Upending Literary Hierarchies: An Interview with kotobli, a SWANA-Focused Book Discovery Platform

August 30, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alex Tan

“It shouldn’t be this hard,” we thought. So we decided to make it easier.

kotobli is a book discovery platform dedicated to amplifying cultural and literary production from the Southwest Asia/North Africa (SWANA) region, with a special focus on independent publishers and marginalized writers. Curated with care according to geography, genre, and even theme, kotobli’s lists create opportunities for readers to encounter their next great read based on affinity and interest. I corresponded with the largely volunteer-run team behind kotobli on their conceptualisation of the website; in the process, I learned a lot about the difficulties underlying literary circulation in the Arab world, and the groundbreaking, creative ways in which small SWANA-based presses navigate them.

Alex Tan (AT): How did you begin to conceptualise kotobli? What distinguishes it from other book recommendation/discovery platforms like Goodreads, or even Bookstagram and Booktok accounts?

kotobli (k): A couple of years ago, we were getting frustrated with how difficult it is to look for good books about the Southwest Asia/North Africa (SWANA) region online. We found them to be badly categorised and difficult to sort through—and if we were looking for books in Arabic, they were almost impossible to find with only keywords and a topic in mind. Without knowing which titles to look for, we could hardly discover books worth reading.

On a brief visit to Lebanon in spring 2021, one of our founders, Omar, was determined to find Layla Baalbaki’s Ana Ahya, which he had discovered through an academic paper on feminism in Lebanon. After unsuccessful online searches and hopping from one bookstore to another, he finally found a used copy.

“It shouldn’t be this hard,” we thought. So we decided to make it easier. kotobli started as a platform to help readers find interesting books from the SWANA region, by topic, genre, geography, the identity of the authors, and through our curated reading lists. We named it kotobli—written in all lowercase letters as a nod to its Arabic origin “كتب لي”—which means “books for me”.

Throughout the process of collecting book information to populate our platform, we noticed deeply entrenched weaknesses in the publishing landscape of Arab countries: many publishers, especially smaller and older ones, do not have any digital presence; as such, many readers, especially in the Arab diaspora, are missing out on incredible books just because they would never show up in internet searches. This is where our project “Daleel el Nashirin” (Publishers’ Guide) started. With a grant from Culture Resource, we’ve been digitising the metadata for thousands of books and more than a dozen publishers in the Levant and North Africa. We’ve also been building virtual tools with publishers and authors participating in the process, giving them a free webpage on our website that they can fully control through a simple and safe content management system. Additionally, the publishers themselves have access to statistics that show how many readers look up their books on kotobli. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: H-A-N-N-A by Hanna Riisager

August 29, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Kristina Andersson Bicher

Blissfully mute, / infatuated babbling / from a marble mouth.

An entrancing poem on babyhood commands our devotion this Translation Tuesday–a fitting muse for poet and critic Hanna Riisager, whose first collection wields overtly feminine symbols to subvert gender norms. In H-A-N-N-A, precisely translated from the Swedish by Kristina Andersson Bicher, a small subject wields a gravitational pull, overwhelming us in equal parts bewilderment and wonderment.

You are a plank you
are a bridge you are a bronze
railing. You are a
landing you are a
nook. You are a ramp
for baby carriages.
Head down feet up
Child’s position.
Perpendicular dominance
trimmed in lead. An
H in the heart.
Think: the scope
of this walk!

READ MORE…

Louisiana Literature Festival: Portraits of Language in the Flux of Loss

August 28, 2023  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

Just beyond the white backdrop of the stage, a multiplicity of silent, unspoken languages lingers.

From August 17 to 20, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Zealand, Denmark, hosted the twelfth edition of the annual Louisiana Literature Festival. Since 2010, on the lawns parenthesized between Louisiana’s wings and the Øresund Strait, authors from around the world—including Adonis, César Aira, Olga Tokarczuk, László Krasznahorkai, Mariana Enríquez, and Itō Hiromi—have participated in readings, interviews, and conversations. The festival has also regularly hosted the most exciting names in Danish literature, such as Naja Marie Aidt, Dorthe Nors, and Signe Gjessing. This year, Asymptote’s Assistant Editor Michelle Chan Schmidt was in attendance, and reports now on the festival’s fascinating intersections, discussions, and performances. 

