Language: Italian

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from The Melee by Valentina Maini

February 16, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Sean McDonagh

The morning is a badly drawn sunrise, there are clumps of light to the left of the scene, the canvas is lacerated in several points.

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, a young woman loses her hold on reality in the aftermath of her family’s personal and political turmoil in this excerpt from Valentina Maini’s critically-acclaimed 2020 novel, The Melee. Translator Sean McDonagh introduces us to the novel’s protagonists: “Gorane and Jokin are twenty-five-year-old twins and children of ETA militants. Raised without rules, they take opposing and complementary directions: compliant and passive to everything, Jokin, a heroin-addict drummer, seems to follow in his parents’ footsteps, while Gorane, ambiguous and introverted, pulls away seeking refuge in an abstract world. When Jokin runs away and their parents become involved in a tragic event, Gorane finds herself prey to strange hallucinations of her parents.” In the following passage, we see Gorane’s dreamlike world through a powerfully-voiced omniscient narration. Childhood memories careen into present-day hallucinations as we veer further into first person—and deeper into the world of an unstable and unreliable narrator. This meandering stream of consciousness takes life through Maini’s virtuosic prose and masterful ability to warp perspective across numerous narrative threads. A lyrically stunning debut novel from an award-winning poet.

from The Melee

They say they don’t need medicine, they keep repeating that they’re healed. They look at her as if they were thirsty, but as soon as Gorane offers them a glass of water, they shake their heads and say: take us home. It’s impossible to make them stop. She signs some sort of verification form with her typically illegible handwriting. The nurse is called Robledo, she has blonde hair gathered in a bun and white latex gloves. Robledo is an open and frivolous surname that weighs a lot less than hers. It’s the surname of someone who cures. The border between Robledo and Moraza is that between Spain and her home planted in the land they call Euskadi. She moves closer to the first bed, her mother’s. As soon as Gorane comes to a halt, her mother raises herself into a seated position. The strain of that elementary motion moves her face, it seems to detach from the neck, distancing itself and fluctuating in the ether like a fish with no eyes. Gorane follows it with her gaze, she almost doesn’t speak, the fish doesn’t see but continues to swim in the air as if it knew by heart every angle of the hospital bedroom, as if its instinct was enough to give it faith, to not lose itself. This is her mother, this blind fish. Then she sees her father curled up on his side, she sees his incredibly lean and broad back and she thinks of the Oma Forest. In her poor repertoire of metaphors, her father was always a tree trunk, an oak. Gorane is a slender and dry branch that won’t break off. Gorane has spent her life fearing the foot that will break the equilibrium, split the frond; the blood of the branch that will sully the earth like an ancient tear. Her blood is now stone because of a sadistic sprite that has tested its pointless powers on her. She touches the cold shoulder of her father who wears a white t-shirt with red hand-drawn writing. The writing proclaims revolutionary words that she knows off by heart and no longer wants to hear. There’s a twisted snake that wraps itself around a badly drawn axe. They will spare her yet another political tirade, the identity that must form itself and grow through the political, which is nothing without a slogan on its backside. Eyes that shine for other people’s words in which to recognise themselves forever. To learn by heart: shout in unison, and keep the rhythm by clapping your hands. Finished sentences, in protest if possible. Without this you are nothing and you can never articulate the revival of your people towards liberty. But this time, her parents don’t attack with the usual slogans because they are tired, because the exertions don’t help to obstruct the path to a swollen body. It’s a kind of struggle that they don’t know, the one against the body that rots. She goes into the bathroom and washes her hands. The first time for Mum who, blind, slams against the furniture of the hospital bedroom, smiling still, saying everything is fine. A second splash for the back of Dad, his wooden head hidden within his jet black hair. The water will wash away all of the sins, if the job is done meticulously, if Gorane will commit herself to scrub at length, to not leave anything to chance and to the stupid belief that a handful of prayers will be enough to receive pardon. She returns to the room where her parents watch each other, smiling, continuing to talk quietly, or to sing. Gorane would like to tell them that the only reasonable option is rest, to close their eyes and await what passes, what heals, but she says it in silence, to herself, before her mother and her father disappear, engulfed by the first, then by the second swollen eyelid.

They walk side by side along the hospital corridor, Gorane keeps her right hand in her father’s left, her left hand in her mother’s right. The beaten bodies are theirs, but it is Gorane who staggers. Strength is applied to the legs, she squeezes her parent’s fingers, which barely reciprocate. The patrons, the relatives of the sick, the patients, watch only her at the centre of that human line that proceeds like an army in an on-the-ground conflict.

“We’ll need to take public transport, you shouldn’t put yourselves under too much strain.”

Gorane pronounces the words in slow motion, expanding each syllable, she makes every consonant snap as if to stamp it in the air, indelible. She continues to look in front of her, the panorama changes, the people enlarge, her body is as weak as theirs.

“We want to walk” they say in unison. “We need to walk.” READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: January 2021

January 11, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ah-reum Han, Sabrina Parker Greene, and Shawn Hoo

The latest in literature from South Korea, Italy, and The Netherlands!

