Language: Russian

“Vulnerable” Languages: An Interview with Jim Dingley and Petra Reid

July 20, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Daljinder Johal

The journey of working on this text has led me to look at the whole field of literary translation much more widely than I ever had before.

The translators of Alindarka’s Children, our May Book Club selection, had good reason to think of the text as an enormous challenge. Alherd Bacharevič’s subversive take on Hansel and Gretel is written in a musical tangle of two languages: Russian and Belarusian, addressing the conflict of Belarus’ languages in a powerful tale of intimidation, suppression, and  postcolonial linguistics. Now released in a brilliant medley of English and Scots, the Anglophone edition adds new dynamism to the politics and cultures at work, immersing the reader in the complexities of what language tells and what it holds back. In the following transcription of a live interview, translators Jim Dingley and Petra Reid discuss their process, the pitfalls of classifying a language as “vulnerable”, and the creative potentials of dissonance.

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, 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. 

Daljinder Johal (DJ): What were your first impressions of Alindarka’s Children? And what did you consider when making your respective decisions to work on its translation? 

Jim Dingley (JD): Alindarka’s Children was published in 2014, I first read it in 2015, and my immediate reaction was: how on earth could anybody even begin to translate this? Then, when I was in Edinburgh with Petra, another Belarusian author began talking about this book with great enthusiasm. It suddenly occurred to me then that there is much being said about Scots being a language—distinct from English—and therefore a source of real national identity. With Scotland’s movement towards independence, it seemed to me that we could try to do something by contrasting English with Scots. I found working with Petra very rewarding as well, because she had an innate feeling for what we were trying to do, putting Scots up against “standard” English.

I think this adds a whole new dimension to the book, which is what any translator does when the process is not purely technical. You’re trying to get the sense of something. When you’re translating a book written in two languages, you can only get to the dynamic between them by introducing some realia from a country where another two languages are spoken. That’s why, in Alindarka’s Children, you feel as though you’re both in Scotland and Belarus at times.

Actually, I hope people experience some confusion with this book. It sounds very strange to say, but I think a lot of language is about dissimulation, confusion, leaving the reader to work it out at every stage.

Petra Reid (PR): Jim and I had very different experiences, because he speaks and writes Belarusian, while I have no knowledge of that language. So when I was reading the novel, I was reading Jim’s translation—that was the first time I’d heard of the novel or the author. In a way, I was reading it through Jim’s filter, and in that, it gained the context of a relationship between the English and the Belarusian.

I also came to it as a third party, as a Scot who doesn’t speak Scots—I was frank with everybody from the beginning, I warned them! I’ve got a strong accent, but I don’t speak Scots. The translation, and my work on it, is a personal explanation of my attitude towards Scots.

DJ: Could you expand on how that exploration went and what you got from it?

PR: What I like to do when I’m reading a translation is to try and imagine how the original sounds in my head, so even if you don’t have the exact vocabulary, you can approach the rhythm of it, and different nuances become available.

That’s what I found interesting about Jim’s translation; I was beginning to feel the Belarusian nuances through Jim. It was a two-way mirror, because Jim and I have our own dynamics in terms of how we speak English, and Jim has his own dynamic in terms of how he speaks Belarusian. It was a multidisciplinary, 3-D process, holding all these nuances in your head and trying to find a way to express that on the page. READ MORE…

Announcing Our June Book Club Selection: Alindarka’s Children by Alherd Bacharevič

June 30, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal

Alindarka’s Children is a striking example of a writer’s role as witness and archivist. . .

A contemporary fable for the linguistic and cultural conflicts of post-Soviet Belarus, wherein the Belarusian language is at risk of being overwhelmed by the dominant Russian, Alherd Bakharevich’s Alindarka’s Children is a poignant and disturbing look into the myriad consequences of language suppression. Translated into both English and Scots, this multilingual novel is a vital testament to both the necessities and moral ambiguities of preservation, and a fascinating investigation of the intricate networks between expression and communication, adulthood and childhood, the public and the private. 

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, 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. 

Alindarka’s Children by Alherd Bacharevič, translated from the Belarusian by Petra Reid and Jim Dingley, New Directions, 2022

Alindarka’s Children is Alherd Bakharevich’s clever reworking of a classic parable, using a simple Hansel and Gretel-like premise to grapple with real-life tensions between language and power in Belarus. Despite being written from the perspective of children, the novel plumbs deeply into the subtle darknesses and psychologies of Belarusian society. The novel begins with Alicia and her brother Avi, interned in a forested camp where children are trained to forget their language through a malefic system. The two are rescued by their proud and defiant father, but eventually slip away on an adventure of their own. As they explore the woods, encountering a series of memorable characters—interpreted from the original fairy tale and its confectionary-packet house—we are led to explore a world of anxiety and obsession, within which the duo must fend for themselves to survive.

