Language: Russian

The Tragedy of the Present: Bryan Karetnyk on Translating Yuri Felsen

April 4, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Though his writing may well ostensibly shun the “outside world”, Felsen was acutely conscious of what he termed “the tragedy of the present”.

A perilous question always hangs over the works of exiled writers: travelling amidst the turmoil of history, where is their place? For the Russian novelist and critic Yuri Felsen, who perished in Auschwitz in 1943, the Anglosphere’s answer only recently emerged by way of translator Bryan Karetnyk, who has lifted Felsen’s works from obscurity and translated them into English—for the first time into any language other than Russian. In a challenging, original trilogy that employs modernist aesthetics, intercultural crossroads, linguistic experiments, and the soul within time, Felsen layered a masterful prose over reality, beyond singular country or era. His place, it appears, can be located within the complexities of any contemporality intersecting with literature. The first novel of the trilogy, Deceit, was published by Prototype in 2022, and the second, Happiness, is due out in 2025. Karetnyk was awarded a PEN Translates award for the latter, and in this interview, he speaks to us on Felsen’s Proustian style, what these works demand of their translator, and how they resonate through the English language.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): One of the most striking aspects of Yuri Felsen’s work is his wield and command of the long sentence and his elaborate, crescendo-ing clauses. While translating, was there any element you prioritised—rhythm, texture, balance—in order to maintain the delicate construction and dexterity of the lines? What do you feel is the most important aspect to preserve in the movement from Russian to English?

Bryan Karetnyk (BK): I’ve lived with Felsen’s prose (and been haunted by it) for almost a decade now, and one thing I continue to be struck by, whenever I return to any one of his works, is his keen ability to make every sentence tell a story in itself. Russian literature of course is no stranger to long sentences, but what sets Felsen’s prose apart from others is the degree to which all his cascading clauses are so interdependent on one another. You just cannot break them down into smaller units, so he necessarily asks his readers to hold a considerable amount of information in their consciousness over the course of a single period. No matter whether he’s describing external events or the narrator’s inner world, each of his sentences has, as it were, a distinct, baroque narrative arc that follows the narrator’s intense ratiocination—the result of which is that his lines twist and turn in unexpected ways, creating a dynamic tension that is as much psychological as it is rhetorical.

As a translator, the primary duty, as I see it, is always to reproduce that carefully crafted narrative-psychological arc—the exposition, the conflict, the climax, the denouement, the segue into the next thought—all in a way that brings life to the soliloquy. Structurally speaking, one has to emulate the architecture of his phrasing by paying attention to rhythm, tempo, poise—the point and counterpoint of his rhetoric; yet, at the same time, that cannot distract from the demands placed on word choice, which presents its own set of challenges and is so vital in creating texture as well as meaning. Felsen’s narrator is always in search of the mot juste, and, together with a fondness for abstraction, he has a habit of using words idiosyncratically—impressionistically even, rarely in the straight dictionary sense. So often, the texts seem to strain at the limits of what is articulable (he seldom seems to find that mot—if it even exists), and you can never quite escape the sense that some shade of nuance remains forever just out of reach. But I think there’s a profound beauty in that. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Dymov” by Yuri Serebriansky

February 27, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Sarah McEleney

The parachutes activated, and Dymov swung from the cords, examining the lines of the converging rivers below. . .

This Translation Tuesday, a hostile confrontation ensues when an astronaut inadvertently kills a cow—or two—during his Earth-landing. Here is translator Sarah McEleney on Serebriansky’s startling work of imagination: “This short story by Kazakhstani author Yuri Serebriansky reflects upon the indirect costs of space travel. While the story is meant to take place somewhere in Russia, Serebriansky considers it very much connected to Kazakhstan, as it was inspired by his trip to an area near the Baikonur cosmodrome. The author was traveling in the middle of spring when people were tending to their gardens in the countryside, and suddenly, he noticed shiny silvery containers everywhere, which reminded him of the tripods belonging to the aliens in H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. People had gathered parts of rockets that had fallen to the Earth and were using them instead of typical garden containers. At the time, Serebriansky already knew that these pieces of rockets emitted geptil, a rocket propellent hazardous to human health and the environment. With this in mind, a contemplation of the unforeseen consequences of space travel is embedded in “Dymov,” in which the protagonist’s thirst for personal heroism is dashed by his calamitous reentry to Earth.”

