Language: Swahili

Translation Tuesday: The Garden of Tomatoes by Esther Karin Mngodo

Tuntufye had already made clear that he didn’t believe in such nonsense. Blood drinkers didn’t exist.

This Translation Tuesday, we deliver gripping fiction from Tanzania, a short story of domestic deception that spawns an unspeakable being, a sinister spirit. Who is to say who is at fault? Hear from translator Jay Boss Rubin on bringing Esther Karin Mngodo’s The Garden of Tomatoes into the English:

“In this story, I was fascinated with how it contains genre elements but is not really genre fiction. There’s a genre element, for sure, but we stayed away from terms such as “vampire” and “zombie” because of all the associations those carry. There’s also an element of free indirect discourse, one that I was aware of in the Swahili, but that came out more in the translation, toward the end of the revision process. Esther was also especially helpful in drawing my attention to moments in the story where the main character’s own words, or her words and actions, might contradict each other. These moments of ambivalence, or rich ambiguity, really, are central to my understanding of the characters in “Atuganile,” the forces that push and pull on them.“

Tuntufye Mwasakyeni raised his cup of milky tea to his mouth and sipped. The house was quiet, different than most Saturdays. Two days had passed since his wife, Atuganile, had left to go see her mother’s ailing brother over in Chunya District—around two hours away by automobile.

Tuntufye placed the index finger of his left hand on the table in front of him so it mimicked the second hand of the clock on the wall. Departing for her trip, Atuganile had promised that she’d be back by Saturday at nine. It was now eight minutes to 9am. He wasn’t worried that something bad had happened to her—not in the least. He was well aware that if there were some shrewd, intelligent women there in Isyesye, Atuganile was one of them. She was a known quantity, especially in Uyole, where she vended fruits and vegetables. But it wasn’t like her to be late.

When it reached nine on the dot, Tuntufye stood up and went outside through the door in the living room. He leaned against one of the white, exterior pillars, keeping his eyes peeled for Atuganile. When he saw her, he grinned. She was striding forward like a champion athlete, her kanga coming undone and starting to fall down as she ran. Colonnades of trees to Atuganile’s left and to her right framed the scene of her arrival. Their branches swayed in the wind like giant claws—as if to swipe at her and sneer, today, Atu, you’re going to get it.

Once she’d drawn close, Atuganile set down the load she’d been carrying on her head and began explaining the reasons for her delay. “Forgive me, my husband. Forgive me, Baba,” she gasped. “The bus broke down. I had to hop aboard a different one. You know how difficult transportation can be here in Mbeya. Forgive me, Baba, for being late.”

Her husband said nothing. He jutted his lip forward, returned to the kitchen, sat down at the table and poured himself another cup of tea. Then he took his Bible and began reading. Atuganile sat with him and started sorting kisamvu, separating the good greens from the bad. In the middle of sorting, she picked up a sheet of Isyesye Oye!, the newspaper that had been used to wrap the cassava leaves. Alert: Blood Drinker on the Loose in Isyeye, the headline warned. Atuganile read on:

An individual in Isyesye is being sought by police for abducting children younger than twelve. According to the information available, five children have now disappeared as a result of coming into contact with the suspect, who is said to be a drinker of blood. Parents are advised to keep close watch over their children, and see that they don’t roam about after dark.

The newspaper described the child of one woman, known as Mama Samweli, who’d been missing for five days. When Mama Samweli went for a consultation with a local healer, the mganga advised her not to bother searching—her child had already had the life sucked out of them. When news of the blood drinker reached the Regional Police Chief, he stated that the government does not officially recognize witchcraft, so he was unable to comment on the rumor any further. But he assured the citizenry that efforts were ongoing to locate Samweli, along with the other four children who had gone missing over the past five months.

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I Carved A Girl Of Stone: Nuzhat Abbas on Feminist, Decolonial, and Anti-Imperialist Translation

What drives my work at trace is perhaps a desire to destabilize the spaces I was made to enter and reside in . . .

