Riveting Reviews: An interview with the European Literature Network

April 9, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Julia Sherwood

Our goal is to support others working in this area: publishers, translators, the trade, and bring them all together.

Over the past ten years the European Literature Network—a tiny organization, run on a shoestring budget—has firmly established itself as the foremost champion of European writing in the UK. Asymptote’s editor-at-large for Slovakia, Julia Sherwood, caught up with the network’s founder and driving force, Rosie Goldsmith, and editor, West Camel.

Julia Sherwood (JS): Rosie, your name has become synonymous with European literature in the UK. You’ve chaired numerous European Literature Nights and, more recently, the jury of the EBRD Literature Prize. I can barely imagine the UK without your organization but some Asymptote readers, who are based elsewhere, may not be so familiar with what you do. Can you tell us what got you to start European Literature Network and what it does?

Rosie Goldsmith (RG): It all started with the European Literature Night (ELN) at the British Library in 2009, hence the rather long name, European Literature Network. I was asked to chair that and be one of the judges. We had to select from about 50-70 texts. Initially it was just me—I’d just left my job with the BBC, I had time on my hands, and when ELN was over, I felt that the momentum should be kept. After a trip to Brussels for the European Union Literature Prize with some twenty editors and publishers, I suggested that we keep this going. So many great books are being published but few people know about them, so I decided to do something I care passionately about and help everyone in the trade connect and get these books to the public. I organized the first meeting at the Goethe-Institut London and later we started meeting at Europe House, which was run by the European Commission but has sadly ceased to operate after Brexit. READ MORE…

Physical Politics: On Alberto Barrera Tyszka’s The Last Days of El Comandante

April 8, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Paul Worley

One is left wondering about the inherent value of innocence in a world where the smallest act can have grave, lifelong consequences.

The Last Days of El Comandante by Alberto Barrera Tyszka, translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey and Jessie Mendez Sayer, University of Texas Press, 2020

Can a single person hold a country together? Are the mundane pleasantries we all agree to participate in the only things that keep society from devolving into complete chaos? How much control do we really have over even the smallest details of our lives? Written by Hugo Chávez’s biographer Alberto Barrera Tyszka, The Last Days of El Comandante takes the reader back to the final few months of the Venezuelan strongman’s life, a time when Venezuela “was always on the point of exploding but it never did. Or worse: it was exploding in slow motion, little by little, without anyone actually realizing.” These reflections by one of the novel’s main protagonists, Miguel Sanabria (retired doctor turned chair of his apartment building’s residents’ association), introduce the reader to the overwhelming uncertainty that began to engulf the country with Chávez’s mysterious 2011 operation in Havana, Cuba. It merits stating that between ongoing food shortages, contested presidential elections, and accusations of U.S. interference in Venezuelan politics, the instability permeating the novel has an all-too-real corollary in the Venezuela of reality.

With Chávez’s impending demise as a backdrop, the novel thrusts us into the unraveling lives of a number of interconnected characters, despite its relatively short two hundred and forty-eight pages. The variant cast includes: Sanabria and his wife Beatriz, who don’t agree on politics, and his nephew, Vladimir, with whom he is very close; Tatiana, a freelance designer, and her common-law husband Fredy, who receive word that the woman who owns their apartment not only plans on returning to Caracas from Miami, but that she needs them to move out at a time when affordable, secure housing in the city is at a premium well beyond their means; María, a young student, spars with her justifiably fearful single mother, who pulls her out of school and confines her to the apartment because of ongoing violence in the streets; and lastly, U.S. journalist Madeleine Butler who, entranced by Chávez’s larger-than-life persona, flies to Venezuela to write a personal profile on the ailing strongman. Chávez himself, of course, serves as the human event that binds all of these people and their troubles together, even as the country’s decline mirrors the slow deterioration of his own physical state. As things grow worse, the characters spin in and out of each other’s orbit as their daily lives and relationships become harder and harder to maintain. Sanabria gets sucked into the conflict between Tatiana, Fredy, and their landlady, while María, locked in her apartment, begins an online relationship with the couple’s young son over the internet. Every chapter is punctuated with official updates about Chávez’s health, as well as different characters’ responses to those updates, an almost point-counterpoint format that underscores people’s increasing lack of faith in their government and in the world around them. When Miguel Sanabria first informs his wife of Chávez’s illness, for example, she responds by saying, “I wouldn’t be surprised if it was all lies . . . Something the Cubans made up to distract us.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpts from I Am Not That Body by Verónica González Arredondo