I’m a bird in a cuckoo clock. Soon I’ll jump out and say my “cuckoo!” to everyone. No. Not aloud. Because, after all, everything is recorded. The whole country considers you a hero, and you’re the next laboratory mouse in line, and everything is recorded. More important than a dog, of course. Dymov. The “cuckoo!” will be long, since I’ve got something to say. They’ll write: “he conducted experiments.” And really, I conducted them. I beat my heart when I had to, I ran blood through my veins. I was in a spaceship for three days without a spacesuit. Every one of us is the first in something. And what I am is a cuckoo bird, and also, codename “Fog”. Do I want anything else? Yes, I want to go to the moon. I want to climb out of here in a spacesuit, I want to go home. To my daughter. And to church. To Father Anisim, to Anisim.

 “Fog’, we’re going to prepare for descent, put on your spacesuit, we’re checking the telemetry before braking. Everything’s in order here.”

“Got it. I’m getting back into my spacesuit.”

That impossible silence is broken. Come on, speak, guys. I’d listen to your sputtering for a century. In an airplane you at least feel the engine, but here there’s just inertia. Space. It’s a heavy word. But howl. Everything is recorded.

The cabin of the spaceship becomes more claustrophobic in zero-gravity. But what can you do? There’s a lever attached to a cord, flying like they had warned. The planet below looks astonishingly lifeless, no traces of life from here—who says that on the radio? Maybe I didn’t hear it there? The globe above the control panel seems like it was made by Neanderthals. But you have to believe in it. Falling to it out of curiosity, into the clouds, from this, not even height, but rather, void—it’s scary, comrades. READ MORE…

The Richness of the Fragment: An Interview with Oksana Vasyakina and Elina Alter

February 21, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Jaeyeon Yoo

I don’t believe in wholeness and I don’t believe in Chekhov’s gun. Language . . . isn't enough to reflect the fullness of the world.

What does it mean to hold grief—to physically carry your mother’s death with you in daily life? 

Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound documents the journey of a queer poet as she delivers her mother’s ashes from Moscow to Siberia. Translated from Russian by Elina Alter, the novel is an auto-fictional exploration of processing grief through language, and also a meditation on the Russian lesbian lyric—a polyphonic conversation with feminist thinkers across time and space. While making her way across Russia, the narrator weaves together a cycle of poetry, composed of recollections of her past sexual experiences and fragmented essays. Wound then began as a few pages typed alone in the dark, when Vasyakina was writing during the pandemic, and this sense—of both intimacy and intensity—persists throughout the book. Vasyakina writes, as Alter puts it, with a brutality and directness that feels “exceptionally clear-sighted.”

Wound is Vasyakina’s first novel and the winner of the 2021 NOS Prize. Since then, she has published Steppe and Rose, books that also center on family figures. In addition, her works include two collections of poetry: Женская проза (Women’s Prose) and a cycle of poetic texts titled Ветер ярости (The Wind of Fury). 

Alter is the editor-in-chief of Circumference, a journal of international culture and poetry, and has also translated It’s the End of the World, My Love by Alla Gorbunova. Her translation of Wound has been listed as one of Nylon’s Must-Reads of the Month and LGBTQ Read’s Most Anticipated Titles of the Year. 

This interview, conducted with Oksana and Elina separately, has been edited for clarity.

Jaeyeon Yoo (JY): How did Wound begin? 

Oksana Vasyakina (OV): As I rode a bus through Volgograd while carrying the urn [containing my mother’s ashes], it occurred to me that I would never be able to describe this experience. It wasn’t because the situation was tragic; I just saw how complicated it was, and I felt that I wasn’t equal to the material. This was in early 2019. 

A bit later, in the summer, I wrote a cycle of poems—which are included in the book—called “Ode to Death.” I had the desire to write, but I understood that poetry wasn’t sufficient for the challenge I saw before me. And then the pandemic began. I was shut up in my apartment, all events were canceled, all work went on Zoom. One night, I opened up my laptop and wrote the first few pages of Wound. I was writing in the dark, because it wasn’t clear to me how to write long prose, and before this I’d only written short poems, I didn’t know how to put together a novel. A week later I pulled up my draft, reread it, and understood that this was what I wanted to do, that I had to continue. 