Since its inception in 2019, Tkaronto/Toronto-based trace press has published “literature that illuminates, in complex, beautiful and thought-provoking ways, contemporary and historical experiences of conflict, war, displacement, exile, migration, the environment, labour, and resistance.” Re-emerging after a brief hiatus during the pandemic, their first anthology River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation (2023) assembles emergent and experienced feminist translators, scholars, and writers from Palestine to Uganda, from Indonesia to Kashmir—spotlighted by, among others, Khairani Barokka, Suneela Mubayi, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, and Yasmine Haj. In the foreword, the decolonialist historian Françoise Vergès describes the vestiges of imperialism, the dominance of the languages of Euro-American colonisers, the myths of globalisation, and the “hegemony of national languages” inflicted by neocolonial nation-states. Having read and reviewed the anthology myself, I think of it as a complex re-mapping of literary hemispheres “twisting through the atrocities of literary empires and post-colonial capitalism.”

In this interview, I asked trace press’ founding editor Nuzhat Abbas, a Zanzibar-born writer and critic of postcolonial mobilities and gender studies, about the literary publishing house she has founded; how independent presses can stay true to a transnational, anti-imperialist and decolonial feminist ethos; and writings from her archipelagic birthplace in East Africa and the Indian Ocean.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Having founded trace press, in what ways do the values of decoloniality, anti-imperialism, feminism, and anti-racism occur as concrete practices in translation and in publishing? And what is the opposite of that?

Nuzhat Abbas (NA): I prefer to pose such questions to my writers and translators—to inquire how they, in their practice, think through such challenges, especially in relation to localized tensions and displacements, both historic and geographical. For example, trace is located on a forcibly white-settled and renamed space where Indigenous and Black resistance and creativity continues to resist and respond to histories of profound violence and displacement. As racialized im/migrant-settlers working with non-European literatures and languages, how do we ‘translate’ and write toward Black and Indigenous readers in the Americas, and toward each other, as people from the global majority, scattered around the globe, displacing each of our certainties? This is a question for me, a beginning question, one that can only be answered in practice—and differently—by each of the books we make and the conversations that emerge. Building space for these kinds of ‘after-publication’ conversations is very much part of what I want to create with trace

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With Bones Against Heartbreak: Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek on the Ugandan Acholi Poetry of Exile

I have been thinking about . . . how poetry might offer a space to imagine a different world, to challenge power, insist on life . . .

“Dear Dad” is how Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek opens a sequence of letter-vignettes to her late father, the revered northern Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek, who wrote in Acholi and English. The intimate piece, entitled “The Meaning of a Song,” was included in River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation, an anthology of decolonial and feminist politics published by Tkaronto-based trace press. In it, Okot Bitek meditates on her Africanness as someone born to Ugandan exiles in Kenya after the Uganda-Tanzania War of 1978-79: “What is it to claim an African identity? What is it to be African or not? How is it that we’re not reading both Ocol and Lawino as African and imagining that there are far more representations of what it means to be African?” Such poignant examination is also to be found in her award-winning poetry collection 100 Days (University of Alberta Press, 2016), in which she muses on the terrains of history, wanting to know “what is it to come from a land / that swallows its own people”. 

In this interview, I conversed with Okot Bitek on the expanse of Ugandan poetry of exile from Acholiland, African literature as world literature in itself (even and most specially) without translation, and the politico-literary legacy of her father, Okot p’Bitek. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): I want to start this conversation by quoting from your essay “The Meaning of a Song”, anthologized in River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation (2023): 

We were people until we were Acholi, also Acoli, and then we were defined by foreign terminology by the Arabs and written in an even more foreign alphabet by the European colonialists and missionaries.

How is naming vital and significant in the collective sense, specially among the colonised?

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest in letters from Hong Kong, Palestine, and Kenya.