Set in Belarus, the novel’s original Belarusian and Russian is brilliantly translated into both Scots and English, with colloquial Belarusian rendered into the former, and the main body of the book written in the latter. The dominant state-approved language, of which the camp is desperately trying to instill, is ‘the Lingo’—one can presume that it stands for Russian. ‘The Leid,’ or the Belarusian language, is left to slowly slip from collective memory, with Father attempting to impede its eradication by secretly speaking it to Alicia—or really ‘Sia.’ As a result, she remains silent at school, having been taught at home that the Lingo, too, is a forbidden language. READ MORE…

Refuting Domination: Margaree Little on Translating Osip Mandelstam

June 22, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Michal Zechariah

I found particularly disturbing the tendency to play up Mandelstam’s death in the translations, sometimes changing the poems radically to do so.

Featured in the current Spring 2022 issue, Osip Mandelstam’s “Lines on an Unknown Soldier” is a nightmarish yet poignant reflection on war. Margaree Little’s new translation aims to bring out previously overlooked aspects of Mandelstam’s poetry by practicing devoted attention to his original text and to its historical and personal contexts. In her discussion of Mandelstam, Little glides between erudition and intimacy with his works. Our correspondence led to surprising discoveries like the everyday object Mandelstam despised, serious consideration of the political significance of translating Mandelstam today, and renewed appreciation for how literary insight can shape translation.

Michal Zechariah (MZ): Before translating Osip Mandelstam’s poem this spring, you published another translation of his work in American Poetry Review. How did you first encounter Mandelstam’s poetry, and what drew you to translate it? What usually guides your choice when you decide to take on a translation project?

Margaree Little (ML): About ten years ago, around the time I was in graduate school, I first encountered Mandelstam’s work in the Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin translations. I was drawn to the poems, but remember feeling that I was missing something, as though there was a screen separating me from the poems.

In 2016, I began to translate [Marina] Tsvetaeva’s work, focusing increasingly on her political poems that have largely been neglected in English-language translation. This work drew me further into that world, that moment. Then, two years later, my partner and I were visiting our friend, the poet and translator Eleanor Wilner, in Philadelphia. Eleanor has talked about the influence of Mandelstam on her own work and gave me her copy of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s extraordinary first memoir, Hope Against Hope. The book describes the last four years before Mandelstam’s second arrest and death, but more than that, it offers a window into the worldview that grounded his poetry and his entire life.

After reading this book, I went back to his poems and started to translate them to get closer to the original work. I found the originals so rich in music, in layers of meaning and feeling, and so varied in tone, including sharp awareness and wit.

I also began to realize the degree to which Brown and Merwin, as well as other dominant English-language translators, have altered the poems. These changes range from what could be considered more benign (clunky wording or phrasing) to distortions that fundamentally alter the poems’ meaning. I found particularly disturbing the tendency to play up Mandelstam’s death in the translations, sometimes changing the poems radically to do so. This tendency creates a romantic myth of the poet, while erasing crucial parts of his actual work. The gap between the originals and existing versions made me want to continue to translate the poems and honor them on their own terms.

I suppose these are the dual threads that run through my translation work, whether of Tsvetaeva or Mandelstam; a connection to the poems and the deep urgency within them, and a frustration with how they have previously been translated—or ignored, or distorted—in English.

READ MORE…

When the Cannons Are Firing: Q&A with Sergey Katran

June 8, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Caterina Domeneghini and Irene Kukota

It’s a constant struggle that I face as an artist: the futility of my efforts and, on the other hand, the wish to speak up, refusing to be silenced

Connections between meaning and visual representation can be puzzling, just like the multiple negotiations that occur between science and art, between natural phenomena and human attempts to grasp, control and even reinvent them through craft. Puzzles of this kind intrigue Sergey Katran. The art critic Vitaly Patsukov has defined the artist as the inventor of intricate “mechanisms” because of the complex ways in which he develops ideas integral to our modern civilization. A former graduate in chemistry and biology, Katran likes to experiment with Science Art and Bio Art in a variety of media, such as installation, sculpture, performance, and video. On the occasion of his most recent exhibition in the UK, currently on display in Wolfson College at the University of Oxford until October 2022, Caterina Domeneghini spoke with the artist and his interpreter, Irene Kukota, about the war in Ukraine, Katran’s country of origin. Their conversation also focused on his current situation, the stance of artists in times of war, and the ways in which his work has captured the growing tensions between two countries he has lived in and loved over the past twenty years.

