Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from The House of the Edrisis by Ghazeleh Alizadeh

October 8, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by M. R. Ghanoonparvar

Occasionally, outside the windowpane, she saw an apparition of her dead husband in a cotton summer suit . . .

This Translation Tuesday we present an excerpt from celebrated Iranian novelist Ghazeleh Alizadeh’s The House of the Edrisis, a novel about the perils and pathos of a world remade by revolution. The story revolves around a once-affluent aristocratic family and their majestic house, a decaying and melancholy backdrop for the unfolding drama among a colorful cast of disgraced family members and disillusioned revolutionaries. Set in Central Asia, Alizadeh’s story cleverly parallels the Islamic Revolution in Iran and offers an intimate portrait of both young ideologues-turned-tyrants and jaded women whose hope for change slowly fades. With a sardonic tone and elements of black comedy and farce, The House of the Edrisis offers an engrossing reflection on a turbulent history and the enduring spirit of men and women living through it.

The emergence of chaos is not sudden in any house; a soft dust settles in the cracks of the wood, the folds of the sheets, the seams of the windows, and the pleats of the curtains, waiting for a breeze to find its way into the house through an open door, and release the components of dispersion from their place of entrapment.

In the house of the Edrisis, life went on as usual. The wall clock with its engraved frame and its top covered with the images of birds and flowers, the work of Bukhara turners, struck ten times.

Leqa looked at her wristwatch, adjusted it forward, and got up from the breakfast table. She swept up the breadcrumbs to feed the fish.

Vahab, the young man of the family, took the last sip of tea from a lapis lazuli–colored Sèvres cup, swallowed his yawn, and turned toward Mrs. Edrisi. “He feels better today.”

The elderly lady shifted her glasses on her nose; her eyes behind the glasses were a cloudy blue. “Nothing that he does is clear.”

The fog came halfway down the arched windows, rubbed against the windowpanes, spun, and went toward the pine and spruce trees. From the end of the entrance hall came the sound of the washing of dishes, the opening of the faucet, and the bubbling of the samovar. In the kitchen, Yavar, occasionally coughing, dragged his feet when he walked. READ MORE…

Guilty But Not Intentional: Carla Bessa on Traversing Germanophone and Lusophone Literary Worlds

October 7, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

We [translators] have to . . . make the text breathe (like an actor on stage) in the language, time, and culture of the target audience.

Carla Bessa wears many hats: theater actress, director, poet, short story writer, novelist, and translator. Born in Rio de Janeiro and now based in Berlin, she has translated Germanophone writers—Max Frisch (Switzerland), Ingeborg Bachmann (Austria), Thomas Macho (Austria), Christa Wolf (Germany), and more—into Brazilian Portuguese for São Paulo-based publishers WMF Martins Fontes and Editora Estação Liberdade, as well as Editora Trinta Zero Nove in Mozambique. As a translator, she works on fiction and nonfiction as well as young adult and children’s literature. As a writer, she writes what may be termed as “cross-genre” or “hybrid works,” questioning the boundaries demarcating limitless possibilities; this would eventually earn her Brazil’s most important literary award, the Prêmio Jabuti, given to her short story collection Urubus (The Vultures, Confraria do vento, 2019).

In this interview, I spoke with Carla on her award-winning works that cross the conventional genres of poetry, play, and prose; linguistic politics in the Lusophone world; and the intricacies of translating German-language writers into the Brazilian Portuguese.

Author photo by Hubert Börsig.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Urubus and Todas uma, two of your short story collections, were translated by Lea Hübner into the German for Transit Verlag. Your 2017 book, Aí eu fiquei sem esse filho, on other hand, was rendered into the Greek by Nikos Pratsinis for Skarifima Editions. In the Anglosphere, you have been translated by Fábio Mariano and Elton Uliana. To anyone working on your works from their Brazilian Portuguese originals, what demands do you think these translators would face—in particular those translating you into German and English?

Carla Bessa (CB): The other day, I read an interview with my colleague Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel—the German translator of Nobel laureate Jon Fosse—in which he said: “Every literary text is an aesthetic project in its own terms. The translation is good if it realizes this aesthetic project in a style that is appropriate and consistent without breaks.”

