. Catherine Xinxin Yu) was a favourite, in its thoughtful exploration of grief for a trans sibling and the best way to remember them. As the title indicates, Yu translates with humour, but also with nuance, crafting a sensitive and moving text throughout.

Poet Ennio Moltedo (tr. Marguerite Feitlowitz) reflecting on the legacy of Chile’s neoliberal democracy in New Things was particularly potent, with a sharp critique of the limits of memory culture that feels even more potent since the failed attempt to reform the country’s  dictatorship-era constitution. Feitlowitz’s translator’s note demonstrates the thoughtfulness that is palpable throughout the translation.

It is always a joy to read Alton Melvar M Dapanas’s translations of Stefani J Alvarez (The Autobiography of the Other Lady Gaga is a favourite of mine from the archive) and Dear Sol continues with the question of life writing, reflecting on migration and loved ones left behind. The multilingual touches of Filipino and German paint an evocative picture.

From the Outsiders Special Feature‚ which seems to have set the tone for the issue more broadly‚ Odette Casamayor-Cisneros’s essay Home of the Maroon Women was a powerful read. Translated with skill and precision by Anna Kushner, the photos within the essay created a sense of history, of listening to and witnessing the Black women who have gone before. The voices of her family are braided with those of vital Black feminists: Audre Lorde; Maryse Condé’s grandmother,Victoire Élodie Quidal; Angelamaria Dávila; Victoria Santa Cruz. Casamayor-Cisneros reflects movingly on the journeys—both internal and external—that led her to the present moment, to the decision to stop running. Throughout, embodiment is key: “When Black women commit to fully living within and for our bodies, we become ourselves. We render our humanity too eloquent to be stifled, as we find the inner peace freeing from the external expectations that define us solely by our actions and roles for others.”

—Georgina Fooks, Director of Outreach

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2024

October 28, 2024  |  in News  |  by Bella Creel and Xiao Yue Shan

Exploring the breadth and depth of our latest issue!

Dive into our latest issue through the eyes of our blog editors, who take a close reading of the pieces that most moved them. In confronting shame and invisibilization, tracking the recurrent tides of grief, rending the mysterious forces of music and literature into poetry, and reimagining the painful, final moments of a migrant’s journey—these translations offer us avenues into wonderment, connection, and understanding.

When I was young, I developed a compulsion to count my fingers, pinky to thumb and back again, to fifteen, whenever I found myself in a situation I didn’t understand, or when I felt ashamed or guilty. The repetitive, reliable action was my way of putting a cork in my anxiety, to stem the building pressure that threatened to well up, and reorient myself in the world around me. No one else I knew had the same need—at least, not that I could see—and realizing this put a box around the world, shut by lock and key, depriving me of any access. In Ornela Vorpsi’s Offworld, in translation from the Italian by Antonella Lettieri, the main character Tamar feels similarly severed from the rest of the world. Where I experienced it like a dam ready to burst, Tamar feels a “fissure,” as if from an earthquake, splitting her brain and setting her apart from other people; where I had a box, Tamar views the world through a window, from which she observes the comings and goings of her neighbors and their visitors. Tamar’s fissure is fueled by an inexplicable wanting, a sense of shame and lust that she cannot put into words: “I could not tell my mother nor anyone else what was happening because I did not know either. I was brutally suspended in fear, under its control.”

From her window, Tamar watches the many sons of her neighbor Maria, entranced by their indulgence and languid masculinity, their bodies cast in light and smoke reminiscent of a Caravaggio. A Virgin Mary watches over the boys’ room, holding a baby Jesus—a reminder that God is always watching, and a source of the religious paranoia that haunts Tamar throughout her life. The religious undertones to her shame are in part what prevent her from recognizing what it is that she wants, even though she knows she lusts for something:

I too, Tamar, felt that I desired something uncatchable, even if I could not give it a name. It took many shapes, my desire, I only sensed that it was sly, that it deceived me, slipping like an eel from between my fingers, from between my thighs.

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Held Together by Dreams: On Erminia Dell’Oro’s Abandonment

September 19, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Rose Facchini

Her characters are profoundly human, each wrestling with their own fears, hopes, and desires . . .

Abandonment by Erminia Dell’Oro, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky, Héloïse Press, 2024

Why do we leave behind people and places? Is it painful or bittersweet? Does it indicate bravery or cowardice, altruism or egoism? Do we have complete agency in these decisions or are we instead constrained by necessity, oftentimes masked by the illusion of choice? What kind of person do we become in the aftermath?

