The Return of the Flood: How ISIS is Destroying Iraq’s Literary Heritage

April 8, 2015  |  in Essays, News  |  by Paul M. M. Cooper

Paul M.M. Cooper assesses the damage done to Iraqi literature and heritage by ISIS’s destruction of thousands of undeciphered cuneiform tablets.

ISIS continues to shock the world with calculated acts of cultural vandalism: taking sledgehammers and electric drills to the millennia-old pieces of art held at Mosul Museum, bulldozing the archaeological sites of Nimrud and Dur-Sharrukin, and most recently releasing a video showing the destruction of artefacts at Hatra. While the predictable images of gleeful vandalism circulate on social media, archaeologists took stock of the antiquities destroyed: statues of the kings of Hatra that form “the finest of all the sculptures unearthed” in the region, several enormous winged bulls with human heads known as lamassu, and assorted irreplaceable relics of the Babylonian, Persian and Roman Empires.

ISIS’s goals are clear: to destroy anything that hints at the region’s pluralistic past, and to strike a blow full of impotent cruelty against the Iraqi government and international organisations such as the UN and UNESCO. Against this backdrop and coupled with the stunning callousness of the group’s ongoing humanitarian atrocities, it has been easy to overlook another loss, one felt particularly acutely by lovers of international literature the world over: that of the still-undeciphered cuneiform tablets caught up in ISIS’s frenzy of destruction. READ MORE…

Is Complex Literature More Rewarding? A Dispatch

April 7, 2015  |  in Dispatches  |  by Dave Haysom

A dispatch from the Beijing Bookworm

Fish, fungi, kittens, and cockroaches mirror the protagonists in Mexican author Guadalupe Nettel’s psychologically incisive tales. In the fictional world of Hong Kong’s Dorothy Tse, brutal violence unfolds according to the incomprehensible but irrefutable logic of nightmares. Xi Ni Er preserves slices of a changing Singapore in his condensed, dialogue-driven micro-narratives.

“Complex literature” is not an unreasonable description for the work of any of these writers, but it is an awkwardly nebulous pretext for putting them on a stage together. At the beginning of the event, they sometimes seemed burdened by the duty to engage with the topic and valiantly attempt to define what complex literature might or might not be. READ MORE…

Contributing a Voice: Interviewing Guest Artist Shuxian Lee

April 6, 2015  |  in Interviews  |  by Berny Tan

“I believe in at least making work about what I have felt or experienced or strongly believe in. Only then do I feel the urge to make art at all.”

Antwerp-based illustrator Shuxian Lee is Asymptote’s guest artist for the January issue. Her joyous, Escher-esque cover image is perfect for our 4th anniversary, while her beautiful, evocative, and often poignant illustrations accompany a total of seventeen texts. I interview her about her process and inspirations, and find out more about her graphic novels.

Berny Tan: I find your illustrations incredibly rich in both texture and colour. Could you take us through your process of conceiving and executing each piece?

Shuxian Lee: I’m quite a visual person—when I read something or feel something, I get these viewpoints in my head that are sometimes quite filmic and are related to a certain mood. Sometimes, when I come across certain expressions, I’m reminded of certain artworks or patterns that inspire me. I love to draw references to paintings because painters (mostly 19th- and 20th-century ones) are some of my biggest inspirations and first loves!

Once I get this image in my head, then I’ll sketch thumbnails of some of the ideas—though to be honest, I’m quite lazy about this part because I usually already have the finished composition in my head. Next, I look for reference images for colour, gesture or to get the perspectives right, then I start sketching. I usually make my own reference images too, and I rely a lot on my partner (or myself) as a model for my characters.

If the sketch works, I get started with the inking, then I scan it and colour it in Photoshop. I love organic textures of paint and dirt and brush marks, so I try to integrate that during the digital colouring too. In general, I work with non-digital mediums, but it’s nice to discover ways to replicate the non-digital look on Photoshop. I actually only started using Photoshop to colour a few years ago, so I’m still figuring out lots of things.

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Weekly News Roundup, 3rd April 2015: Judges Bicker, Joke’s on You!

