Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

March 23, 2018  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Diána Vonnák, and Jessie Stoolman

The most exciting world literature news—all in one place.

It’s Friday and that can only mean one thing at Asymptote: reports of exciting developments in the world of literature. This week our focus falls on a diverse set of countries, including Tunisia, Hungary, and Hong Kong. 

Jessie Stoolman, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Tunisia: 

In just a few short weeks, the 34th edition of Tunis’s annual Book Fair will begin, where numerous prize winners will be announced, including the winner of the newly created Prize for Literary and Intellectual Creativity, or prix de la créativité littéraire et intellectuelle.

However, if you’re itching for activity now, don’t fret, there are numerous literary events taking place throughout Tunisia in the meantime, with a special focus on young writers and readers. Specifically, the 10th annual Festival of Storytelling, organized by the Tahar Haddad Cultural Association in Tunis, has already begun and will continue until March 25th. The festival is dedicated to preserving Tunisian oral traditions, as each day it presents a storyteller, or حكاوتي, who brings to life tales taken from regional oral literature. Similarly, the literary association “Above the Wall” (فوق السور), created for young writers, will host its 10th annual assembly on March 20th and 21st in Benzart, one of the northernmost cities in Tunisia.

Further south, in Sousse, on April 1st, the Book Lovers Association of Sousse will hold a discussion at Le Paradoxe, a local cultural café, to discuss the Tunisian writer and poet Shafiq Tariqi’s award-winning novel, Lavazza (لافازا,) which questions the full realization of the Tunisian revolution. In 2015, the novel was awarded a monetary prize for creativity by the journal, Culture Dubai (دبي الثقافة). READ MORE…

The Man Booker International 2018 Longlist: At the Boundaries of Fiction

March 22, 2018  |  in Essays, News  |  by Barbara Halla

"Non-European works included in the longlist come highly recommended by readers and critics alike."

The 2018 Oscars may be over, but the awards season for the literary world has barely begun, with the Man Booker International Prize receiving the most international attention. In the world of translated fiction, the Man Booker International holds a prestige similar to the Oscars, which explains the pomp and excitement surrounding the announcement of this year’s longlist, made public March 12. The longlist includes thirteen books from ten countries in eight languages, from Argentina to Taiwan.

The MBI used to be a career-prize akin to the Nobel, awarded to a non-British author for his or her entire body of work every two years. Since its merger with the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize its format has changed. Now the Prize seeks to honor the author and translator of the best book (“in the opinion of the judges”) translated into English and published in the UK for the eligible period. For 2018, all eligible submission were novels or short story collections published between May 1, 2017 and April 30, 2018. Much like its sister prize (known simply as the Man Booker Prize), the winner of the MBI tends to garner much attention and sees a boom in book sales. Its history accounts for its prestige, but just as importantly, the MBI is one of the few prizes out there that splits the monetary value of its prize between the writer and translator.

Part of the MBI’s unofficial mission is to raise the profile of translated fiction and translators in the English-speaking world and provide a fair snapshot of world literature. What does this year’s longlist tell us about the MBI’s ability to achieve that goal? Progress has been made from past years, especially with regard to gender equality: six of the thirteen nominated authors and seven of the fifteen translators are women. Unfortunately, issues arise when taking into account the linguistic and regional diversity of the prize not only this year, but with previous lists as well. For 2018, only four of the thirteen books come from non-European authors, with no titles from North and Central America or Africa. This is an issue that plagued the IFFP before it merged with the MBI and marks even the Nobel Prize for literature, as detailed by Sam Carter in his essay “The Nobel’s Faulty Compass.”

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What’s New in Translation: March 2018

March 21, 2018  |  in New in Translation, News, Reviews  |  by Anaka Allen and Janani Ganesan

Looking for your next read? You're in the right place.

Whether this March the leaves are falling or only starting to grow, new books in translation continue to push through borders and languages. This month, our editors review new translations from Germany and Lebanon, whose stories span diverse regions and explore complex notions of belonging.
Pearls-new-cover

Pearls on a Branch by Najla Jraissaty Khoury, translated from the Arabic by Inea Bushnaq, Archipelago Books

Reviewed by Anaka Allen, Social Media Manager

“It happened or maybe no.
If it did, it was long ago
If not, it could still be so.”