Sergey, let’s start from where you are right now and what you are doing at this critical moment in our history.

I am currently in Moscow. For forty days I couldn’t do anything, the whole situation came as an overwhelming blow. What is happening to me is precisely what you have been describing, almost a split identity . . . I mean, that’s exactly how I feel, split. I’m in this slightly schizophrenic situation where my heart and all these worries that I experience are in Ukraine and at the same time I physically remain in Russia. And this situation continues, because for various reasons it has to remain like this.

 I decided to resume my artistic work after a while, even though I might not be feeling entirely up to it. Many artists are leaving the country. I decided I am not going to leave for now. Instead, I am planning to make an artistic project at an independent art platform, dedicated to the current situation. Rather than fearing it, I want to still be able to express what I feel, though I cannot tell you much more for now.

You said that many Russian artists are leaving the country. Many artists, too, have withdrawn their participation from important international events, like the Venice Biennale. Does art still have reasons to exist in times like this?

You know, when the whole thing started, I was talking to some good artists, quite well known, and many of them were expressing different sentiments, emotions, thoughts. Some of them were saying, “What have we done wrong? How could we not prevent this from happening?” A couple of them were saying they didn’t want to be artists anymore.

It’s the usual thing, as clichéd as it may sound: art works with rather fine substances or fine energies, if you like this expression. It works with a certain germination of thought. Do you know the phrase “When the cannons are firing, the Muses are silent?” Art seems irrelevant in situations like this. Artists feel that their voices are not going to be heard, because there are other, more pressing issues of survival on people’s minds. Perhaps art should be using other media in times like these. It might need to be more performative, more poster-like, as it’s closer to action and speaks more directly about the current situation. READ MORE…

Spring 2022: Highlights from the Team

May 2, 2022  |  in News  |  by AM Ringwalt, Amaryllis Gacioppo, Andriana Hamas, Bassam Sidiki, Caridad Svich, José García Escobar, and Liam Sprod

Still don’t know where to start with our latest edition? Here are some more entry points, courtesy of our generous multicontinental team!

I felt that the Spring Asymptote was an incredibly timely and unsettling issue and I hope that broader readers can use it as a lens to think about ongoing dynamics of imperialism, capitalism, and more. I was drawn immediately to Kim Hyesoon’s poems from The Hell of That Star (tr. Cindy Juyoung Ok), with its overwhelming and abundant female presence that kept mutating. In Signe Gjessing’s poems from Tractatus (tr. Denise Newman), I really enjoyed the tension between the abstract and the material—for example, the fact that shampoo is able to exist alongside transcendence. The voice of Nina Yargekov’s “The Obedient Little Girl” (tr. Charles Lee) was immediately disarming! I was delighted by the emphasis on disobedience at the end. Last but not least, I enjoyed reading Agnieszka Taborska’s The World Has Gone Mad: A Surrealist Handbook How to Survive (tr. Soren Gauger). Leonora Carrington is my favorite artist and writer (I actually have a tattoo of one of her paintings); it was exciting to see her mentioned at the conclusion. I also enjoyed the automatic writing components. This is a text I do need to spend more time with and I am so glad that it was included in this issue.

—AM Ringwalt, Educational Arm Assistant

I have a love for Nordic literature in general, there is something about its directness and its simplicity, and yet at the same time its ability to confront existential issues through the details of the everyday. As I live in Sweden and yet am not Swedish, I see literature as a way into understanding the place and society where I am. I was struck by how so many of the pieces in the Swedish special feature confronted the deep hypocrisy that is there in Sweden’s self-presentation as a tolerant, progressive, consensual, and equal society: The uncovering of misogyny and violence against women in the Kristina Lugn (tr. Zach Maher), Lina Hagelbäck (tr. Freke Räihä) and Hanna Nordenhök (tr. Saskia Vogel) (there is a reason that the original Swedish title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was Män som hatar kvinnor [Men Who Hate Women]); or history of institutionalized homophobia in the Jonas Gardell (tr. Elizabeth Clark Wessel); and racism in the Majgull Axelsson (tr. Kathy Saranpa). These all show that there is something deeply troubling in the supposedly comfortable Swedish society that people here live in. And yet, for all this social awareness, these texts are not themselves sanctimonious or worthy. There is a distinct existential edge in each of them, they show how these social issues penetrate deep down into the world of the characters affected by them. Oppression is not an accident or mistake that can be simply rectified or remedied, it is a constitutive fact of the world as it exists and is revealed and experienced: violence, oppression, and torment penetrate and persist right through the world, into each blade of grass, bunch of flowers, childhood memory, or everyday action, and all this writing captures something of that pain and its penetration. This is the world. And it needs to be shown and seen again, recognized for what it is, as it is in this writing; and through the seeing again that this writing provides, it can also be recreated as other than it is.

