Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

February 14, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Barbara Halla, Nestor Gomez, and Shelly Bhoil

This week's latest news from Tibet, El Salvador, and France!

This week our writers bring you the latest news from Tibet, El Salvador, and France. At Indiana University, a new Tibetan translation of Elie Wiesel’s Night sparks discussion; in El Salvador, the contemporary poet Vladimir Amaya gives an interview about his poetic decisions; in France, the accusations of sexual assault in the literary establishment ignite urgent discussion about French law and the #MeToo movement. Read on to find out more! 

Shelly Bhoil, Editor-at-Large, reporting from United States

There was a powerful coming together of two exile stories—the Tibetan and Jewish—at the Central Eurasian Studies Department of Indiana University through a panel discussion—The Tibetan Translation of Elie Wiesel’s Night—on January 29. The Nobel Peace Prize-winner Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night (1960), discussed by the distinguished Jewish literature scholar Alvin Rosenfeld in the panel, has been translated into more than thirty languages, its Tibetan version being the most recent. Wiesel was a Holocaust survivor upon whom the Dalai Lama conferred the International Campaign for Tibet’s Light of Truth award in 2005.

Wiesel’s Night is the first work to be translated into Tibetan under New York-based Latse Library’s 108 translations project and made available for free here. According to Latse’s statistics, “In the first two weeks alone [since the book’s publication in Oct 2019], there were 3,300 downloads of the ebook and PDF, and countless more instances of sharing and forwarding on social media and email.” Gendun Rabsel, the Tibetan language expert, spoke in the panel about the welcoming reception of Night among Tibetan readers. Pema Bhum, Night’s translator and a leading Tibetan intellectual, discussed his meeting with Wiesel and the challenges and choices in translating this work into Tibetan, including his consultations with the celebrated historian on Tibet, Elliot Sperling, and with IU Jewish Studies faculty. READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (Feb 2020)

February 13, 2020  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

We’re bursting out of the gate with publications galore!

Other than editing your favorite literary journal, what have Asymptote staff been up to in the New Year? Catch up with our talented team with this latest quarterly update.

Gustave Roud’s “Air of Solitude” followed by “Requiem,” is finally coming out with Seagull Press at the end of February 2020 in Communications Manager Alexander Dickow and Sean Reynolds’s English translation; it is already available for preorder here. Alexander also published the story, “Rican’s Tale of the Expedition to Perigonne,” in Big Echo Critical Science Fiction.

Assistant editor Andreea Scridon read excerpts of her translations from the Romanian at a poetry reading in Pembroke College, UK, on February 12.

The  TA First Translation Prize was announced on February 12, and the runner-up went  to People in the Room by Norah Lange, translated by Charlotte Whittle and edited by our new Copy editor Bella Bosworth.

Contributing editor Ellen Elias-Bursac published her translation of Croation author Kristian Novak’s Dark Mother Earth with Amazon Crossing on January 14.

Editor-at-large for Morocco Hodna Nuernberg‘s co-translation, with Patricia Hartland, of Raphael Confiant’s Madam St. Clair, Queen of Harlem was published by Lavender Ink / Diálogos in January 2020.

Editor-at-large for Iran Poupeh Missaghi published her debut novel trans(re)lating house one with Coffee House Press on February 4. READ MORE…

The Necessity of Translating Women: Monica Manolachi Interviewing Helen Vassallo and Olga Castro

February 12, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Monica Manolachi

If women are left out of culture, then the very notion of culture is itself impoverished.

When participants registered for the inaugural Translating Women Conference (October 31–November 1, 2019) at the Institute for Modern Languages Research in London, UK, they probably did not yet know that October 31 would become “Brexit Day.” Fortunately, Brexit was postponed, and when some of the delegates arrived in London, they saw a sign in front of a restaurant: “The year is 2192. The British Prime Minister visits Brussels to ask for an extension on Brexit. No one remembers where this tradition came from, but it attracts many tourists every year.” Over two days, a potentially isolationist “historical day” gave way to a fruitful international dialogue focused on translation and women writers from many parts of the world, forging connections and understanding in a time of division and uncertainty.

In the following conversation, Monica Manolachi, Helen Vassallo, and Olga Castro—co-organisers of the Translating Women Conference—speak about the meaning of the hashtag #BeMoreOlga, the many conference highlights, reading books in translation, and explain why feminism and translation are connected movements that have the potential to fully open up the Anglosphere to world literature.

