Language: Serbian

Fall 2022: Highlights from the Team

Where to start with our glorious Fall 2022 issue? Here are some entry points, courtesy of our global team!

Emma Ramadan’s work as a translator has been so important to me and my literary journey—not least because of the attentiveness she lends to the writers she translates from Francophone North Africa, such as Ahmed Bouanani. I also really admire the way she speaks about her process with Claire Mullen in her interview, the passion and commitment and genuineness that shine through, for instance, in how she discusses her feelings at finally finding a copy of Molinard’s Panics. It reminded me a little of Alice Guthrie’s work with Malika Moustadraf’s Blood Feast, which was also out of print and circulated online as low quality scans.

I really love the slow, meditative writing of Dejan Atanacković’s absent narrator in Lusitania (tr. Rachael Daum). When it ranges with a kind of radical exteriority over the ephemera that remains of Teofilović, and the marginal annotations of Stojimirović that accompany his journals, it reads almost like the prose of Sebald—with the enigma of Teofilović as one such central, inaccessible figure around which the story endlessly circles, never losing sight of the larger political and social context.

Laksmi Pamuntjak’s “The Tale of Mukaburung” could easily have been written and translated to pander to a white gaze, and it’s really to the credit of both Pamuntjak and her translator Annie Tucker that there is a pervasive self-sufficiency to the story and its world, a refusal to explain itself, a matter-of-fact revelling in the ordinariness of its own magic and ritual. This seems especially commendable when a dominant affect in the story is puzzlement and defensiveness, in confrontation with foreigners whose presence and purpose are unknown, even to the reader, until much later in the story when it is revealed that many among them are political prisoners.

—Alex Tan, Senior Assistant Editor (Fiction)

Olavo Amaral’s “Steppe (tr. Isobel Foxford) is exquisite in every way: the writing of the translation, the unusual subject matter, the relationship and emerging love between the two main characters and how it is described, the mood created by the atmosphere of snow and remoteness.

I have been following closely the horrors of Putin’s war in Ukraine and though still angry and frustrated by its continuation, I thought I was fairly hardened to the extent of Russian atrocities. But I broke down towards the end of Galina Itskovich’s War Diary (tr. Maria Bloshteyn), where the unspeakable rape and violence against children is put into words.

—Janet Phillips, Assistant Managing Editor

Kudos to Jonathan Chan for beautifully translating such ancient poems of Choe Chi-won, whose characteristic loneliness metaphorized in natural images is successfully rendered in translation.

think one of the most important missions of Asymptote is to sustain languages under oppression, be that a national language that is close to extinction or the voice of a people amid a political process of erasure. Lauren Bo’s review of The Backstreets by Perhat Tursun undertakes this mission in remarkable earnest and rigor, by not only posing the biopolitical question of survival faced by the Uyghurs but also diligently analyzing the text via a close reading, and ultimately marrying the two to derive a conclusion that engages readers with the enduring challenge of humanity that surpasses the violence that is immediately palpable: “The Backstreets is an account of survival and a reminder that even the cruelest elements of humanity are fabricated out of absurdity and fear of the uncertain.”

The elusive language of Krikor Beledian’s “Unpeopled Language” (tr. Taline Voskeritchian and Christopher Millis) is delicate yet piercing, and while  the history of the Armenian genocide cannot be separated from the poetics of Beledian, its implementation of “the tool against the game of expression“ speaks to the broader context of the survival of a people and their language in and after the era of mass murder.  

—Megan Sungyoon, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

READ MORE…

Summer 2022: Highlights from the Team

Don’t know where to begin with our latest issue? We’re here to help!

The most striking piece in this issue was Abdelfattah Kilito’s “Borges and the Blind” (tr. Ghazouane Arslane) for informing me of Borges’ deep affiliation with Arabic literature (something I wasn’t aware of before)—it opened my eyes to another dimension of Borges’ works as well as highlighted the blind spot of critics and readers of translation who might not be privy to the multifaceted aspects of the text behind the text. Cao Kou’s “The Wall Builder” (tr. Chen Zeping and Karen Gernant) is a truly wonderful and chilling fable on the idea of border, i.e., a porous wall between insider and outsider, individual and the collective in a repressive society. Anna Felder’s “Unstill Life with Cat” (tr. Brian Robert Moore) is a lovely, fully immersive tale from a cat’s point-of-view. The translation is magical, wondrously immediate. I love Rose Bialer’s perceptive questions and the resulting interview with Maureen Freely for revealing how Turkey’s political situation might affect the relationship between an author and his translator, and how there are so many layers of “the other” in Turkish society.

—Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora

Kelsi Vanada’s translation is itself a reflection of Andrea Chapela’s long meditation on the meaning and mechanics of mirrors, with all the inevitable subtle distortions and complex reconfigurations that Chapela elaborates on. This extended reflection employs myriad angles of vision‚ philosophy, science, toys, personal narrative, literature, and history, from which to view the significance of mirrors, the act of looking at oneself, and the act of constructing a self-image, with and without the fragmented and inevitably distorted images that mirrors provide. Juan Calzadilla’s poems from Dictated by the Pack (tr. Katherine Hedeen and Olivia Lott) are virtuosic translations—the complexity of the diction and rhythms as well as the subtlety of how the language accretes are very challenging to carry over into English without disrupting the balance between sense-making and surprises in the language. The lines shift across the page, like waves lapping onto the shore, as if the rhythms of thought have been recorded faithfully in their syncopated arrivals, gaps, and runnings-over. Almog Behar’s long poem “First We’ll Speak Many Words About God” (tr. Shoshana Olidort) is a meditation on religion and god, but also an interrogation of our conception of god, an interrogation of the faithful as well as the faithless. It’s subversive and yet hopeful. Sa’eed Tavana’ee Marvi’s ”The Open Tome” (tr. Khashayar Kess Mohammadi) is set in a post-apocalyptic, interplanetary, post-Earth world. The voice of the poem shifts‚ from an unnamed speaker, to a television set, to an ”Oceandweller,” to an unnamed speaker again. The experimental formatting of the poem allows the reader to shift between these different lens ratios. As such, the reader experiences a telescoping which perhaps informs the experience alluded to in the poem‚ by a visionary which either documents the future, or foretells the otherworldliness of the present moment. I really enjoyed Rose Bialer’s interview with Maureen Freely, which touches on the craft of translation, the challenges and the advantages of translating through the prism of race, gender, sexuality, etc., and what it’s like to navigate a translator-author relationship that spans two very different cultures, especially when the author in question is famous, and at certain points even infamous.

—M. L. Martin, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

I have a distinct affinity for Mitteleuropa miserablism, and this edition contains two quintessential instances of this literary tendency: Elfriede Jelinek (tr. Aaron Sayne) and Thomas Bernhard (tr. Charlie N. Zaharoff). It does not get much more central European than Austria, and the Austrians seem to have an affinity for misanthropy, self-loathing, destruction, perversity, and psychosis, but all expressed in the most perfect prose, poetry, painting, and music. Part of my love for these two writers in particular, however, is their pushing, bending, and breaking of the formal rules of language. Perhaps this formalism is my own perversity, since, as a copy-editor, I should be forcing such language back into its grammatical and syntactical straightjacket; but as much as I know and can enforce such rules in a professional manner, I thrive and find a thrill in breaking them. READ MORE…

Our Spring 2022 Issue Has Landed!

Individuals of the woodland canine persuasion run amok in our Spring 2022 issue, thanks to Theis Ørntoft and Nina Yargekov!

Welcome to our Spring 2022 edition, released just as Russia’s invasion enters a brutal new phase. We’ve been curating a space for writers in support of Ukraine in a new Saturday column. Now, we proudly bring you Andrii Krasnyashchikh’s letters from Kharkiv, Kate Tsurkan’s interview with Zenia Tompkins, and Ian Ross Singleton’s review of Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine. Complemented by guest artist Shuxian Lee’s poignant cover, these pieces and the new issue remind us that if “humans are destructive”—as frequent contributor Theis Ørntoft puts it across so powerfully in his essay “Our Days in Paradise are Over”—“we are also an organising phenomenon in the cosmos.”

An absolute highlight amid new work from thirty-four countries, Ørntoft’s essay is itself an organizing phenomenon that deserves to be dwelt on. According to him, civilization “began with the delineation of a garden,” but capitalism has taken it to the point where every inch of planet Earth has been altered and nature no longer exists “out there”—no wonder, then, that his expedition to the West of Jutland yields zero sightings of wolves. Heavily mythologized across cultures, wolves most often represent danger, chaos, the unknown—yet, in the author’s telling, they also stand for the primeval and, therefore, a certain elusive real, in stark contrast to the various symbolisms thrust upon them. Ørntoft then inverts the anthropocentric paradigm that humans are used to—with them at the top of the food chain, even though they do not necessarily self-identify as animals—and asks us to consider what message wolves might hold for us instead.

Apart from Nina Yargekov’s uproarious adaptation of “Little Red Riding Wolf” for the age of the #MeToo movement—the obvious story with which Ørntoft’s nonfiction might be paired—“Our Days in Paradise are Over” echoes Nobel laureate Hermann Karl Hesse’s empathetic Weltanschauung in two new translations of his poems by Wally Swist; it also asks us to pay attention to the various animals conjured in this edition: from the suffering, captive bat in Bosnian author Aljoša Ljubojević’s “How We Started the War” to the suffering, liberated “Fish” in Georgian writer Goderdzi Chokheli’s story about a man who jumps into a lake and renounces his very own humanity along with the social contract it entails. Then there is the elusive boar in Pedro de Jesús’s slippery poem, in which various hunters discuss the “art of the hunt” only to miss the point; the cats with beautiful eyes in Agnieszka Taborska’s fascinating piece on surrealists vis-à-vis their chosen suicides, “yawn[ing] and stretch[ing] in all their dignity, distance, and above all their enormous indifference to the person standing there on the chair with her head in a noose.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

News this week from the Czech Republic, Taiwan, and Serbia!