I agree with that, despite the particularities of syntactic and verbal structures between Brazilian Portuguese and German. (As for English: I haven’t mastered this language in depth, but I dare say that the differences are minor.) I believe that the greatest difficulty in translating my texts is not of a textual or grammatical nature, but a cultural one. In my writing, I work very closely with spoken language, sometimes even using a kind of verbatim technique. So the translator of my work needs to have an in-depth knowledge not only of the environment where the stories take place—specifically the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro—but also, and above all, of the musicality of the Brazilian Portuguese spoken in these layers of society that I portray. I was very pleased that the translators who have translated me into English so far—Elton Uliana and Fabio Mariano—are Brazilian. Normally, we tend to think that a literary translator should have the target language as their mother tongue, but I don’t think that applies to all types of texts. In my case, the main challenge lies precisely in transferring this specific social environment with its many overlapping layers of cultural influences into the language and reality of German- and English-speaking countries, because this environment and its characters are the basis of my aesthetic project: to return here to the idea presented by Schmidt-Henkel.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

October 4, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, René Esaú Sánchez, and Sofija Popovska

The latest from Mexico, North Macedonia, and the Philippines!

In this week’s round-up of literary news from around the world, our editors report on an exciting translation-centric colloquium in Mexico, a prestigious award going to a new translation of one of North Macedonia’s most canonical novels, and the Frankfurt Book Fair’s spotlighting of the Philippines in its 2025 edition—a choice that has met resistance from local publishers due to the fair’s Zionist sympathies.

René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Mexico

They say that no matter what you do, there is always a saint from which you can ask for help. In the case of translators, that is Saint Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin. Following the Council of Trent, his translation became the official Latin Bible in the western hemisphere.

With this in mind, the fourth Coloquio de Traducción Literaria San Jerónimo (Saint Jerome Literary Translation Colloquium) took place last week in Veracruz, Mexico. The event was dedicated to fully immersing participants in the art of translation and fostering discussions on what it truly means to translate. It was organized by the Culture Office of Veracruz and the independent publishing company Aquelarre Ediciones, which also sponsors a prize dedicated to literary translation.

Among the participants were notable figures such as Fabián Espejel, the recent winner of the Bellas Artes Margarita Michelena Literary Translation Award; Mario Murguía, who won the same prize last year; José Miguel Barajas, the translator of Mallarmé into Spanish; and José Luis Rivas, a poet who has translated works by Derek Walcott, John Donne, Ezra Pound, William Shakespeare, and T.S. Eliot. READ MORE…

A Literary Cocktail of Fiction, Non-Fiction and Autofiction: On After Kafka by Magdaléna Platzová

October 3, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel

Platzová options a radical methodology of writing that reveals the unanswerable questions composing our present. . .

Life After Kafka by Magdaléna Platzová, translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker, Bellevue Literary Press, 2024

Collage is perhaps the best term to describe Czech author Magdaléna Platzová’s Life after Kafka (Život po Kafkovi), recently translated into English by Alex Zucker. The cover of the book distinguishes the text as a novel, yet its two hundred and fifty pages are in effect an intricate labyrinth of letters, diaries, interviews, fictions, and the author’s own descriptions of working on the book, all blurring the boundary between fact and imagination. Bringing these myriad fragments together is a common thread: the life of Felice Bauer, one of Kafka’s many women. To Platzová, she remains a mystery: “Who really was Felice Bauer? Who was the woman a generation of Kafka fans knew only as a lover of meaty dishes, heavy furniture, and precisely set watches? . . . Little is known of her life after Kafka. She got married, had two children, and immigrated to America. Did she leave any traces behind?”