The Louisiana Literature Festival has no theme, and as such, widely varying discussions of language and writing recur across the four days. In this year’s line-up of forty authors, sixteen write in languages other than Danish. Most of them are authors of English or Swedish, and thus there are only a few individuals representing other languages: Haruki Murakami in Japanese, Constance Debré in French, Claudia Durastanti in Italian, Eva Menasse in German, Camila Sosa Villada in Spanish, and Fríða Ísberg and Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir in Icelandic. Despite the limitations of this Euro-heavy selection, the festival’s vibrant dialogues present studies across language—including that of signs, of family, and of binaries in societies marked by syntaxes that divide rather than combine. In an interview, the Irish English-language writer Claire Keegan says that “narrative feeds on loss,” and this idea of loss feeds back across the festival’s symphony of languages in conversation.

Icelandic:

During an interview with her Danish translator, Erik Skyum-Nielsen, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir states that her favorite childhood books were dictionaries. Each letter was a new chapter in a book of thirty-two chapters—a history of a language “in the margins” of global literature. Writers like Ólafsdóttir and Fríða Ísberg, as well as their translators across most European languages (with the addition of Arabic and Turkish in the case of Ísberg’s novel, The Mark), are instrumental in not only the continuance of Icelandic literature, but also in diversifying Icelandic modes of expression in a language anchored in the legacy of the sagas.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 25, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, MARGENTO, and Rubén López

The latest in world literature from Sweden, Guatemala, and Ireland!

This week, Asymptote‘s Editors-at-Large take us around the global literary scene, featuring book fairs and the highlights of Women in Translation Month! From the multimedia cultural event Bokmässan by Night in Sweden to the Taiwan/Ireland Poetry Translation Competition, read on to learn more!

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

A month from today, it will be time for Scandinavia’s largest literary event, the Göteborg Book Fair—an event spanning four days with around eight hundred exhibitors and the same amount of seminar speakers. Started in 1985, it now attracts eighty-five thousand writers, publishers, librarians, teachers, and book lovers every year. This year’s themes are Jewish Culture, The City, and Audio. The club concept Bokmässan by Night was introduced last year, which combines bar hopping with various cultural experiences. The fair has now announced that Bokmässan by Night will return on September 29 with four stages, five bars, multiple DJs, and stage performances. The evening includes Swedish writers and dramatists Jonas Hassen Khemiri—known to Asymptote readers through pieces like I Call My Brothers and Only in New York—and Agneta Pleijel, whose novel A Fortune Foretold was published in Marlaine Delargy’s English translation by Other Press in 2017. Bokmässan by Night will also offer live literary criticism with critics Mikaela Blomqvist, Jesper Högström and Valerie Kyeyune Backström, as well as live podcasts, including Flora Wiström’s Röda rummet—a literary podcast which borrows its name from the Swedish Modernist writer and playwright August Strindberg’s 1879 debut novel The Red Room. While Bokmässan by Night is an in-person experience, many other events during the fair are available online through Book Fair Play. 

READ MORE…

Translating Multiple Dimensions: Sarah Timmer Harvey on Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About

August 24, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Daljinder Johal

Life isn’t one-dimensional; it’s a blend of emotions, absurdity, and different tones. . .

Jente Posthuma’s striking, moving novel, What I’d Rather Not Think About, delves into the aftermath of an unthinkable loss: the death of a twin. In tracing the patchworked life of a narrator who has long thought of herself as one-half, Posthuma explores the complexities of our most intimate relationships with evocative reflection and unexpected humor. This distinct work and our July Book Club selection has been translated beautifully by Sarah Timmer Harvey, resulting in razor-sharp prose that navigates the most intricate aspects of our selfhoods—how we are with one another. In this following interview, Harvey speaks about her discovery of this novel and her translation process, as well as the intricate journey of following this book’s many thought-paths and references. 

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. 

Daljinder Johal (DJ): I’m curious about your background and your journey into translation. I read that you’re Australian-born but ended up living in the Netherlands, where you began reading and occasionally translating Dutch fiction and poetry. Was there a particular work that played a significant role in sparking this interest?

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): Of course. Back then, while learning Dutch, I relocated to the Netherlands at nineteen with the intention of staying for a year. That single year evolved into a fourteen-year stay. During this time, I was working at a university, which eventually led me to translation as a second career. It happened somewhat unexpectedly. I strove to read while learning Dutch, focusing on more accessible books such as Hermann Koch’s The Dinner and even Harry Mulisch’s The Discovery of Heaven—which, while not mainstream, deeply resonated with me.

READ MORE…

Translation as Disorder in Carlos Fonseca’s Austral

August 23, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa

. . . disorder plagues the opening pages of the book, always in tight connection to translation.