This week, our editors are bringing news of their vigorously alive world literatures. From a celebration of Czech letters at the Warsaw Book Fair and the Prague MicroFestival, to a commemoration of iconic Taiwanese writer Li Qiao, to a push for Serbian women’s voices in a collection of short stories—the ongoing efforts of writers, presses, and translators around the world indicate always towards greater and greater realms of understanding.

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Czech Republic

Held from September 9 to 12, the Warsaw Book Fair was one of the first major industry events to make a comeback after the pandemic-enforced hiatus, with the Czech Republic as the guest of honour. The timing was quite fortuitous, since barely two months after the event, cases were again surging in these two countries, as well as in most of Europe.

Czech literature has been enjoying a real boom among Polish readers, and this was reflected in the strong contingent of leading Czech writers who came to Warsaw. They included Michal Ajvaz, Bianca Bellová, David Böhm, Petr Hruška, Alena Mornštajnová, Iva Procházková, Jaroslav Rudiš, Marek Šindelka, and Kateřina Tučková. Past Asymptote contributor Radka Denemarková—who drew the largest crowds—felt that “in recent times, it has been particularly important for us writers to show solidarity—especially with countries such as Poland and Hungary—creating a kind of enclave of humanism.”

Also popular with Polish readers was a meeting with Petra Hůlová, who presented the Polish translation of her 2018 novel Stručné dějiny hnutí (A Brief History of the Movement), a book she describes as “a feminist manifesto and critique of feminism rolled in one.” Her “provocative satire of a feminist future challenges and unsettles in equal parts” (Kirkus Reviews) has just been published by World Editions as The Movement, in Alex Zucker’s English translation. You can read an excerpt from the book here as well as in BODY.Literature, the Prague-based English-language literary journal whose fall issue also features poetry by Karel Šebek (trans. Ondřej Pazdírek) and Pavla Melková (trans. Joshua Mensch), as well as a chilling absurdist story by Vratislav Kadlec (trans. Graeme Dibble).

On October 18, Hůlová and Zucker read from and discussed The Movement in an event organized by Czech Centre New York. Their conversation (now available to watch on YouTube) also included the writer-translator pair Kateřina Tučková and Veronique Firkusny and the novel Gerta, published by AmazonCrossing earlier this year. On November 22, Firkusny will be featured again as part of European Literature Night, organized by the Czech Centre; she will appear with Elena Sokol, as their joint translation of the final part of past Asymptote contributor Daniela Hodrová’s trilogy, City of Torment, is soon to be published by Jantar Publishing. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “I, The Executioner” by Srđan Miljević

She did not think of how people, even the richest, humiliated themselves by picking up their own small coins off the street.

Today, we’re thrilled to debut in English the runner-up of the 2017 Festival of the European Short Story, “I, The Executioner” by Serbian writer Srdjan Miljevic. Distilled in nine bracing vignettes, the flash fiction centers on former prostitute Jasna who, on the brink of literary success, meets a gushing reporter—except, her mind elsewhere, she finds herself unable to concentrate. Through the stilted interview questions, which recall the stilted essay assignments she was given in a childhood disrupted by refugeedom, we are given to understand that Jasna’s life from the margins is one that does not fit the neat checkboxes that society has imposed.

*

In Sarajevo, in her second year of primary school, she got a D on her essay on the topic: “When I grow up, I want to be . . .” 

She never found out why a D, because the very next day she became a refugee.

*

A man in a worn-out McCloud jacket stopped in front of her. He bent down, trying to pick up a coin that fell out of his pocket from the pavement. He made it on his second attempt. Two dinars. She did not think of how people, even the richest, humiliated themselves by picking up their own small coins off the street. She thought how good it would be to try not to smoke more than one pack of cigarettes today. Up to two drinks. And one joint max. 

She had been smoking for nineteen years. More than half her life. On a daily basis. She could burn through up to three packs. Theories about what a cigarette was a substitute for and what processes occurred in your brain were comprehensible to her, but she could not think about that now. She would quit one day. And she would take more care today. It was different with alcohol. She had no craving for it, but she did not refuse it either. She did not like to lose control. The same went for ganja. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest news from Bulgaria, Palestine, and Serbia!

This week our writers bring you the latest news from Bulgaria, Palestine, and Serbia. In Palestine, the Sheikh Zayed Book Award winners have been announced, including Iman Mersal taking the Literature Award; in Serbia, a new anthology of Miloš Crnjanski’s poetry has been translated into English; and in Bulgaria, a conference about Bulgarian Literature as world literature was held at the National Book Center. Read on to find out more! 

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

It is an unusually hot spring, Ramadan is in its last third, and the country has been under partial lockdown for a long time, which leaves no reason to wonder that the literary scene in Palestine is suffering from Frühjahrsmüdigkeit (aka springtime lethargy)! One cannot but wonder how people in hotter regions, such as in the United Arab Emirates, not only manage to get through with their days, but also make international literary news.