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The Sea Will Dream In My Ears: Megumi Moriyama on Recasting Virginia Woolf into Japanese and Spiral Translation

September 18, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Translation can never be just a flat movement between two points, merely returning to its origins.

Japanese poet, critic, and translator Megumi Moriyama has so far worked on metamorphosing Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) into the Japanese and on a ‘back translation’ of Arthur Waley’s poetic rendition of the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, in collaboration with her sister, haiku poet and critic Marie Mariya, published by Sayusha. As a poet, Megumi confesses that even her original poems in Japanese are layered with translation across varying texts within and outside her native language. Of her forthcoming poetry collection, she told me, “Perhaps you might say that through translation, I have made a journey into the depths of Japanese language.”

In this interview, I spoke with Megumi, currently in Tokyo, on rendering Virginia Woolf and Waley’s The Tale of Genji into the Japanese; how spiral translation goes beyond back-translations; and the new-age scene of literary translation in Japan.

Author headshot courtesy of Benjamin Parks.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): You translated Virginia Woolf’s experimental classic The Waves into the Japanese as Nami (2021), published by Hayakawa. Could you speak about your process in rendering a 1931 polyphonic novel set in England by a prose writer known for her stream of consciousness narrative mode with the modern-day Japanophone readership in mind? I heard there was so much hype about it, especially on Japanese book Twitter, as it was the first translation of this novel in almost 50 years.

Megumi Moriyama (MM): The new translation of The Waves was welcomed much more enthusiastically than I had expected. When I posted the announcement on social media, it went viral. And after the publication, the book was immediately put into reprint.

I studied Virginia Woolf as a student, and The Waves was one of my favorites of hers, but I never thought I would have the opportunity to translate it. It was thanks to social media that I got the chance. I tweeted very casually that I was interested in translating The Waves, an editor took notice of it, and the project became a reality.

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Michele Mari’s “Obscene Excess” of the Literary

September 11, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Francesca Mancino

For [Mari's characters], collecting signifies a dependency on nostalgia and memory, all of which coexist with each individual object.

We all love our books, but at what point does that love become reductive—or even dangerous? Italian writer Michele Mari weaves elements of materialist obsession into his fictions, describing how one’s attachment to literature can create falsifications, egomaniacal delusions, and objectifications of the people around us. In this following essay, Francesca Mancino takes a close look at Mari’s You, Bleeding Childhood and the recently published Verdigris, tracing their narratives in their manifestations of literary greed.

In the threaded lines that clutter all but the gutters of his works, Michele Mari comes close to Becca Rothfeld’s fantasy of excess, as detailed in her essay, “More Is More.” There, she writes, “I dream of a house stuffed floor to ceiling; rooms so overfull they prevent entry; too many books for the shelves; fictions brimming with facts but, more importantly, flush with form; long tomes in too many volumes; sentences that swerve on for pages; clauses like jewels strung onto necklaces. . .” In both the collection You, Bleeding Childhood (2023) and the novel Verdigris (2024), translated into English by Brian Robert Moore, there is a feeling that the text cannot contain the objects described. It is as if the words command a vaster space than a page can allow for.

Mari’s work toes the line between the wonder and the obscenity of excess; in both You, Bleeding Childhood and Verdigris, the author presses his readers to think about its many forms and their respective limits. Reflected in his writing style, one could almost say that there is too much in Mari’s books—too many literary objects, household items, convoluted adjectives, coveted authors, and blended dialects. In Verdigris, the walls of a home have almost no free space because “everywhere has gradually been overrun by objects and signs drawn on paper, when not by symbols traced directly onto the plaster. Anyone walking into that room would have the impression of a random and compulsive clutter, as though owing to a kind of horror vacui.” The narrator, Michelino, reminds the reader that the objects are not arbitrary, since he and Felice, the house’s owner, share an intimate knowledge of “every single element” tacked onto its surfaces. READ MORE…

In my dreams I reply like this

August 15, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Oonagh Stransky

Either way, it too is a kind of reply—to the call of literature, the call of writing.