April 7, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Allison A. deFreese

here no one/ is watching, not even God

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, poet Verónica González Arredondo bears witness to the plague of gender violence in Mexico in this excerpt from her forthcoming chapbook, I Am Not That Body. Our narrator speaks from a place beyond the remains of her body, recounting with chilling forensic detail the horrors she has witnessed and endured. From this ghostly viewpoint, the speaker refuses the anonymity, objectification, and cultural silence mandated by Mexican officials and the popular media, leading us to the horrifying and heart-breaking final stanzas where our speaker informs her family—and the reader—the she is not a statistic, or a faded memory, or a voiceless body. This excerpt, sublime in its masterful use of religious imagery, metaphor, and concise, almost staccatoed lines, is a necessary and timely read for understanding the recent wave of protests against femicide in Mexico. 

I Am Not That Body

When the night yawns
there are rows of teeth in its mouth
that pierce every bone in the earth

 

 

violence of a white handkerchief covers my mouth
I don’t scream
I don’t breathe
all my memories
will lose their tongue
I will become another,
identical to the voice I never recognized
I scream in order to wake up in another dream
but the dream has gone missing READ MORE…

Au Diable Vauvert: the French publishing house championing translation

April 6, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Alexander Dickow

Au Diable Vauvert ought to be a model for all American publishers of speculative fiction . . .

Au Diable Vauvert is a French publishing house, founded in 2000 in the Camargue in the South of France. Its mission has always been to widen the concept of literary genre and to champion the translation of emerging voices in pop culture. In this essay, Alexander Dickow introduces us to Au Diable Vauvert’s impressive history of translations, as well as discussing his own experience of their writers-in-residency programme. 

There I was, translating the inchoate into sentences amongst the black bulls and white horses of the Petite Camargue. Here I was, watching the mosquitos drink my hands dry, admiring the rows of cypress trees and bent grapevines. And then came coronavirus, and I had to find some way back to Blacksburg, Virginia, through the crowded train stations and the petri-dish airports.

But as Magritte wrote (more or less), ceci n’est pas un journal de confinement: no need to dread a deluge of pandemic-inspired prattle (there’s only a trickle of that here), for I intend instead to pay homage to an intrepid publisher, Au Diable Vauvert. The name comes from the identical expression, which in French means something close to “in the middle of nowhere.” Indeed, this house is located in La Laune, a mere cluster of houses ten minutes beyond the town of Vauvert, between Arles and Nîmes. It’s a strange location for a publishing house: a mostly rural and right-wing community where the publishing house’s founder Marion Mazauric’s left-wing intellectual background stands out. But Marion stands out anywhere: she’s a force of nature, which brought her the moniker “The Red Tigress” as a student in the 1970s. READ MORE…

In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

April 4, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Sarah Moore

Defeating lockdown with what makes us human. The shared word—Ariadne's thread that allowed Theseus to find his way.

As COVID-19 continues to leave devastation in its wake, one is reminded of the importance of bearing witness. As Paul Celan said: “It, the language, remained, not lost, yes, in spite of everything.” In our new Saturday column, In This Together, we at Asymptote are gathering a series of texts from writers around the world—poetry, journals, essays, and all the other tools language gives us to see beyond the surface of things. Today, in our inaugural post, we present diary entries from French theatre director Wajdi Mouawad, translated by assistant blog editor Sarah Moore. Below, Moore gives us an introduction and context to Mouawad’s life and work:

Wajdi Mouawad has been the director of La Colline theatre in Paris since 2016. One of five national theatres in France, La Colline is renowned for its mission to stage contemporary works. Since taking up this role, Mouawad has programmed work by writers such as Édouard Louis, Vincent Macaigne, Elfriede Jelinek, and Angélica Liddell. Last month, I went to see Anne-Marie la Beauté (Anne-Marie the Beauty), a nostalgic, bittersweet monologue written by Yasmina Reza, one of France’s most successful contemporary playwrights. The following week, Friday March 13, I had tickets to see the new play by Peter Handke, Les Innocents, Moi, et l’Inconnue au bord de la route départementale (The Innocents, I, and the Stranger on the side of the departmental road). Handke, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a contentious figure, and I was curious to see what I’d make of this new text. However, hours before the performance was due to start, the French government limited gatherings to fewer than one hundred people in an attempt to curb the spread of coronavirus. And since March 17, the country has been on a strict lockdown. Now, beside each listing for Reza and Handke’s plays reads “—annulé.” Mouawad, like everyone else, is on lockdown, with life on pause. How does a playwright and director respond when his theatre must close its doors to the public? Since the first day of this lockdown, Mouawad has been keeping an audio diary, published on the website of La Colline. Through his diary, Mouawad reflects on this unprecedented situation, on how he can continue to write and engage with communities, and as he says, “how to turn the time of lockdown into a time that’s alive.”

Excerpts from “Lockdown Diary — Day One”

by Wajdi Mouawad

Washing them twice an hour and for thirty seconds each time. I’ve never had such clean hands as during these days of solitude. And yet, despite the cleanliness of my hands, I must be responsible for something. Lady Macbeth, unwittingly. But then, what is this stain which won’t go and which I can’t stop scrubbing? What crime have I committed? What king have I slain? Unless, reflecting my own era, I’m nothing more than one of the thousands of Pontius Pilates (another character obsessed by the cleanliness of their ten fingers,) who is wondering what all this has to do with them. In this case, what is it about washing my hands that today carries the risk of being put to death? Which Christ am I sending to his crucifixion? What is sublime and who dies? What departs? What spirit of the forest is deserting the world? What must I, from now on, mourn? Carefreeness. It’s been two weeks since I can say I’ve been feeling carefree: climate, fire, violence against women, liberalism. If the world I’m giving up through lockdown was that one, why wish this lockdown to end as quickly as possible? To return to what kind of world? Between a world that crushes me, and one that turns me today into a statue, how to prevent a state of shock, without a reply to this question: what to do with this lockdown? I open my eyes this morning after wandering all night long in the bois de Vincennes. What is happening to us? On this first day of lockdown, taking stock of the situation is impossible. It’s like writing yourself in reverse. I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m feeling. I don’t know where the measure of everything is. I don’t know if my lucidity is panic. In the evening, I go to bed and tell myself that without even knowing, I perhaps won’t see summer. So many of us won’t see it. Overwhelming and collective sorrow. I can’t reassure myself with the idea, increasingly fragile, that this only affects the elderly. And even if that were true, how can the death of others be reassuring? And anyway, how could we live in a world without the elderly if all the elderly were to disappear? For an hour, I’m overcome by unease and everything comes back to me. A civil war won’t stop the epidemic and misfortune doesn’t wait its turn. The gods don’t exist. No logic, other than nature and her disruption. Confused thoughts. Feelings in disarray. Multiple sensations. Like so many pieces of a puzzle, of no precise image except a fog, none of which fit perfectly together. Fear, sadness, anxiety, and memories. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

April 3, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andreea Scridon, Barbara Halla, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest news from Albania, France, and Japan!

Many countries around the world are now weeks into their lockdown, but literature continues to thrive and is necessarily concerned with the current crisis. In Albania, literary events are moved online whilst booksellers are expected to continue working; in France, a Romanian writer and opponent of the Romanian communist regime sadly passed away from coronavirus. In Tokyo, pandemic literature sees a revival. Read on to find out more! 

Barbara Halla, Assistant Editor, reporting from Albania

There was a moment when it felt like an early April literary dispatch from Albania would just be a chance to mourn the events that I was excited about but that never came to pass. Albania registered its first cases of COVID-19 on March 8 and went into full lockdown less than 48 hours after. That obviously means that for almost the entire duration of March, literary news and activities have been scarce. There was one event that I was sad to see postponed: a panel and discussion to be held on the lost voices of Albanian women writers, something that was long overdue.