This erasure in the numerous works of Kafkology inspired Platzová to spend ten years writing about Bauer, and the resulting text finally appeared in Czech in 2022 (with the English edition coincidentally being published this year, the one hundredth anniversary of Kafka’s death). Kafka’s life—a short one of forty years—was shared by at least six very different women, mostly Jewish, verging from Austrian, Czech, German, to Polish: Hedwig Weiler, Felice Bauer, Grete Bloch, Julie Wohryzek, Milena Jesenská (the only non-Jewish exception), and Dora Diamant. Academia and popular culture have mostly retained Jesenská—herself a prolific journalist and writer—and Diamant as the main feminine figures in Kafka’s life, but Bauer, who hailed from Berlin, was Kafka’s first fiancée. They first met in Prague in 1912, and maintained a relationship until 1917, when Kafka broke their engagement for the second time. Grete Bloch, who was a friend of Bauer’s, met Kafka in 1913 and ended up playing a major role between the two. Kafka also wrote letters to Bloch, and she later intervened in the relationship between him and Bauer, at a time when the couple was drifting apart. Platzová centers her narrative around these two female figures, telling the story of how their lives intersected in the shared link to Kafka, and how his letters became a focal point of their complicated existences in exile, haunting them to their last days. READ MORE…

“alchemic / exchange / we fade bruises here”: Rajiv Mohabir on Editing I Will Not Go: Translations, Transformations & Chutney Fractals

October 2, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

I offer these translations as a door that opens to a field of ancestral knowledge, with a threshold that is familiar while moving into a new space.

The cover of I Will Not Go: Translations, Transformations & Chutney Fractals features “Ties That Bind,” a mixed media piece on archival paper by Renluka Maharaj. In the pixelated color photo of an Indo-Caribbean wedding, the groom is about to fall asleep, the bride looks demure—perhaps trying to hide her laughter, carefree children chat in the corner, two fierce-looking women look daringly into the camera, and an elder female relative holds a moneybag. Following the ingenuity and the personality of the anthology’s cover—with sequins that imbue historical reality with fantasy—the contents of the text, divided into an introduction and five sections, are even more astonishing. I Will Not Go contains two translations, two fractals, and various lyrical essays about the translation/ writing process of seventeen Indo-Caribbean writers: Krystal Ramroop, Aliyah Khan, Divya Persaud, Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard, Nadia Misit, Alex Bacchus, Simone Devi Jhingoor, Andre Bagoo, Eddie Bruce-Jones, Anu Lakhan, Will Depoo, Natasha Ramoutar, Nicholas Peters, Anita Baksh, Miranda Rachel Deebrah, Elizabeth Jaikaran, Suzanne Persard, Chandanie Somwaru, and Ryan Persadie. Like Maharaj, each of the featured translators are descendants of indentured South Asian peoples or part of the Coolie diaspora in the Caribbean.

In Mohabir’s foreword, “Like Chutney Masala,” he describes the music that fuels these writings and translations: “Chutney music as cultural production is poetry: oral and performed. There is flexibility in the writing down of these words, the singing of them, the performance of them.” In terms of its sound, it “blends Afro-Caribbean beats with Indo-Caribbean experience and music.” Beginning with the base of two chutney songs, the translators reimagine the music and lyrics, adding their own inflections and personality that is oftentimes “smoothed out” as incorrect in the Western publishing process. As this multivocal and imaginative collection seeks to reveal, chutney music forces its listeners to hear in its lyrics and melodies the gender violence, sexism, and expectations of marriage within the Indo-Caribbean community—“an open secret.”

Tiffany Troy (TT): In your foreword to I Will Not Go, “Like Chutney Masala,” you wrote of how this collection is “. . . a kind of Caribbean, diasporic response to [Eliot Weinberger’s] 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. . .” How does I Will Not Go draw inspiration from and go beyond 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei in its conceptualization of chutney music?

Rajiv Mohabir (RM): For me, this book extends into a kind of spiritual realm whereby the translators all are descendants of indenture, and as such, they hold the particularities of our diaspora’s nuances in particular regard. What I mean is that this is not just an academic experiment; this work blends our own familial histories, our embodiments of music and rhythm, and writing skill. While 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei uses the editors’ essays to discuss what each translation does, the translators in I Will Not Go respond to their translational acts.