Amidst the uncertainty of what the new year will bring, one surety is that wonderful literature remains to be discovered. In our first selections of new translations for 2021, there is a masterclass in historical fiction about a chess champion whose awe-inspiring trajectory was regrettably tainted with prevailing prejudice; a Dutch memoir that reconciles public and private definitions of sexuality, personhood, and recognition; and a Korean novel that beautifully illustrates that median pain between a love of life and an acknowledgement of its ephemerality. Read on to uncover their discrete and distinct gifts!

kim

My Brilliant Life by Ae-ran Kim, translated from the Korean by Chi-young Kim, Forge Books, 2021

 Review by Ah-reum Han, WoW Editor

Meet Areum Han, the sixteen-year-old boy with a rapid-aging genetic disorder that is at the palpitating heart of Kim Ae-ran’s bestselling novel, My Brilliant Life, translated by Chi-young Kim. “This is the story of the youngest parents with the oldest child,” writes young Areum, in the prologue to his own story. Readers learn some simple truths about Areum from the get-go: he has an uncanny way with words, he loves his parents deeply, and he doesn’t have much time left. But don’t be fooled; this story is not about the sick, nor is it about overcoming suffering. This quirky, bighearted book crackles with life on every page.

My Brilliant Life is a bildungsroman in fast-forward. We enter Areum’s life on the cusp of his final act—and, incidentally, at the age that his own young parents had him. What ensues is a tale that is tender and funny, startling and sad. He writes about his condition:

People say it’s a miracle that I’ve lived this long. I think so, too; not very many people in my situation have lived past their sixteenth birthdays. But I believe that the larger miracle exists in the ordinary, in the living of an ordinary life and dying at an ordinary age. To me the miracles are my parents, my aunts and uncles, our next-door neighbors, the middle of summer and the middle of winter. I’m no miracle.

We become familiar with this enviable “ordinary” through Areum’s watchful eyes, meeting his father, Daesu, who is equal parts foolhardy and brash but with a boyish charm, and Mira, his proud, sharp-tongued, and fiercely protective mother. We see how they each grieve privately and publicly; how they fight, curse, and joke; how they keep secrets to be kind. We watch their simple moments of ordinary miracles: eating shaved ice together, or laying on the living room floor with face masks on.

With Areum’s growing medical expenses, Daesu and Mira struggle to make ends meet, and reluctantly agree to let Areum go on a television show. Through this national exposure, Areum has new encounters with the ordinary. For one, he meets Seoha, a seeming kindred spirit and young girl who reaches out to him after seeing him on the show. Their email exchanges soon bloom into something more—the thrill of first love, tempered with the gravity of impending loss. As Areum’s circumstances quickly unravel, we ache for him to be a teenager with teenage-sized problems. We wish him the mistakes and failures, the freedom to pout and sulk.

In all this, Daesu and Mira do what they can to give Areum a normal life, and Areum knows it. This stereo vision—Areum’s awareness of his parents’ struggles and their lives both before and beyond his own—shows us how Daesu and Mira were also unceremoniously thrust into adulthood. My Brilliant Life is a coming of age tale, not just for Areum, but also for his parents, whose stories bookend his. This is a story that is very aware of its own symmetry: the two unlikely seventeen-year-olds who became parents; their child destined never to outlive them; and the stirrings of a newborn as their first slips away. The story folds into neat patterns that amplify life’s indifferent poetry. READ MORE…

Announcing our December Book Club Selection: Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli

January 4, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Allison Braden

Dissipatio H.G. is . . . an opportunity to unspool our own reaction to the loss of mankind—and perhaps find in it an unexpected sympathy.

Quietly, almost as if afraid to disturb, a new year has made its way into the world. The recession of 2020 into the distance of the past presents an opportunity to not only evaluate the changed world, but also to contemplate our responsibilities in readjusting, amending, and moving on. In a fitting selection, our last Book Club title of 2020 is Guido Morselli’s acclaimed novel, Dissipatio H.G., a text that reconciles the stark realities of mourning with poignant examinations of presence in and amidst so much absence. It is a rare feeling that has somehow, incredibly, become common: What is one to do upon waking up to an unrecognizable world? 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli, translated from the Italian by Frederika Randall, New York Review Books Classics, 2020

Near the outset of Guido Morselli’s short and surreal 1977 novel, Dissipatio H.G., the unnamed narrator sits in a cave at the edge of a steep drop into an underground lake, getting up the nerve to end it all. Meanwhile, down in the valley, in the invented, industrious city of Chrysopolis, the economy booms, not unlike the growth Morselli observed in post-war Italy. Leery of society’s so-called progress, the narrator has retreated to an isolated property in the mountains—but even that is threatened; he’s pushed to the lip of nonexistence when he finds a cluster of numbered stakes in the ground “a couple of hundred paces from my mountain retreat.” After a fever and a frantic investigation, he uncovers that a company plans to build a highway there, complete with entrance ramps, a cloverleaf, and a motel. “As Durkheim might say,” the narrator reflects, “there’s your trigger.”