That being said, Albanians with a literary inclination have found other ways to remain engaged with their reading lists or interests. Radical Sense is a reading group that meets weekly in Tirana to read and discuss radical leftist texts at 28 November, a versatile bookstore/safe space for readers and activists, among its many other uses. Although the physicality of the charming attic where these discussions are held is sacred to the group, participants have taken a page from universities and workplaces across the globe and have just held their first online book club meeting through Zoom. Readings and discussion happen in English, so for those who live in Albania and are interested in participating, you can check in with the lovely owners of 28 November here for more details. READ MORE…

Announcing our March Book Club Selection: Three Apples Fell From the Sky by Narine Abgaryan

April 2, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Josefina Massot

Given the array of epic horrors she alludes to, Abgaryan could’ve opted for fast-paced . . . narration; instead, she goes for delicate portraiture.

On the tails of its celebrated success in Russia, Narine Abgaryan’s award-winning novel, Three Apples Fell From the Sky, is now available to English-language readers in Lisa C. Hayden’s expert translation. This tripartite tale takes on the form and mysticism of fable to spin a narrative of a village constantly at the mercy of catastrophe, and, as Josefina Massot points out in this following review, may act as a poignant response to our current age of precarity. With its characteristically sensitive descriptions, Abgaryan’s work explores the human things that evolve in the aftermath of disaster; in times that teeter on the edge of dystopia, it invites us to read our lives into them—a reminder that one of literature’s most enduring gifts is its expansiveness.

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!

Three Apples From the Sky by Narine Abgaryan, translated from the Russian by Lisa C. Hayden, Oneworld Publications, 2020

They say the best way to ward off anxiety is to focus on the here and now. At the moment, though, “here” is a seemingly shrinking apartment and “now” is any time I hit refresh on decidedly growing pandemic statistics. It’s been that way for weeks, so when Abgaryan’s novel hit my inbox (my locked down city’s impermeable to foreign paperbacks), I was desperate for a folktale. What better than a nowhere, no-when land to flee the grim here-and-now—a tale that would end happily, or at the very least end, flouting the boundless infection curves that plagued my feeds and fed my dread?

Three Apples Fell From the Sky isn’t the strictly uchronic utopia I’d expected: most of it unfolds in the Armenian village of Maran during the twentieth century. When I googled “Maran Armenia,” however, I found no such place, and the search I then ran on “Մառան Հայաստան,” courtesy of Google Translate, yielded a stub on a village for which “no population data had been retained.” In fact, there seems to be no data at all—just an unverified note on villagers’ deaths and deportations during the Genocide. As far as I was concerned, Maran might as well have been fictional. Grounding the novel in time proved equally tricky: save for a few scattered references to telegrams or left-wing revolutions, its protagonists could’ve just as easily lived through the 2015 constitutional referendum or the Russo-Persian Wars. My sense of chronology was further challenged by recurring flashbacks, occasional changes in verb tense, and the Maranians’ own cluelessness regarding dates. Near perfect fodder for escapism, you’d think, but by the time I’d put it down, I was more firmly rooted in the times than ever. READ MORE…

Translation as an Exercise in Letting Go: An Interview with Sam Bett and David Boyd on Translating Mieko Kawakami

April 1, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Allison Braden

What reading and writing have in common, and what makes translation possible, is listening.

Mieko Kawakami’s 2008 novella Breasts and Eggs won acclaim in Japan for its depiction of the tense, complex relationship between the narrator, Natsuko Natsume, her sister, and her niece. Haruki Murakami called Kawakami his favorite young novelist, and the novella went on to win the prestigious Akutagawa Prize. Kawakami later expanded the story into a novel of the same name. Its translation into English, forthcoming from Europa Editions (US) and Picador (UK), will be her English-language debut and has been listed among this year’s most anticipated releases by The New York Times, The Millions, Lit Hub, and others. The book’s award-winning translators, Sam Bett and David Boyd, are working together to translate all of Kawakami’s novels. Here, they discuss their co-translation process and some of the novel’s challenges: Kawakami’s musical prose, the characters’ Osaka dialect, and the plot’s focus on women’s experiences.

Allison Braden (AB): How does your work, in general, complement each other’s? What is it about the other’s product or process that makes for a good collaborator?