For twenty years, in the midst of Lebanon’s civil war that lasted from 1975 until 1990, the traveling theater company Sandouk el Fergeh (the Box of Wonders) traversed the Levant searching for inspiration for their live shows. The actors and their marionettes would travel from shelters to refugee camps, villages to towns, performing the oral tales painstakingly collected by their founder Najla Jraissaty Khoury. It was no small feat trying to find and record stories during wartime when suspicion and fear were particularly acute, not to mention the difficulty in assembling complete narratives from a depleting cache of collective cultural memory.

Oral tales are one of the most fragile cultural legacies, and too often die with their storytellers. So, what happens to the oral history of a region suffering through war and displacement? That’s what Khoury hoped to find out, and the question is what inspired her to embark on a rescue mission in search of these unwritten remnants of Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian culture. She collected dozens of folktales, writing them down exactly as they were told (repetitive phrases and all), culled one hundred from that catalog, and published them in Arabic. English speakers now have the opportunity to read a selection of thirty stories in Pearls on a Branch.

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Translation Tuesday: “Finger” by Toshirō Sasaki

March 20, 2018  |  in Translations  |  by Sacha Idell and Toshirō Sasaki

"The girl stood there, a large pair of sharp pruning shears in her right hand, waiting for the turtle to stick its head out."

In this story by Toshirō Sasaki, a young woman in pre-war Japan buys a turtle and unintentionally contributes to a man’s arrest, opening up questions about class, poverty, and criminality in a nation that is beginning to rapidly modernise. 

1.

At the black markets in Ginza a girl bought a soft-shell turtle. She put it inside her large crocodile-leather opera bag and set out on the Ginza streets. It was early evening, and the district was filled with people bustling about. She pushed her way through the crowd, heading for the Owari-chō tram stop. Customers gathered impatiently at the opening street stalls. Red, blue, and violet rays of light swayed all around. The chaotic sounds of footsteps echoed.

“Excuse me! Young miss!”

Feeling that someone must have been calling out to her, the girl came to a stop. From her shoulder to the end of the street, countless shoulders rubbed together. Grey summer overcoats and bright green silk crepes. Spring jackets the color of matcha. Brand new straw hats. A rich fragrance of sweets. And then the refreshing chill of the night air, washing away the mood of afternoon.

It was an illusion. No one had been calling to her at all. Only a pale man with a long face, a grey hunting cap pulled down over his eyes and light brown jacket wrapped around his body, his shoulder touching hers, moved towards her.

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In Conversation: Ghayath Almadhoun

March 19, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by Ghayath Almadhoun and Sohini Basak

My poems are full of death, but that’s because they are also full of life.

Describing Ghayath Almadhoun’s poetry in Adrenalin is anything but easy. The blurbs on the book call the collection ‘crucial political poetry’, ‘urgent and necessary’, ‘passionate and acerbic’, and ‘our wake-up call’, although we find out that Almadhoun’s own views on his poetry are slightly different. Written in the wake of the Syrian war, the refugee crisis, and a personal loss of his homeland, the poems in Adrenaline are formally experimentally and emotionally explosive. In a voice that is, in equal measure, full of wonder and irreverence for the turn the world has taken, Adrenalin dwells on war, empathy, displacement, suffering, love, and hatred unapologetically. Translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham, and released by Action Books last November, this is the poet’s first selection of poems to be published in English.

The collection starts with the poem ‘Massacre’ (which can be read at our Guardian Translation Tuesday showcase), with the unforgettable lines: “Massacre is a dead metaphor that is eating my friends, eating them without salt. They were poets and have become Reporters With Borders; they were already tired and now they’re even more tired.”

Born in Damascus, the Palestinian poet Almadhoun has been living in Stockholm since 2008. The following interview was conducted over email and has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Sohini Basak (SB): As a point of departure, could you tell us which writers you have been reading these days? And are you working on something new?

Ghayath Almadhoun (GB): I am now re-reading Tarafah ibn al-Abd. He was so young when he died, in the sixth century (around twenty-six years old). He is a great poet and could be described as pre-postmodern as he was ahead of his times. I’m also reading Closely Watched Trains by Bohumil Hrabal.

