Language: Latin

Our Milestone 50th Issue Has Landed!

January 18, 2024  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Emily Wilson, Ilya Kaminsky, Michael Cronin, Nam Le, and Samer Abu Hawwash alongside new work from 35 countries!

Living today is a feat of coexistence. In Me | You | Us, our Winter 2024 edition—Asymptote’s landmark fiftieth!—people seek ways to equably share a world of jostling values, languages, and stories. Embracing the rare spotlight in mainstream English media almost never afforded translators, Emily Wilson discusses her groundbreaking translation of Homer and its place in the constellation of existing English Odyssies. Public intellectual Michael Cronin makes the case for translation’s centrality in the construction of new narratives necessary for the continued survival of our species amid other species. Headlining our Special Feature themed on coexistence, Nam Le’s frenzied poems are just as preoccupied with Carl Linnaeus’s taxonomy in the original Latin as they are driven to distraction by the insufficiency of that same scanty alphabet against the tonal splendor of Vietnamese. In Ilya Kaminsky’s Brave New World Literature contribution, truckloads of Dante’s Inferno being delivered to a besieged Kharkiv speak to a different, tenuous, and moving, coexistence. As support for Ukraine wavers in the US, we at Asymptote have kept up our coverage of the region also through Elina Sventsytska’s devastating poetry, a review of Oksana Lutsyshyna’s latest award-winning novel in English translation, and a dispatch about the chilling aftermath of a Russian dissident’s self-immolation. Alongside these, I invite you to discover the Mexican pioneer of magical realism Elena Garro, Palestinian poet Samer Abu Hawwash, Cuban artist Gertrudis Rivalta Oliva, and Romanian playwright Edith Negulici amid never-before-published work from a whopping thirty-five countries. All of it is illustrated by the Netherlands-based guest artist Ehud Neuhaus.

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If, as Taiwanese author Lin Yaode put it, “literature’s history is really a history of readers of literature,” the history of Asymptote might also be in part a tale of its readers. But why should it stop there? To all collaborators and supporters, past and present, I say gratefully: this one is for you! As hinted at by last year’s closures of The White Review and Freeman’s—both similarly prestigious journals with a focus on world literature—existence (by which I mean mere survival) has not been easy. We made it to our 1st, 2nd, 3rd . . . and to our 50th edition because of you.

If you are an avid reader of the magazine and haven’t yet signed up, we hope you’ll consider becoming an official sustaining or masthead member today for as little as USD5 a month in addition to subscribing to our socials (Facebook, X, Instagram, Threads) and our monthly Book Club. If you represent an institution advocating for a country’s literature, check out this (slightly outdated) slideshow and get in touch to sponsor a country-themed Special Feature, as FarLit has recently done. (The deadline to submit to our paid Faroese Special Feature is February 15th, 2024; the guidelines and a new call for reviewers to contribute to our monthly What’s New in Translation column can be found here). If you work for a translation program, prize, or residency, consider advertising through our myriad platforms, including our newly launched “Upcoming Opportunities in Translation” column. And, finally, if you’d like to join us behind the scenes in advocating for a more inclusive world literature, we just announced our very first recruitment drive of the year (deadline to apply: February 1st, 2024). Thank you for your readership and your support. We can’t wait to hear from you!

Seas Otherwise Too Treacherous To Navigate: Mario Aquilina on the European Essay and Its Planetary Histories

December 4, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

. . . the essay sustains a tension between experience and the attempt . . . to derive ideas or abstractions from experience . . .

In The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form (2021), Mario Aquilina, a Maltese literary historian and scholar, probes through the philosophies and ethos of the genre’s figureheads—from Montaigne and Francis Bacon to Samuel Johnson and Ralph Waldo Emerson—and considers the “paradox at the heart” of the essay: “the more resistant to genre an essay is, the more properly an essay it is.” The foundations of the ever-expansive, proliferating possibilities of the essay as a genre, form, and mode can be found in its pre-Montaignean roots from Azwinaki Tshipala of 315 CE South Africa, al-Jahiz of 8th-century southeastern Iraq, and Heian Japan’s Nikki bungaku (diary literature) comprising of court ladies Sei Shōnagon, Izumi Shikibu, Lady Sarashina, and others, to the Graeco-Roman philosophers Plutarch, Seneca the Younger, St Augustine of Hippo, and Marcus Aurelius.