In the end, he abandons his plan after contemplating the quality of the Spanish brandy he’s brought along for liquid courage. His body’s physical matter simply refuses to accede to his will; he bangs his head on the way out of the cave, just as a powerful groan of thunder rolls through the valley. “The truth is,” he thinks, “a man who draws back from killing himself does so (and Durkheim didn’t see this) under the illusion that there is a third way, but in fact tertium non datur—there is no third possibility: it’s either a leap into the siphon or a dive back into daily life, where the rhythm of everything has stayed exactly as it was and you must hasten to make up for the progress lost.”

But when he returns from the cave, the narrator discovers an entirely unexpected third possibility: while he has chosen to live, the human race has vanished. He inspects the newsroom where he once worked as a journalist, placing calls across Europe and across the Atlantic to determine that for all functional purposes, he is the last man alive. “I’m now Mankind,” he says. “I’m Society (with the capital M and the capital S).” He is, he says, “Incarnation of the epilogue.” READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2020

October 19, 2020  |  in News  |  by Josefina Massot, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Our blog editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2020 issue!

Asymptote’s momentous fortieth issue features brand new work from thirty-two countries, a Dutch Literature Special Feature curated by 2020 International Booker Prize co-winner Michele Hutchison, and a literary roster spanning classics like Tagore, heavy hitters like Harwicz, and rising stars like Fabias. Dizzy yet? We’re here to help.

In the Chinese language, we never use the abstract noun of beauty. Instead, beauty is always a quality, a trait something possesses. There is, for example, no real way to express the notion that “beauty is all around us”; instead, one would say, “everything here is beautiful.” I find something wondrous in this distinct nature of what beauty is. It is a wandering state, a constantly mutating definition, a metamorphosing form that adapts to whatever subject it is applied to—never fixed, never permanent. Something is beautiful not for its appeal to the pure nature of beauty, but for its unique addition to the myriad of beauty’s appearances.

I was once again reminded of this definition while reading through the Fall 2020 issue, in which the writings from thirty-two countries have compiled and allowed the contours of literary beauty to vacillate and transmit. The various Englishes that evolve via translation do not subscribe necessarily to the English that certain texts are born to, instead bringing the colours and geometries of their own language, imparting a distinct and knowing pleasure. In Stella N’Djoku’s poems, the brief lines are vehicles for a cyclical musicality, emphasized by the rhyming Italian but also vivid in the tender translation of Julia Pelosi-Thorpe, sensitive in their lineation. The verses are potent with grief, but positions it within the great immeasurability of the world—creating a familiar dwelling for grace amidst pain, and the poem as our path towards that space.

As if yesterday today tomorrow
were not places
and were here now
in centuries.

In the two poems of Kashimiri poet Nādim, one is also reminded of the singular iterations of his the poet’s original language. As translator Sonam Kachru informs us in his translator’s note, “[Nādim] is thinking of [Kashmir’s] history—a history revealed, in part, through the history of its poetry.” There is then, an impression that we are not privy to when reading in translation, yet the poem still transmits the meditative, majestic quality of scanning the poetic horizons for something that reverberates from the past into the present, and back again. The stoic power of lines like:

I will not sing—
I will sing today no song of Nishat or Shalimar, no annealed song of waters
engraving terraced gardens, no bower songs of bedded flowers;
No soft songs flush or sweetly fresh, not green dew songs
nor songs gentle and growing—

READ MORE…

What it Takes to Come Home Again: Nadia Terranova’s Farewell, Ghosts in Review

September 9, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Victor Xavier Zarour Zarzar

Terranova [. . .] foregoes the hyperbolic, opting instead for nuance and realism.

Farewell, Ghosts by Nadia Terranova, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, Seven Stories, 2020

Nadia Terranova’s sophomore novel—her first to be published in English—is a carefully crafted meditation on familial ties and the pernicious effects of unprocessed trauma on a woman’s sentimental education. Originally published in 2018, Farewell, Ghosts tells the story of Ida, a thirty-six-year-old woman who lives in Rome and makes a living by writing stories for the radio. One morning in September, she receives a call from her mother, asking her to come home to Messina—a city that Ida has ceased to think of as hers—to help prepare their house for sale. In sorting through the objects of her childhood, Ida will be forced to revisit the trauma that defined her life: the sudden departure of her father when she was thirteen.

Although we are told that Ida’s father, Sebastiano, suffered from severe depression, his disappearance is never explained, nor is it clear if he is still alive. His fate, however, is of little consequence to the novel, which instead lingers with the living—those left behind in the wake of abandonment. Years after the event, Ida’s emotional growth has been stunted by the failure to come to terms with her pain, a failure exacerbated by the lack of a body to mourn, or even the certainty of death. As a result, Ida has grown into a woman who meticulously and egregiously avoids emotion, preferring to reroute her suffering via the “fake true stories” that she writes. She carries herself—and her relationships—with a composure that betrays a tumultuous undercurrent of repressed feelings, acquired through years of conscious disassociation.