—Liam Sprod, Copy Editor

Andrii Krasnyashchikh’s As Bombs Fall (tr. Matthew Hyde) made me cry. This account of daily life in Kharkiv made me think of my grandmother living in Rome under Nazi occupation—the immediacy of daily life while the world crumbles around you. Accounts such as this allow us a window into the individual human impact of war that newspaper reportage does not. Johannes Lilleøre’s My Sick Friend (tr. Sharon E. Rhodes) read like prose poetry. I love the way it plays with time: we move through a life, and then once illness strikes, time slows down. The taut, matter-of-fact sentences, with their seemingly throwaway observations and details, evoke not just the immediacy created by bodily illness and suffering, but also convey the pain and helplessness of the narrator. Kate Tsurkan’s interview with Zenia Tompkins discusses so many vital questions, for example: what responsibility do we children of the diaspora have to our homelands? How much is our image of homeland shaped by the trauma of our parents and grandparents?

—Amaryllis Gacioppo, Newsletter Editor

READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2022

April 25, 2022  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Erica X Eisen, and Xiao Yue Shan

Introducing our favorites from the latest issue!

Featuring work from thirty-four countries, the Spring 2022 issue is once again charting new territory across the landscape of world literature. From Hermann Hesse to Kim Hyesoon, as well as coverage of Ukrainian poetry and exceptional Swedish works in our Special Feature, these wonderful inductions into the English language are full of discoveries. Not sure where to begin? Read on for our blog editors’ curated selections!

Through the brutal scorchings and flighty erasures of passed time, Greek tragedies have endured—as though stone, and not words, were their material. Near as our own stories, ancient as storytelling itself, and inextricable from the passions they depict, the characters that had suffused the fifth-century Athenian air with their spectacle defy temporality, continuing to walk and rage within the immediate theatre of our world. In the betrayal of fathers and the names of flowers, in funerals and weddings, in any force that could be mistaken for fate. By the logic of the tragic’s pervasive mutability, their untimely timeliness, one is made to think of the ways cycles are kept and broken, if whether the knowledge of something coming has ever been enough to stop it.

On the mitigative potential of the tragedies, Brian Doerries (the founder of Theatre of War, a production company which stages performances for communities confronting urgent social issues) had posed a question: “What if tragedy is a form of storytelling that was designed . . . to wake us up to the slim possibility of human agency, of making a choice that averts imminent disaster before it’s too late? What if tragedy is as refined of an advancement as architecture or the sculpture, law, government of 5th century BCE . . . a form of storytelling that arose out of a necessity of nearly eighty years of war, to communalise trauma, give citizens permission to access and express their emotions, and help heal the city?” To conceive the life of these plays as not to instruct but to change, what emerges is how the devastation of tragedy offers us, by way of its lapidary endings, the opportunity for transcendence. In José Watanabe’s Antígona, translated with an impeccable ear by Cristina Pérez Díaz, Sophocles’ Antigone is given fluid, elemental form, a series of poetic rooms built for one actress to walk through, inhabiting their rhythm as she inhabits time. Written beneath the dense terror of civil conflict in Peru, Watanabe’s distilling of chorus into a single rivulet of speaking is to run a thin-wire sieve through the voracious appetite of mass violence and statistic, provoking the wide overarch of trauma into open intimacy, into something that is suffered individually, in bodies united by the likeness of experience but ruthlessly alone in bearing it. The voice is torn with the tension between thinking and knowing, between feeling and narration, spreading itself amidst the leaves of time:

The sacred eye of daylight does not penetrate that far
nor the cries of friends and relatives. In that silence,
death, laborious, enfolds the girl
in a dense cocoon of shadows.