Seven authors and researchers, from Egypt, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, and the US, as well as a publishing house from Lebanon, have been declared the winners of this year’s Sheikh Zayed Book Award. The winners were selected from a pool of more than 2,300 submissions, the most the annual award has received since it was founded in 2007. The awards will be formally presented via a livestream ceremony on Youtube during the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair (23–29 May 2021).

This year’s Literature Award went to Iman Mersal for her 2019 work of creative nonfiction Fee Athar Enayat Al Zayyat (In the Footsteps of Enayat Al-Zayyat). This look into the life of the Egyptian writer Enayat al-Zayyat, who killed herself in 1963, illuminates the challenges of writing while female, of attitudes toward mental health, and life in mid-20th-century Egypt. It is part detective story, part biography, and part memoir, and unfolds tender and surprising connections. It recently came out in Richard Jacquemond’s French translation as Sur les traces d’enayat Zayyat. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Five Poems by Radmila Petrović

some words are so tender / that we keep them in greenhouses

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, memories of a pastoral youth emerge as an urban woman’s coming-of-age in these selections from Serbian poet Radmila Petrović. Our speaker alternates between moments of bittersweet nostalgia for her erstwhile village life (“The Curse of the Woods”), and a reckoning with the violent patriarchal norms of her home (“Forest, Plow, Primrose”). This sequence of poems demonstrates a liberated wisdom beyond the stifling lessons of past generations, a voice which confronts the brutality of patriarchy—and even the alleged inefficacy of poetry itself—with an acerbic wit (“Above Your Collarbones,” “Just Checking”). Petrović’s verse masterfully bridges a bitter, world-weary narrative voice with moments of childlike vulnerability (see especially the power of maternal silence in “The Language of Plants”), and deploys bucolic images alongside moments of bodily destruction. Of particular note is the poet’s use of line breaks (here captured by the superb translation from Jovanka Kalaba and edited by Ellen Elias-Bursać) to almost mimic the process of gradual, episodic recollection—and the hesitation warranted by traumatic memory.

The Curse of the Woods

does never came near the households
we would see them when we headed uphill
to pick rosehips for jam

one summer while mowing a meadow
Father accidentally mowed a fawn
the mountain wailed at sunset

ever since that day I have always
walked in front of the mower
moved rabbit kits out of the way
catapulted snakes with a pitchfork

ever since that day I have carried the curse of the woods

your doelike heart sees yellow hunting dogs
in my eyes
my fingers feel like blades of a mower

You can’t do this anymore, you said

Mother put my legs out with the hay
this morning
for the cows READ MORE…

Disassembling Father’s Tractor in Silence with Someone, or, New Sincerity in Contemporary Serbian Poetry

Radmila Petrović is unafraid of dismantling existing cultural and literary canons . . .

Poets, among all artists, are the ones most likely to turn back again and again towards the innate failures of their craft. Whether if it is a stifled voice suffering the consequences of societal atrophy, a consummate frustration at the form’s lack of innovation, or the perceived obsolescence of the written word in addressing the pertinent concerns of life—writers of verse are constantly looking for ways to subvert and resolve such plaguing doubts. Amongst them, Radmila Petrović is a young Serbian poet composing under the brightening promise of the New Sincerity movement, helping to lift the veil of stasis. In this following essay, our Editor-at-Large for Serbia, Jovanka Kalaba discusses the weary weight that burdens the works of Serbian literature, layered with a century’s worth of national trauma, and how Petrović has rejuvenated the scene with equal parts lightness and gentleness. 

There is something about Serbian cultural productions—of film especially, but literature as well—that audiences do not find particularly appealing. “Too dark” is what one will normally hear people say; with a particular brand of gloom, our narratives often dwell on national tragedies—namely the major conflicts of the twentieth century, most pertinently the Yugoslav Wars—but also political failures, systemic dead-ends, and the emotional and societal burdens that come along with them: guilt, denial, emotional numbness, ideological polarization, class polarities, etc. Literary and art works are often received in a way that can be summed up in a statement uttered by one of my friends: “Does reading a good book or watching a good movie around here always have to result in feeling as if someone had clubbed me with a baseball bat?” This “tough love” approach taken by most artists as a way to confront their audiences with the truth usually results in an overtly cerebral recognition of their works on the progressive, liberal side of the spectrum, and utmost consternation and suspicion of auto-chauvinism and self-hate on the conservative and nationalist part of the spectrum—nothing else.

Times have been rough for those determined to be sincere about the philosophical and cultural preoccupations of (post)modern living; truth is largely perceived as an outdated concept, a perhaps inevitable conclusion considering how worn-out the language has become—used up by television, advertising, and other forms of mechanical reproduction. In his Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories, Mikhail Shishkin says that words—“guards that keep out emotion and meaning, sentries at the boundary between people”—have lost their divine meaning. The only thing remaining is to “learn to grope your way toward understanding each other, or else be able to escape over the verbal barbed wire.” He insists, however, that “there is no road to understanding except through words.” But how can one speak the truth if the language is not working?  READ MORE…

Announcing our November Book Club Selection: At the Lucky Hand, aka The Sixty-Nine Drawers by Goran Petrović

One could spend a pleasant hour wandering inside nearly every evocative sentence of At the Lucky Hand.