April 3, 2015  |  in News  |  by Patty Nash

This week's literary highlights from across the world

Happiest of Fridays! Hard to believe we are already entering the fourth month of 2015. But this stretch of spring means we’re well into literary awards season, as well as awards-speculation. Close to our heart, Three Percent‘s Best Translated Book Award is just iiiiinches away from announcing the long-awaited longlist. Want some clues? Tickle your curiosity here and here. And the judges for the United States-based National Book Award have been announced. And in the Morning News’ Tournament of Books, judge Steven Merritt has ruffled feathers with disparaging reviews of Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light we Cannot See.  READ MORE…

Hunger and the Artist: Interviewing Windham Campbell Prizewinner Helon Habila

April 1, 2015  |  in Interviews  |  by Nicole Idar

An interview with Nigerian author Helon Habila, winner of a 2015 Windham Campbell Prize in Fiction

The Windham Campbell Prize, launched just two years ago, has quickly become one of the most sought-after literary awards in the world, offering recipients the financial freedom to write with a $150,000 no-strings-attached grant. This year, Nigeria-born Helon Habila, author of the novels Waiting for an Angel (Norton, 2002), Measuring Time (Norton, 2007), and Oil on Water (Norton, 2010), received a Windham Campbell Prize in the Fiction category. Established by Donald Windham and Sandy M. Campbell, who were artists themselves, the prize recognizes writers writing in English from anywhere in the world.

Nicole Idar: The Windham Campbell Prize was inspired by Donald Windham’s own experiences as a young writer struggling to support himself, and in your own work you’ve written about young writers faced with this very struggle—Diaz, the narrator and aspiring journalist in “The Hotel Malogo,” for example. When you were first starting out as a writer, you worked as an editor for several years in Lagos. How has this struggle to balance art with financial security shaped you as a writer?

Helon Habila: Hunger, both metaphorical and literal, is always good for the artist. It sharpens your focus and drives you on. There’s a beautiful essay by Ben Okri on this subject, published in the British Council’s New Writing anthology a long time ago. It is based on his own experiences as a struggling writer in London. He describes how hunger would literally wake you up at night and drive you to the writing desk. But of course the best work on this subject for me is Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. Yet, when the hunger becomes too much, it becomes a burden, not a helper. You might, for instance, find yourself writing about food for no discernible reason. I wrote my first book mostly hungry, with no computer, and by candle light because our electricity wasn’t working. This was in Lagos. I had to go to work at 7 am, and get home at around 7 pm, rest for a few hours and start writing by candle light till around 3 am. Then rest and go to work at 7 am. It was tough, but it shaped me in so many ways. I am glad that book worked out, it went on to win the Caine Prize and got me my first book deal with Penguin and Norton. It would have been devastating if it didn’t. READ MORE…

In Review: The Scapegoat

April 1, 2015  |  in Reviews  |  by Isabel Lower

“Even though the mystery is decades old by the time it reaches the main character, The Scapegoat is a page-turner.”

It is always a good sign when a book makes you laugh on the first page. In the opening scene of Sophia Nikolaidou’s novel, The Scapegoat, an American reporter named Jack Talas observes a dirty and scabbed old villager, “A man who took life as it came and made the most of it—or so he seemed to the American, who’d been raised on eggs and bacon, had studied at expensive schools, had seen plenty of poor people in photographs. Now he wrote dispatches about them, and he did so with compassion.”

With compassion. This phrase evoked such a bombastic, self-assured character it made me laugh out loud. However, if you’re dead set on comedy, that’s too bad. Because by the next page, Jack Talas is a corpse, found floating in the Mediterranean with cuttlefish eggs in his eyelashes. The Scapegoat is based on the murder of CBS reporter George Polk, who, like his fictional double Talas, was in Greece in 1948 to expose the government’s corrupted use of American aid relief.

Talas makes enemies of everyone: the government, the communists, and even the Americans. But it is a fellow journalist, named Manolis Gris, who is accused of murdering Talas. However, the forces behind Gris’s indictment reach far beyond Gris himself.

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New in Translation: March 2015

March 31, 2015  |  in Reviews  |  by Dylan Suher, Eva Richter, and Patty Nash

Yan Lianke's The Four Books, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's The Dead Mountaineer's Inn, and Addendum to a Photo Album by Vladislav Otroshenko

To imagine the Great Leap Forward—an event that began as a febrile dream and ended as an apocalyptic nightmare—tests the limits of the lucid consciousness. In late 1957, Mao Zedong declared that China could “surpass the UK and catch up to the US” through backyard steel furnaces, experimental agricultural practices, and sheer force of will. Village officials vied with each other to promise impossibly high crop yields; newspapers printed staged photos of experimental rice fields planted so densely that they could support the weight of children. Now it’s hard to understand how anyone sincerely believed, or even pretended to believe, that such outcomes were possible. When famine hit in 1958, the crisis was compounded by an unwillingness on the part of the government to admit failure to Mao or to the citizenry. As a result, China exported grain while millions—anywhere between twenty to forty million between 1959 and 1961—starved to death. We may never know the true death toll, as the Great Famine is more taboo a topic in China than even the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution: where responsibility for the Cultural Revolution can be safely foisted onto a group of extremists, the Great Famine is the original sin of the People’s Republic. The Communist Party has therefore consistently sought to efface from public memory the realities of the most lethal famine in human history.