READ MORE…

We Stand With Ukraine: “Mother Says” by Andrii Krasnyashchikh

April 23, 2022  |  in We Stand With Ukraine  |  by Andrii Krasnyashchikh and Matthew Hyde

Every morning in the faculty chatroom they do a headcount: ‘Alive’, ‘Alive’, ‘Alive’.

This piece, a war diary by Kharkiv native Andrii Krasnyashchikh translated from the Russian by Matthew Hyde, marks the conclusion of Asymptote‘s We Stand With Ukraine Series. Over the course of the series’s run, we have brought together translations and original English-language compositions from around the world. Collectively, these pieces report on the war from the ground and examine the voyeuristic feeling of following it from afar; they comment on the latest developments and put them in dialogue with other conflicts from history. Above all else, they are an expression of solidarity with the victims of this war and a call for an end to the violence.

Mother Says

Translator’s note: Andrii Krasnyashchikh writes from his hometown of Kharkiv, a town of literary renown, as Russian bombs fall. The added tragedy of the situation is that history is repeating itself, in a distorted form. Much of Kharkiv was reduced to rubble in World War II; now Andrii’s mother says: ‘they’re worse than the fascists.’ The other bitter irony is that Andrii is a Russian-speaking Ukrainian, a representative of the ‘Russian World’, whom Russia has supposedly come to liberate. In his sparse, tense style, Andrii documents the reality of life in a town under bombardment, everyday mundanities offset against the ever-present, terrifying backdrop of war. But hope is not yet lost, and humour is one of the coping mechanisms; Andrii’s daughter finds an anecdote on the internet in which Putin returns to earth from hell, only to find that wherever he goes he is charged in the Ukrainian currency, the hryvnia; the whole world is Ukrainian now.  

—Matthew Hyde

Kharkiv, March 2022.

Mother says: they’re worse than the fascists.

She was born in 1946, she doesn’t remember the war. My father remembers, he was born in 1940. He talks about the missile which hit their house, how he and his brother fled through a field, how a bomb fell right next to them. He remembers plenty from the war.

Mother talks about her granddaughter, about when she was little, how she’d say ‘tyup’ instead of ‘soup’. Her granddaughter’s not so little now—ten years old already, she’s sure to remember this war.

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Listening to Syntax: Eugene Ostashevsky on Lucky Breaks

April 20, 2022  |  in Book Club  |  by Shawn Hoo

[Belorusets] writes in this beautiful, off-kilter, very non-state, non-Russian Russian

Reviewing Yevgenia Belorusets’s Lucky Breaks, Shawn Hoo writes, “The question of what photographs and literature can do in war, I suspect, will not be resolved anytime soon.” Still, as one reads Belorusets’s text of stories from the fringes of wartime, the role of writing within conflict—even if varied and not always discernible—emerges as vital, urgent. Our Book Club selection for the month of March, Lucky Breaks provides a doorway by which the voices and images of Ukrainian women, and their ordinary lives, emerge and connect in unexpected, miraculous ways. In the following interview with Eugene Ostashevsky, whose expert and precise translation of Lucky Breaks has given this title a formidable presence in English, Hoo and Ostashevky discuss the rejections of typical narratives, transitions of impossible grammars, and translating as a pursuit of poetics.

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, 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.

Shawn Hoo (SH): You have translated mostly Russian avant-garde and absurdist poetry. Were the things that drew you to these poets the same things that drew you to Yevgenia Belorusets’s Lucky Breaks?

Eugene Ostashevsky (EO): I translate as a poet, if that makes sense, which means that translation is vital to my poetic work (which foregrounds translation, which problematises translation) but, more importantly, that my poetics help me make translation choices. I started translating the OBERIU, the so-called absurdists, an avant-garde group in the ’20s and an underground group in the 1930s. The way their work formed me as a reader and a poet, even before I started translating, was their absurdisation of language: the way they took classical poetics and projected avant-garde poetics on them, breaking up classical poetics to build these very beautiful linguistic structures which questioned rather than affirmed language. They questioned rather than affirmed reference or the veracity of statements, and greatly relativised linguistic truth. So here’s the important point: I think maybe what drew me to them was the fact that I’m an immigrant. It was the fact that—I don’t want to say I don’t write in my native language, but—I don’t write in my native language, technically speaking.

With Belorusets, you read Lucky Breaks and there is a lot of Daniil Kharms, member of OBERIU, for the reason that Kharms really reflects on and deconstructs narrative. When Belorusets takes her stories about war and cuts out authorial omniscience, writing about the fog of war, and about interacting with people whom you don’t know much about, she describes these people in this kind of glancing way, often slipping into these Kharmsian rejections of classical narrative.