There is, for instance, her marriage—described as a “lame creature”—to the dependable-if-too-bland Pietro, perfectly named for his rock-like reliability and immutability. As Ida remarks at some point, “our bodies had stopped functioning together, stopped fitting together in sleep and the waking that precedes it; we had become shields for one another.” Progressively, the novel reveals that this extreme reserve comes from Ida’s adolescent years, in which her mother entrusted her with the care of her father while she went—or, as Ida saw it, escaped—to work. The pain of these years and the culminating abandonment drove a wedge between the two women. “If there was an art in which my mother and I had become expert during my adolescence,” Ida says, “that art was silence.” Even decades later, their relationship is entirely modulated by her father’s absence, governed more by the things left unsaid than those they are able to utter.

It is to Terranova’s great merit that she is able to capture trauma’s potential to stop time in such a limpid manner. Among the novel’s many metaphorical figures (the house and its crumbling foundations, for one) is the alarm clock that belonged to Ida’s father, frozen at 6:16 a.m. on the day he left. “The alarm clock said six-sixteen,” Ida muses, “[and] would say six-sixteen forever.” Victorianists and fans of Dickens will sense a reference to Great Expectations, specifically to the morbidity of Satis House, where all the clocks had been stopped at twenty to nine, the exact time when Miss Havisham realized she’d been abandoned by her lover. Conjuring the specter of Miss Havisham makes abundantly clear just how high the stakes are for Ida, and the extent to which she risks being trapped in the prison of trauma. And while Dickens’s depiction of a woman ravaged by abandonment was inflected by his extraordinary gift for the grotesque, Terranova makes a similar claim about the dangers of remaining stuck in the circuity of grief, even if she foregoes the hyperbolic, opting instead for nuance and realism. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “My Friend Daniele’s Flight” by Ernesto Franco

August 25, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Anne Milano Appel

His hands were so clenched on the wheel that the knuckles stood out white from the force and concentration.

A flying lesson allegorizes the lifework of Italian writer Daniele Del Giudice in “My Friend Daniele’s Flight,” our selection for this week’s Translation Tuesday. In this philosophical essay, writer and editor Ernesto Franco recounts Del Giudice’s views on the writer’s vocation, a discipline defined by the responsibilities of precise language and careful attention to the world. Del Giudice gives Franco the controls of his plane—upon which we are guided through Del Giudice’s philosophies on writing, friendship, and ways of knowing the world. Franco turns to three key words to describe Del Giudice’s enterprise: Sentire, the feeling that relies upon lived knowledge and experience to avoid sentimentality; Mania, the obsessive energy that demands precision and allows one to know the world; and Phantasia, a creative contrast to shallow, mimetic ways of writing. Franco’s memoir comes to a tragic revelation, but the allegory nonetheless has Del Giudice safely returning us from our flight, illustrating what his philosophies can teach us outside of literature.

“Here, now you take it,” Daniele tells me, continuing to look straight ahead while at the same time taking both hands off the controls. It is a cold, sunny autumn morning toward the end of the nineties. We have just taken off from Nicelli Airport in Venice-Lido aboard a single-engine touring plane, whose model I don’t remember, and which Daniele has stabilized to maintain altitude. I had just experienced the words that I have not forgotten and that I won’t ever forget: “The run-up to take-off is a metamorphosis; here is a pile of metal transforming itself into an aeroplane by the power of the air itself, each take-off is the birth of an aircraft, this time like all the others you had had the same experience, the same wonder at each metamorphosis.” The precise, imaginative words of Staccando l’ombra da terra for something I had never experienced before, because taking off on the grass aboard a small airplane, a small “machine” as Daniele would say, sitting beside the pilot, is something completely different from taking off on a normal airliner. Among other things, with the title Staccando l’ombra da terra he formulated for all of us non-pilots an action and an emotion that did not exist before, and did so with the paradoxical effect (how can a shadow take off from the ground?) of the precision of the words concurrent with the added “shadow” of meaning which they alluded to. I actually felt as if wings had sprouted from my shoulders, but I didn’t dare move. “Go on . . .” Daniele says with a knowing smile. And I place two hands on the control wheel, remaining stock-still amidst the roar of the “machine.” Who knows why, but I feel like I have to be ready to make a move and resist with a decisive, forceful action. Perhaps, simply, my body is thinking about the powerful, rotational thrust of the rudder of a sailboat, with which I am much more familiar. But that’s not the case. The flight control is very light. You can practically move it just by thinking of moving it, but doing so moves the entire world in which we find ourselves. Steering on the edge of a subtle, brand new sense of equilibrium. That’s the sensation that I will have the whole time spent inside Daniele’s mania.