Sam Bett (SB): I discovered David’s work as a reader, through the magazine Monkey Business, and wrote him something of a fan letter. We’ve been each other’s first readers for almost five years now. Depending on the project, this sometimes means doing a close “side-by-side” read, where we offer comments on specific translation choices, and sometimes means reading the translation independently from the original, to see how well it stands up on its own. I think the most important thing is receptivity. Translation is, by nature, a group effort. Our collaboration is essentially a long-term workshop. When you have mutual trust and let your guard down, you can admit your fallibility, which is the only way to grow.

David Boyd (DB): Translating Breasts and Eggs with Sam was incredibly satisfying. That said, I could see how co-translation could go horribly wrong under different circumstances. If you asked around about experiences with co-translation, you’d probably hear more horror stories than happy endings . . . I agree with Sam. What made our collaboration work was trust. On top of that, if you’re going to co-translate, you’d better be happy with how your collaborator approaches writing. Otherwise it isn’t going to work. There was one other thing that I think made our collaboration work: the way we divided the text. Sam retained ultimate say over the translation of the narrative and I had the same degree of control over how we handled the dialogue. That division really helped. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by C.D. Zeletin

March 31, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Andreea Scridon

We find Elysium in each other, / It is your moment that, in my time, I discover.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, Asymptote remembers the life and work of acclaimed Romanian poet C.D. Zeletin. The three selections below exemplify Zeletin’s prosodic brilliance and his masterful juxtaposition of nature with emotional memory.

Translator and our own Assistant Editor Andreea Scridon honours the late poet:

“C.D. Zeletin, born Constantin Dimoftache (1935 – 2020), was a Romanian poet, essayist, translator, and medic. He was a professor of biophysics at Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Bucharest. He published forty books during his lifetime, including translations of Michelangelo, Baudelaire, and Verlaine into Romanian (among many others), as well as his own poetry. He was awarded a series of international prizes for his work, and was decorated with the Order of Cultural Merit by the Romanian state. Zeletin died on February 18, 2020, exactly one year after we published a story on his work. We mourn his loss with immense regret.”

It’s no longer enough for the soul

It’s no longer enough for the soul, it’s true
to say just: you, you, you, and you,
so it seems to me, in these strange timely spheres,
that in you I enumerate my hours and my years,
and you, from my ever weaker hesitation
grow of yourself an independent incarnation.
We find Elysium in each other,
It is your moment that, in my time, I discover.
To left and right, look up or down
you move, I move, we live without duration,
the sunbaked sweetness of stagnation . . .
Our lives braid into one another—a rope for a maroon
strewn out between the frigate and pontoon,
through which there is no chance in storms
to hide our grain of sand’s small form.
By memory we rise and fall at helm,
encountering the venom of the same realm,
of pleasure locked in a kiss,
as butterflies over a flower’s deep abyss.

It’s no longer enough for the soul, it’s true
to say: you, you, you, and you . . . READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Solaris

March 30, 2020  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Sarah Moore and Xiao Yue Shan

[Tarkovsky's] films are not designed to entertain—their pleasure comes from the possibility of being forever changed by seeing them.

Our second feature for Asymptote at the Movies is Andrei Tarkvosky’s Solaris, a 1972 Soviet masterpiece based on Polish writer Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel of the same name. Arguably one of the greatest science fiction films ever made, the plot focuses on psychologist Kris Kelvin and his arrival at the space station orbiting Solaris, a planet whose ocean had been the focus of intense scientific study for decades. As the two other scientists aboard behave increasingly strangely, Kelvin discovers that they are being “visited” by figures of their past, resurrected in the space station. A complex exploration of man’s place in the universe, his quest for knowledge, and the meaning of love and life, Solaris is a triumph.

Sarah Moore (SM): Sometimes it appears that a novel exists, destined for a certain filmmaker, as if it had in fact been written for such a connection. So it is with Lem’s novel and Tarkvosky; Solaris lends itself perfectly to Tarkovsky’s slow, profound meditations on human nature, the purpose of existence, memory, and the function of art. Lem’s novel is classified as science fiction but (as with many works of science fiction) incorporates a wealth of philosophy and spirituality. Tarkovsky unabashedly confronted the big questions. His films are not designed to entertain—their pleasure comes from the possibility of being forever changed by seeing them. Both the novel and the film are immensely detailed; whenever I watch Tarkovsky’s film, I am always struck by how much there is to comprehend, how much more there is to be contemplated each time. Perhaps a good place to begin this discussion, therefore, is with Tarkovsky’s own impression of Lem:

When I read Lem’s novel, what struck me above all were the moral problems evident in the relationship between Kelvin and his conscience, as manifested in the form of Hari. In fact if I understood, and greatly admired, the second half of the novel—the technology, the atmosphere of the space station, the scientific questions—it was entirely because of that situation, which seems to me to be fundamental to the work. Inner, hidden, human problems, moral problems, always engage me far more than any questions of technology; and in any case technology, and how it develops, invariably relates to moral issues, in the end that is what it rests upon. My prime sources are always the real state of the human soul, and the conflicts that are expressed in spiritual problems.

Tarkovsky’s preference for the human problems over the technological is clear in his huge re-structuring of the plot—or rather, his ability to lengthen the chronology. Whilst the action of Lem’s novel is restricted solely to the space station, such action contributes only three-quarters of Tarkovsky’s film. In a forty-minute prelude, the day before Kelvin’s departure to Solaris, we see him at his parents’ home, surrounded by lush nature. Long sequences of forests, flowing streams, underwater reeds, and large ponds contrast with the sparse, sterile settings of the space station that will appear later. Here, his complicated relationship with his father is introduced and he burns documents over an outside fire, preparing for a total rupture from his life on earth. For a text that so explicitly posits the choice between remaining on Solaris in the pursuit of scientific study and returning to earth, beginning the film in such a naturalistic setting is a huge gesture that places the human at its centre. How do you feel about the tension between “the scientific questions” and the “hidden, human problems” in the film? READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

March 27, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, José García Escobar, and Sarah Moore

The latest news from France, Hong Kong, and Nicaragua!

“Our clocks strike the hour of courage,” wrote Anna Akhmatova in the winter of 1942. Now, as countries around the world go into lockdown and hospital teams battle against coronavirus, the hour of courage is called upon once again. Our writers bring you news this week from France, where literary festivals find innovative solutions to cancellations; Hong Kong, where launch events and publishers move online; and Nicaragua, where writers and the public have been mourning the passing of celebrated writer Ernesto Cardenal. Read on to find out more!

Sarah Moore, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting from France

France has been under a strict lockdown since March 17, and with all non-essential establishments now closed—including bookshops, theatres, libraries, and cultural centers—writers and organizers have had to be creative in finding new ways to engage with the public.

The annual Printemps des Poètes was due to be held from March 7 to 23. Its theme for this twenty-second edition was “Courage” and its poster design featured an original artwork by Pierre Soulages. The festival’s director, Sophie Nauleau, published a text on the festival website, “Espère en ton courage” (“Hope in your courage”) from her collection of the same name:

It’s a verse by Corneille. An old, famous alexandrine, right at the end of The Cid, which speaks of the heart, hope, and triumph of time somewhere in Seville:

Hope in your courage, hope in my promise . . .

Of course, none of us knew how much more pertinent her words would become after the new security measures taken by the French government caused the festival to close early. Suddenly, her words took on an additional meaning:

And in this hemistich, all the world’s bravery assaults centuries, with so much constancy. So much patience passed down into posterity, like a bequeathed secret, like a more efficient mantra than the coarse rule of blood.

READ MORE…

Writing Orang-orang Oetimu, Writing Wounds

March 26, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Felix K. Nesi and Lara Norgaard

Once I managed to accept that those stories had been invented, I started to enjoy writing. When else would I be allowed to lie to people like that?

Two years ago, in 2018, a book by a little-known author won the Jakarta Arts Council annual award for best novel and became one of the most widely discussed texts in contemporary Indonesian literary circles.

Orang-orang Oetimu (People of Oetimu) by Felix K. Nesi is a portrait of a small fictional town on the island of Timor in eastern Indonesia. The book clearly stands out for its satirical wit, cyclical structure, and cohesive navigation of myriad perspectives. However, also remarkable is the way in which Nesi – himself originally from Timor—depicts the province of East Nusa Tenggara, a peripheral region that is seldom represented in Indonesian literature. His is a humorous yet fully heartfelt depiction of life in the context of pervasive violence in Timor. From 1974 to 1998, the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Fretilin) led a fight for East Timorese independence, and the Indonesian state in Jakarta attempted to crush the separatist movement at all costs, committing gross violations of human rights against members of the revolutionary movement and civilians alike. In representing the reality of Timor, Nesi also exposes political and social ills from across the Indonesian archipelago.