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In Praise of Translation

March 30, 2015  |  in Multimedia, Podcast  |  by Emma Jacobs

An all-new podcast episode! Listen to some of the best moments from our live event in London

If you missed our fourth anniversary event in London this January, never fear! Our newest podcast episode brings you highlights from the evening. Listen to Adam Thirlwell, Daniel Hahn, Stefan Tobler and Deborah Smith discuss books they love, translation pitfalls they avoid, and the meaning of the German euphemism “to shake the coconut from the palm tree.”

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About the speakers:

Stefan Tobler is the publisher at And Other Stories, a young publishing house whose titles include the Booker Prize shortlisted Swimming Home by Deborah Levy and much literature in translation, including the Latin American authors Juan Pablo Villalobos, Iosi Havilio, Carlos Gamerro, Haroldo Conti, Yuri Herrera, Rodrigo de Souza Leão and Paulo Scott. He is a literary translator from Portuguese and German. Recent translations include All Dogs are Blue by Rodrigo de Souza Leão, Água Viva by Clarice Lispector and Silence River by Antônio Moura. @stefantobler and @andothertweets

Adam Thirlwell’s new novel, Lurid & Cute, was published in January 2015. He has written two novels, a novella, and a project with translations that includes an essay-book and an anthology edited for McSweeney’s. He has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. His work has been translated into 30 languages.

Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator (from Portuguese, Spanish and French) with some forty books to his name. His work has won both the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award. He is currently chair of the Society of Authors and on the judging panel for the 2015 IMPAC Dublin Award.

Deborah Smith (@londonkoreanist) is the translator of The Vegetarian by Han Kang (Portobello Books, 2015). She has also translated The Essayist’s Desk and The Low Hills of Seoul by Bae Suah. She is currently in the final year of a Korean literature PhD at SOAS, and is setting up a non-profit publishing company which will publish translations from Asian and African languages, after apprenticing with And Other Stories.

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Weekly News Roundup, 27 March 2015: The Knausgaard/Ferrante Personality Test, Leo’d Be Proud

March 27, 2015  |  in News  |  by Patty Nash

This week's literary highlights from around the world

Whoop, whoop, blog fiends—it’s Friday! You’ve probably already partaken in your fair share of literary personality quizzes (they provide a cheap alternative to psychoanalysis when your insurance goes bad, and it’s always heartening to read you’re more of a Dumbledore than a Malfoy), but the New Yorker‘s article contrasting Italian recluse Elena Ferrante with Norwegian road-tripper Karl Ove Knausgaard is of particular interest to those of us interested in more international literary trends. (Meanwhile, if you’re excited for the English-language release of Book 4 of Knausgaard’s My Struggle, you can read an exclusive excerpt here).  READ MORE…

The Latest from Our Editors & Contributors

March 26, 2015  |  in News  |  by Eva Richter

Updates from Asymptote’s international team: new publications, plays, and exhibitions for the curious reader!

Past contributor Aya Ogawa is proud to see her play Ludic Proxy near its world premiere at New York’s The Play Company. Each act of this multi-media play centers around a distinct story: Act 1, in the past, takes place in Chernobyl; Act 2, in the present, is about Fukushima; and Act 3 takes viewers to the future. The play explores our relationship to technology and is a “beautiful, haunting and magical piece that pulls you into uncharted territory where memory, fantasy and virtual reality swirl together.” First previews begin April 1, and the not-to-be-missed play runs until May 2 at WalkerSpace in TriBeCa, 46 Walker St, NYC.

“The surreal atmosphere of Self-Portrait in Green began to create disturbances in my own reality,” writes assistant editor Erin Gilbert in her review of Marie NDiaye’s obsessive memoir, now up on Brevity. She also has a poem in Issue 13 of Structo. 

Editor-at-large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood saw her and Peter Sherwood’s translation of Ilona: My Life with the Bard published by Calypso Editions. The duo deliver a “superb translation [that] renders faithfully the sense of a woman’s world around the nostalgic period of the fin de siècle,” according to Martin Votruba of the University of Pittsburgh—just one bit of the extensive praise that Jana Juráňová’s novel-in-English-translation has received.