This week, our editors are reporting on the intersection between literature and social movements. In Hong Kong, writers reflect on the June 4 protests at Tiananmen Square, in light of  the continual tensions between China and the island. In Palestine, a new podcast features writers orienting their own work within the \ body of Palestinian literature. And in Kenya, the country mourns the loss of revolutionary playwright Micere Mugo. 

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

Since the National Security Law in Hong Kong came into effect in June 2020, the annual candlelight vigil for commemorating the June Fourth Tiananmen Square protests have not been organized for four years; the event’s host, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, was also dissolved in September 2021. Additionally, the event’s traditional venue, the Victoria Park in Causeway Bay, was under renovation and not available to be booked this year.

Although public commemoration was forbidden, remembrance could still be possible through writing; Cha: An Asian Literary Journal called for short submissions of reflections written about June 4, 2023—which could be directly, indirectly, or even not related to the event. The project, “Just Another Day”, also welcomed written works accompanied with photos or artwork. Fifty-four submissions were published on Cha’s blog, presenting a wide range of reflections from local and overseas writers. Translator Lucas Klein contemplates on the protest culture in Hong Kong and what he witnessed outside of the Victoria Park in his post, while Hong Kong poet Jennifer Wong contributed a prose poem on the importance of memory. Asymptote’s assistant editor of fiction Michelle Suen interweaves childhood nostalgia and postcolonial politics in her reflection, and I also tell a brief story of my personal experience of June Fourth over the years. Varied as they are, the texts testify to the unstoppable impact of the historical event, in both people’s mind and reality.

Meanwhile, as issue 72 of local bilingual poetry magazine, Voice & Verse, was just published, the magazine is organizing a reading session in collaboration with Cha, a crossover that echoes the issue’s English section theme: “Crossings”. The reading session will take place on July 12, hosted by Tammy Ho and Matthew Cheng. Local and international contributors to both journals have been invited to read their works. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest from Kenya, Canada, and Oman!

In this week of literary news, our editors on the ground are bringing stories of triumph, mourning, and commemoration. In Kenya and Ghana, readers mourn the loss of pioneering feminist author Ama Ata Aidoo; in Canada, a Quebec initiative supports readers in finding more books by Indigenous writers; and in Oman, a lauded author brings home the prestigious International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Read on to find out more!

Wambua Muindi, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Kenya

The end of May seemed to position itself as a direct communication to geo-literary production history; on May 27, a bilingual anthology of East African short stories, The Heart is A Bastard, launched at the Goethe Institut Library, Nairobi. Edited by Elias Mutani and Zukiswa Wanner, the collection is a result from the Kenyan writing workshop under the auspices of the Univerity of East Anglia International Chair in Creative Writing. The inaugural chair for Africa, Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangaremba, expressed her delight over the launch, which includes stories in English and Swahili translations. Some of the emerging writers featured in the anthology include Gladwell Pamba—from whose story the anthology’s title is taken, Fatma Shafii, Nyasili Atwetwe of Writers Space Africa Kenya, Charlie Muhumuza, Noella Moshi, and Sia Chami. The anthology not only holds space for these writers but also represents the creative breadth of the region, while simultaneously embedding a language politics given its bilingual character.

However, this joy was dislodged by the unfortunate news of a writer’s death. On May 31, Ama Ata Aidoo, the Ghanaian author of Our Sister Killjoy (1977), a pioneering feminist novel, died at the age of 81. As such, Africa is mourning; Ghana is mourning and Kenya, too, is mourning the novelist, playwright, short story writer, and committed radical feminist, who wrote to assert the agency of African women within literary history. As reverential eulogies have been paraded across the world, the Kenyan literary community joined in the outpouring of grief in a country where her influence not only transcends her writing, but is also compounded by a teaching stint she had at the then named Kenyatta College, now Kenyatta University, as well as the literary contributions of her Kenyan-born daughter, Kinna Likimani. Where Austin Bukenya, a leading East African scholar of English and literature, for instance, dubbed her “Queen of African literature”, Mukoma wa Ngugi, the author of Nairobi Heat and son to Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, sees her as a “pillar” without which “the African literary tradition wobbles”. While Joyce Nyairo, an academic and a cultural analyst, references the short story “Something To Talk About On The Way To The Funeral” as praise of her storytelling genius, Yvonne Owuor lamented, in proper proverbial fashion: “A great, and giant tree that sheltered many beings has fallen”. Moreover, her writings, which among others, include The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965), No Sweetness Here (1969), Anowa (1970), and Changes (1991) cut across the genres to show the depth of her imaginative oeuvre and demonstrate the commitment—in different but related ways—to the African woman’s cause, through literature and in society. Rest in Power Mama. READ MORE…