About my work, I have begun a new project—my fifth poetry book. I find myself in front of the question that I faced when I started writing more than twenty years ago: will I survive this time? Will I be able to write something new? And, like always, I punch the world in the face and continue writing.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

March 16, 2018  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Hodna Nuernberg, Jacqueline Leung, and Noah Ross

Our weekly roundup of literary news brings us to Morocco, Hong Kong, and the United States.

We are back with the latest from around the world! This week we hear about Morocco, Hong Kong, and the United States. Enjoy!

Hodna Nuernberg, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Morocco

Some seven hundred exhibitors from Morocco and around the world descended on Casablanca for the Salon international de l’edition et du livre, which took place from February 9-18. Half open-air souk (rumor had it that one of the ambulatory vendors went so far as to offer women’s panties for sale!), half oasis of high culture, the book fair counted over 125,000 titles from forty-five different countries. Egypt, this year’s guest of honor, accounted for nearly fifteen percent of the titles on offer alone, and managed to ruffle more than a few feathers when an Egyptian publisher was allegedly caught displaying a book (A Brief History of Africa) whose cover featured a map of the continent depicting a “mutilated” Morocco—the disputed territory of the Western Sahara appearing as an independent nation under the Polisario flag. The presence of the book was firmly denied by the Ministry of Culture.

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In Conversation with Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez

March 15, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

We mustn’t be allowed to be jailed by our own countries.

Last October, the Spanish publishing house Alfaguara put out Ya nadie llora por mí, the most recent novel from the acclaimed Nicaraguan writer, Sergio Ramírez and sequel to his 2009 novel, El cielo llora por mí (The Sky Cries for Me). A couple of weeks later, the Spanish Ministry of Culture announced that Sergio was the winner of the 2017 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the most important literary award for Spanish-language writers. Other laureates include Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Sergio is the first Central American writer to receive this distinction. He has published around thirty books, two of which have been translated into English: Divine Punishment (McPherson & Company) and the 1998 Alfaguara Prize winning novel Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea (Curbstone Books).

Three months later, Sergio and I—his umpteenth interviewer since November—got together at a fancy hotel on the misty mountains of Guatemala City, hours before he presented Ya nadie llora por mí in SOPHOS bookstore. I imagined all the questions Sergio had answered during the past few months. What does it feel like to have won it? Where were you when you got the news? Can you give us a preview of your acceptance speech? I should ask him about his favorite Guatemalan dish, I thought, to shake things up.

Sergio is kind but equally incisive, serene, and voracious. He speaks with care and potency about Central American literature, being a writer, and Centro América Cuenta. Hosted in Nicaragua, this is the biggest literary festival of the region that seeks to strengthen Central American writers and bring them closer to the rest of Ibero-America. Sergio, with a cup of coffee in his hand, is also critical of the contaminated reality of his country. A reality from which his work often comes to life.

In Ya nadie llora por mí (Nobody cries for me anymore) inspector Dolores Morales has been discharged from the National Police, and he now works as a private investigator. He mostly handles cases about adultery for clients with no money. Then the disappearance of a millionaire’s daughter takes him out of his routine. In Sergio’s latest novel we also get to see how corruption and abuse of power underlie the revolutionary discourse of contemporary Nicaragua.

“As a citizen, I desire a different reality,” he says. “As a writer, I take advantage of it.”

Sergio is arguably the most important Central American writer today.

José García Escobar (JGE): What was it like to revisit detective Dolores Morales for your latest book? Did you have the story for Ya nadie llora por mí first, and then realized you needed Dolores to tell it? Or was it the other way around?

Sergio Ramírez (SR): I came up with the story first. I wanted to write about Nicaragua today, and for this, I needed a character like Dolores: a detective and former guerrilla. Noir fiction, or novela negra, as we call it, gives me the opportunity to look at the events I’m writing about from afar. With this distance I can add humor, irony. Also, given his background, this character helped work around that distance. Dolores is often bound by his ethic, a type of ethic he picked up from his years as a guerrillero; he uses that critical thought and critical distance for his work, but at the same time he’s always at risk of getting contaminated by that environment. He observes the situations as he would have in the past and is that moral nostalgia and critical distance that allows my character to lead the book.