In the contemporary era, this obscured historico-aesthetic timeline courses through the genre, from the New Journalism movement of the 60s (Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Annie Dillard, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe) to ‘memoir craze’ of the 90s (David Sedaris, Mary Karr, Frank McCourt), from the British life-writing movement and its American counterpart, creative nonfiction, to its present-day extra-textual permutations: essay films, graphic memoir, the imagessay, and video essays. But what of this “memoirization of the essay” and “essayification of the memoir”—to quote from David Lazar? “If we think of the ‘I’ of the essayist as collaborative, then we understand that the essay does not have to be as narcissistic a genre as it has sometimes been presented. Its value—literary or communicative—not simply expressive,” writes Aquilina for The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay (2022). 

In this interview, I spoke with Prof. Aquilina on, among other topics, the histories of the essay within and beyond the Western literary imaginary, his thoughts on Montaigne and Montaigne’s Euro-American stalwarts Georg Lukács, Theodor W. Adorno, Phillip Lopate, and John D’Agata, and the genre’s recalcitrant relationship with categorisation, alterity, and selfhoods. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): I would like to begin this interview with your opinion on John D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) which was part of his trailblazing yet contentious trilogy. D’Agata follows the essay to its genesis in ancient cultures of Sumer, Greece, Babylonia, South Africa, and China: miscellanies of Ziusudra, dialogues of Ennatum, self-interviews of Azwinaki Tshipala, and biographies of T’ao Ch’ien. 

Mario Aquilina (MA): Editing an anthology is always a contentious act. Literary anthologies are political in the sense that they organise a body of knowledge in specific ways, bringing to our attention that which we might otherwise not see or something hiding from us that we should see. Anthologies establish or disrupt hierarchies of value and relevance, and they influence in decisive ways what is preserved and circulated as well as what is lost. Anthologising is inseparable from canonisation, archivisation, but also representation and social relations as shown in the well-known debate between Rita Dove and Helen Vendler in The New York Review of Books around The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2011). 

John D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) is provocative in the sense that, unlike some other accounts of the history of the essay, it does not begin with Michel de Montaigne. It also casts its net beyond the Western Canon. It thus stretches both the temporality and geographical positioning of the story of the essay that we often tell ourselves. It forces us to consider the possibility that the essay is not necessarily a fundamentally modern form (Jacques Rancière calls Montaigne the ‘first modern man’) and not necessarily tied to the rise of humanism and a human-centred perception of the world. However, what is perhaps even more contentious for some is that, through this alternative history of the essay, D’Agata also makes an intervention in the present by shifting the parameters within which one might think of the essay as a genre. D’Agata’s instinct in this anthology is to open the genre, to find it in places and times in which we did not see it before. The consequence of this is that as readers we are fascinated by the extent of the potential of the essay but also possibly confused by being presented with a form that is so stretched that it almost starts to incorporate everything. I personally think that D’Agata’s book does important work and I consider it to be a valuable contribution to not only studies of the history of the essay but also to its theory. 

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

December 9, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Kristina Tatarian, and Wambua Muindi

Literary news from Armenia, the Philippines, and Kenya!

This week, our editors on the ground are watching out for multilingual poetry events, emerging Armenian writers, solidarity in language and literature, the favourite texts of Filipino readers, translation in Southeast Asia, dialogues between authors in Nairobi, and PEN/HEIM Translation Grants winners. Read on to find out more!