The 2023 PEN/Heim Grantees Talk Translation: Part I

Doesn’t the magic of writing happen in those rare bursts where you manage to coax an extra voice out of your mind?

The PEN/Heim Translation Grant is one of the most reliable indicators as to which texts will come to be considered vital in the English-language literary landscape, with past grantees including George Szirtes translating the Hungarian giant of postmodernism, László Krasznahorkai; Daniel Borzutsky translating the Chilean revolutionary poet, Raúl Zurita, Jennifer Croft translating Polish Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk, and Anton Hur translating the celebrated South Korean genre-bender, Bora Chung. The aim of the grant is to support translators during their vital and difficult work of working on a text, and as a result, the texts that come to English-language readers by way of this gift are often exemplary examples of not only the writers’ intelligence, imagination, and effort—but equally importantly, the translator’s.  

In this three-part series, Asymptote has asked the 2023 PEN/Heim grantees to talk about their work in progress; their responses, brimming with excitement, conviction, and connection, are a testament to how much translators put themselves into their labor. Through the varied approaches and languages, they share the important commonality of surety: that the work they’ve been entrusted with has an immense potential to illuminate our reality, enlarge our world, and enrich our experiences of literature.

Here, Mark Tardi ruminates on the importance of discipline; Richard Prins talks about following instinct; and Caroline Froh opens up about the physical effect that reading has on us.  

Mark Tardi on Olga Hund:

In The Poethical Wager, Joan Retallack argues intelligently for the creative embrace of life’s unexpected swerves, the “unsettling transfiguration of once-familiar terrain [which tends] to produce disorientation, even estrangement, by radically altering geometries of attention.” Olga Hund’s remarkable and award-winning debut novel, Psy ras drobnych (Dogs of Smaller Breeds) was such a swerve for me, thanks to James Guerin and Klaudia Cierluk, editors at Berlin Quarterly, who commissioned me to translate an excerpt. Hund’s writing pulled me in immediately, and I felt sure that English-speaking readers would connect with the book much like I had.

Dogs of Smaller Breeds takes place in an in-patient women’s psychiatric ward in southern Poland and via the narrator—who may or may not be the pseudonymous Hund herself—we’re offered short vignettes, unabashed and unapologetic glimpses into the lives of women who would be otherwise largely invisible and neglected. In one poignant and heartbreaking segment, Hund’s narrator observes that:

If it weren’t for papers: documents from orphanages, correctional institutions and prisons, hospital records, blue cards and prescriptions; and if it weren’t for their various small objects: a spoon from the canteen, a prayer book, a photo of two Yorkies torn out of a newspaper, a cassette with the inscription “Mother” and the chaplet of Our Lady recorded on it, a tote bag washed and folded evenly—no one would remember that these women, who are here today, were alive at all.