Today, Nesi continues to command attention in Indonesia as one of the country’s emerging literary voices. In the first weeks of 2020, the author spoke on his process for writing Orang-orang Oetimu in Yogyakarta, a university city on the island of Java. He began by expressing the motivations behind writing one of his characters: Laura, a young woman who, in the novel, is kidnapped, separated from her parents, detained without trial, tortured and abused, before finally escaping into the forest and stumbling upon a small kampung. From Nesi’s powerful, personal anecdote on Laura’s character arose a reflection on the main concerns embedded in his novel: trauma, both personal and collective; politics of identity and representation within Indonesia; and the simultaneous power and futility of storytelling. The following translation of the essay he read aloud acts both as an important exploration of those themes and as an introduction to the work of this compelling new voice in Indonesian literature. READ MORE…

Róbert Gál’s Multi-Instrumental Compositions

March 25, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Seth Rogoff

For Gál, the failure of language to hold the social fabric together opens up something new at its frayed end . . .

Róbert Gál is a Prague-based Slovakian writer. Known for his aphorisms and innovative narrative forms, his work is playful, philosophical, and interrogates the limits of language and communication. In this essay, Seth Rogoff examines the English translations of his work. 

What to make of an author who distrusts language, who questions the necessity or the ability to communicate? These might be the central questions one faces when approaching the works of the writer Róbert Gál. Two recent translations from Slovak, Agnomia (Dalkey Archive, 2018) and Naked Thoughts (Black Sun Lit, 2019), bring the total number of Gál’s books available to English readers to four. Naked Thoughts is a continuation of the aphoristic form Gál demonstrates in his first two English editions, Signs and Symptoms (Twisted Spoon, 2003) and On Wing (Dalkey Archive, 2015). Agnomia is a departure among these titles—it consists of a 79-page prose fragment, narrated in one unbroken paragraph. The slimness of these four volumes only emphasizes their literary and philosophical weight. Gál’s project is an ambitious one. He builds his literary oeuvre on a fundamentally unstable foundation: a language that is continuously breaking down in varying ways. This breakdown puts pressure on a whole host of social pillars, like truth, reason, progress, purpose, and meaning. On the one hand, such an assault on the stitches that hold society together leads, in Gál’s work, to isolation and desperation, eventually pushing toward death—and the motif or theme of death hangs low over these works. At the same time, for Gál the failure of language to hold the social fabric together opens up something new at its frayed end, new possibilities for a kind of truth that lies below or alongside “Truth,” for an understanding that is overshadowed by reason, and for an even deeper type of communication that is prevented by quotidian language games. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Buddha” by Jules Boissière

March 24, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by A. Z. Foreman

The Buddha gave our wolfish men a smile.

This week’s Translation Tuesday presents a chilling and challenging poem by Jules Boissière, translated from the Occitan. At turns uncomfortable to read yet undeniably skilful in its imagery and structure, the poem’s deft enjambment and linguistic precision belies the speaker’s cultural ignorance (e.g., the suggestion that the Buddha is revered as a god) and his complicity in colonial terror. It’s admittedly difficult to make sense of the colonizer’s mindset, which at once mourns a seemingly indifferent universe while confirming the wolfish volition of his compatriot soldiers.

Also noteworthy is the poet’s insistence on writing in Occitan rather than French. Writes translator A.Z. Foreman: “It is only in Occitan that Boissière allows himself to be honest about life as a colonial soldier. This poem gives a soldiers’-eye view of terrorized civilians running for their lives from a home in flames, followed by a macabre meditation. We are more accustomed to poetry that describes the effect of brutality on those who suffer from it. This poem, though, conveys the effect on a man who inflicts it. The coarsening of the mind, brought on by acceptance of the horrific.”  

The Buddha

Our soldiers won, then torched a domicile.
The owner with his sons ran half a mile
Under gunfire. On the ancestors’ altar
Not guarding the old creeds or their old shelter,
The Buddha gave our wolfish men a smile. READ MORE…