This brings me into another element that differs from I Will Not Go from Weinberger’s text: the translators add their original poetry that responds to their individual vision of chutney music’s afterlives. That we are haunted by our language loss is no secret—this is how colonization worked for many of us; we take in the colonizer’s messages about ourselves, and they go on to dwell in the deepest parts of our psyches. This anthology plumbs that depth, reaching into ourselves to see where chutney music (if it does at all) lives and loves inside of us. It’s personal and intimate, wrapped up in identity and ancestral trauma and joy. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Woman to Make Over the World” by Antoine Charbonneau-Demers

October 1, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Trask Roberts

If I want to make over the world, it must start with me.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present to you a short story by Antoine Charbonneau-Demers, translated from the French by Trask Roberts. In it, a son frantically tries to outrun his mother’s approaching death by embarking on a total makeover: an aesthetic project which requires, most crucially, a long-anticipated nose job. His dissatisfaction with his face mirrors his resentment of his Quebec hometown, polluted by chimney smoke. Both are the unappealing, defective raw materials from which he was forced to fashion his life. Yet even as he rejects his origins, he is drawn to recreate them through his physical transformation.  His ideal of beauty is, after all, his dying mother; he wishes to “breathe from the same smokestacks, taste the same exhaust fumes, the same deadly cold, the same snowy thoughts.”

At the clinic. 

—What is it about your nose that bothers you?  

If only I could come up with a good reason: I have a deviated septum, I struggle breathing, my nose keeps me from going out, from speaking—my nose, attached as it is to my windpipe, keeps me choked up, keeps me from living, plain for all to see—please, doctor, I’m begging you, fix it! But really, no, I don’t know what bothers me about my nose.  

—I don’t really like it.  

—Don’t really like it? 

—I’ve always thought the nose makes the face. So, if I fix my nose, my face will follow.  

—Yes, but… 

I start to cry. Nothing showy, nary a sniffle, no, just tears on a stolid face.   

—Young man, could it be that perhaps you’re not quite ready?  

—No, I’m crying because I hate my nose.  

READ MORE…

Announcing Our September Book Club Selection: A Long Walk From Gaza by Asmaa Alatawna

September 30, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

Alatawan’s novel is both personal and political; at its heart, it’s a story about freedom.

In Asmaa Alatawna’s mesmerizing and clear-sighted debut novel, A Long Walk from Gaza, the long journey of migration is revealed as a dense mosaic of innumerable moments—a gathering of the many steps one takes in growing up, in fighting back, and in learning the truths about one’s own life. From the Israeli occupation to the daily violences of womanhood, Alatawna’s story links our contemporary conflicts to the perpetual challenges of human society, tracking a mind as it steels itself against judgment and oppression, walking itself towards selfhood’s independent definitions. We are proud to present this title as our Book Club selection for the month of September; as Palestine remains under assault, A Long Walk from Gaza stands as a powerful narrative that resists the dehumanizing rhetoric of war.

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 USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

A Long Walk From Gaza by Asmaa Alatawna, translated from the Arabic by Caline Nasrallah and Michelle Hartman, Interlink Publishing, 2024

There are some books that grab you from the very first line and hold your attention tight, right through every single word to the end; even once you’ve finished reading them, they keep delivering with their exquisite phrasings and stunning imagery, their deft, original storytelling. Asmaa Alatawna’s A Long Walk from Gaza, co-translated by Caline Nasrallah and Michelle Hartman, is one such novel. Through her enthralling and thoughtful prose, Alatawna unfolds idea after idea, fact after fact, emotion after emotion, recounting a tumultuous upbringing and journey that moves with both personal and universal resonance.

A Long Walk from Gaza is Alatawna’s debut in both Arabic and English—a semi-fictionalized, coming-of-age novel. Originally published in 2019 as Sura Mafquda, it explores the struggles of a teenage Gazan girl as she rebels against her surroundings, both at home and at school, and her heartbreak as she leaves Gaza for a new life in Europe. Her escape doesn’t resolve her problems but instead introduces new challenges, revealing the persistent, ongoing internal conflict of exile. While portraying life and a childhood under Israeli occupation and oppression, Alatawna also takes an incisive, knowing look at the patriarchal system of her own people. READ MORE…

September 2024: Upcoming Opportunities in Translation

September 28, 2024  |  in News  |  by Kathryn Raver

From mentorships to new submission opportunities, check out this fall's latest opportunities in translation!

SUBMISSIONS

TWO LINES PRESS

Spooky season is nearly upon us, and Two Lines Press is getting into the spirit.