When I think of Daniele, of his books, his writing, his idea of literature, his way of thinking and understanding, even when I think of our friendship, the feeling I had at that moment comes back to me. I think about it even now, when I arrive in Venice and instead of San Polo or the hangar, I head for Giudecca, make my way through the maze of calle to the residence where he is housed, and speak my name into the intercom. Everyone here is very kind, the grounds, which overlook the lagoon and the Lido, are beautiful, but of no use to Daniele now, whom I always find in his room. A room that I could not distinguish from the outside, a room that is his, so to speak, in a neutral way: containing him, but without any trace of him. It seems strange only to me. His traces can be found, however, not only in his books, but in some universal words that speak of Daniele Del Giudice better than any other utterance. I will choose three. Sentire, to feel, to experience, has been one of “his” words since Lo stadio di Wimbledon and Atlante occidentale in fact. He applies it, I’ve always thought, not so much as an antidote to sentiment, but to sentimentality employed as an element, as recourse, rhetoric, to compensate for the aphasia of a lack, or absence, of experience. Sentire, on the other hand, is like improvisation in jazz: you can’t do it if you don’t know all the music, but you can’t do it if you don’t venture to the edge of the music you know, and from there love and know in one sound, in one action. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “What I see” by Beatrice Cristalli

July 21, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Julia Pelosi-Thorpe

You see, even if I don’t see you / I know you’re breathing inside of us.

Love in the time of lockdown is given voice in Beatrice Cristalli’s “What I see,” this week’s Translation Tuesday selection. Written in response to the COVID-19 crisis in Italy, the poem’s speaker prefaces the piece with a philosophical declaration about fate—through subtle and clever enjambment (the power of the poem’s one punctuated line: “Right?”), this musing becomes the speaker’s guiding question. The poem flows through possibilities and memories, to and from that one pivotal inquiry. Seemingly mundane objects—a toothbrush, a comb, a jumper—are charged with new emotive meaning as they evoke the processes brought about by the lockdown: leaving. Absence. And remembering. The speaker, trapped in the moment when these objects were fixed in place by circumstance, longs for the safety of a missing love.

What I see 

They say all’s subjective
But things play parts in fate
Right?
READ MORE…

I Have a Story to Tell: An Interview with André Naffis-Sahely

July 15, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Timmer Harvey

I was instantly struck by how Sibhatu had managed to balance a fabulistic tone with an exposé's sleuthy grittiness.

André Naffis-Sahely has been translating the multi-lingual work of Eritrean writer, poet, and refugee-rights activist Ribka Sibhatu for over a decade. Born in Asmara but in self-exile from Eritrea since 1982, Sibhatu has lived in Ethiopia, France, and Italy. First published in 1993, Sibhatu’s much-acclaimed Aulò! Canto poesia dall’Eritrea was revised, expanded, and re-released by Italian publisher Sinnos in 2009.  Sibhatu is also the author of Il numero esatto delle stelle, a bilingual edition of Tigrinya folklore. She is the subject of a 2012 documentary film, Aulò: Roma Postcoloniale, holds a Ph.D. in communication studies from La Sapienza, and has been widely published in journals and anthologies around the world.  

Poet, translator, editor, and critic, Naffis-Sahely has translated over twenty fiction, poetry, and non-fiction titles into English. And yet it has still taken Naffis-Sahely almost ten years to garner the funding needed to publish his full-length English translation of Aulò, Aulò, Aulò!, a collection of Sibhatu’s poems and retellings of Eritrean folk tales written in Tigrinya, Ahmaric, and Italian. Ahead of the Poetry Translation Centre’s Ribka Sibhatu Tour, a series of online events celebrating the publication of the book, I asked Naffis-Sahely about the significance of Eritrean sycamore trees, the long road to publication, and white gatekeeping in the publishing industry. André sought input from Sibhatu, and we conducted the following interview via email.  

—Sarah Timmer Harvey, June 2020

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): What was the first piece of Ribka’s writing you encountered? Do you remember your initial response, and how you were able to form a relationship with it?

André Naffis-Sahely (ANS): I first came across Sibhatu’s work on a blog sometime in 2009, which featured an account of one of Sibhatu’s visits to a public school somewhere in Italy. The post also reproduced a snapshot of her prose poem “Virginity,” an autobiographical account of how Sibhatu had once been forced to pretend her virginity had been violated to avoid entering an arranged marriage at nineteen, by which time she’d already spent a year in prison for refusing to wed an Ethiopian army officer. I was instantly struck by how Sibhatu had managed to balance a fabulist tone with an exposé’s sleuthy grittiness. The writing was lyrical, yet economical, and the author’s personality was sharply on display: uncompromising and questioning, but never devoid of empathy. Sibhatu’s work clearly operated on a variety of engrossing levels: first and foremost, perhaps, her opus is deeply inspired by her native country’s ancient literary traditions; secondly, it is a song of exile, one which has seen her live in Ethiopia, France, and now Italy. The truth is that translating Ribka Sibhatu also enabled me to interact with my Italian heritage in a way I’d never thought possible. Although I mostly grew up in the United Arab Emirates, my earliest memories of Italy include being chased down the street by neo-Nazis, all for walking hand in hand with my older brother, who—having taken more after our Iranian father—had proved too dark-skinned for their liking. My other memories aren’t too different from that point of view. Thus, translating Ribka not only introduced me to realities I hadn’t experienced or knew little about, but she also helped me reconnect with my own roots. Here was a black woman from Eritrea crafting wonderful, engrossing literature out of a language I thought was too resistant to be employed by anyone as outward-looking as her. Of course, Ribka, like many so-called postcolonial Italian writers, has not received as much attention as she deserves. But I think that will only change with time, albeit perhaps too slowly for many of us.