I’m superstitious, so when I start writing a text, I name the file with a random combination of letters, just in case I never finish. But as I continued writing, I thought that the novel needed a simple name. The simplest word. The first word a child utters when it learns to speak is mama, and that was the original title of the manuscript. But some time later, I thought that mama rhymes with the word rana [“wound” in Russian]. It’s just as simple, and contains many meanings. After I wrote the scene in which the mother is lying in her coffin, I renamed the file. Since then, the book has been called Rana: Wound. 

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Is That You, Seryozha?” by Mikhail Zemskov

February 13, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Yuliya Gubanova

He exhaled into the receiver one more time and smiled happily. The tip of his nose trembled slightly.

This Translation Tuesday, a short story from Kazakhstani author Mikhail Zemskov, brought into English by Yuliya Gubanova. Alone in his dirty apartment, an oddball takes a creepy enjoyment from cold-calling strangers on his Soviet-era landline. Never speaking, only breathing suggestively into the receiver, he becomes the missing, longed-for person in another family’s domestic drama – a ghost, even – before hanging up and dialing his next victim. A grim prank, inflicting his loneliness on others.

He set his plate aside. The Korean-style carrots from a nearby cooking shop turned out to be just carrots, finely chopped, dusted with red pepper, and drizzled with vinegar. And stale, too. He suspected they would be… but for some reason he craved something spicy today.

He turned on the TV (an old Soviet one, still functioning, so why should he throw it away?). He switched channels, and turned the TV off.

He rubbed his stubble, which was coming up in gray patches. “I’d better shave, or it’ll be harder to do in a few days. Or should I grow the beard again?” But with those specks of gray, the beard – even when washed and carefully brushed – looked shaggy and unkempt.

It would have been nice to clean the flat today. But he was tired and did not want to get up from the deep armchair which had already been sagged by his parents. In fact, it had been a week since he first thought of tidying up. But in previous days, he had been just as reluctant to get out of the deep armchair.

He pulled up an old disc telephone set, also left over from his parents. He took a stack of small bills out of his jeans pocket, pulled one out at random. A ten-ruble bill. He put it on the table next to the telephone. He picked up the receiver. He dialed the numbers from the serial number of the dark green paper carefully and slowly. He cleared his throat.

Three rings, and somebody answered on the other end.

“Hello. Hello?” there was the uncertain voice of a young guy. READ MORE…

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!

Where Are You Racing To?

October 9, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Heloisa Selles

Russia has a long history of endings.

The apocalyptic story of a (fictional) post-epidemic Russia in Yana Vagner’s To the Lake had found an enormous international audience by way of a 2020 adaptation, directed by Pavel Kostomarov and Dmitriy Tyurin and released on Netflix. This positive reception of what audiences called an exceptionally prescient tale perhaps encouraged another English edition of the award-winning text, which is now out by way of Deep Vellum. In this following essay, Heloisa Selles discusses To the Lake in view of its on-screen reproduction.

When I first saw the publication announcement for To the Lake from Deep Vellum, I almost missed it. It was mid-July, and social media feeds were rife with pictures of a New York city ablaze with smoke from Canadian wildfires—scrolls of tiny red suns paired with tips on how to cope with poor air quality. Through the apocalyptic scenes, the outline of a hazy pine forest on a white, inconspicuous cover caught my eye, and within a few minutes I discovered that the book was, in fact, the book—that gave origin to the lauded Netflix series of the same name.

When To the Lake (Эпидемия in Russian, or “Epidemic”) came to screens in October 2020, we were all stuck at home, journeying around our rooms, trying to find ways to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, and two months away from the first vaccines being administered. The show seemed to be an addition to an ever-growing collection of media that depicted viruses, contagious diseases, and varying levels of societal panic—as though watching chaos unfold before our eyes made the palpable reality a bit easier to endure. But this story, an action-packed drama directed by Pavel Kostomarov about a group of people struggling to survive an epidemic ravaging Moscow, had a distinct texture. READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (Aug 2023)

August 17, 2023  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Find out what our staff members have been up to when we’re not editing your favorite literary journal!