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In Review: Banthology, edited by Sarah Cleave

March 14, 2018  |  in Reviews  |  by Cassie Lawrence

Good stories help us to make sense of the world.

In January 2017, independent British publisher Comma Press announced that in 2018 they would only be publishing authors from ‘banned nations’. This was a response to President Trump’s directive to block entry to citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries for ninety days. Whilst continuing to generate hate and divide people, Trump’s announcement did give rise to some positive news. Organisations around the world stood up to fight for the rights of the citizens of these countries. In a show of solidarity, Asymptote’s Spring 2017 issue featured writing from authors in many of the countries affected. And now, a new title from Comma Press, Banthology: Stories from Unwanted Nations, has just been published in this spirit.

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Translation Tuesday: “Concealed Words” by Sin Yong-Mok

March 13, 2018  |  in Translations  |  by Brother Anthony of Taizé and Sin Yong-Mok

Nobody had stolen the sound of my footsteps.

Today we bring you a poem from a lauded South Korean poet, Sin Yong-Mok, in a translation by Brother Anthony of Taizé that is sensitive to the sonorous aspects of Sin’s lines. If you enjoyed this, be sure to check out the poetry section in the Winter 2018 issue of Asymptote.

Concealed Words

God used up all the summer heat trying to sew the sound of rain inside rain. It was morning when, in order to retrieve one raindrop dropped by mistake, mists roamed the ground.

If there’s a leaky roof the water may be an abraded stone.

I enabled that stone to hear a sound of footsteps.

One day at an estuary I happened to pick up one raindrop. Nobody had stolen the sound of my footsteps.

Translated from the Korean by Brother Anthony of Taizé

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On Surtitles and Simultaneities: Reflections on the German Theatre Scene

March 12, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Flora Brandl

No longer before, behind, or above the original, with surtitles, the translation is now parallel or simultaneous to it.

Lars Eidinger, playing Richard III, huskily whispers some German lines of Shakespeare into an amplifier, furtively glances up to the English surtitles, and spins round to berate a coughing audience member in French. This is theatre in a truly globalised arts scene. But the multilingual nature of many recent productions not only reflects the realities of our contemporary social conditions. It raises fundamental questions about the nature and role of the linguistic mediation of culture today.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

March 9, 2018  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Barbara Halla, Erik Noonan, and Theophilus Kwek

Our weekly roundup of the world's literary news brings us to France, Singapore, and the United States.

It’s Friday, which means it is time to catch up on the literary news from around the world, brought to you by our fabulous Asymptote team! This week, we highlight France, Singapore, and the United States. 

Barbara Halla, Editor-at-Large, reporting from France:

As previewed in our January dispatch, Paris is getting ready to host its annual Book Fair, starting March 16. The spotlight this year will be on contemporary Russian literature, with thirty-eight guests including Olga Slavnikova, Vladimir Charov, and Alexandre Sneguirev—all previous winners of the Russian Booker Prize. But even before the fair opens its literal doors, another event is organized in Southern France to satisfy those readers that can’t make it to Paris. Bron, a commune of Lyon, will hold its first Book Festival, dedicated entirely to contemporary fiction, between March 7 and 11. The festival celebrates those French authors who showcase the heterogeneous nature of the novel itself, with a spotlight on the works of Jean-Baptiste Andréa, Delphine Coulin, Pierre Ducrozet, Thomas Gunzig, and Monica Sabolo.

March is also Women’s History Month and French publishers have joined in the effort to promote literature by women and on women. Folio, a Gallimard imprint, has launched its “Femmes Prodigieuses” (“Brilliant Women”—a play on Elena Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend”) campaign on social media, urging readers to read and share the works of their favourite women authors. Folio’s own suggested reading list include classics and contemporary authors, from Virginia Woolf to Marie NDiaye and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Beyond just the campaign, publishers are celebrating Women’s History Month by simply publishing more women. Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir “L’age de discrétion” (“The Age of Discretion”), analysing womanhood at sixty and beyond, will be published for the first time as a standalone book. Albin Michel, another major publisher, will publish Susan Rubin Suleiman’s “La question Némirovsky,” a biography of Irène Némirovsky, of “Suite Française” fame, to paint a portrait of a great, and yet forgotten, author.