Kristina Tatarian, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Armenia

The beautiful auditorium of the Carfesjian Center for the Arts, located at the Cascade Complex in Yerevan, is a frequent stage for literary readings. On the night of October 8, the center hosted a performance as part of antiBabylon, a multilingual poetry event that brought together literary communities from Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, Moldova and Germany. Organised by PANDA Platforma, an NGO from Berlin, the event took place in Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, and Ukraine, as poets visited each other’s countries for joint workshops and performances to create, translate, and perform. The Project’s aim is to create a “free multilingual poetic space,” and test if poetry can answer the most burning existential questions of today’s troubled world.

On the same day, IALA’s Emerging Writers Showcase took place online. This showcase featured readings from Armenian authors championed by the organisation as mentees or winners of the Young Armenian Poet Award. By supporting emerging literary talent, the organisation adds to the global effort of Armenian artists to accelerate cultural revival in the country.

The Armenian diaspora around the world plays a crucial part of setting the cultural agenda for Armenian literature, and now, the groundbreaking collection We Are All Armenian: Voices from the Diaspora, edited by Aram Mjorian, is available from University of Texas Press. The collection will feature essays from writers and poets of Armenian origin, shedding light on diverse experiences of “Armenianness” and personal perspectives on ethnicity, identity, and the sense of home. 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…

Translation Tuesday: “Whalesong” by Aurélia Lassaque

October 6, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Madeleine Campbell

And her child would have asked her one day why isn’t the Earth called Sea when it’s covered by all that water?

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, a mother’s heartbreak echoes the mournful music of the Earth in Aurélia Lassaque’s hybrid story “Whalesong.” Our protagonist is a prodigious scholar processing a loss so excruciating and traumatic that our narrator frames it via global atrocities and cataclysms. The Earth’s persistent gravity seems absurd, even obscene. Mass extinctions are viewed as unimportant. Through the speaker’s close-third reveries, we witness the massacre of the French Cathars—a gnostic community burned alive by the Church—and meditate upon the world’s cruelty as their ashes are washed away by a seemingly divine rain. Even the sea’s withdrawal evokes a desert’s emptiness. Excerpted from Lassaque’s forthcoming novel, “Whalesong” marries poetry with music, verse with prose—its aural artistry is preserved and accented by Madeleine Campbell’s exquisite translation, which strategically leaves passages in French, Occitan, and Latin to preserve bits of the source language’s sound. Just as our protagonist writes love poems in Occitan (the “language of secrets”), Lassaque’s prose itself reads like verse. A hauntingly beautiful selection by a contemporary troubadour.

She doesn’t know what to pack in her suitcase . . . Toothpaste. A translucent comb with a broken tooth.

When do milk teeth start to grow in? Why this amnesia of our early years? Why don’t our memories reach back to our birth? We are born, and then we step out on a tightrope without a net. We survive infancy. It takes so much effort there’s no room left to remember them. No room either for the future save for the thirst.

What is she to do with all the things they’ve given her? If only she could track the objects passing from nursery to nursery, outgrown in a matter of weeks. Why do people discard them so readily? What would a map of their journey look like?

She has fluoride toothpaste. She thinks it’s silly to deny herself a microwave yet use a toothpaste that causes cancer.

To lose your parents is to become an orphan. To lose your child, what is that? Why is there no word to express it?

*

Outside, it’s pelting down. In the South it rains less than in Paris. The rain is striking. In the tongue of Oc they say it’s raining millstones, raining anvils. A Christian god wouldn’t pelt them with anvils. Mind you . . . He did allow men, women, and children to gather in his temple, be massacred in his temple, even though the stones bleached out, all the blood had dried off centuries ago. That god had let it be known: Kill them all, God will know His own. The river of blood might be flowing still. There may be the odd mistake. A tiny martyr disappears down the river. Does God really welcome all innocents? The god who imposes baptism to save one’s soul, what does he do with the stillborn?

Dehors il pleut à coup de pelles. Plòu a palas.

It’s raining shovels. READ MORE…

Long Forgotten Stories of Translation: Part Two

August 8, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Brother Anthony of Taizé

Those long-dead translators and scholars deserve to be celebrated for what they were, giants on whose shoulders we sometimes still need to climb...