Editor-at-Large for Palestine Carol Khoury will be the guest editor of a special issue of the Jerusalem Quarterly, titled “Write-Minded: Jerusalem in Literature”; check out her call for submissions here or email her for further details.

Newsletter Editor Cody Siler published an essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books about  the impact of the American suspense writer Patricia Highsmith’s diaries on her critical reputation.

Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania & Moldova, chaired in June the 5th edition of #GraphPoem at Digital Humanities Summer Institute, a “data commoning” hyper-platform performance involving hundreds of participants and watched by thousands of viewers online.

Nonfiction Editor Ian Ross Singleton translated four poems by Marina Eskina for Barzakh.

M.L. Martin has a new translation of the pre-10 c. Anglo-Saxon queer, feminist poet in the latest issue of Cordite.

Assistant Editor Megan Sungyoon‘s translation of The Cheapest France in Town by Korean poet Seo Jung Hak is scheduled to be published by World Poetry Books in October 2023.

Blog Editor Meghan Racklin’s essay on sore throats as illness and as metaphor was published in Full Stop and her review of The Light Room by Kate Zambreno was featured in The Brooklyn Rail.

Assistant Editor (Fiction) Michelle Chan Schmidt published a review of Owlish by Dorothy Tse, translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce, in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.

Editor-at-Large for North Macedonia Sofija Popovska‘s Macedonian translation of the novella Im Kopf von Bruno Schulz by Maxim Biller was published in July by Makedonika Litera Press; additionally, “Thaumatropes”, a poetry collection she co-authored with Jonah Howell also appeared in July, published by Newcomer Press.

Copy Editor Urooj recently had two poems published in Gulmohur Quarterly‘s Issue 10, released in June 2023. They were also invited to share their poems at the Bangalore Poetry Festival, in Bangalore, India as one of four young, emerging poets in a panel called “Poems in Progress.”

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Interested in joining us behind the scenes? We’re still finalizing our mid-year recruitment drive—hurry and apply if you’d like to help power the world’s literature! 

Writing from the Ghosthouse: Maria Stepanova on Postmemory and the Russian Skaz

August 16, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Now I understand that catastrophe is never a one-time event; it’s a sort of a pendulum, destined for a comeback.

Maria Stepanova’s award-winning work, In Memory of Memory (2021), translated into English by Sasha Dugdale from the Russian original Pamiati, pamiati (2017), seamlessly blends transnational history, private archives, and memoir-in-essay—an oscillation beyond autofiction that the nonfiction reader in me had previously thought impossible. Also embedded in the novel are texts from various sources—from Phaedrus to Paul Celan, Heraclitus to Thomas Mann’s diaries, Orhan Pamuk to Nikolai Gogol—blended smoothly in Stepanova’s sinuous prose.

Already an author of ten volumes of poetry, Stepanova’s debut was described by Dmitry Kuzmin as a display of “brilliant poetic technique and a purity of style.” Now, known as a chronicler of her Russian-Jewish lineage, Stepanova had written: “I would become a stranger, a teller of tales, a selector and a sifter, the one who decides what part of the huge volume of the unsaid must fit in the spotlight’s circle, and what part will remain outside it in the darkness.” She is now widely regarded as both an important and popular contemporary writer—or in the words of Irina Shevelenko, “one of the most original and complex poets on the literary scene in Russia today.”

In this interview, I asked Maria about the genre-defying In Memory of Memory, political poetry since the Silver Age of Russian literature, and the literary tradition of folktales.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): In a previous interview, you spoke about being an eyewitness to a generation of writers who “were traumatized by the crash of the Soviet system of literary education and literary work,” stating: “You could live for three years after publishing a book, but it had to be a bad book, because it was the result of an inner compromise.”

Can you speak on that moment in time—when literary bureaucracy and censorship was prevalent, when Social Realism and traditional genres and forms were requisite, and at the same time, artists thrived?