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Asymptote Book Club: In Conversation with Martin Aitken

March 8, 2018  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Jacob Silkstone

Love can be a terrible thing, as terrible as its absence.

Continuing our monthly series of Asymptote Book Club interviews, Martin Aitken discusses his translation of Hanne Ørstavik’s Love.

Aitken, currently translating the sixth volume of Knausgård’s My Struggle alongside Don Bartlett, tells Asymptote’s Jacob Silkstone how readers are now more open to the idea that “English isn’t all there is,” and why it’s sometimes better to “switch yourself off as a translator and just read.” And, given the novel’s title, there’s also time for a brief meditation on love’s potential to be “a terrible thing, as terrible as its absence.”

Jacob Silkstone (JS): Love strikes me as a book that changes tone dramatically when read for a second time. Apparently innocuous lines (“He thinks he’ll look out for her on the bus tomorrow,” for example) suddenly take on a tremendous amount of weight. Do you generally read a novel cover to cover before beginning a new translation, to get a sense of where the plot is heading, or do you start translating immediately?

Martin Aitken (MA): This is a very short book, a novella, and every sentence in the Norwegian has been faceted very carefully indeed. The translator’s challenge is to poise the target-language sentences in the same way. I couldn’t envisage embarking on a novel like this without having read it first. I used to jump in at the deep end a lot, with crime fiction especially. There’s always a risk of being caught out by twists of plot when you do that, though of course rectifying mistakes is a lot easier these days than I imagine it used to be. However, with literary fiction I now prefer to spend time with the original before getting started on anything. With a novel like Love, so much of the work is about immersing yourself in the atmosphere of the piece, and I think the best way into that is to switch yourself off as a translator and just read. Getting the sense of the thing as a reader first, listening to its music as you move through the story, is a different thing entirely from the focus applied in crafting the translation.

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What’s New with the Crew? A Monthly Update

March 7, 2018  |  in News  |  by Sasha Burik

Stay up-to-date with the literary accomplishments of the wonderful Asymptote team!

Contributing Editor Aamer Hussein participated in the Sixth Annual Lahore Literary Festival on 24 February, 2018 at the Alhamra Arts Center.

Communications Manager Alexander Dickow won a PEN/Heim grant for his translation of Sylvie Kandé’s Neverending Quest for the Other Shore: An Epic in Three Cantos.

Drama Editor Caridad Svich published an article entitled Six Hundred and Ninety-Two Million: On Art, Ethics, and Activism on HowlRound. Her play, An Acorn, recently opened at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island.

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Translation Tuesday: “Surface Effects” by Francesc Serés

March 6, 2018  |  in Translations  |  by Lawrence Venuti

The ivy recovered. It spent two years fighting off that ochre evil until it returned to its formerly exultant state.

This week the eminent Lawrence Venuti brings us a curious story from Catalonia about a house consumed by ivy. The existence and appearance of this menacing plant dominates this rural community and the people who inhabit it.

The house came with a garden—like all the others in the promotion. It was large, three floors, and had a slate roof. Not till Cinta and Pere bought the thing did it change. Ivy began to envelop the ochre façade. They had planted it after falling out with the neighborhood. The houses were painted in a bright earth tone, an ochre that possessed a concrete reference. The only distinguishing feature was the uneven discoloration that the sun caused to the paint. At community meetings, Cinta and Pere would dig in their heels against their next door neighbors on either side and, finally, against everybody else. They (she, and he too, although not as much) wanted the ivy.

And so they planted it and installed an American mailbox, which wasn’t permitted either. That broke the perpetual peace that reigned over urbanization in the countryside. They contracted a gardening firm to fertilize the grounds and plant ivy all around the house. The ivy liked the place: it grew like a shot. From my house, just beyond the development, the ivy on the east wall seemed quite like a hand or paw clinging to it. Time passed quickly for the neighboring houses, and the hand continued to grow nonstop till its entwining tentacles reached the nearby façades.

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