STH: You have written that you tend “to think of Aulò as Sibhatu’s Leaves of Grass.” Can you tell me why this is?

ANS: As Sibhatu enthusiastically told me during one of our earliest meetings in London in 2011, Eritrean literature has been handed down through generations in the form of aulòs, the Tigrinya word for “bardic songs,” which are performed at public and private celebrations and religious rites. Performers always begin their tales by invoking the word Şïnşïwai, which roughly means, “I have a story to tell,” to which the audience replies, Uāddëkoi şęlimai, “We’re ready, we’re listening.” Sibhatu learned her craft in the capital city of Asmara and her ancestral village of Himbirti, in the high plateaus above the capital, where these stories can be traced back for centuries, and she spent a great deal of time talking to village elders in order to transcribe their stories. Despite falling into various different genres—poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—Sibhatu’s work essentially represents a reconstruction of Eritrea’s cultural heritage in exile, and it is a work that is continually evolving and growing, like Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. It is a deeply personal book, heavily fueled by its author’s biography and background, but it is also one of those rare books that is strong enough to carry a national sentiment—or spirit—on its shoulders. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “On How to Be a Good Immigrant” by Elvira Mujčić

June 30, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Matilda Colarossi

Don’t worry about it, somebody had to cry. What the heck kind of story on immigration would it be if nobody cried?

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, two immigrants bare the wounds of their respective traumas in this excerpt from Elvira Mujčić’s novel On How to Be a Good Immigrant. Our narrator, a Bosnian immigrant haunted by the atrocities that robbed her of her family and her home, finds kinship with an immigrant from Mali, who opens up about the systemic racism he endures in Italy. Colarossi’s superb translation captures the subtleties of Mujčić’s prose: the uncomfortable silences, the hesitant divulgences, and the quiet pain that follows when the narrator’s emotional walls break down. A meditation on the myriad ways immigrants face trauma and are expected to appease Western stereotypes.

Chapter X

“Can you light a fire wherever you like in Italy?” asked Mele, a friend of my brother’s whom I had met the last time I was in Bosnia.

“What do you mean?” I asked surprised by the sudden turn the conversation had taken from the surreal dissertation on the non-existence of God of just a few minutes ago.

“I mean: can a man light a fire wherever he likes and cook lamb on a spit?”

“No, you can’t.”

“Well, life isn’t worth living in a country like that!”

Why did everything have to take a folkloristic hue, I wondered, annoyed and uncomfortable, like some sort of Austro-Hungarian elementary teacher sitting on an Oriental futon. I was going to meet Ismail when I remembered the incident. It was probably because of our last discussion and the African proverb with which we had greeted each other: “When you don’t know where you’re headed, remember where you came from.” You should have instructions on how to be a good immigrant when you go back to your homeland, I thought. And suddenly I realized that the longing I had felt for tens of years was gone, replaced with a renewed curiosity for that country’s present. But I only loved it if it was set in the past, because it couldn’t harm me from that distant place. My curiosity was not, however, light and untroubled: it was often laden with overwhelming sorrow and paralyzing fear. It was a visceral bond I could do absolutely nothing about, an incessant alternating of thoughts that went from the conviction that I had left something there that I absolutely needed to find, and the realization that what I was looking for was made of the same substance as fog. READ MORE…

“The past is anything but”: On Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults

June 22, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Victor Xavier Zarour Zarzar

Ferrante aims to shock, and she aims to please. But she also aims to critique.

The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, Europa Editions, 2020

Reading is and has always been spatial. Zadie Smith has said it, Henry James said it before her, and I am certain someone else said it even before him. We often enter novels as if they were houses, taking in whole rooms at once, or stopping to admire a well-positioned taboret or fix a crooked frame. Because of this, reading different novels by the same author often gives us an uncanny sense of déjà vu, the familiar feeling of a thing estranged, of perhaps entering our neighbor’s house to realize that, unlike us, they have held on to carpeted floors, or have shown a preference for impressionist art or gaudy vases, but that, fundamentally, our house and theirs were designed by the same mind. This is exactly the kind of unfamiliarity I felt as soon as I began reading The Lying Life of Adults, Elena Ferrante’s latest novel, translated by Ann Goldstein. At first glance, fans and devoted readers of Ferrante’s work will not be surprised by this novel, which reworks some of the major themes that have made the pseudonymous author a worldwide phenomenon. It traffics in urgent issues like gender and its intersections with class, the tension between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie of Naples, the perils of friendship and sexual desire, and the hypocrisy that often subtends the life of intellectuals. Ferrante isn’t exactly charting new territory here, and yet, as an undisputed master in rendering the familiar strange, her prose packs a punch just when we are about to settle into a sense of familiarity. With the publication of The Lying Life of Adults, we see an author at her peak, deftly synthetizing the density of her first three novels with the sprawling quality of the Neapolitan Novels, all while managing to uncover complex and challenging human truths.