Monica Manolachi (MM): Helen Vassallo and Olga Castro, you co-hosted the first Translating Women Conference at London’s Institute of Modern Languages Research on October 31 and November 1, 2019. On this occasion, participants received pins with the hashtag #BeMoreOlga. What issues does this hashtag address?

Helen Vassallo (HV): This stemmed from an opinion piece I wrote after the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded the delayed 2018 prize to Olga Tokarczuk and the 2019 prize to Peter Handke. Apart from the controversy in awarding the prize to Handke (a decision I found ill-judged, to say the least), I was incensed by the way in which the chair of the prize committee casually and erroneously justified the paucity of women laureates in the prize’s history by saying that “now” there are many great women writers. This only compounds the problem of women’s invisibility: suggesting that women hadn’t featured significantly because they weren’t there or weren’t “great” assumes that awards are based only on merit and not on visibility. I took issue with both the androcentric and the Eurocentric approach to choosing winners: I agree that Tokarczuk was a great choice, but the committee had previously stated that they were looking further afield than Europe, and then both prizes went to Europeans. It’s almost like saying: “well we looked, but there wasn’t anything good enough,” which is exactly what I mean about the myth of meritocracy. There wasn’t any real, demonstrable evidence that the prize committee had scrutinised its own policies, just empty rhetoric. And it was ironic that they commended Tokarczuk’s work for “crossing boundaries as a form of life”; I thought that they could take heed of that for calling into question their own criteria and approach—hence my suggestion that they “Be More Olga.” That was the specific context, but generally, “Be More Olga” stands as a call to action for all of us to be more open, to challenge borders and boundaries—whether literal or figurative—and to claim our place in a connected world. And to cap it all, Olga Tokarczuk herself was wearing one of our #BeMoreOlga badges at the Nobel Prize ceremony in December; I never dreamed that would happen! Tokarczuk’s Nobel lecture offers profound reflections on crossing borders, remaking our broken world, and challenging isolationism; it’s translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Jennifer Croft, and expresses far more articulately than I could exactly what “Be More Olga” means. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Lost Spell” by Yismake Worku

February 11, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Bethlehem Attfield

Now I am only a sorrier version of the dog that traversed through the forest with the grace of a cheetah.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, visionary novelist Yismake Worku adopts fantasy and satire as probing social commentary in this excerpt from The Lost Spell. While researching a book of spells, a wealthy man transforms himself into a dog. We follow the (now) canine protagonist as he journeys to Addis Ababa, and through his eyes we witness the sublime beauty of the Ethiopian landscape. The story of one man’s literal dehumanization allegorizes the abasement our narrator witnesses around him as he simultaneously lauds and laments his country. Through the narrator’s unique position as both subjective participant and objective bystander, Worku presents a fly-on-the-wall (or a dog-on-the-road) view of contemporary Ethiopia that is at once a critique and a bittersweet love letter.

It has been a horrible few days. I feel like some life has been drained from my short dog existence. If I hadn’t managed to drag myself into the middle of a corn farm, I would have been picked apart by merciless scavenging birds.

The cause of my pitiful circumstances was an auto-rickshaw accident. If the God of dogs and all creation hadn’t spared me, I would have departed my dog life by now. The rickshaw didn’t hit me full on; it knocked me on my left rear, bending me like a rubber and causing me to plunge into a drain. An unseasonal rain had been pouring down all evening. So, the flood could have carried an elephant, let alone a battered dog. It hauled me along the garbage of Shashemene. Banging me around with every object it carried along, the flood finally threw me into a small river. The river in turn dragged me through shrubs, sometimes battering me against rocks, and deposited me near a cornfield.   READ MORE…

“Faithful to the imagination”: A Review of Silvina Ocampo’s Forgotten Journey

February 10, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Sarah Moore

Reading her short stories has the effect of seeing an enlarged eye behind a held-up magnifying glass.

Forgotten Journey by Silvina Ocampo, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan, City Lights Books, 2019

Silvina Ocampo (1903-93) was once called “the best-kept secret of Argentine letters.” Luckily for Anglophone readers, however, more of her work is being gradually revealed, most recently with two publications by City Lights Books: The Promise and Forgotten Journey. The Promise is a novella which Ocampo spent twenty-five years completing, whilst Forgotten Journey, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan, is her debut piece of fiction, a collection of twenty-eight short stories originally published in 1937 as Viaje olvidado.