For her translation of Erminia Dell’Oro’s Abandonment, Oonagh Stransky received one of the prestigious PEN Translates awards in 2023; one year later, this powerful, lyrical novel is due to arrive by way of Héloïse Press on September 15. Rendered into English with great sensitivity and intimacy, Abandonment tells the story of a mother-daughter pairing in Eritrea, and their alienation from both local and the colonial Italian communities in the aftermath of racial laws. Stransky fought for its appearance in the English-language for twenty years, and in the following essay, she speaks on the emotional, introspective process of translating this tremendous work, and why she has remained so determined that the world should read it.

abandonment

It’s July 2024, and I’ve received the proofreader’s notes for Abandonment. I need to reply to an issue with the passage below:

“Then Sellass felt a deep languor come over her and she understood that her body was dissolving into the seawater, that the wave she had become was returning towards the light and slowly breaking on a beach where the shades of the dead had gathered. Even Mariam’s shells were there, specks of darkness on the sand, and a hand reached out to grab them. The wave tried to speak, to tell her that she was Sellass, but the voice was only a watery gurgle, and the shades, going through the gestures of life, ignored the coming and going of the wave.”

The proofreader says

This is a bit confusing—reads to me like the wave is speaking to Sellass, but if I’ve understood correctly the wave IS Sellass? And she’s trying to speak to Mariam? I think the confusion is using “she” to refer to the wave, if it read ‘to tell her that it was Sellass’ it would be clearer.

I reply

Using “it” does fix the problem but ambiguity and the gendering of the wave are important to both story and style. Actually, the original Italian doesn’t say that the wave is trying to speak to Mariam. It just says, L’onda tentava di parlare, di raccontare che lei era Sellass. . . I suggest modifying that line to: The wave tried to speak, to say she was Sellass. . . This keeps the female gender of the wave and retains an element of ambiguity.

In my dreams I reply like this

The world of this book is filled with objects that we readers might commonly see as neutral but that are attributed gender by characters who need them to survive, who see their fragile lives building and then crumbling, over and over, casually, randomly, like waves. Sellass in this instance is indeed the wave, and because the wave in Italian is a feminine noun, she is both wave and girl. More than trying to address Mariam here, Sellass is receiving a message from the universe that she is a mere mortal, that she coexists with death, with the shades. Her daughter, Marianna, will be made aware of her own mortality, but she is accepting of it, which in turn allows her to survive and not become a victim; this awareness is the key to her resistance.

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Principle of Decision: Translation from Italian

July 11, 2024  |  in Principle of Decision, Translations  |  by Antonella Lettieri, Candice Whitney, Catherine Xinxin Yu, Elena Pala, and Julia Conrad

How does one evaluate the works of a writer who paradoxically championed women’s rights and supported an ultra-patriarchal regime?

Principle of Decision takes a close look at the manifold, careful decisions made by translators in their interpretations. Each participating translator is given the same excerpt of a text to render into English, revealing the various incarnations that can stem from even a single word. In this edition, Catherine Xinxin Yu presents a piece from the Italian writer Ada Negri.

When I was casually browsing at a book fair in 2023, my eyes were caught by two descriptors on the back of a tiny claret booklet featuring Ada Negri’s works: ‘feminist literature ante litteram’ and ‘twice nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature’. I had to find out who this Ada Negri was.

Ada Negri (1870-1945), born in the northern Italian city of Lodi, grew up in a working-class milieu and began earning a living as a schoolteacher from the age of seventeen. She published her first poem La nenia materna (Mother’s Lullaby) in 1888, her first poetry collection Fatalità (Fatality) in 1892, and continued to garner literary acclaim through the 1910s. Her gaze was directed outwards, encompassing the struggles of the Italian working class of which she was a part, but also turned inwards, voicing her intense emotional turmoil as a woman, a lover, and a mother. At the same time, she actively participated in socialist projects like the Lega Femminile di Milano and co-founded the Asilo Mariuccia in 1902 for at-risk women and minors.

In 1917, Negri published her immensely successful short story collection, Le solitarie (Solitary Women), from which the excerpt below is drawn. Eighteen grayscale character studies provide ‘humble glimpses into the lives of women who fight alone: alone despite family, alone despite love, alone due to faults of their own, of men, or of destiny’, as the author wrote in the book’s preface (translated from the Italian). This collection was groundbreaking in its focus on the tribulations of lower-class women and unflinchingly tackles taboo subjects from female sexuality and abortion, to marital unhappiness and the lack of care for the elderly.