Maria Stepanova (MS): Well, it was not exactly a good time from an artist’s point of view, as practically all the significant writers—not even mentioning the really big names—were pushed into the margins by this system. Some of them were killed, some jailed, some scared into silencing themselves, some forced to start writing in a “normal” realistic mode. And there are a couple of individuals who were appreciated by the Soviet system; though heavily censored, they were published after a lifetime of fear and loss, like Akhmatova—whose first husband was killed, third husband died in jail, and only son spent years and years in the concentration camps. It was long before the 1990s, but the Soviet utopia of Writer’s Unions, those big honorariums and that enormous audience, was actually shaped in the 1930s, over the backdrop of so many deaths, and it never transformed into anything that would allow arts or artists to thrive. Even later on, when the times became more or less vegetarian, there was an enormous split between independent culture and the official, “publishable” one that appeared in state-funded exhibition spaces or in bookshops. If you were willing to make an official career out of writing, you had to prepare yourself for the lifetime of compromises—to agree that your writing would get cropped and reshaped according to the Party line. But, of course, the benefits were significant, and the life of an underground author was not the easiest—still, the most interesting poetry and prose being written in Russia in the twentieth century were produced by the authors who had chosen such a life, who were writing “v stol”: unpublishable books that were kept in the desk.

It’s important for me to say it, banal as it is, because lately, one might hear people referring to the Soviet times with some weird sort of nostalgia; as if the books we are able to read and quote now were a result of that system, and not a desperate attempt to resist it. The very names of the writers who had perished or were silenced in the 1930s (or remained in danger and unpublished in the 70s and 80s, until the Soviet empire crashed) are used as showcases for how an oppressive society might produce great works of literature. It somehow reminds me of the way ducks are tortured to produce foie gras: the amount of pain involved in the process is unjustifiable, whatever the results are. READ MORE…

The Edge of Understanding: An Interview with Robin Munby

July 12, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

It matters a lot as a translator that you trust in the author, and the writing.

As Charlie Ng writes in her essay, ‘Translating Whale-Song into Human Speech’, the poetic ‘Song of the Whale-road’ embodies the “primordial unity” of humans and nature in the timeless, ahistorical figure of the whale. Published in Asymptote‘s Spring 2023 issue, ‘Song of the Whale-road’ is a series of experimental excerpts from the novel Oceánica by Yolanda González, arranged and translated by Robin Munby. It navigates the ocean not only as a landscape but as a powerful “symbol of the collective unconscious”, juxtaposing the false narrative of human godhood we tell ourselves against the whales’ magnitude in our shared planetary experience of nature and time. In this interview, I spoke with Robin Munby about his role in shaping the gravity and pull of this text, as well as about his piece ‘A New Vocabulary of Translation’, also published in Asymptote‘s latest issue, in which a serpentine glossary helps guide a critic’s review of translations.

Michelle Chan Schmidt (MCS): Robin, you almost seem to have gone beyond the remit of a translator with ‘Song of a Whale-road’. Building on González’s approach to Oceánica, you’ve brought ‘Song of a Whale-road’ into your own experimental realm of language, structure and presentation by compiling the text yourself. What was the creative process behind the piece’s cohesive form?

Robin Munby (RM): The way the piece came about is quite straightforward. I’d read and enjoyed Oceánica and planned to do something with it down the line, but it was the call for the Asymptote animal-themed special feature that gave me the prod I needed. Because I was translating the piece with that goal in mind, it made sense to focus on the intercalated sections running through the novel told from the perspective of a pod of whales, as opposed to working on sections from the novel’s various other strands.

In the context of the novel, the sections which became ‘Song of the Whale-road’ function a little like the Greek chorus. For that reason, I wasn’t sure until I’d compiled them and really until after I’d had a go at translating them, whether they would work as a standalone piece; there’s something a little absurd about presenting the chorus without the play. But I felt there was an internal logic to them and a music that would hopefully come through even outside of their original context. Though translation always involves re-forming and re-contextualizing to varying extents, I’m sure I’d have made different decisions had these pieces been translated alongside the rest of the novel. In particular, the translation of the wider novel would likely have influenced my approach to these sections, and I’d have had to focus slightly less on their internal coherence and more on the points at which they resonate with and speak to the novel’s other strands. I’ll come back with a fuller answer if/when I translate the rest of the novel! READ MORE…

Announcing Our June Book Club Selection: Where I Am by Dana Shem-Ur

June 29, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

Reut senses more and more how even common tongues can quickly become incommensurable walls, especially within the confines of her family.