Ocampo may be under-recognized outside of Argentina, but during her lifetime she was part of an elite literary and intellectual circle formed by Jorge Luis Borges. Along with Borges, and her eventual husband Adolfo Bioy Casares, she collaborated on a famous anthology of Fantastic Literature and formed friendships with authors such as Virginia Woolf, Paul Valéry, Lawrence of Arabia, Federico García Lorca, and Gabriela Mistral. She was also a visual artist, having trained in Paris under Fernand Léger and the surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico.

These surrealist influences are evident in her writing, and there is undoubtedly a fairytale quality to Ocampo’s stories: fairytale in the sense of its truest origins—innocence is flooded with the dark and the ominous, childhood confronts and battles adulthood. Throughout Ocampo’s tales, there is always a moment when death enters, knocking the innocent out. And these stories are dark: a horse is whipped to death, a servant murders the young son of her mistress, a woman’s pet is brutally killed by a jealous lover. The duality of dream and nightmare is always present, similar to writers such as Leonora Carrington, Angela Carter, and Clarice Lispector. In a 1982 interview with Noemí Ulla, Ocampo says that Lispector wanted to meet her in Buenos Aires, and Ocampo was devastated not to have done so before Lispector’s death in 1977. READ MORE…

Parasite Takes Best Picture!

February 10, 2020  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

In a post-‘Parasite’ world, the best-picture winner can come from anywhere.

Chances are that you’ve already heard of Bong Joon Ho’s history-making feat at the Oscars yesterday following our prediction in December, but did you know that it wasn’t so long ago that Bong was on a blacklist, along with some 10,000 filmmakers deemed to be critical of the South Korean administration, and those people were prevented from receiving arts funding? As the New York Times notes, Parasite is the first movie not in English in the Academy Award’s 92 years to take the top award; “in a post-‘Parasite’ world, the best-picture winner can come from anywhere.”

As we invite you to explore more of what South Korea offers to the world in our extensive archives (ranging from magical realist writing, experimental poetry, and the most inventive science fiction to surreal drama and playful Hangul text art—and including work by Burning director Lee Chang-dong), we hope you’ll also consider joining our mission to break down similar barriers in literature. By coincidence, we too do not receive arts funding, because the government of the country where we are incorporated does not consider our endeavor supportable. Take it from Eliot Weinberger, who has said, “Asymptote may be a small chisel and drill, but these things force cracks that, time and time again, have eventually brought the walls down.

Help us bring the walls down—become a sustaining or masthead member today.

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

February 7, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng and MARGENTO

This week's latest news from Hong Kong, Belgium, and Romania!

This week our editors bring you news of the effects of coronavirus on cultural events in Hong Kong, as well as news of the Romanian writers taking center stage at a Belgian arts festival, and new publications in Romania that address its troubled but intellectually rich past. Read on to find out more!  

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

As China’s coronavirus pneumonia epidemic shows no signs of slowing down, Hong Kong is now under the threat of the wide-spreading virus and the possibility of a community outbreak of the disease. While the Hong Kong government refuses to take decisive measures to close the border to ban visitors from the Mainland even in face of a strike from the medical workers, many art and cultural events have been cancelled due to the temporary closure of venues managed by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, including the programs at the Hong Kong Arts Festival and Art Basel.

Meanwhile, local poetry publication Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine is calling for submissions for its special issue on “Virus,” which is going to address the recent virus panic from a poetic perspective. The deadline for submission is March 15, 2020. The magazine accepts both Chinese and English works. Moreover, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal is going to host a session on “Poetic Women in Translation” to explore how female sensibility is reflected in poetry and its translation. The event will feature translator Jennifer Feeley, Hong Kong poet Ng Mei-kwan, and Cha’s founder and editor Tammy Ho. READ MORE…

Other Worlds: Engaging Rajko Grlić (Part II)

February 6, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Ellen Elias-Bursać

At the airport, Honorio confesses to his wife that he has neither the strength nor the enthusiasm for new revolutions.