Hund doesn’t attempt to construct a comprehensive picture, which would reveal some neatly packaged truth. This is one of the most compelling aspects of the book—the devastating intimacy and scaled back narratives propel the story forward, à la Fleur Jaeggy or Jenny Offill. For instance, in one scene, the narrator recounts how the women are not so crazy as to have forgotten the abuses they’ve suffered, most often from family and partners. Hund uses a neologism, “męże-węże,” which literally would be something like “husband-snakes,” but the term rhymes perfectly while simultaneously magnifying menace. I rendered this as “spouse-louse,” which loses some of the historical connotations of snakes and viperous dangers, but the parasitical qualities of lice—surviving on the blood of another—echoes other aspects in the novel. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: April 2023

New translations from the French, Swahili, and Polish!

This month, we are taking a look at works from world literature that unveil the universal intersections at the centre of society: an empathetic interrogation into the cross-section of contemporary life in a superstore by the inimitable Annie Ernaux; a brilliantly curated selection of humanist stories from the Swahili; and a subtle, delicate look into the nature of happiness as written into dialogue by lauded Polish author, Marek Bieńczyk. Read on to find out more!

look at lights

Look at the Lights, My Love by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer, Yale University Press, 2023

Review by Laurel Taylor, Assistant Editor

Even at its best, ethnography is an ethically tricky subject; at its worst, it can dehumanize, tokenize, and Other the people who fall under its burning eye—an eye so often situated in wealth, power, whiteness, and patriarchy. Annie Ernaux is all too aware of the treacherous ethnographic ground she walks in Regarde les lumières mon amour, originally published in 2014 and translated now into an incisive and unadorned English by Alison L. Strayer as Look at the Lights, My Love. In this brief but gripping nonfiction entry, Ernaux records her various visits to the French big-box store Auchan from November 2012 to October 2013, a period which happens to coincide with the 2013 Rana Plaza building collapse in the Savar sub-district of Dhaka, Bangladesh. 

For all its drab ubiquity and late-capitalist imbrication, Ernaux treats the site of the superstore not only as a place perpetuating a unilateral and devastating economics (in the broadest sense of the word), but also one which engages humanity in complex ways—affectively, socially, temporally.

. . . when you think of it, there is no other space, public or private, where so many individuals so different in terms of age, income, education, geographic and ethnic background, and personal style, move about and rub shoulders with each other. No enclosed space where people are brought into greater contact with their fellow humans, dozens of times a year, and where each has a chance to catch a glimpse of others’ ways of living and being. Politicians, journalists, “experts,” all those who have never set foot in a superstore, do not know the social reality of France today.

Indeed, it feels almost taboo in the often inward-facing world of Parisian literature to engage with something so blasé as a big-box store. At one point, Ernaux even says in an aside, “I don’t see Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, or Françoise Sagan doing their shopping in a superstore; Georges Perec yes, but I may be wrong about that.” For me, this is what makes Ernaux’s earnest attempt at engagement all the more relevant (and close-to-home, as I grew up in a squarely middle-class family that did most of its shopping at a big-box store). In addition to the unconventional topic, this particular book also feels difficult to classify. Neither journalism nor something so structured as a dialectic, Look at the Lights, My Love is something more akin to mindfulness. It is an attempt to deliberately undo the asynchronous pace of the superstore—a place where flash sales, labyrinthine design, ever-changing displays, and the press of daily chores all collude to entrap and entangle us in the past, present, and future all at once. Ernaux’s thick descriptions, in trying to circumvent these snares, work to better provide us with “[a] free statement of observations and sensations, aimed at capturing something of the life of the place.”

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest from China, Sweden, and Kenya!

This week, our editors-at-large report on recent science fiction adaptations in China, the Sámi National Day in Sweden, and the passing of literary icons in both East Africa and China. From a revived book festival to the runner-up of the Safal-Cornell Kiswahili Prize, read on to learn more!

Jiaoyang Li, Editor-at-Large, reporting for China

Liu Cixin’s Hugo Award-winning novel Three Bodies was recently adapted into a TV series and streamed more than 3 million times in a week on Tencent Video, making it the most popular TV series in China. In addition to the live action, Bilibili, the largest animation website in China, also launched an animated series of the novel.