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The Tiff: Is the Translator Responsible for Political Problem Texts?

March 25, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by M. Lynx Qualey and Yardenne Greenspan

Yardenne Greenspan and Marcia Lynx Qualey on the choices we translators can make

M. Lynx Qualey: The most important decision a translator must make is: Will I translate this text?

Being an essentially freelance profession, translation has a mountain of drawbacks, but it does make a bit more allowance for choice. The injunction to “translate only what you love” works—as long as you have a stable income outside of translating. I prefer Samah Selim’s version: “Never translate a book you don’t like unless you have to.” Or my own: “Never translate a text you think you’ll regret (unless creditors are outside the window).”

Yet what makes for a “politically problematic” text may have less to do with the text itself and more to do with context. Propagandists thrive on selective translation. The MEMRI “media monitoring organization,” described by Guardian reporter Brian Whitaker, is perhaps the largest ongoing Arabic-English translation project. Some of the individual news and cultural texts that MEMRI translates might be innocuous, but the project as a whole furthers a political agenda.

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Four Poems by Tóroddur Poulsen

March 24, 2015  |  in Translations  |  by Randi Ward

Translated by Randi Ward

Under Black Sails

 

questioning why the fog’s green

is my goodnight to the godless

and my good evening

to a hasty summer

of trains that don’t run on time

and rain that always wants to be first

with the freshest of the fresh

so the dance can bloom

on the great sloom’s deck

as it heads straight into a glare of cold

where the comatose lie

awaiting passage home to the dull life

the superficial love

because they don’t think

there’s anything else

when a person can’t be

like a garbage truck in paradise

that’s forgotten its way

to the incinerator

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An Interview with the “Turnip Princess” Translator, Maria Tatar

March 23, 2015  |  in Interviews  |  by Patty Nash

Beyond Brothers Grimm, beyond Hans Christian Andersen: "There's nothing like this collection in English."

The following is an interview with translator Maria Tatar, of Franz Xaver Von Schönwerth’s The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Tales, available here—and if you’d like a taste, check out our recent Translation Tuesday, featuring the short story “The Enchanted Fiddle!”

Could you talk about the Turnip Princess and what sort of fairy tales they are?

Schönwerth collected his stories from farmhands, domestic servants, artisans —people who worked for a living and were experts in the art of gossip, improvisation, talk, and storytelling. His official work took him into royal quarters, but he was deeply committed to capturing tales told by adults in workrooms and around the hearth. Unlike the Grimms, who were equal-opportunity collectors, begging and borrowing from all social classes, Schönwerth wanted tales untainted by literary influences—hence the rough-hewn quality of many of his stories.   He did not smooth out rough edges, add psychological motivation, or make stylistic “improvements.” The Turnip Princess lets us listen in to storytelling sessions from times past. And suddenly, once you’ve read a a dozen or so of these tales, you begin to see how they were put together and animated for audiences.

How did you prepare to translate this sort of writing?

I suppose I could say that I have been preparing for this work all my life. I was trilingual for a brief period as a child, speaking Hungarian, German, and English—never confusing them according to my parents, and thank goodness for that. My graduate work in German Studies took a literary turn, and I did not begin research on folklore and fairy tales in earnest until I started reading fairy tales to my children in the 1980s. Translating the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen for my annotated editions of their work was in some ways actually not the best training ground for Schönwerth. The Grimms and Andersen strive for a carefully constructed folksy tone; Schönwerth by contrast just puts on the page what he hears. I often had to resist the temptation to smooth out the rough edges and create a reader-friendly story. READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 20th March 2015: London Nominees, PEN Nominees!

March 20, 2015  |  in News  |  by Patty Nash

This week's literary highlights from across the world

Yay, it’s Friday! Here at Asymptote we are especially giddy this weekend because of a gosh-wow shortlist nomination from the London Book Fair—alongside two other notable organizations, Asymptote journal is nominated for an International Excellence Award, for Initiative in International Translation. Keep your fingers crossed for us!—but really, it is such an honor to be recognized for the hard literary work we do. And the PEN Awards longlists have been announced—of special interest to us, of course, are the poetry in translation and fiction in translation categories (we’re happy to note that Danish writer Naja Marie Aidt, blog interviewee, has been nominated—read a selection of Baboon, featured on Translation Tuesday, here)!

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