This week, the Asymptote blog is excited to share a special two-part engagement with Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić. Yesterday in Part I, we featured an interview between Grlić and Ellen Elias-Bursać, who, in addition to being an Asymptote contributing editor, is also the editor of the first English translation of Grlić’s memoirs. Today, in Part II, we bring you an exclusive excerpt from that memoir, from a section called “Festival Selector.”

Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić organizes the material of his memoir, Long Story Short, like a lexicon of filmmaking terminology. Under each heading and definition, he includes a story from his life: his filmmaking; his struggles against nationalism in Croatia during the war of the 1990s; and his years of teaching at NYU, UCLA, and Ohio University. Grlić was known as one of the leading Yugoslav filmmakers in 1980s Croatia, celebrated for such box-office successes as You Love Only Once (1981); In the Jaws of Life (1984), which was based on a Dubravka Ugrešić novel; and That Summer of White Roses (1989). He left Croatia in the 1990s during its war for independence and has since gone on to make several more notable films, including The Border Post (2006) and The Constitution (2016). He collected stories during his many years of making movies and moving through the world, aware that he’d never have the opportunity to make every story he had to tell into a film, but refusing to lose them to oblivion.

Grlić’s memoir was translated by Vesna Radovanović and edited by Asymptote contributing editor Ellen Elias-Bursać. Elias-Bursać spoke recently to Grlić about the life that led to Long Story Short, an interview that was published yesterday as Part I of this series. In the excerpt that follows, “Festival Selector,” Grlić tells of his decades-long friendship with Honorio Rancaño, the selector for movies shown at Mostra, a film festival that was held for many years in Valencia, Spain.

Festival Selector: the person who chooses the films, conceptualizes and shapes the festival creatively.

Cannes, 1981

In the hall of Palais des Festivals in Cannes, someone taps me on the shoulder and, before I have a chance to turn, starts talking about my movie You Love Only Once, in a jumble of Czech, Russian, and Spanish.

“Honorio Rancaño, selector for the Valencia Film Festival,” the man finally introduces himself, unshaven and chewing on a long, wet cigar. READ MORE…

Other Worlds: Engaging Rajko Grlić (Part I)

February 5, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Ellen Elias-Bursać

I was on a blacklist of cultural enemies said to be destabilizing the state through their work . . . but this was something survivable.

This week, the Asymptote blog is excited to share a special two-part engagement with Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić. Today in Part I, we bring you an interview between Grlić and Ellen Elias-Bursać, who, in addition to being an Asymptote contributing editor, is also the editor of the first English translation of Grlić’s memoirs.

Don’t forget to check back for Part II tomorrow, when Asymptote will have an exclusive excerpt from Rajko Grlić’s memoir!

Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić organizes the material of his memoir, Long Story Short, like a lexicon of filmmaking terminology. Under each heading and definition, he includes a story from his life: his filmmaking; his struggles against nationalism in Croatia during the war of the 1990s; and his years of teaching at NYU, UCLA, and Ohio University. Grlić was known as one of the leading Yugoslav filmmakers in 1980s Croatia, celebrated for such box-office successes as You Love Only Once (1981); In the Jaws of Life (1984), which was based on a Dubravka Ugrešić novel; and That Summer of White Roses (1989). He left Croatia in the 1990s during its war for independence and has since gone on to make several more notable films, including The Border Post (2006) and The Constitution (2016). He collected stories during his many years of making movies and moving through the world, aware that he’d never have the opportunity to make every story he had to tell into a film, but refusing to lose them to oblivion.

Grlić’s memoir was translated by Vesna Radovanović and edited by Ellen Elias-Bursać, who spoke recently to Grlić about the life that led to Long Story Short. In the excerpt, “Festival Selector,” which will be published tomorrow as Part II of this series, Grlić tells of his decades-long friendship with Honorio Rancaño, the selector for movies shown at Mostra, a film festival that was held for many years in Valencia, Spain.

Ellen Elias-Bursać (EEB): In this entry from your memoir, you describe your involvement as a filmmaker in film festivals in Cannes (where the story begins), Spain (Mostra), Japan (Tokyo), Croatia (Pula), and your friendship with Honorio Rancaño, who was born in Spain but went on to live in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, France, and, ultimately, Spain. What does “place” as such mean to you now? Where have you situated your movies, both in terms of storyline and the locations where they were filmed?