Although we must recognize it as a milestone in Chinese science fiction literature for IP adaptation, there is one thing to question: Why is it always Three Bodies? There are plenty of other wonderful sci-fi collections written by female Chinese writers needing our attention. For example, New York-based bilingual sci-fi writer Mu Ming’s fiction collection 宛转环 (The Serpentine Band), an excerpt of which was published by Clarkesworld Magazine in 2021, will be fully released in Chinese by One Way Books in 2023. 

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary news from Armenia, the Philippines, and Kenya!

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

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

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

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

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

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest in literary developments from Palestine, Sweden, and Kenya!

This week, our editors report on the rebirth of theatre in Palestine, the best Swedish crime novels, and the Kenyan Readathon Challenge from September. From the Palestine National Theatre Festival to the Nairobi International Book Fair, read on to learn more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine

In Palestine, there is a generation of people who don’t really know what a theatre is! This might sound like an exaggeration, but sadly, that’s reality—or at least, that’s how it looks on the surface. 

When the first Intifada broke out in late 1987, all theatres and cinemas were closed and most did not reopen or regain momentum until the late nineties. With simple arithmetic, we can see that the chances are low today of finding high-caliber theatre actors or actresses, let alone directors, aged in their thirties and forties. 

With that in mind, I must admit I wasn’t too enthusiastic to attend the third Palestine National Theatre Festival running in the last week of October. Little did I know! All that was needed to get fully hooked was one play. 

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Hip-hop Songs from the Swahili

Not everyone in jail committed a crime / Not everyone in jail committed a crime

In this very special edition of Translation Tuesdays, we are thrilled to bring to our readers three translations of hip-hop song lyrics translated from the Swahili by Richard Prins. From LWP Majitu to Juma Nature to Inspector Haroun, these three songs give us a peek into the music made by a generation of hip-hop artists working out of contemporary Tanzania. These lyrics, thoughtfully arranged in a visually refreshing use of space, find their own musicality and rhythm on the page in Prins’ translation as they tackle issues such as power and punishment through allegory and allusion. Be sure to check out the music videos in the links under each song as you feel your way into the counterpoints of page and performance. 

Story! Story!

“Hadithi Hadithi” by Sloter ft. Juma Nature

Back in the old days,
in the village of Kwale
in the land of the Pare,
there came a lion,
a lion,
stomping an elephant
dead.

Come, deceit
Make it sweet

So listen: When the wild dogs saw that the lion was a killer,
        They pulled a gun on the lion.
        They pulled a gun on the lion.
        The elephant rose from the dead.

Story! Story!
Come deceit
Make it sweet

Better hear it young
Or you’ll be lost

And now that the elephant was resurrected,
Giraffe
        Lion
                Gazelle
                        Hyena
                                Monkey
                                        Cheetah
                gathered around Lake Tanganyika
                        to witness the matinee
                                spectacle:
An elephant, trampled
        to death.

And once the elephant was resurrected:
        He pulled a gun on the lion.
        The lion pulled a gun back.
        Beat the elephant down.
        Lion stomped him afresh
        and knocked his lights out.

The elephant fell,
extinguished.

Story! Story!
Come deceit
Make it sweet

Better hear it young
Or you’ll be lost READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Comfort Is Expensive” by Mlenge Mgendi

Standing up alone in a nearly empty daladala, every passenger could see me. Those majambozi rascals had turned me into a public one-man show!

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the Swahili-language writer Mlenge Mgendi. “Comfort Is Expensive” comes from Mlenge Mgendi’s self-published collection Mama wa Jey: Hadithi za Uswahilini (Jey’s Mother: Stories of Swahili Life). Nathalie S. Koening’s nuanced translation captures the different registers of speech in this scatological tale, which weaves indispensable Swahili terms with well-timed slang that, in some ways, feels universal. The speaker captures the anxiety of youth squeezed under community expectations and bureaucratic pressure. Sober, infused with wry humor, and laced with charming off-beat metaphor, “Comfort is Expensive” shows a slice of life that points to the atmosphere of a place and the dispositions that form under specific pressures there.