So far, so good, right? But Negri was also a controversial figure who achieved her status partly due to her staunch support of Mussolini’s fascist regime. In the 1890s, she befriended socialists active in Milan, such as Filippo Turati, the Russian-born feminist Anna Kuliscioff, Nobel peace prize winner Teodoro Moneta—and Benito Mussolini, who identified as a socialist at the time. But by the outbreak of WWI, as Mussolini’s break with socialism gave way to his avowed fascism, Negri definitively sided with Mussolini’s bellicose patriotism and distanced herself from the antimilitarist democratic socialism of Turati and Kuliscioff. She would go on to win the Premio Mussolini in 1930, become the first and only woman to be admitted into the Accademia d’Italia in 1940 (a short-lived hall of fame for intellectuals in fascist Italy, if you will), and follow government directives in her long-standing collaborations with major newspapers until her death in 1945. READ MORE…

Poem for a Vanishing World: On Translating Orlando Furioso

June 26, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Sebastián Sánchez

Chivalric romances . . . had been popular for centuries. . . . At the same time, though, the world that they were describing was vanishing.

Ludovico Ariosto’s magnum opus, Orlando Furioso, has only been translated into English four times since 1900. After first appearing in 1516, this epic has become an indispensable entry in the Italian canon and remains one of the longest poems in European literature, numbering over thirty-eight thousand lines in forty-six cantos, telling tales of love, war, tragedy, and fantasy across continents, seas, and even the cosmos. In our Spring 2024 edition, we presented a daring translation by Steven Monte of one of the poem’s most famous episodes—a fantastical voyage to the moon, which demonstrates at once the ecstatic potentialities of poetry, the corruption of art by human vices, and all the ways by which the self can be lost.

In the following interview, Monte speaks to our very own Assistant Interview Editor Sebastián Sanchez about the challenges and delights of rendering the best-selling book of the sixteenth century into English.

Sebastián Sanchez (SS): Despite his influence on European literature, Ludovico Ariosto’s work is underappreciated in the Anglophone world. What drew you to translate Orlando Furioso?

Steven Monte (SM): The underappreciation is partly what drew me, but perhaps more than anything I wanted to translate the specific episode of Astolfo’s trip to the moon. Astolfo is my favorite character in Orlando Furioso, and translating one episode was plenty challenging. When I discovered that the most recent verse translation of the epic-romance—David Slavitt’s—did not include this famous section, I was even more motivated.

SS: Whenever I read an early modern text—I am thinking specifically of those by Rabelais and Cervantes here—I am surprised by its liveliness and audacity. Do you think Orlando Furioso has a contemporary relevance which might surprise new readers? 

SM: Absolutely. First off, as with the two authors you mention, Ariosto is funnier than twenty-first-century readers might expect. And again like those two authors, he is self-aware; the narrator often addresses the reader, or a subset of his readers, in a knowing and urbane way. Finally, Ariosto often feels modern in his depiction of female characters and gender relations. This last element is not so much present in the episode that I translate, which focuses on two male characters and is something of a spoof of Dante. But note the irreverent way in which Saint John discusses the entire epic tradition and the way in which other poets, like Virgil, misrepresented characters like Dido.

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Serpentine

June 24, 2024  |  in Essays, Retellings  |  by Kanya Kanchana

The loop of the ☥ ankh is the Ouroboros, the endless serpent that swallows its own tail, and there is a void at its heart. Mind the gap.

In our column “Retellings,” Asymptote presents essays delving into myths, those enduring stories that continue to transform and reincarnate. In this rendition, Kanya Kanchana traces the winding path of serpents across world literature and translation in a longform lyric essay. Weaving between times and traditions, Kanya draws together the philosophical concepts, conflicting perceptions, and atavistic emotions that serpents inspire, such that we are not quite sure where one story ends, and another begins.

“In every story, if you go back, as far back as you can, to the point where every horizon disappears, you find a snake, the tree, water.”

– Roberto Calasso, Ka

cobra transparent

When the word nāga (Sanskrit: serpent) is uttered, the first syllable must rear its hood in the air like a cobra, and the second must root into the earth like the coil it lifts itself from. The sound is the word. Where the ouraeus, the symbol of the rearing Egyptian cobra, Naja haje, is found, it’s an unmistakable mark of sovereignty, the golden hood that guards the head that wears the crown. The symbol is the deed. Sound, symbol, story—myth is the skin beneath the skin of the world, that which shapes from within.

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The Story as Experience: Oonagh Stransky and Marla Moffa on Eugenio Montale’s Butterfly of Dinard

June 20, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

[A]s ephemeral, beautiful, and delicate as these stories are, they are firmly grounded in history. . .