Rajko Grlić (RG): The story about Honorio is a tale of a different world, a world now long gone. About a man who was born in a utopian age, who, after those hopes were shattered, spent his life seeking for something new to hope for. Like any search, his tangled path through space and time touched many places and continents. This is one of the reasons why I believed that his life story, so scattered in bits and pieces all over the world, needed to be told. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from “A Cold Season” by Jin Yucheng

February 4, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Cleo Qian

The drizzle fell steadily, and in the night, the shallow bridge, the village houses, all faded in the distance, so I could see nothing clearly.

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, novelist Jin Yucheng captures memories of Suzhou in this haunting excerpt from “A Cold Season.” Jin’s Proustian narrator evokes scenes which portend his sense of misplacement: buildings are ragged shades of decay; pedestrians roam silently like spirits; a young man appears pallid and skeletal as he laments his lost love, whose beauty is described as “bleak.” The only breaks in the town’s somber quiet are the omnipresent folksongs which seem to follow the narrator. Jin is a virtuoso of temporality and consciousness; here he slows down and speeds up the narrative via exquisite sensory detail. “Back then,” the narrator begins, though the recalled images of gloom are obfuscated by time and the town’s cold rain.

Back then, I could still sit by the bank all day, watching boats, looking at the town’s bridges. There were shops on both banks, the narrow streets boarded on top with awnings to protect them from the rain and sun. During the rainy season the buildings were ragged and gloomy, the color of mildew and decay. Pedestrians passed each other in a breathless, soundless silence, as intangible as spirits. It was a mournful scene. If you pushed open the window casements, inlaid with shell, you could hear the plaintive sound of girls singing folktales alongside the pluck of silken strings, filling the town with their poetry. Only in the pitch dark nights, by the lights from between the green plastered walls, could you see the fishing lights far off on the lake. READ MORE…

“Poesía es mundial. Mundial y local”: Ernesto Cardenal at Ninety-Five in Mexico City

February 3, 2020  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by Whitney DeVos

For Cardenal, literature has always marked a utopian site in which the existing boundaries of a nation could be negotiated and transgressed.

The largesse of Latin American poet Ernesto Cardenal’s political and literary accomplishments is the result of a prolific lifetime of honouring and devoting himself to the humanity of writing. A living legend of Spanish literature, Cardenal turned ninety-five years old earlier this month, and as admirers from all over the world paid tribute, Asymptote’s assistant poetry editor Whitney DeVos was privileged to have attended an event held in the poet’s honour in Mexico City. Below, find her dispatch from the occasion, as well as an overview of his immense accomplishments as a writer, a leader, and a revolutionary.

We at Asymptote would like to wish a happy belated birthday to Nicaraguan-born poet, Roman Catholic priest, liberation theologist, and revolutionary Ernesto Cardenal, one of Latin America’s greatest living writers and likely the most widely-read poet working in the Spanish language today—his literary works have been translated into over twenty languages. Winner of the 2012 Premio de Reina Sofía de Poesía Iberoamericana, Cardenal—known among his admirers simply as el maestro—turned ninety-five on Monday, January 20. Still, he hasn’t slowed down at all in recent years, continuing to make public appearances and releasing three books in 2019 alone: in Spain, Hijo de las estrellas and the single-volume, one thousand-plus page Poesía Completa appeared with Trotta de Madrid, and Canto a México with the Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE) in Mexico. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

January 31, 2020  |  in Dispatches  |  by Daniel Persia and Leah Scott

The latest in literary news from Brazil and Spain!

This week, our reporters bring you news of new publications, prizes, and book fairs in Brazil and the release of new novels in Spain examining the Franco regime. Read on to find out more!

Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brazil

Things are heating up in Brazil, as summer carries on in full force and the Sambadrome gears up for its first parade of the decade. Brazil is more than just Carnaval, though, as Eliane Brum reminds us in The Collector of Leftover Souls (Graywolf Press), translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty and longlisted for the National Book Award. A prolific journalist and documentary filmmaker, Brum calls out the reader in the first few pages of the book: “Whenever I visit an English-speaking country, I notice Brazil doesn’t exist for most of you. Or exists only in the stereotype of Carnival and soccer. Favelas, butts, and violence.” Brum invites the reader on a journey into indigenous villages, through environmental destruction (and reconstruction), and into the heart and soul of politics in Brazil. The translation resonates in the midst of growing tensions over fires in the Amazon, met by what Brum characterizes as an unfit and “destructive” response by the Bolsonaro administration.