In the second part of this previous post, Brother Anthony of Taizé continues to celebrate the forgotten thinkers of the early Arab world. Although Renaissance Europe turned its back on Arabic writing, two of Spain’s greatest thinkers, Averroes and Maimonides, had produced invaluable commentaries and philosophies based on the works of Aristotle, whilst Toledo became a literary epicenter for re-translations from Arabic into Latin and Spanish. Read on to find out more.

The golden age of Córdoba did not last long. In 997, the military leader Almanzor captured Santiago and soon became the effective ruler of southern Spain. He ordered the destruction of books related to philosophy and astronomy, which he considered contrary to Islam, leaving only those about medicine and mathematics. After his death in 1002, bands of marauding North African Berbers sacked Córdoba, sparking an exodus of Jews, in particular, to other cities. Later in the century, in 1085, the Christian kingdom of Castile captured the great city of Toledo. The Muslim leaders were forced to turn to the Almoravid dynasty in North Africa for help, likewise composed of fierce Berber warriors. In 1089, the Almoravids took complete control of Islamic Spain. Less than a century later, they were replaced by an even fiercer and more fanatical North African dynasty, the Almohads, who were especially intolerant of Jews and Christians. READ MORE…

Long Forgotten Stories of Translation: Part One

August 7, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Brother Anthony of Taizé

Anti-Islamic attitudes are not a modern phenomenon and the campaign to erase the Islamic contribution to modern thought began long ago.

Today, early Arabic thinkers are largely overlooked in discussions of the origins of Western philosophy. In this essay (the second part of which will be published tomorrow), Brother Anthony of Taizé brings the focus back to this period of prolific scholarship and translation, and remembers the most influential philosophers and Greek-Arabic translators of the Medieval Islamic world.

In a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, “La busca de Averroes” (1947), we find Averroes (ibn Rushd, 1126-1198), the great Spanish Arabic commentator of Aristotle, at a loss to understand the words “comedy” and “tragedy” he has found in Aristotle’s Poetics, because his own culture has no tradition of theatrical drama. He is given hints by the sight of children playing at being the muezzin in a mosque, as well as by an account of a theatrical performance in China given by a returning traveler, but he can make nothing of them. Borges then intervenes to make this a parable illustrating the impossibility of ever understanding anyone who lives in a radically different time and culture. In reading this story, we are confronted with our own (and Borges’s) inability to write and read the actual words for “tragedy” and “comedy” which Averroes was struggling with. Today’s widespread Western inability to read Arabic, Greek, or even Latin, should be a source of shame, although it doesn’t seem to be. Many of Borges’s readers might already be at a loss to imagine an Arab struggling to understand Aristotle, so unfamiliar the intellectual history of the Muslim world has become. READ MORE…

My 2018: Nina Perrotta

December 19, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Nina Perrotta

As a resident of Brazil, I made it a point to read books by Latin American women in their original languages.

In today’s post, Assistant Blog Editor Nina Perrotta reflects on the many books that accompanied her during a year abroad in Brazil, ranging from classic Japanese novels to contemporary fiction in translation.

Early in 2018, as I was preparing to move to Brazil, I picked up a faded old book from my parents’ bookshelf. Junichirō Tanizaki’s classic novel The Makioka Sisters, originally published in serial form in the mid-1940s, follows four sisters, two of whom are in need of husbands, as they navigate their own altered fortune and the clash between tradition and modernity in inter-war Japan. There’s nothing I love more than a really long novel, and this one, for me, was an ideal blend of familiar (the Jane Austen-style plot) and different (the specifics of Japanese society in that era, which I knew little about). In hindsight, it was probably my favorite of all the books I read this year.

As soon as I finished The Makioka Sisters, I started The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (who, notably, was shortlisted for Literary Review’s “Bad Sex in Fiction” award this year). Though the two novels were written nearly a half-century apart and have little in common, I enjoyed reading them back-to-back, especially since one of Murakami’s characters, who would have been a contemporary of the Makioka sisters, tells war stories from his time in the Japanese army during World War II.