As we inch towards the end of a year that has tested in turn the limits of our imagination, the capacities of our patience, and the extent to which we indulge our escapist tendencies, we have been encouraged to examine closely the narratives that perpetuate contemporary existence: narratives that not only exist within the pages of books, but that also thread our day to day, commanded by something as curious as it is unknown. So, in our second-to-last Book Club selection of 2020, we are thrilled to introduce a complex, mysterious, and commandingly beautiful novel by Serbian master Goran Petrović, which inquires into the infinity of literary invention in order to infer how fantasy contributes to reality.

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

At the Lucky Hand, aka The Sixty-Nine Drawers by Goran Petrović, translated from the Serbian by Peter Agnone, Deep Vellum, 2020

Goran Petrović’s At the Lucky Hand, translated from the Serbian by the late Peter Agnone, flatters the sensibilities of those enamored with the written word—within its pages, we become romantic leads and daring detectives. Our quality of “mild presence or mild absence at the same time” becomes a virtue, nearly a superpower, highly valuable to various profiteering types. In fact, the novel is Petrović’s contribution to what might be considered the devastatingly nerdy genre that animates literary theory. And yet, this is only one face of a multifaceted work. Irresistibly engaging and virtuosically crafted, At the Lucky Hand marries high theory with high drama in spaces so quiet and invisible, that their liveliness takes one completely by surprise.

Petrović strikes a winning balance between imaginative extravagance and sober social criticism. Adam Lozanić, a somber, lonely philology student and part-time proofreader, receives a lucrative job offer from a mysterious couple; he must revise a memorial already long out of print. The book, expensively self-published, contains six hundred pages of description with no plot or characters to speak of. Adam and his employers are practitioners of a sort of reading analogous to lucid dreaming, in which they can meet other readers enjoying the same book at the same time and explore the universe of the text in all the richness suggested, not explicated, by the words. The elaborately described estate, imagined by the deceased author in a state of devotion to a love no less real for having never escaped the page, provides a ripe stage. Adam and the few other readers, thrown together by happenstance, fill in the vacuums where conventional literary elements were missing. Love, murder, mystery, power, and ambition electrify places that tremble on the edge of existence and people who, by all appearances, sit in chairs moving nothing but their eyeballs.

Jelena, characterized mainly by her pleasant smell, fervent desire for escape, and careful companionship to an increasingly senile woman, unwittingly enchants the innocent Adam. But they are only the latest lovers to inhabit the home and garden. As the stories of their predecessors unfold, frustrated precisely because of the disjunction between the realities on and off the page, one yearns for Adam and Jelena to reconcile the two. However, the more decidedly a character chooses to exist inside the literary imagination, the more they develop a noble purity outside of it. Adam and Jelena learn what the more seasoned readers already know: that they neither need nor want anything of “real” life. The very food that nourishes them is cooked in fictional kitchens and the money they exchange in long-shuttered shops appears from memories of long-defunct banks. Using nothing, they are useful to no one, and the talismans that give them access to their imaginations are the only means one has to influence them. READ MORE…

From Two Solitudes to Quattro Books: An Interview with Bilal Hashmi

Quattro will . . . shift the discussion so it’s no longer . . . English and French, but the multilingual nature of Canadian writing.

Quattro Books was founded in 2006 by Allan Briesmaster, John Calabro, Beatriz Hausner, and Luciano Iacobelli, with the aim of publishing established and emerging authors who represent the linguistic and cultural diversity of literature in Toronto and across Canada. As such, from the start, Quattro Books has sought to bring out works originally written in English alongside those translated from the multilingual voices of Canadians who have arrived in the country as immigrants or refugees. The press’s recent acquisition by Bilal Hashmi, president of the Association des traducteurs et traductrices littéraires du Canada / Literary Translators’ Association of Canada (ATTLC-LTAC), and a translator himself—from French, Urdu, Persian, and Hindi—has led to a shift in focus that favours the latter. This is evidenced by Quattro Books’s first catalogue since Hashmi took over as Executive Director and Publisher. Due out in the fall of 2020, it will feature English translations of Canadian works spanning six languages. Asymptote’s co-Editor-at-Large for Argentina, Sarah Moses, met with Hashmi in Toronto to discuss Canadian literature as international literature, works in translation as partnerships, and how he’s shaping Quattro Books into a translation-focused press.

Sarah Moses (SM): Id like to begin by asking you about your involvement with the ATTLC-LTAC. How has it led to Quattro becoming what youve described as a translation-focused press?