For their upcoming Calico, Two Lines is calling on translators to answer the question: “What is a ghost and what does it show about the place or culture it inhabits?” Ghost stories exist in every culture, and are steeped, often inseparably, in a combination of a place’s history, politics, religion, and folklore. Translators are encouraged to “shake the dust” from this genre and explore what makes a modern-day ghost story.

Short stories between 2,000 and 10,000 words will be considered. Submissions are open until November 18th. You can find additional information on how to submit here.

 

EDUCATION

ALTA EMERGING TRANSLATOR MENTORSHIPS

The American Literary Translators Association’s annual mentorship program is now open for applications!

Founded in 2015, ALTA’s mentorship program aims to establish a rapport between emerging and established translators. The mentor and mentee will work for one year together on a translation project of the mentee’s choosing, culminating in a reading of the work at ALTA’s annual fall conference. In its nearly ten years of existence, the program has supported over 70 translators working from 25 different languages.

The program is available to emerging translators—those who have published no more than one full-length literary translation. Applicants should submit their CV, a project proposal, and an 8-10 page sample translation. Applications are open from now to November 30th. Find more information here.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

September 27, 2024  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas and José García Escobar

The latest literary news from Bulgaria and Central America!

This week, our editors-at-large fill us in on literary controversies, new releases, and returning festivals. From a conflict over a literary prize in Bulgaria to new short story collections from Asymptote alums, read on to find out more!

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Bulgaria

In July, I reported on the then unfolding conflict surrounding the proclaimed winner of the Novel of the Year award, given by the endowment fund 13 Centuries Bulgaria. It had turned out that Boris Minkov, the editor of the book (Вулкан or “Volcano” by Elena Alexieva), had also been a member of the jury, a fact that seemingly everyone had overlooked. The heated debates surrounding the legitimacy of the final choice led to Alexieva giving up her prize and the annulment of the decision.

In a recent development, Manol Peykov, managing partner at Janet 45, Вулкан’s publishing house, announced he would be withdrawing all nominated Janet 45 books from the competition as a way of making a statement against the way the above-mentioned crisis was resolved. The formal written withdrawal, which he shared on his personal Facebook profile, described the manner of dealing with the situation as “unacceptable, unprofessional, unethical and unfair.” The document questioned an existing legal ambiguity in the contest’s terminology: “No less worrying is the fact that neither [the organizers’] statements nor the published rules of the competition make it clear exactly what the definition of ‘conflict of interest’ is. Is it a conflict of interest for a member of the jury to have been or currently be published by one of the participating publishers? Or be close friends (or even bitter enemies) with any of the nominees? Or to have very recently received an unequivocal rejection from one of the other participating publishers?”

An official reply has yet to be issued. READ MORE…

Every Word Translucent: Julia Sanches on Translating Eva Baltasar

September 26, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Hilary Ilkay

I think Eva is still trying the novel form on for size, figuring out what suits her.

In Mammoth, our Book Club selection for August, Eva Baltasar masterfully builds a sensually invigorating, intensely lucid character study of a woman that follows desire to its most extreme ends, drawing on the author’s cultivated themes of rebellion and self-liberation to lay wreckage to social norms, sexual standards, and the pretense of civility. Translated with finesse and lyric precision by her long-time English voice, Julia Sanches, the novel is by turns thrilling and disturbing, meticulously structured in its lines and its narrative; in line with Baltasar’s work as a poet, every word serves a purpose. Here, Sanches speaks to Hilary Ilkay about working with such fine prose, the necessary care taken on both linguistic and musical levels, and moving between strangeness and sense.

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 USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Hilary Ilkay (HI): Mammoth is the last of Eva Baltasar’s trio of novels that reflect uniquely on motherhood and maternity—and you’ve been the translator of all three. I’m wondering how you see Mammoth fitting in with the other two, Boulder and Permafrost?

Julia Sanches (JS): I’m still working through my views on that. Eva has said in the past that Mammoth crystallizes her work in the triptych, and the more I’ve thought about the book, the more I’ve realized that their defining tension is between the societal expectations of motherhood and its instinctual, more primal side. If I’d read Boulder and not known Eva had children, I’d have found it impossible to believe that this woman—who’d written a character so allergic to motherhood—could be a mother, too. But from her position as a mother, Eva is always questioning the push and pull of norms and expectations, asking: what is motherhood for human beings as animals? And what is motherhood for human beings as part of a social fabric? I think this is what the triptych is exploring.