In Butterfly of Dinard, the great poet Eugenio Montale leads the reader up to numinous looking points along the towers of everyday experience, pointing us towards an innate sublimity and magic—how individual vision and experience can strike pedestrian sceneries with an extraordinary intensity of meaning. Originally published as columns in the Corriere della Sera, fifty of these stories have been translated with extraordinary care and finesse by Marla Moffa and Oonagh Stransky, and in this interview, they speak to us about the affinity between Montale’s prose and poetry, the revelations of translation, and how such stories travel from the page into personal realities, deepening and celebrating the spaces, people, and objects that—if looked at closely—“reveal a great truth.”

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 USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): I wanted to start with asking you both about the crossings between Montale’s poems and his prose works. What do both of you consider Butterfly of Dinard to be saying to us on its own? Is there an independent author to be found, or should we read his prose as dialogic with his poetry?

Marla Moffa (MM): I would say that there are various symbols in the poems that we can also find in the stories. Considering that he wrote Butterfly of Dinard when he was in his fifties—after the two main volumes of poetry, Cuttlefish Bones and The Occasions, and concurrently with The Storm and Other Things—it’s as if he’s regrouping in these stories everything that we find in the poems as well.

For example, as Jonathan Galassi points out in the introduction, Montale speaks about the eels in the story “The Best Is Yet to Come,” and just at the mention of the word eel on the menu for the protagonist, the narrator has this flashback, because the eels represented something special in his youth. There’s also the poem “L’anguilla / The Eel” in Montale’s poetry, which is one of his most important poems. It’s interesting to be able to read the two pieces in parallel, but at the same time, I feel like the stories are independent. If you don’t know his poetry, and you just read Butterfly of Dinard, you can still enter into Montale’s world. He even says himself that if one wants to know his story, that this is the book to read, because it is quite autobiographical.

Oonagh Stransky (OS): I agree with what Marla said, and the only thing I would add is that one of the things that appeals to me most about these stories is really the element of humour—the self-deprecating humour and irony. As in his poetry, there are moments of existential crisis, of gaps and sudden shocks, but there is also a delight in life, and a delightfulness that he attributes to so many different things. The nostalgia towards his past is one aspect of it, but I also like how he talks about himself—how he describes this figure, who may represent himself, as bumbling and Chaplin-esque, as Galassi calls it. It opens up new windows onto Montale the man, and who this very mysterious and obscure Nobel-winning poet was. Here we see him as a man in slippers, with a turban on his head, holding a rug up to scare away a bat—all those things are elements that allow the reader to feel more familiar with him. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: from “A Minimal Unhappiness” by Carmen Verde

June 18, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Katie Shireen Assef

Unhappiness is not only a state of the spirit... No. Unhappiness is a place, a real, physical place, a dark room that we decide to stay in.

This Translation Tuesday, we are excited to present the English debut of Carmen Verde, a finalist for the Premio Strega in 2023 for her very first novel, A Minimal Unhappiness, which we excerpt here in Katie Shireen Assef’s impeccable translation. Verde’s narrator is a habitué of sadness and madness, an accustomed yet discerning sufferer. If unhappiness is a room, as she claims with some authority, then hers is lush-black, Gothically plangent, and filled with lugubrious relatives.

God is the Highest. God is the Most High.
Isn’t that terrifying?

 

***

In photographs we’re always sitting close together, my mother and I: she, pale, uneasy, with a look that seems to apologize for itself.

In those days, she still prayed to God that my bones would lengthen. God had nothing to do with it, though. If it took stubbornness for a girl not to grow, I had more than enough.

I never thought I was ugly. And I never doubted that I resembled my mother, even if I didn’t have her thin ankles, her elegant proportions. Ours was an elusive, an indecipherable resemblance: the sort of resemblance that pierces the heart of those who manage to recognize it.

 

***

In my five years of primary school, she came to pick me up every afternoon. The window of my classroom looked out onto the street, so that between my desk and the bench where she sat waiting, there couldn’t have been more than a hundred fifty feet as the crow flies. I was happy when I saw her on the other side of the glass, even if I was soon overcome by the fear—the terrible certainty, even—that she would decide to go and leave me there, alone. I never believed I had a right to my mother’s presence.

In winter, on windy days, the dust from the street would cling to her silk stockings, to her camel-colored coat, to her hair that was so straight and smooth it seemed like velvet. On the first warm days in June, she would stand beneath the shade of the linden tree at the center of the piazza. If she stayed, I told myself, it meant she loved me. I couldn’t see her from where I sat at my desk (the shutters were closed to block out the sun), and so the fear would slowly build up inside me until, five minutes before the lesson ended, I had lost all hope of finding her. And yet there she would be, still in the same spot. Yes, Sofia Vivier was a good mother.

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