As my trip to Brazil drew nearer, I rushed through The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and, fortunately for my suitcase, managed to finish it just before I had to leave for the airport. Once at my gate, I got started on Charles Dickens’ massive Bleak House, which I had tried—and failed—to read once before. I promised myself that I would finish it this time, no matter how long it took. And so I spent the next two months carrying Bleak House around the streets of Curitiba, Brazil, reading it on the sunny couch in my apartment, and occasionally using it as a yoga block (it was about the right size).

READ MORE…

In Conversation: Susanna Nied

November 19, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by Sohini Basak

Acclaimed translator Susanna Nied on polymath author Inger Christensen and their parallel lives

A giant in world poetry and experimental text, much of Inger Christensen’s influence can be seen cascading to many generations of writers, in several languages. Her book-length poem, Det (1969) shook the foundations of Danish poetry, and in its translations, continues to startle and affect readers profoundly. Her essays have been translated into English and collected into a volume for the first time. To mark this literary event, poet and former Asymptote team member Sohini Basak spoke via email to Susanna Nied, who has translated into English Christensen’s poetic oeuvre as well as the forthcoming book of essays The Condition of Secrecy (New Directions).

SOHINI BASAK: For those of us bound by the English-language, it is because of you that we’ve come to know of Inger Christensen’s poetry. And as you’re the translator of her complete poetic oeuvre, it’s very interesting that you started with her first book (Light), and then the sequence almost coincides with the order in which the original collections were published … although not entirely. How did you decide your working order?

SUSANNA NIED: I actually didn’t do anything like choosing a working order. When I started on Light, in the 1970s, I didn’t know Inger had written anything besides Light and Grass. I didn’t even know who Inger was, and I certainly didn’t know that I was going to become a translator, much less her translator. I was just a university student browsing the library stacks for something Danish to read for pleasure, and I happened upon this little bibliography of contemporary Danish poets. When I got to “C” I found “Christensen, Inger”.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

October 5, 2018  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Ilker Hepkaner, José García Escobar, and Scott Weintraub

We're back with weekly updates in world literature from around the globe!

We’re back with our regular Friday column featuring weekly dispatches from our Asymptote team, telling you more about events in world literature. Join us on a journey to Guatemala and Chile, before heading to New York City, to find out more about the latest in world literature.

José García Escobar, Editor-At-Large, reporting from Guatemala:

We begin with great news coming from the Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon whose novel Mourning (Duelo in Spanish) got shortlisted for the 2018 Kirkus Prize. Halfon, whom we interviewed for our blog last June, is sitting beside other fantastic writers such as Ling Ma, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, and Lauren Groff. Mourning, published by Bellevue Literary Press, was translated into English by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn. The winner will be announced on Thursday, October 25, 2018.

Additionally, Halfon was just declared the recipient of the 2018 Miguel Angel Asturias National Prize in Literature, the most important literary prize in Guatemala.

On a much sadder note, recently, one of Guatemala’s most influential and emblematic poets, Julio Fausto Aguilera has passed away at the age of 88. He won the Miguel Angel Asturias prize, in 2002; he was part of the arts collective Saker-Ti, and one of the founding members of Nuevo Signo—arguably one of the most important literary groups in Central America. He wrote close to twenty books of poetry, and his family confirmed that he left two manuscripts that they hope will get published soon. Francisco Morales Santos, his friend en Nuevo Signo’s editor, called Julio Fausto a worthy and unbreakable man. Many other writers such as Vania Vargas and the most recent winner of the Miguel Angel Asturias Prize, Francisco Alejandro Méndez, also mourned the death of Aguilera.

To read more about Aguilera and Nuevo Signo, click here.

READ MORE…

Fall 2013: Translators Talk to Us

September 12, 2018  |  in 30issues30days  |  by Ellen Elias-Bursac

Here is yet another dimension of Asymptote which has only begun to emerge: it is becoming an invaluable historical record.