Bilal Hashmi (BH): Beatriz Hausner is central both to the ATTLC-LTAC and Quattro. She’s one of the founding members of Quattro and was the president of the ATTLC-LTAC in 2017, when I joined. I had the privilege of being mentored by her in translation and advocacy work, and the one thing we all sort of agreed on is that there should be more international works in translation available in Canada. So the movement from the ATTLC-LTAC to Quattro was, in a way, organic—the work at the former led to the idea: now we have an opportunity, let’s see what happens. That’s the way I thought of it. I started off as membership secretary in 2017 and I’ve been the president since June. We continue to work through some of the same issues that we’ve dealt with in the past: translator visibility, proper recognition, and so on—these remain our goals. But I think what Quattro will possibly do in the future is shift the discussion so it’s no longer necessarily the “two solitudes” of English and French, but the multilingual nature of Canadian writing that comes through.

SM: Is this primarily how you see Quattro Books fitting in among publishers of translation in Canada and internationally—as a press that moves beyond translations between English and French?

BH: In our first catalogue we have translations from French, Serbian, German, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, and then two titles that were written in English. We’re not going to do exclusively translation, but that’s the focus, which I think is unique in Canadian publishing. Whether or not that continues is something we’ll have to determine. We’re really hoping to find out if publishing majority translations is a viable activity.

Working with translation has involved a very international cast of characters, which is really what I find most exciting about Canadian literature as international literature. I think those who are very skeptical about translation’s profitability or potential for success kind of forget that you do have access potentially to other markets. Typically, Canadian books are marketed internally for Canadian consumption and the expectation is that Canadians will buy fellow Canadians. It doesn’t always work that way. My hope is that these books will be seen as Canadian literature, plus whatever other literature they’re referencing—let’s say the Portuguese-Angolan return novel, of which there’s now a sizable and critically acclaimed subgenre in Portuguese fiction. So the hope is that they’ll cross over into other markets, beginning in the US.

The catalogue started as kind of an exercise in fantasy, which I think I shared with you a couple of summers ago. It was an exercise in what works within the funding paradigm. Readers of Asymptote should know that in Canada the main translation activity is English-to-French, French-to-English, but the official requirement for funding from the Canada Council for the Arts is that the author be Canadian. There’s no limitation on the source language so long as the work is translated into French, English, or an indigenous language. I did a little bit of a research and I found a list of about twenty or so Canadian writers who brought in different literary histories with them. All of these works are technically eligible for Canada Council for the Arts grants, and we’re very lucky and grateful to the Canada Council for funding all six, which may be a first in Canadian publishing for one season, and probably unique in this part of the world. So that’s how it started. I think we have another half dozen languages already in the pipeline if not already under contract, also all Canadian authors. My hope is really to explore this lesser-known part of Canadian literary history, which tends not to see that much exposure in the current framework.

In the first couple of years, the focus will be on Canadian content, but we’re also starting to acquire from outside, including translations. That’s a challenge since I will insist that everyone gets paid at the Canadian rate, which is the determining factor. Because if it’s a five-hundred page novel and there’s no funding for it, then we’re probably not going to be able to pay the eighteen-cents-per-word rate—that’s the rate for prose. I believe the per-word rate remains at twenty cents for theatre and twenty-five cents for poetry. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest news from Poland, Hong Kong, and Serbia!

This week our editors bring you the latest literary news from Poland, Hong Kong, and Serbia. In Poland, high-profile authors including Olga Tokarczuk have been vocally supporting women’s rights and an exciting, newly discovered Bruno Schulz story has been published; in Hong Kong, authors have spoken out against claims of a dearth of writing in Hong Kong to attest to its thriving literary scene, just as the Hong Kong International Literary Festival kicks off; and in Serbia, a new biography of Ivo Andrić, the only Yugoslav Nobel Prize winner for literature, has sparked debate. Read on to find out more!  

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Poland

As if having to cope with two waves of the coronavirus pandemic was not enough, Poland has been swept by two major waves of social unrest. The summer months were dominated by protests against the rising tide of homophobia, which prompted an open letter from the world’s leading writers, directors, and actors, including Margaret Atwood, Pedro Almodóvar, and Olga Tokarczuk. And since October 22 people have been out on the streets in their thousands protesting against the decision to further tighten the country’s abortion law, already one of the most restrictive in the world. Members of the LGBT+ community and people from all walks of life, including miners and farmers on tractors, joined women in marches up and down the country. Olga Tokarczuk summed up the sentiment in a tweet:

“Let us not deceive ourselves—this system will cynically exploit every moment of crisis, war, and epidemic, to return women to the kitchen, the church, and the cradle. Women’s rights are not given once and for all. We have to safeguard them, like every other achievement broadening the range of civil rights and human dignity. As of today, all of us are women warriors.”

Many other renowned writers—women including Wioletta Grzegorzewska, Agnieszka Taborska, and Anna Janko, as well as men, such as Zygmunt Miłoszewski, Mariusz Szczygieł, Jacek Dehnel, Szczepan Twardoch, Ziemowit Szczerek, and Aleksander Kaczorowski, have expressed their support for the women’s strike and their right to voice their anger in very strong language. Marta Frej, whose in-your-face feminist posters and memes have been empowering women and LGBT+ people for years now (here is her cover for a recent issue of the weekly Polityka) was joined by a number of renowned illustrators (see a selection featured in Calvert Journal).