In our global village, a great many of us have found ourselves in liminal states between cultures, countries, languages, and selves—whether in travel or in daily life. As the world becomes seemingly smaller, however, our internal universes have continued to expand and multiply, as demonstrated in Dana Shem-Ur’s penetrating and incisive novel, Where I Am—our Book Club selection for the month of June. Portraying the conflicts and multitudes of a woman inhabiting the very definition of a cosmopolitan life, Shem-Ur brilliantly encapsulates the alienations that pervade contemporary existence, tracing all the detritus of when an individual collides with place.

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.

Where I Am by Dana Shem-Ur, translated from the Hebrew by Yardenne Greenspan, New Vessel, 2023

In the world of literature, the question of one’s own “where” takes on new dimensions. “Where” dances sinuously with class, language, education, climate, religion, politics, and more, each amorphous construct reinforcing and transforming the others, driving back the question of origin into the unknowable. The concept of “where I am” is dictated not only by the objective latitudes and longitudes of geography, but also by the subjective constructs that layer over each other—over “me” and “you.” Reut, the protagonist of Dana Shem-Ur’s Where I Am, translated from the Hebrew by Yardenne Greenspan, embodies this dance even more strongly in her position as a foreign resident and translator, amidst the confusingly cosmopolitan yet prescriptive Paris literary scene.

READ MORE…

Bilingual Books: A Personal History

June 8, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Ian Ross Singleton

The process of doubling, of language regenerating itself, overlaps the process of translation and the weaving of two versions together. . .

Though not yet standard practice, bilingual editions of translated works are becoming increasingly welcomed by readers, both as a method of language engagement and an embodiment of a text’s various appearances and lives. In this following essay, Ian Ross Singleton discusses the power of reading and learning from a bilingual text, as well as the many dialogues that can transpire from this meeting of reader, writer, translator, and the worlds they each bring along.

I have bilingual books to thank for access to much of my knowledge of each and every language I utter—specifically Russian and, most recently, Ukrainian. I began to learn Russian about seventeen years ago. I was delighted to be able to access the originals, alongside helpful translations, in books such as Russian Stories / Русские рассказы, edited by Gleb Struve, which introduced me to the work of writers such as Evgeny Zamyatin and Fyodor Sologub, among others. Penguin also published a bilingual anthology of Russian poetry that became the basis of my education in this language, from which I memorized poems by Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Aleksandr Blok.

There are bilingual books by individual poets as well; Pushkin Threefold, translated by Walter Arndt (Dutton Books), gives the original Russian texts of Pushkin alongside literal English translations and verse translations. The book shows how translators must scrutinize, interpret, and create texts that are nonetheless complemented by ready comparisons with the original. Nativity Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a collection of the exile Joseph Brodsky, includes work written during the end-of-the-year holidays or discussing the story of Christ’s birth, and provides both a way of reading Brodsky’s original Russian poetry as well as elegies by poets who admired his writing, such as Derek Walcott, Anthony Hecht, and Seamus Heaney. Even the American poet Carol V. Davis wrote It’s Time to Talk About… / Пора говорить о…, a bilingual book of poems written in Russian and English, published in Russia by Simposium in 1997.

A bilingual book lends itself to a dialogue between two languages, the kind of negotiation that take place in a bi- or multilingual mind. It also creates a space for the kind of lingering that a bi- or multilingual person does with their words—the space a translator navigates in their relationship with both the original and their own renderings. It signifies companionship: of the author and the reader, of the author and the translator, and, if the reader is a language learner, of a teacher and a student. A bilingual book also does much to demonstrate the intimacy between the translator and their source texts—a relationship that involves a close scrutiny of language and meaning—and thus it also fosters the relationship between the two texts. READ MORE…

Spring 2023: Highlights from the Team

May 1, 2023  |  in News  |  by Anna Rumsby, Heather Green, Mary Hillis, Megan Sungyoon, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Sofija Popovska

Don’t know where to begin with our latest issue? Here are some personal recommendations from our amazing staff!