That day, I was coming from school. My stomach, jeopardizing the love, unity and cooperation that had reigned in my bowels for centuries, was causing me real trouble. I had no choice but to hurl myself into a daladala bus and get home in a hurry. Don’t you know? Since our schools have no money for healing all that ails us, students get a “discount” when they ride the bus?

When I got to the stop, a daladala was waiting. It was totally empty, having been outsmarted by another bus that, zipping past like a toothbrush, had plucked up all the fares. As I was climbing in, the konda boy grabbed hold of me. “Hey, you! Stoo-denty! You taking up an actual seat coz you’re gonna pay full price?” The bus pulled away brush-empty, but even then, he wouldn’t let me sit. READ MORE…

Fall 2014: Interlinked Dimensions of Spacetime

The Fall 2014 issue of Asymptote demonstrates an exceptional thematic cohesion across genre, language, location, and time.

Around this time, equipped with a new legal advisor (the extremely efficient Win Bassett), a small group is formally set up within our team to look into the feasibility of Asymptote becoming a non-profit organization in the USA. This makes most sense for tax-deductibility, since our largest readership, outnumbering the second largest demographic by a ratio of three to one, is American. It would take one and a half years for me to reach a definitive decision, but I decide in the end not to take the plunge. To become a non-profit, a board would first have to be formed, and all major decisions about the journal’s direction would have to be run by this board (which would mostly comprise Americans). Had I worked so hard for the magazine’s survival only to surrender its reins to others? Aren’t there already more than enough American mediators of otherness? I’m also wary because of what one board member of another online magazine has told me in confidence: being bound to a board has held that magazine back from reaching its full potential. We do, however, thanks to Win Bassett, Erin Stephens-North, Lynette Lee, and Eric M. B. Becker, succeed in acquiring fiscal sponsorship with Fractured Atlas on August 26, 2014. This is a breakthrough: For the first time, we are tax-deductible for American donors, removing one more barrier standing in the way of support. Here to introduce the Fall 2014 issue is Assistant Editor Erik Noonan.

Published in sync with the release of the inaugural episode of the Asymptote Podcast—whose producer Emma Jacobs suggests that the mythical stories we tell ourselves are really signs of “our inability to map our own minds”—the Fall 2014 issue of Asymptote sets the reader afloat through a tesseract located among the interlinked dimensions of spacetime.

In Shi Tiesheng’s “The Year of Being Twenty-One,” that mapless place masquerades in public life as a monotheistic deity: “I did see God, one day—but he went by a different name, and that name was the mind,” Shi writes. “In the hazy patches of science; in the chaos of destiny; you can only turn to your own mind. Everything we believe in—no matter what that might be—comes from the promptings and the guidance of our minds.”    READ MORE…

From Ahtna to Zapotec: Celebrating Four Years of Literature from Rare and Underrepresented Languages

Assistant Editor Daniel Goulden on rare and underrepresented languages in translation and Asymptote

All too often, ‘World Literature’ gets reduced to European literature.

I jumped at the chance to help Asymptote buck that trend. When I came on board as assistant editor, Yew Leong (our editor-in-chief) asked me to research languages that Asymptote hadn’t yet featured in translation. This was—predictably—a challenging assignment.

For authors in the West, getting a novel published in translation is already an exceedingly difficult task. For authors elsewhere, the hurdles are exponentially greater. Regional instability and economic underdevelopment can stand in the way. Finding a talented translator—someone who not only speaks your language but also has the skill to make it come alive in English—or being found by one can be nearly impossible. Without passionate, skilled translators, many writers abroad who want their voices to be heard in other countries ultimately resort to writing in English (if they can) and thus set aside both their native language and its unique literary vocabulary. I found myself tracking down leads for hours, emailing contacts from around the world in search of an author or translator with work to submit. READ MORE…