Moving on to more strictly literary news, the online journal Notes from Poland has come up with a minor sensation: a translation of “Undula,” a newly discovered story, almost certainly written by Bruno Schulz, more than a decade before the writer’s first known works appeared. The story “follows the masochistic sexual imaginings of a sick man confined to his bed in a room inhabited by whispering shadows and cockroaches” and was published in an obscure Polish oil industry newspaper in 1922 under the name Marceli Weron. The Ukrainian researcher Lesya Khomych, who found it in an archive in Lviv, immediately suspected that this was a pseudonym and that the story could only have been written by Bruno Schulz. The story has now been translated and is introduced by Stanley Bill of the University of Cambridge and editor-at-large at Notes from Poland. READ MORE…

Tectonic Shifts: An Interview with Montenegrin EUPL Winner Stefan Bošković and Translator Will Firth

. . . the Balkans are cultivated as a space of trauma, as an eternal misfortune in which everything is further emphasized.

In both literature and art, the Balkan countries are still tackling themes and topics issuing from the 1990s Yugoslav Wars. Although coming to terms with a nation’s disintegration is an ongoing process, one assumes that a thirty-year distance would have produced a more substantial corpus of literature, capable of integrating remaining traumas into burning contemporary matters—corrupt Balkan political elites, organized crime, simmering nationalism, and the slow but steady disappearance of the middle class as a carrier of democratic change.

Though there are few works of note that have managed this coherence, a novel that has succeeded is this year’s Montenegrin winner of the European Union Prize for Literature, Ministar (Minister), written by the dramatist, scriptwriter, and prosaist Stefan Bošković. The story follows nine days in the life of Valentin Kovačević, a fictional Montenegrin minister of culture, immediately after he accidentally kills an artist while participating in a performance. Initially oblivious of the heavy burden of guilt resulting from the act, Valentin goes on with his life entangled in a web of shady political deals, strained familial and conjugal ties, and dead end shortcuts he takes to get himself out of a situation of impending doom. The novel has not yet been translated entirely into English, though Will Firth—a literary translator from BCMS (Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian), Russian, and Macedonian into English—has translated a fifty-page excerpt, which was published by the EUPL team along with translated excerpts from the other prize-winning books.

In this interview carried out with both Stefan Bošković and Will Firth, we discuss primarily the challenges of engaged writing that aims at the essence of contemporary sociopolitical developments in the Balkans, and the place their translations take—or dont take—within the dominant narratives of todays world literatures. The interviews were conducted separately, and have been edited to be presented here as one.

Jovanka Kalaba, Editor-at-Large for Serbia

Jovanka Kalaba (JK): Stefan, aside from your primary job as a screenwriter, you also write prose. How do your two forms of expression inform and influence one another? 

Stefan Bošković (SB): Writers often distinguish between the work they produce through different media—in my case, prose and screenwriting. I have been writing scripts for a long time, and it is inevitable that they have influenced my prose, as is the case with the prose that unknowingly becomes influenced by journalism. All influences are of secondary importance to me, because I view different expressions as a set of tributaries to a huge, confused mouth that flows into the same matter. And all the time its a game of digging, merging, bringing in connections. Literary talent—the ability to defamiliarize language—is crucial for writing prose, whereas a gift for storytelling is necessary for writing a good script. The organization of the novel is a very important segment, because that way, the sentences contribute to the fundamental accuracy of what is being told.

JK: Will, in terms of translation, the Serbo-Croatian language as well as Macedonian turned out to be your main interest, although you have a degree in German, Russian, and Serbo-Croatian. What drew you to the Balkan cultures and literatures?

Will Firth (WF): What fascinates me about South Slavic languages and literatures is their richness and diversity, and their home in a complex region with a twentieth-century history of Partisan struggle, multiculturalism, and a remarkable experiment in Bloc-free socialism. That’s the “positive” side; the West’s lack of real interest in these languages and literatures today fills me with a spite and a mission, which is perhaps the “negative” side of my motivational coin.

JK: The epigraph at the beginning of Ministar are Giorgio Agamben’s words: the modern is the one who looks at his time, and being modern is, first of all, a question of courage. Yet it seems that inclusion of certain issues originating from the civil war of ex-Yugoslavia—poverty, emmigration—are still always expected from artists in the region.

SB: I don’t know if the West is asking from us to present ourselves through stereotypes, or if we are so immersed in anachronistic and worn-out literature in this area that we have completely forgotten to keep track of where the world is going. It seems to me that one conditioned the other, and the problem does not only stem from the writers and the messages they think they should get across. The majority of this region’s literary scene (including editors and critics) has contributed to the preservation of uninteresting and calculated literature; there are certainly great novels in this rather conservative canon, but this dominant ideology has produced a line of soldiers who are happy to occupy a place in the mainstream, and the prestige of being translated into foreign languages has cemented their position.  READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest news from Taiwan, Serbia, and El Salvador!