The second thing is that, like virtually all Ukrainians, she is bilingual. But she writes in Russian because that’s what they speak in her family. Now the Russian language is associated with the Russian state, but there basically used to be, in the twentieth century, two forms of Russian: an émigré Russian and a Soviet Russian. After the Soviet Union collapsed and the émigrés started publishing in Russia—because that’s where the readers were—it turned out that the compromise, the attaching of the language to the political unit of the Russian Federation (even though nobody did it consciously) turned out to be very harmful for the language. [Belorusets] writes in this beautiful, off-kilter, very non-state, non-Russian Russian which has (it sounds like I’m talking about wine) tinges of Austro-Hungarian syntax. Also, she is trained as a translator from German, so that’s also there; beyond that Central Europeanness of her Russian, there is Gogol. You feel that in the ironies, in the way the words and the clauses are not lined up one after another but rub up against each other, the way they are defamiliarised. I just love that.

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We Stand With Ukraine: “Life’s More Enduring Than War” by Irina Ivanchenko

April 2, 2022  |  in Translations, We Stand With Ukraine  |  by Ian Singleton, Irina Ivanchenko, and Marina Eskina

As the war in Ukraine continues, our new column shows that the world stands with Ukraine.

In our fourth installment of this new weekly column, we collect the works of writers around the world in response to the ongoing war in Ukraine—texts of compassion, of endurance, of commemoration, and of reaching outward. This poem expresses the resilience of both the art of poetry and the Ukrainian people in the face of violence.

Life’s More Enduring Than War

When the water runs out,
light fades, frost falls, and the
firmament freezes over,
we won’t stoop to prose.

Тhe grasses, dry and stiff,
have not yet grown above us.
Until the words run out,
we’ll speak in verses

of those who are far and near,
and say that we’re one and loved,
above the Bug, the Vorskla, the Dnieper,
in Warsaw, Rome, and Prague.

When all the words run out,
in bird language, we’ll proclaim,
in one universal roll call—
our homeland is alive.

Life’s more enduring than war,
long-lasting, sacrosanct.
We’re all her children, and while
she lives, we won’t be orphaned. READ MORE…

Announcing Our March Book Club Selection: Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets

March 31, 2022  |  in Book Club  |  by Shawn Hoo

Belorusets is the peerless documentarian of her times, a meticulous stitcher of the incongruities that beset contemporary Ukrainian life.

As war cruelly rages on in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one searches for elucidation amidst madness from the country’s writers. As pivotal statements of witness, hope, persistence, and humanity, such texts will undoubtedly go down in history as bright sparks of intelligence and endurance in the dark obfuscations of violence. In Lucky Breaks, Yevgenia Belorusets’s stunning documentation of daily life in eastern Ukraine, the author expertly renders stories of women struggling to reconcile their existence with the broken infrastructure of their country, weaving oratory and textuality with an expert balance of surrealism and sobriety. Testifying simultaneously to Ukraine’s tumultuous history and its uncertain present, Belorusets’s timely work speaks, necessarily, to what survival means, as it is happening.

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, 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. 

Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky, New Directions, 2022

More than a month now since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the crisis for Ukrainians continues to have no end in sight. For those of us spectating from afar, the internet has burst into a deluge of breaking news: images of aerial attacks, fleeing citizens, and pulverised buildings circulate and refresh, drawing us into the eye of the conflict. As for the heart, how much of this goes into cultivating real empathy and solidarity, and how much into encouraging a lethargy towards the bits of violence we witness daily through the screen? Literature and translation have risen up almost instinctively to defy this impersonal onslaught: from readings organised by The Guardian to Odessa-born poet Ilya Kaminsky’s advocacy of Ukrainian poetry. Asymptote, too, has launched a new column in support of Ukraine, and as Translation Tuesdays editor, I published Oksana Rosenblum’s translation of Yevhen Pluzhnyk’s “Galileo,” which, while published a week before the invasion, eerily voiced the fate of small states: “I am quiet as grass, even quieter still,/ I am so easily unnoticed.”