October 2013 marks a turning point: for the first time since our debut, I am not editing at least five sections (as I have for each of the first eleven issues), only two (fiction and nonfiction). Ironically, my workload only increases. A larger team means more housekeeping tasks (some delegatable, some not): asymptotejournal.com accounts to create, staff dossiers to maintain, orientations to conduct, internal surveys to chase after, recommendation letters to write. Most of all, supervising so many new staff in a virtual environment proves a Sisyphean task. Some are not used to being held accountable to pledged hours; others, passionate though they may be about our mission, quickly realize that magazine work is actually rather gruelling. Morale during this transitional period is low, with more than a few recruits falling off the radar. Still, each time a personnel does not work out is a valuable HR lesson learnt, better than any management book can teach. On 6 September, the first-ever draft of our orientation manual is produced by then part-time Managing Editor Tara FitzGerald in close consultation with me and circulated among senior team members; on 23 September, a revised version is released to the entire team, now 45-strong. At 31 pages (as opposed to 66 in its current incarnation), this groundbreaking document represents a hopeful beacon of synced work protocol. Among the milestones this quarter: Poetry Society of America publishes an interview with me; we make our first appearance at ALTA; our daily blog (yes, this one!) is launched at the same time as the October 2013 edition, featuring, among others, an interview with Anne Carson and Robert Currie, and poetry by Wanda Coleman, who passes away—we note with great sadness—five weeks after said issue launch. A quick look at the first month’s blog offerings reveals: A new translation of Louis Aragon (via Damion Searls), a review of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, dispatches from International Translation Day in London and Frankfurt Book Fair, as well as Florian Duijsens’s inspired “Pop Around the World” column. As with the quarterly journal, then, we tried to set a high bar from the get-go. Here to introduce the Fall 2013 issue is contributing editor Ellen Elias-Bursac.

I first heard about Asymptote when my translation of an essay by Dubravka Ugrešić was published in the Fall 2011 issue, the journal’s fourth. But it was only with the Fall 2013 issue—and a short story by David Albahari which I’d translated from the Serbian—that I began an ongoing collaboration as a contributing editor.

I agreed to come on board because I was drawn to the extraordinary number of languages and literatures represented in each issue (17 in Fall 2013), the caliber and inventiveness of the editorial staff, and the ways the journal makes the most of its online presence by including both a recording of the work read aloud in its original language and the original text. (Have a look, here, for instance, at the Isthmus Zapotec of Natalia Toledo’s poems, or here, at Vyomesh Shukla’s poem “What I Wanted to Write” in Hindi.) I was also wowed by the stunning illustrations in every issue.

As a translator myself, I am always interested in reading what my peers have to say about their writers and the challenges they have faced. To demonstrate the many ways translators can talk to us through Asymptote, below I offer several quotes from their notes in the Fall 2013 issue. READ MORE…

Translator’s Diary: Vincent Kling

November 27, 2017  |  in Translator's Diary  |  by Vincent Kling

If it’s true that every translation must inevitably fail, this passage would be Exhibit A.

In this final installment of Vincent Kling’s translation column, En Route, Up Close, Kling discusses the difficulties of translating complicated works and considers whether one should remain loyal to meter at the expense of feel and fluidity. Kling explores translation in all its layered complexity, demonstrating with characteristic erudition and generosity the reasons why literary translation as a form resists the confines of any universally accepted code.

Two Hurdles for Translators

1. The Relatively Easy One. Two newly acclaimed releases, Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey and David Ferry’s of the Aeneid, have prompted some discussion about what elements can and should be reproduced as closely as possible and what should—or indeed must—be altered. Reviewers are mainly concentrating on meter, because it is usually agreed that Homer’s and Virgil’s dactylic hexameters come across awkwardly in English; even a technical virtuoso like Longfellow couldn’t always make six-beat dactylic lines work in Evangeline. Both Wilson and Ferry have opted for blank verse (beautifully rendered in both cases), and even strict Augustans like Dryden and Pope knew better than to espouse a line that’s too long for flexibility in English. It was Dryden, after all, who adopted the idea of “imitation,” of the need to respect the nature of the target language. Later, Richard Wilbur shrewdly recast Molière’s alexandrines into pentameter, a decision that finally made the French dramatist’s work performable, even palatable, in a meter that best follows the contours of English accentuation. Anthony Hecht similarly forged vigorous, muscular heroic couplets out of Voltaire’s six-stress lines in his “Poem upon the Lisbon Disaster,” an idiomatic, fast-moving translation that is at its most ‘faithful’ in changing six beats to five.