This week our writers bring you the latest literary news from Taiwan, Serbia, and El Salvador! In Taiwan, renowned writer Huang Chun-ming has brought out his latest novel and Chinese novelist Yan Lianke’s new essay compilation, Hers, has just been published. In Serbia, the annual Shakespeare festival, Šekspir Festival, has begun, and the Reading Balkans 2021 programme has launched in collaboration between Goga Publishing House, PEN Centre, and others. In El Salvador, a new blog run by Nelson Alonson, Una Verdad Sin Alfabeto, and publishing house Editorial Kalina have run online debates about Salvadoran writing and diaspora literature. Read on to find out more! 

Vivian Szu-Chin Chih, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Taiwan

The autumn equinox has brought drizzling rain to cool Taiwan down from the previous summer heat. During the final quarter of 2020, while hoping our global readers will all stay safe and healthy, several literary and movie events are taking place in Taiwan. With online screenings and live discussions being streamed, it might be the best time for an easy access to Taiwan’s recent cultural events, no mater where you are.

The renowned Taiwanese novelist and playwright, Huang Chun-ming’s (黃春明, 1935-) latest novel (Hsiu-Chin, the Girl who Always Smiles,《秀琴,這個愛笑的女孩》) was just published by Unitas Magazine’s publishing house. The story centers around a village girl from northeastern Taiwan entering the film industry accidentally in the 1960s, when Taiwanese-language films were at their peak. Huang’s novella was featured in our past issue, with the translator Howard Goldblatt’s moving account of his long-term friendship with Huang. At the same time, the Chinese novelist Yan Lianke’s (閻連科, 1958-) essay compilation, Hers (Tamen,《她們》), was recently published by Rye Field Publishing Company in Taiwan, unprecedentedly featuring stories of women the novelist encountered, inside and outside of his own family. Perhaps most unorthodox is the publication from Taiwan Tongzhi (LGBTQ+) Hotline Association of their eight-year project that interviewed seventeen lesbians over fifty-five years old in Taiwan, to be published by Locus Publishing Company in October. This groundbreaking book on the life experiences of “lao-la” (「老拉」) in Taiwan, literally meaning old lesbians, is not only about their personal memories and struggles of being lesbians in the conservative Taiwanese society before the 1990s, but also a literary historical review of Taiwan’s gender equality and LGBTQ+ movements since the 1950s.

READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

This week’s latest news from Palestine, Serbia, and the United States!

This week’s literary news comes from our writers in Palestine, Serbia, and the United States. In Palestine, the winners of the Najati Sidqi Competition have been announced; in Serbia, the annual KROKODIL festival has welcomed an array of authors, with a particular emphasis on regional female poets and prose writers; and in the United States, the University of Notre Dame’s reading series began with a reading by Paul Cunningham and Johannes Göransson, in addition to the launch of a new program focusing on “Literatures of Annihilation, Exile & Resistance.” Read on to find out more! 

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

Out of eighty-nine applications from different parts of Palestine and the diaspora, the three winners of the Najati Sidqi Competition for Short Story by Young Writers (2020) have been announced: “al-Barzakh” (The Isthmus) by Muhammad Atef Ghuneim from Nuseirat Camp in Gaza; “al-Toot al-Faased” (Rotten Berries) by Dunya Yusef Abdullah from Salfit, which is published in Arabic here; and “al-Khalaas ka Dam’a: Seeret Bukaa’ al-Sayyed Meem” (Salvation As a Tear: Crying Biography of Mr M.) by Majd Abu Amer from Gaza. According to the jury (which consisted of three renowned Palestinian writers: Safi Safi, Ziad Khadash, and Amani Junaidi), the prize “comes in recognition of the importance of the role of youth in cultural life and building a national society capable of preserving the history and memory of place and man,” as well as to honor the legacy of Najati Sidqi.

In a new venture between Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line, Tibaq Publishing in Ramallah published Qalaaqel Jameel wa Hiyaam (Jamil and Hiyam’s Turbelences) by Hani Salloum from Nazareth. The play is about a romantic relationship, taking place between the two cities of Nazareth and Haifa, which sheds light on the social transformations that have affected Palestinian Arab communities in Israel. This is the second literary work by Salloum, after his novel al-Khuruuj min Halaqat al-Raaqisseen (Exiting the Dancers’ Circle) was published in 1997.

Five Palestinian authors have been selected for the new Arabic Stories by emerging writers, published bilingually in Arabic and English by adda. adda is an online magazine of new international writing, which supports and promotes stories and literary talent from the Middle East. Arabic Stories is part of the project Short Stories by KfW Stiftung in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut and Commonwealth Writers. The five selected stories are: Mai Kaloti’s “The Madman of Almond Hill,” translated by Basma Ghalayini; Majdal Hindi’s “Fly,” translated by Katharine Halls; Eman Sharabati’s “A Story from the South” —her first published story—also translated by Halls; Huda Armosh’s “Walking on Quicksand,” translated by Nariman Youssef; and Mira Sidawi’s “The Story of Nasr,” translated by Basma Ghalayini. READ MORE…