Unlike its immensely popular predecessors, this novel does not trace a woman’s laborious ascent up the social ladder, but rather begins when the protagonist’s father has emerged victorious from the social battle and is comfortably settled into a middle-class life, which includes a position as a teacher in a prestigious liceo. The story is told in the first person, as are all of Ferrante’s novels. It’s hard to imagine otherwise at this point; prose, for her, serves as a conduit for the most rigorous kind of self-examination, often dragging us into psychic places we’d rather not inhabit. Take, for instance, the uncomfortable scene that opens the novel: Giovanna Trada, at age twelve, overhears a conversation between her parents in which her father calls her ugly. Or rather, she overhears him say that she is beginning to look like his long-estranged sister, Vittoria, a woman in whom “ugliness and spite were combined to perfection.” This aunt, whom Giovanna barely remembers ever seeing, has come to symbolize in the Trada household the squalor and indignity of the Neapolitan lower class—her name has, through the years, become a moniker for everything that Giovanna’s father has fought hard to leave behind. Thrown into disarray by her father’s words, an initiation into adulthood of sorts, Giovanna determines to establish contact with Vittoria, unleashing a series of events fated to unearth her family past and shed new light on her present. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

June 12, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Anna Aresi and Xiao Yue Shan

Find out what's going on in the literary worlds of Japan and Italy in this week's update!

Our editors bring you the latest news in global literature from Italy and Japan this week as COVID-19 continues to make its presence known, the one-hundredth anniversary of Gianni Rodari’s birth is celebrated, and traditionally paper-dependant Japan starts investing in a virtual literary presence. Read on for the scoop!

Anna Aresi, Copy Editor, reporting from Italy:

As is well known to people in the industry, the COVID-19 pandemic has deeply impacted the publishing sector on many levels. In particular, the cancellation of most book fairs has deprived many of an important opportunity to meet fellow publishers, authors, translators and illustrators, to discover new releases to potentially translate, and set up those professional relationships that keep the industry alive. However, as we’ve seen over and over again in these months, the scope of the pandemic’s impact has often been countered with inventive, creative solutions to hold these same events in a different format.

One of the book fairs that had to be canceled was the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, one the most important events for children’s literature, taking place in Bologna, Italy, every spring. Originally scheduled to be postponed, it soon became clear that holding the BCBF in praesentia was not going to be possible, and the event happened virtually this past May.

One of the highlights of this year’s edition was the celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of Gianni Rodari’s birth. Rodari is perhaps the single most important author of children’s books in Italy, having influenced and shaped generations of students, teachers, authors, and illustrators with his poems, short stories, books, and theoretical essays. The BCBF’s website hosts a virtual exhibition, Illustrators for Gianni Rodari, showcasing the works of many Italian artists who’ve illustrated Rodari’s books. In particular, Beatrice Alemagna, an award-winning Italian illustrator based in Paris, participates with her new illustrations for A sbagliare le storie (Telling Stories Wrong), in which an absent-minded grandfather keeps making mistakes when trying to tell the story of Red Riding Hood to her granddaughter, who has to continually correct him. As anyone who’s ever read to young children knows, consistency is key when telling them stories (over and over and . . . over again!), yet as the book shows, deviations from the norm might be as fun and rewarding as the canonical version. Alemagna’s beautiful new visual interpretation of this classic will hopefully be brought to other languages soon! READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Another Biography of the Lunar Phases” by Amarji

June 9, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Sean McDonagh

from my creaking nocturnal crib / i saw the white and luminous beak of the kite / lacerate the pink skin of dawn

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, Syrian poet Amarji chronicles the cycle of the moon with visceral surreality in “Another Biography of the Lunar Phases.” Through the imagery of growth and decay, our speaker takes us through nine phases, each new phase unleashing a barrage of dreamlike (or perhaps nightmarish) scenes. We begin with the “nourishment” of a milk that stains the world, and we return to this bodily metaphor as it tarnishes the speaker’s very being. There are shades of Celan’s sublime and terrifying beauty; here the ‘black milk’ is persistent, its repetition adding a dizzying mantra-like meditation on death and the consumability of the body.

1. New Moon

black milk drizzles on the windows. it trickles on the northern forest. first on the sharp needles of the cedar and those blunt on the fir, and then on the other lesser kinds. black milk trickles on all of the families and all of the species. [nothing vanishes in front of the vanished white eye of the exposed black milk] as you see, as you don’t, the black milk makes everything tremble. one drop makes a blue roller tremble. one drop makes a cotoneaster tremble. one drop makes a squirrel tremble. one drop makes a blue rock thrush tremble. one drop makes a blue tit tremble. one drop makes an ash leaf tremble. one drop makes a maple leaf tremble. one drop makes a checker leaf tremble. one drop makes a thread of lichen tremble.
a black, black, black milk.
on the barbary nut iris: black milk. on the prostrate cherry tree: black milk. on the peony
flowers: black milk.
black milk that spreads and coagulates on everything.
black milk that coagulates on the bones of a dead lynx. black milk that coagulates on the skin
of a dying roebuck.
black milk on the corners of my mouth, on my Adam’s apple, and on my chest.
black milk that spills on all of the world, on all of my body:
as i, with my mouth, i pull towards the window and i suck
the black nipple of the night. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “On the Mountain” by Grazia Deledda

May 12, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Matilda Colarossi

The rain stops, the clouds come undone, and great strips of azure sky illumine the air. A fiery eye appears in the distance.