The question of what photographs and literature can do in war, I suspect, will not be resolved anytime soon. Amidst this media torrent, however, the daily war diary of Ukrainian photographer and writer Yevgenia Belorusets stands apart for her ability to document the war in both its pedestrian and surreal registers. On the third day, for example, Belorusets writes about meeting a woman in the park who, while carrying two huge shopping bags, admits happily to her: “When there are two of us, I’m less afraid of the artillery.” Two weeks later, she hears two students speak outdoors about what it means to teach as air raid alarms sound. Occasionally, she includes photographs: friends walking their dogs after curfew; a woman holding two bouquets of flowers. Often, the moments she records are ordinary, allowing the mingling of fragile, contradictory truths—that of people living in a simultaneously exceptional and quotidian time and place. Receiving these daily dispatches in my inbox, they come across as disciplined, tender, and urgent.

READ MORE…

Happy World Poetry Day!

March 21, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Celebrate with an eclectic selection of the best poems from our archives!

In honor of World Poetry Day, we invite you to revisit some of the best international poetry from our eleven-year archive. For a start, Brazilian poet Lêdo Ivo’s work soars to great heights through its accumulation of brilliant specificities. But it also catches one unawares with looser, breath-taking lines like these: “Life itself is a round thing / so that when we go wrong, we go wrong roundly.” Revisit Lêdo Ivo’s “The Earth Is Round” from our Summer 2021 issue.

 

A leading light of South Korea’s contemporary poetry scene, Yi Won takes ‘avant-garde’ to new extremes. Catapulting the reader into a future where technology rules the human spirit, her lacerating social commentary interrogates the very nature of poetry itself. Courtesy of translator Kevin Michael Smith, discover Yi Won’s radical work from our Summer 2018 edition. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “10 February 2020” by Dmitry Gerchikov

March 1, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Lena Tsykynovska

War isn’t easy. / War is inevitable.

Poetry, in dark times, must record and resist. This Translation Tuesday, read Russian poet Dmitry Gerchikov’s response to a Penza court’s high profile sentencing of eleven men for allegedly participating in an anti-government anarchist organisation known as Network—a group widely regarded as non-existent and fictitious. Proceeding through an obsessive adherence to the reportage of numerical data points, Gerchikov stretches the language of factuality and neutrality to accommodate the absurd. In Lena Tsykynovska’s translation, Gerchikov’s protest poem against the banality of state violence and the state’s manipulative use of language is conveyed to chilling effect.

“In a 2019 essay about an imaginary action consisting of walking around Moscow wearing a mask of Putin, Dmitry Gerchikov wrote: “Art is what happens right now, but writing is always in the past, especially poetry. Poetry is always running late to reality.” “10 February 2020” was only two months late to reality, published in April 2020. The Network group that appears in the first line of the poem are eleven young men accused of participating in an anti-government terrorist anarchist organization, seven of whom, on 10 February 2020, were given long prison sentences. Many believe that the evidence against the defendants was falsified, and extracted through torture. 

One moment in the poem I could not translate within the poem proper was: “Mark Fisher is not a lion.” When I first sent him the translation, the author pointed out to me that the lion was also a play on the word for “left.” We decided to convey that information in this note. I also was not able to translate the fact that, toward the end of the poem—“I am still in love”—the speaker gestures to herself as female, by using the feminine form of the verb.

Thanks to Dima and to many other poets in Russia for their solidarity with Ukraine.”

—Lena Tsykynovska

10 February 2020

10  February 2020, the day of the sentencing of the Network group the average speed of the wind was 8 m/s. The day was 9 hours and 15 minutes long. The sun rose at 08:06.

According to a calendar called “A Calendar For Gardeners” it was a good day for gathering crops suitable for drying. The moon was in Virgo, which is the optimal time to do some bookkeeping, and promises healthy digestion. 

As noted by RIA news: “Comrade Beria lost his trust, so comrade Malenkov gave him some kicks.
Him some kicks.
Him some kicks.”

The magnetic field was calm. Barometric pressure was measured at 739mm. By 15:00 humidity had dropped to 70%.

A third world war is inevitable. Life is difficult. Sunset is at 17:22. We have fused together like a swastika and a star. A swastika and a star.
A swastika and a star.
Life is inevitable.

“The police wear big round caps, because they are forbidden to look at god’s sky, at god’s sky, at god’s sky by an order issued on 4 February 1999. So if they try to surround you, you should jump as high as you can, because then they’ll only be able to see your shoes, and won’t remember your face.
Won’t remember your face
Won’t remember your face.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

February 18, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Julia Sherwood, and Kristina Tatarian

Literary festivals, translation contests, and more from Mexico, Armenia, and the Czech Republic!

This month has seen the publication of new essays in Mexico highlighting the importance of editors, literary festivals in the Armenian capital, and the screening of restored screen adaptations of Czech literary classics. Read on to find out more!