READ MORE…

Translator Profile: Jennifer Scappettone

November 13, 2017  |  in Interviews, Translator's Profile  |  by Allegra Rosenbaum and Jennifer Scappettone

The notion of a unitary, homogenous, and monolingual “America” is as much an alternative fact as Spicer’s attendance numbers at the inauguration.

Former Asymptote blog editor Allegra Rosenbaum interviews translator and scholar Jennifer Scappettone, whose profile appeared in our Winter 2016 issue. Her translation of Italian poet Milli Graffi was featured on the Asymptote blog last week and her translation of F. T. Marinetti’s futurist poetry appeared in our Spring 2016 issue. 

Who are you? What do you translate? (This is just a preliminary question! To be taken with an existential grain of salt.)

I am a poet and scholar of American and Italian nationalities who grew up in New York, across the street from a highly toxic landfill redolent of the family’s ancestral zone outside of Naples (laced with illegal poisonous dumps). I translate Fascists and anti-Fascists; Italian feminists and a single notorious misogynist; inheritors of Futurism and the historical avant-garde; and contemporary poets who are attempting to grapple with the millennial burden of the “Italian” language by channeling or annulling voices from Saint Francis through autonomia.

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A Lexicon Like No Other

April 17, 2017  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Julia Sherwood and Oľga Kovačičová

“The crushing of the Prague Spring was followed by another communist party crackdown. Dozens of translations...were banned."

Oľga Kovačičová, PhD is a Slovak literature scholar and specialist in old Russian literature and translation studies. She works at the Institute for Literary Studies at the Slovak Academy of Sciences where for the past few years she has been the driving force behind a unique project, “The Lexicon of 20th century Slovak translators,“ which she co-edited and contributed some 80 of the total 400 entries. She has agreed to share some reflections on the special role literary translation played in shaping Slovak language and culture with Asymptote’s Editor-at-large Julia Sherwood, who then translated her insights into English.

Translated literature necessarily plays a more important role in smaller countries compared with bigger nations where much of the reading public’s literary and general cultural needs are met by local literary output. When it comes to a really small country like Slovakia, even without citing statistical data it is obvious that the ratio of translated to domestic literary production is roughly the converse of that in Western Europe, where translations represent 12% (Germany) or 20% (Italy) of book publishing overall, let alone English speaking countries with the notorious 3-4% of translated books.

Lexicon cover

Another big difference is that while the major European cultures have had access to the great works of world literature in their own language for many centuries, in Slovakia the process of reception was basically condensed into the 20th century, since Slovak as a literary language was only constituted in the second half of the 1840s.  Volume I of the Lexicon of Slovak 20th century Literary Translators (Slovník slovenských prekladateľov umeleckej literatúry 20. storočia), published in 2015 by the Slovak Academy of Sciences (volume II is almost complete), provides a fascinating glimpse of this frantic catching up process.

There are lexicons and then there are lexicons. Unlike pragmatic manuals of the “Who’s Who” type, the profiles of some 400 translators featured in The Lexicon aim to chart the trajectory of literary translation in the 20th century and through this, the history of reception of world literature in Slovakia. Individual entries are between three and five pages long, and apart from basic biographical details and each translator’s bibliography, they look at the works each of them translated and how he/she translated them.  The fruit of the painstaking labour of over 30 linguists and translation studies scholars, the book includes Katarína Bednárová’s comprehensive introductory essay on the history of literary translation in Slovakia and its international context, a bibliography of secondary sources, and an index. Volume II will feature an illustrated supplement, showcasing a selection of around 200 book covers, which doubles as a comprehensive survey of the evolution of Slovak book design, as well as lists of translators by source country.

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