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, a small community’s hike to an old church becomes a sacred portrait of the pastoral in Grazia Deledda’s short story “On the Mountain.” On a cool day portending rain, our protagonist observes and participates in this exhausting climb through the fields, the woods, and finally the mountain. We can almost smell the petrichor and wet leaves of the forest, and see the ashen expanse of the clouds above the moss-covered boulders (and the Mediterranean Sea makes a brief but memorable cameo). But Deledda’s genius is not merely in the exquisite imagery of this journey; it’s also in how her attention to detail manipulates narrative time. One afternoon feels like an arduous and prolonged pilgrimage through the wilderness. Through sensory parallels and contrasts, nature almost becomes an extension of the old temple; and once their day ends, time immediately accelerates as the spent travellers descend the mountain under a newly cleared and vivid sky.

It’s a morning in August. In the vast sky, closed in by the thin broken lines of the mountain chain, turned turquoise in the distance, glide ashen clouds, like herds of fog, which vanish on strips of still limpid azure. We are on a trail that leads to the mountain, before it reaches the woods. During the night, it rained: the earth, humid but mudless, has taken on dark tobacco-colored hues; it is lined in serpent-like channels of flowing rivulets, and rows of stones that seem made of slate.

Great granite boulders, naked, burnt by the sun, end the trail. No trees yet: just huge thickets of mastic, and fields of ferns, their dentelated leaves turned yellow by the hot sun.

The people climb the trail slowly, in groups, or alone.

READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2020

April 27, 2020  |  in News  |  by Eva Heisler, Garrett Phelps, Henry Ace Knight, Lee Yew Leong, Sam Carter, and Varun Nayar

Our section editors guide you through the riches of our Spring 2020 issue!

Our Spring 2020 issue has arrived amidst a rising desire for unity and community. As we seek new sights from views made familiar by isolation, Asymptote is proud to have gathered some of the most vivid and singular works from literary talents from thirty countries, so that we may all benefit from the vitality of their distinct imaginings and realities. Here, our section editors share their favourites and guide you around this edition’s abundance of ideas and inventions.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction and Galician Poetry Feature Editor:

If you enjoyed watching Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant, you’ll probably love “Red Ivory” by Italian writer Matteo Meschiari from the new issue: like the film, it’s a survival tale set in the extreme cold (in the Siberian permafrost, to be specific), riveting in its depiction of the elements, narrated urgently with brilliant flashes of lyricism—including one electric moment of human contact collapsing 12,000 years. By the end, it’s also a möbius strip of a story posing big existential questions. (Don’t miss the edifying note by emerging translator Enrico Cioni, who did an amazing job rendering the story.) The omniscient narrator of Mirza Athar Baig‘s “Junkshop” transports us similarly through history—this time centering around the objects of a contemporary junkshop—infusing an everyday scene with wonder at just how much we don’t know. Many delights abound in the Galician Poetry Feature headlined by Manuel Rivas, Chus Pato, and Alba Cid (translated by Jacob Rogers, who also helped put together the Feature), but be sure to acquaint yourself with Luz Pozo Garza, one of Galicia’s literary greats, who passed away at age 97 less than a week after the release of the issue. In the selection that translator Kathleen March presented, she used cadences of the canticle and other musical forms to sing of an ecstatic yet bittersweet love for an evanescent world.

From Henry Ace Knight, Interviews Editor: 

Kamila Hladíková’s conversation with Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser for the Spring issue’s interview section centers on the precariousness of Tibetan cultural memory and the poet’s resistance to its wholesale erasure. Citing Milan Kundera and Edward Said, Woeser suggests that the survival of marginalized collective identity is incumbent upon the insistence of individual eyewitness memory and testimony. “The history of a nation consists of the personal histories of its people,” she writes. “Descartes said, ‘I think, therefore I am’; but in Tibet, it should be, ‘I remember, therefore we are.’”

From Varun Nayar, Nonfiction Editor: 

Following the footsteps of the great Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō, Durian Sukegawa writes about a journey he made in 2012, traversing a landscape reshaped by the earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster the year before. Alison Watts’s vivid translation of Sukegawa’s written account of this journey acquaints us with the personal and political stakes of living in post-Fukushima Japan. Part travelogue, part political meditation, Sukegawa’s writing pairs the beauty of the Japanese landscape with the ugliness of government negligence. At the heart of this piece is a desire to bear witness to the lives rendered invisible in the eyes of the mainstream media and the country’s disaster management apparatus. In its sober reflection of the human cost of events still fresh in Japan’s collective memory, Sukegawa’s piece also conjures an eerie relation to the current pandemic we’re living through.  READ MORE…