HI: In Baltasar’s work, I find the blurring between animal and human to be so striking—and that tone is set right from the beginning, so you see both the loss of self and the finding of oneself in that slippage. That tension, exactly as you describe it, is so alive in her novels. Did Mammoth in particular pose any unique challenges as a translator that the other two didn’t?

JS: Mammoth was slightly easier to translate because it’s the third book I’ve worked on by Eva, so I’ve become used to her style. She’s very, very controlled. The three sections of Mammoth are practically the same length, and her sentences are nearly all constructed in the same way. I had to play a little bit with the structure, because in Romance languages you can start a sentence with a verb, so the repetition of “I” doesn’t grate as much; that’s not the case in English, and I had to find a workaround.

I also struggled with some of the more agricultural terminology. Eva, who is an endlessly fascinating person, worked as a shepherd for at least one year (possibly as many as three) in the Pyrenees, and so in the novels, she uses some of the offhand language of a shepherd who knows the ins and outs of lambing, as opposed to the technical terms. The British editor and I discussed these sections in detail. For example, at some points, she refers to the sack that the lamb is birthed in as the placenta, but I thought English lay readers like myself might get confused because we have a very specific idea of what a placenta is.

While Permafrost has these intricate, paragraph-long metaphors that are difficult to unwind and render in English, Mammoth is a lot more pared down. So it was a matter of dialing things back and making sure the language remained very clear. I wanted no spare words whatsoever, and I don’t know if I succeeded in being as ascetic as I intended. It was a challenge. I am not terse by nature, so I had to go against the grain of my usual writing. READ MORE…

Rudderless in the samidare-rain: On Naoko Fujimoto’s Reinterpretation of Heian Period Japanese Woman Poets

September 25, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

. . . Fujimoto has rendered her translations to “restore some of the freedom of form in which these original works were made.”

09/09 Nine Japanese Female Poets / Nine Heian Waka Poems, translated from the Japanese by Naoko Fujimoto, Toad Press/Veliz Books, 2024 

My parents were criticized for allowing a girl to study advanced language skills and piano lessons–for what–“Why don’t you keep your daughter in Nagoya?” Some teachers looked at me saying, “You are not even the smartest, nor a boy.”

Have you ever wished to be a boy? And have you ever interrogated the root of that wish? Perhaps you have been told by your family members that a woman’s role is not to utter garbage-talk like a hen pooping. Or perhaps your family’s insistence that you get married off has grown more insistent over the years. Maybe it’s shameful to admit that you’ve never been seated at the center of the table, that you’ve internalized a certain misogyny, or that you live in a society that has instated men as the heads of households, as breadwinners and intellectual superiors—not because they are smarter, but because they were given the opportunity to pursue their education.

This was the case for the men and women in my grandparents’ generation, who grew up under the Japanese occupation of Taiwan and the Confucian teachings that compare the “tiny man” (the scoundrel) with the “women.” I grew up learning about the Nineteenth Amendment and the Declaration of the Rights of Women in a neighborhood that largely continues to unlawfully segregate jobs by gender. The number of times I have been told that my writing is “frivolous” and that I was “not serious” about my literary career is innumerable.

How remarkable it is then to behold 09/09 by Naoko Fujimoto as a testament to the resilience and remarkable artistry of Japanese women writers during the Heian period (794 to 1185), a time of both gender segregation and cultural flourishing. I find myself seeing my obstacles mirrored in the Heian court custom of referring to women by their relationship with their male relative, or in Fujimoto’s lament in being called out as “not even the smartest”—with smart being measured by her ability to repeat what she has memorized verbatim on these make-you-or-break-you high stakes examinations that are characteristic of East Asian countries like Japan, Korean, or Taiwan. The idea that only the “best women” are afforded the same education as the most ordinary man is pernicious and deeply ingrained in East Asian society, even with the ongoing women’s rights movements in those countries. That identity is further complicated in East Asian-American communities overseas, where western values of independence clash with Asian values of Confucian filial piety and female subservience to men, and where leadership positions continue to be wielded by men in all types of professions. READ MORE…

Blurring the Lines of Time: A Conversation with Ruoyi Shi

September 23, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Junyi Zhou

This sense of displacement, which many might perceive as humor, mirrors my relationship with language.