I read the Spring 2023 edition of Asymptote as the NBA playoffs began in the United States, and Damantas Sabonis (son of legendary Lithuanian player Arvydas Sabonis) and the Sacramento Kings faced the defending-champion Golden State Warriors in a first-round matchup. I was immediately drawn to the nonfiction piece “Liberating Joy” (tr. Delija Valiukenas) which centers the 2003 European Basketball Championships and the collective joy that the Lithuanian team, Žalgiris, inspired in their fans all over the country. Author Julius Sasnauskas, also a priest and monk, approaches the topic from his unique perspective, incorporating Catholic doctrine into his narrative which intertwines sports, culture, and national identity.

 —Mary Hillis, Educational Arm Assistant

Alaa Abu Asad’s interview with J Carrier, for the very nature of its form, felt at times reductive of his rich investigations into the everyday, but the poetry in Asad’s visual pieces aptly captures the sentiment of (un)belonging.

Resonating very much with Hannah Arendt’s quote “it wasn’t the German language that went crazy,” Yevgenia Belorusets’s interview with Eugene Ostashevsky begins with her love of the Russian language. It’s only right that “no language can be mobilized against the tremendous violence offered by war […],” and this renders many writers and artists hopeless especially in times of insurmountable physical and linguistic violence. Yet it is still, somehow, language that rebuilds one’s voice and keeps one conscious. Ostashevsky’s question is also very apt in this regard when he argues “the idea that any language can’t express the full range of human relations and emotions is false.” Belorusets’s answer, “maybe it’s easier for us to think that it is the language that is under threat,” is at once the most poignant critique of and piercingly emotional charge against the “easier” indictment of language.

—Megan Sungyoon, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

A highlight of our animal-themed Special Feature, Yolanda González’s “Song of the Whale-road”(tr. Robin Munby) is so dense and weighty in meaning that I feel the reader cannot but be transformed; the original piece, as well as the translation, so deftly compresses eons of whale-years and experience into an exceptionally moving and eloquent and elegant piece. I particularly love the ambiguity of the pronouns—it takes a few readings to wrap your mind around the narrative voices and personages, which further adds to the ‘darkness’ of the piece and the impression of coming out into the ‘light’ of mental clarity with each read.

 —Michelle Chan Schmidt, Assistant Editor (Fiction)

“Let it Go” by Mariana Berenice Bredow Vargas, has an urgent, propulsive rhythm in Forrest Gander’s translation, and, in the stunning audio version by the author, feels almost like a hymn, each mesmerizing, sweeping me into the vision of the poem. After reading the dazzling Present Tense Machine by Gunnhild Øyehaug (trans. Kari Dickson), I was thrilled to see “But Out There—Out There—,” a nonfiction piece by Øyehaug, this time in Francesca M. Nichols’s translation, and this essay is similarly, satisfyingly interior, funny, inviting, and surprising, although it is itself focused on the quality of “incompleteness,” which, for Øyehaug, makes writing a novel so difficult. The excerpt from Wu Ming-Yi’s Cloudland, translated by Catherine Xinxin Yu, is concerned with a relationship between text and life, which is similar to the relationship between dreams and experience. This delicate story of a man, following the traces of his late wife’s short story about cloud leopards, into a mountain forest, where he uploads mapping data and images into a cloud of a different sort, was one of the most memorable pieces in the issue, and I’ll certainly be keeping an eye out for the English publication of the novel. I’ve been intrigued by what I’ve heard of Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid, but even if I hadn’t, Alex Lanz’s review would have been well worth the read for Lanz’s kaleidoscopic descriptions and grapplings with the book’s allusions and form, and with Cărtărescu’s “Bucharest, that ‘open-air museum’ of melancholia.”

 —Heather Green, Visual Editor

READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2023

April 24, 2023  |  in News  |  by Meghan Racklin and Xiao Yue Shan

Diving deep into the issue with spotlights on Bolivia, Ukraine, Romania, and more!

Our Spring 2023 issue is alive. Animated with the wide plethora of voices, lifeforms, and phenomenon from thirty different countries, this selection of world literature is moving, feeling, singing, and changing—wonderfully emblematic of writing’s capacities to transcend the page or the screen. To aid you in your explorations of this multivalent “Vivarium,” our blog editors present their favourites from the issue, including our first ever feature of Bolivian literature, and work from Portugal’s famed modernist, Fernando Pessoa. 