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

The literary community has not been discouraged by the global pandemic. February is already blooming with a host of literary events and new publications, some of which—announced early to build excitement—will reach readers later in the year.

On February 4 and 5, the fourth edition of the Kerouac International Festival took place. The event featured poetry readings and performances, showcasing work that disturbs traditional boundaries between visual art, music, and literary creation. The festival takes place every year in Vigo, New York, and Mexico City. This year, the lineup included several nationally and internationally recognized poets. Among them was Hubert Matiúwàa, who has been translated by Paul M. Worley for Asymptote. Poet Rocío Cerón also participated in the festival, presenting performances that blurred the lines between digital art and poetry. Shortly after the Kerouac Festival, she also kicked off a solo video art and poetry exhibition called Potenciales Evocados (Evoked Potentials), hosted in the convent where Early Modern poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz lived.

Four hours north of Mexico City, in the state of Querétaro, another event of international importance took place: the publication of Editar Guerra y paz (Editing War and Peace) by the independent publishing house Gris Tormenta. Written by Argentine editor Mario Muchnik, the book is part of Gris Tormenta’s Editors Collection, a series that highlights the work behind designing, planning, and putting out a book.

Finally, February also brought thrilling news to writers. Translated by seasoned Asymptote contributor Christina MacSweeney, Daniel Saldaña Paris‘s novel Ramifications was featured in the longlist of the Dublin Literary Award. Similarly, poet, translator, Asymptote contributor, and champion of contemporary literature in Spanish Robin Myers had her poem “Diego de Montomayor” selected for the compilation The Best American Poetry 2022.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: February 2022

February 14, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan and Andrea Blatz

New work this week from Tunisia and Russia!

In this week’s selection of translated literature, we present Hassouna Mosbahi’s expansive, dreaming portrait of Tunisia through the recollections of one man’s life, as well as Nataliya Meshchaninova’s precise, cinematic cult classic of a young girl carving her own way through abuse and neglect in post-Soviet Russia. Read on for our editors’ takes on these extraordinary titles.

mobsani

Solitaire by Hassouna Mosbahi, translated from the Arabic by William Maynard Hutchins, Syracuse University Press, 2022

Review by Alex Tan, Assistant Editor

The essential core. The innermost heart. The pupil of the eye. The central pearl of the necklace.

These are epithets lifted from a tenth-century anthology of poetry and artistic prose by the literary connoisseur Abu Mansur al-Tha’alibi—a privileged arbiter of what counted as the era’s innermost heart. Determined to immortalise the remarkable cultural efflorescence of his contemporary Arab-Islamic world, al-Tha’alibi took upon himself the task of gleaning the anecdotes, biographies, epigrams, and panegyrics he deemed exemplary of his epoch: “sift[ing] our enormous rubbish heaps for our tiny pearls”, as Virginia Woolf once wrote.

Not for nothing did al-Tha’alibi name his compilation Yatimat al-Dahr fi Mahasin Ahl al’-Asr: “The Unique Pearl Concerning the Elegant Achievements of Contemporary People.” From the inheritance of this opulent work, the Tunisian writer Hassouna Mosbahi drew inspiration for his own dazzling, shape-shifting novel Yatim al-Dahr—cleverly rendered in English by William Maynard Hutchins as Solitaire. Hutchins contextualises the title in his helpful preface, explaining that “yatimat” refers to both a “unique, precious pearl” and “fate’s orphan.” “Solitaire” reflects these prismatic valences.

Solitaire, also, is a game one plays with oneself; Mosbahi’s book, in many ways, is a puzzle with no straightforward answers. It is encyclopaedic and uneven and oblique. Stories proliferate, nestled within other stories, structurally echoing the classic Thousand and One Nights.

On a first reading, it is easy to sink into the sediment of the novel’s non-linear chronology, before being pulled abruptly out of the seductive illusion and back onto the newly destabilised present. Mosbahi’s work dissolves temporal barriers, saturating the present with echoes of the past. It feels vertiginous to remember that all the action spans a single day, kaleidoscoped through the mind of the eponymous orphan-protagonist Yunus and taking place mostly along the coast, at the threshold of sea and sand. Language arrives on the page like slips of paper curled up in glass bottles: Sufi prayers, journal entries, newspaper articles, quotations of verse, orally transmitted tales, autobiographical monologues—shored up in their rawness. Digressions expand, often without warning, to constitute entire chapters. Hutchins’ translation captures these tonal shifts impeccably. READ MORE…