From a glass casket for sculptures, to a piece of a burial figurine cast into edible gummy bears, and gelatin-based fish placed on silver platters, Ruoyi Shi’s whimsical oeuvre spans the realms of the organic and the inorganic, the imaginary and the real to interrogate the nature of truth, storytelling, and language. An interdisciplinary artist working across the domains of sculpture, video art, and writing, inspired by the oral histories and mythologies she grew up with, Ruoyi invents a singular kind of artistic practice that transforms not only personal memory but also collective history. “I am interested in how people are encouraged to appropriate any image they encounter, and how our vocabulary was chosen and formed in today’s society. I consider my work as fragments I collected for creating an alternative reality,” she says in a talk with Shoutout LA. In the following interview, I spoke with Ruoyi about the role that humor plays in her projects, reinventing historical objects, and the everyday precarity of living with language and mass media.

Junyi Zhou (JZ): I’d like to begin with your work Tomorrow’s Comforts are Here Today, in which you built a casket for your glass skeleton sculpture, as if it were a living entity. “I always call my art creations creature,” you wrote in your artist statement for this piece. It seems that the relationship between the organic and inorganic, or the dissolving boundaries between the two, are central to your body of work. Could you speak more about this?

Ruoyi Shi (RS): Exploring the boundaries between nature and artificial existence, as well as the notion of truth and its fabrication, has been a central theme of my practice. I see my art-making as a process of building an alternative reality—one that can be fragmented, chaotic, and full of coincidences. This reality of mine lies in the area where the organic and the inorganic slowly merge into one another. My goal is to mimic nature and capture the moments when nature exposes its unnatural side.

Many decisions I had to make in my art were neither preplanned nor expected. My immediate environment, materials, and time worked together to provide me with options, and my choices were directed by instinct rather than logic. It’s a form of collective creation. In this era we live in, the term “organic” has been deliberately shaped into a manmade concept. By placing our collective creations on a more equal footing, I aim to express greater honesty and respect for the elements beyond my control.

Tomorrow's Comforts

Tomorrow’s Comforts are Here Today (2021). Performance, writing.
Courtesy of the artist.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

September 22, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury and Charlie Ng

The latest in literary updates from Palestine and Hong Kong!

With a slight delay due to technical issues, in this week of dispatches from around the world our Editors-at-Large introduce the most impactful releases from their regions as of late. From Palestinian poetry that “transcends mere expression” in its beauty and purpose, to a number of works that promote public engagement with literature in Hong Kong, read on to learn more.

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

Ibrahim Nasrallah, the acclaimed Palestinian poet and novelist, has recently released a poignant collection of four new poems. The collection is now translated from Arabic by Huda J. Fakhreddine and will be published by World Poetry. Written in the shadow of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, these verses serve as a powerful indictment of global indifference towards the Palestinian plight, echoing the enduring tragedy of the Nakba that began in 1948. 

“I write now so that I do not die,” Nasrallah asserts, emphasizing the urgency of his message. He believes that with each attempt to erase their existence, Palestinians become more defined, more visible. These poems, dedicated to Gaza—a small yet symbolically vast territory—transform its struggle into a universal fight against darkness and tyranny. As Pierre Joris notes, Nasrallah’s work transcends mere expression; it embodies a visceral scream of the body, mind, and spirit, affirming the existence of Palestinians while mourning the losses of those killed and the land that remains elusive.

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Held Together by Dreams: On Erminia Dell’Oro’s Abandonment

September 19, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Rose Facchini

Her characters are profoundly human, each wrestling with their own fears, hopes, and desires . . .

Abandonment by Erminia Dell’Oro, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky, Héloïse Press, 2024

Why do we leave behind people and places? Is it painful or bittersweet? Does it indicate bravery or cowardice, altruism or egoism? Do we have complete agency in these decisions or are we instead constrained by necessity, oftentimes masked by the illusion of choice? What kind of person do we become in the aftermath?

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