“Love does not fulfill itself,” the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy once wrote, “it always arrives in the promise and as the promise.” Though it seems almost flippant, in this line is the (not so well-kept) secret that has always led me to look for love in poems, that moves me to believe there is still no better medium than poetry to offer us love’s canyons and shadows, and that it is the poem’s purposeful language which allows us to seek love out—not in the validating or reciprocating constructs of daily life, but in truer forms: those sublime visions, conquerings of time, and suspensions of reality. Nancy knew that love is unfulfillable because its absolution is impossible, but it still comes to us as inextricable from eternity: the promise of love is love’s own perpetuity, the promise that love’s law is the one that overcomes all others. And though there are great, sweeping narratives of love in novels, there are wondrous portrayals of love in theatre and in cinema, there are photographs and paintings that capture love’s possibilities and devastations, but the reason I return to the poem is that it, too, is a form that recognises its own innate impossibility (because how can a word capture any of this), and then goes on to form its own laws, which enact the impossible.

Mariana Berenice Bredow Vargas’s alluring, propulsive work, “Let it Go,” is one of the most magical love poems I have come across in some time. Translated with the expert, time-keeping ear of Forrest Gander (whose prowess is especially evident in his rendering of the last lines), the piece begins with an invitation and does not wait a beat before seemingly taking us by the hand to sweep over the landscape, magic carpet-ing over the exhaustive obligations of everyday patterns and collected burdens, up and towards the vast and imagined horizon that separates the awake and the dreamed, into the kaleidoscoped marvels and cacophonic frequencies of everything the world has to offer. The poem is an exalted plea for the lover to recognise the availability of immense beauty and profound joy, but also a tender admittance that one can only get there travelling alongside another: “. . . there’s life // dreaming you past the pain, let’s go, I want / to dream it too . . .” Balancing the imploring voice of a hopeful romantic with the resonant fact that fantasy is essential to anyone wanting to live, within Vargas’s impatient call is the promise of love—a promise so beautiful, it almost doesn’t need to be kept. READ MORE…

Traitor to Tradition, Resister to Remorse: A Conversation with Kiran Bhat

April 13, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I want to shift the story before the labels set in; I want to blur the border before it has had time to be constructed . . .

Khiran Bhat is true to what he says he is: a “citizen of the world.” Among other things, he has authored poetry volumes in both Spanish and Mandarin, a short story collection in Portuguese, and a travel book in Kannada. He is also a speaker of Turkish, Indonesian, Hindi, Japanese, French, Arabic, and Russian, and has made homes from Madrid to Melbourne, from Cairo to Cuzco.

In this interview, I asked Bhat about writing across genres, self-translating from and into a myriad of languages, and being a writer who identifies as planetary, belonging to no nation—and thus, all nations at once. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): As a polyglot, a citizen of the world, and a writer “writing for the global,” are there authors (especially those writing in any of the twelve languages that you speak) whom you think were not translated well, and therefore deserve to be re-translated? 

Kiran Bhat (KB): What an interesting question! I’m rarely asked about translation, and since I dabble in translation, I’m glad to see someone challenge me on a topic that speaks to this side of myself. 

It’s a hard one to answer. I would pose that almost all books are badly translated because no one can truly capture what an author says in one language. Every work of translation, no matter how ‘faithful’ it aspires to be, is essentially an interpretation, and that interpretation is really a piece of fiction from the translator. Some people really want ‘authenticity,’ but when I read a translation, I just want something that compels me to keep reading (probably because I’m so aware of the ruse of it all). 

For example, a lot of people prefer the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace, but I fell in love with the Constance Garnett translation. This might have been because it’s easy to find on the Internet and I was reading it on my computer while waiting on a ferry crossing Guyana and Suriname in 2012, but Garnett’s effortless storytelling style really made me fall in love with Pierre and Natasha. I can understand why technically Pevear and Volokhonsky are truer to Tolstoy’s sentences and paragraph structures, but I feel riveted when I read the Garnett version. I want to turn the pages and find out what’s going on, and I think that’s important as a reader: to get lost and immersed in a fictional world.

READ MORE…