READ MORE…

Announcing Our January Book Club Selection: The Sweet Indifference of the World by Peter Stamm

January 30, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

How often do we look back on our lives only to be confounded by our own choices?

Do writers aspire to live forever? Is literature a cultivated method of extending our capacities, prolonging the temporary, and rectifying our past mistakes? In this month’s Book Club selection, Asymptote has selected lauded German author Peter Stamm’s latest novel, The Sweet Indifference of the World, which probes such questions with a graceful awareness of how human relationships materialize and dissipate. Cohered by a love story told and retold, Stamm deftly enwraps complex psychological themes of identity and memory in his polished prose, translated into English skillfully by poet Michael Hofmann. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers in the US, the UK, and the EU. 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!

The Sweet Indifference of the World by Peter Stamm, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann, Other Press (US/Can) & Granta (UK), 2020

What casualty of a failed love affair doesn’t leave some phantom of themselves wandering eternally through their memories, in search of what could have gone differently? Peter Stamm’s The Sweet Indifference of the World, translated from the German into understated, efficient English by Michael Hofmann, invites the thrilling possibility of the alternate ending. Christoph, middle-aged and still coasting on the success of his first and only novel, recalls his relationship with actress Magdalena, grasping at a slippery opportunity to finally salve his unsatisfied soul. 

The masterful craftsmanship of both author and translator animates a universe that trembles on the limit of realism. An elevation from the typical love story, the novel invites meditation on topics like the nature of narrative, the unreliability of perception, the standards by which we judge the value of a human life, and even the act of translation. READ MORE…

Fiction as Seduction: An Interview with Anne Serre

January 29, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Tristan Foster

A writer’s only responsibility is to seduce without cheating.

Anne Serre has been published steadily in her native France since the release of her debut novel, Les Gouvernantes, in 1992, but it wasn’t until October 2018, when New Directions published it as The Governesses, translated by Mark Hutchinson, that her writing was made available to an English-speaking audience. The Governesses was followed by The Fool in October 2019, a collection of three unlinked but thematically cohesive novellas. Serre’s two books tell enchanting and surprising stories, both delightful in style and shocking in their disregard for moral norms. At their heart is the subject of the fulfillment of desire—desires which range from living absolutely for the story to the taboo of incest; this jarring mix of charm and discomfort makes for a unique and surprising reading experience. Here, in a rare English-language interview, Serre speaks about her work in translation, her “infinite conversation” with longtime friend and translator, Mark Hutchison, and unravels some of the mystery surrounding her untranslated work.

—Tristan Foster

Tristan Foster (TF): In your essay published in Granta, entitled “How I Write My Books,” you state that you begin with a sentence, that this is the gate through which the rest of the story enters—this sentence and those which follow are the product of your reading and your thinking and living life. You write: “It requires on my part months of silence and solitude, a form of inner tranquillity, and close attention to what is taking shape inside me.” You frame this as something less serendipitous than it is magical, using the language of the occult—mystery, trickery, secret ceremonies—to describe it. How important is the magical for you, both in your writing and how you think of it? 

Anne Serre (AS): I don’t believe in magic, neither in life nor in writing! When I try to describe how I write, I’m describing a mental process in which memory and imagination meet like two rivers that suddenly flow together. It’s a bit of a mystery because, for me, this only ever happens in writing. You might compare it to a child at play. When a child pretends to be a character and invents a situation, he is both himself and the invented character.  

TF: It was also a delight for me to read, in that same piece, your view that the writing is a patchwork—of memories, your previous work, and the imagination, but one which “appears to be cut from the same cloth, and a cloth that is new and without a snag.” I say that because the story told in The Governesses seems to me to contain a perfect world of its own, one that is recognisable from fairy tales encountered as a child as well as, perhaps, Emma and Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair, an ecosystem in total balance, so much so it might pop if poked with a stick. The Governesses was your first book, originally published in 1992; why has building this kind of world been so important to you from the outset? 

AS: I used to say that I came to literature through “the door of enchantment” because it was the only door open to me. I tried to find other doors but I couldn’t. Sometimes I think that 99% of my early material was made up of my reading and my daydreams about my reading. I was full of fiction. Maybe a little too much to make do with just living. READ MORE…