Austral by Carlos Fonseca, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023

“What is the social impact of translation?” is a question that often buzzes in my ear like a hungry mosquito, especially when I read translated books, and even more commonly when I try to teach colloquial expressions in Spanish to my non-Hispanic friends—more precisely, Spanish from Mexico City, my hometown. Immediately, attempts at clear definitions become convoluted, uncertain, ambiguous—in a word, atropellados (literally “ran over,” an adjective that refers to stumbling over words). I sound more or less like this: 

“Take ‘chido/chida/chide’ [CHEE-duh/-da/-de] (adj.). It can technically mean ‘cool,’ but also ‘good,’ ‘agreeable,’  or ‘comfortable’ (for things and places and preceded by the auxiliary verb ‘estar’); it also means ‘nice-kind-laidback-easygoing-friendly’ (for someone who meets all and every one of these attributes and with the verb ‘ser’); or ‘ok, no problem,’  and ‘thank you’ (in informal social interactions with a close friend but not necessarily an intimate one and, crucially, with an upbeat intonation)…but if you want to make things easier for you, just remember that in any colloquial situation where you would say ‘cool’ in English or the closest equivalent in your mother tongue, you can say ‘chido.’ Don’t forget to adjust the last letter for the grammatical gender of the noun, or the preferred gender of the person you are referring to. Recently, non-binary gender is expressed with an ‘e,’ but some people prefer ‘ex,’ or the feminine (a), or do not have any strong preference. When in doubt, ask.”

Similarly involved and protracted explanations often result in simpering faces and jocose efforts by my bravest friends to try out the words I share. More common, and more fun, is when friends also share their favorite colloquial untranslatables in their mother tongues, eliciting everyone’s excited perplexity and marvel at the abundance of meaning and the frustrating difficulties of carrying that meaning across languages and cultures. When we try to explain these terms, it is as though their translation abruptly hits the brakes on our language, pushing us into linguistic confusion with the inertia from the sudden interruption. In other words, translation begets disorder, upsetting the comfortable and normally thoughtless flow of everyday language. This sensation—which emerged in me after my recurrent attempts at translating colloquialisms—appears more subtly and robustly in the 2023 novel Austral by Carlos Fonseca and its translation by Megan McDowell. Disorder, Austral suggests, lies at the heart of translation’s social potential, as it makes translation (its exercise and its experience) essential for radical change.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “She Sits Beneath Her Father’s Olive Tree” by Audefroi Le Bastart

August 22, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Timothy Perry

Whoever has love’s grief and pain / Should also have love’s joy.

This Translation Tuesday, a melodic love story for the ages floats in the air, transporting us to a time of dueling knights and castle towers. Hear from Timothy Perry, translator of “She Sits Beneath Her Father’s Olive Tree” by Audefroi Le Bastart, on appropriation in the layered histories of France’s medieval weaving songs: an oral tradition of working women recorded in writing by men:

“The weaving songs of medieval France do not survive. Which is to say, the traditional songs of women engaged in textile work—a largely oral tradition—do not survive. In their place, we have approximations to this genre written by men in a purely literary context. These literary weaving songs, with their themes of courtly love, (artfully) simple language, and repetitive rhythms, attempt to preserve the ‘feel’ of the oral tradition, but their appropriation of it results in a problematic shift in perspective—narratives involving the objectification and abuse of women take on an entirely different tenor when taken from a context of women’s work and transformed into a male literary exercise. The resulting poems have been considered among the finest lyrical creations of medieval French literature, but their casual misogyny raises timely (and timeless) questions about how we should read aesthetically accomplished but morally tarnished works, and how we should translate them.

The ‘weaving song’ translated here tells the story of Idoine and the obstacles to her love. The poem upends the conventions of courtly love by presenting everything—even martial pursuits—though Idoine’s eyes, resulting in a complex layering of gender: a male poet writing in a female genre presents male activities through the eyes of a female character. Despite this complexity, the misogyny outlined above remains very much present and I have tried both to draw attention to and undercut it. For example, the French text mentions the aesthetic qualities of Idoine’s hair even as she is being dragged by it, but in an unemphatic way: ‘[the queen] takes her by the hair, which she has blonde like wool’. I have heightened this aestheticization of Idoine’s suffering by overtranslating the prosaic ‘takes’ as ‘grasps’ and by expanding the description of the hair from half a line to a whole line and setting it off between dashes. Elsewhere, however, I employ vocabulary not found in the French to undercut the poem’s ‘happy’ ending. Twice my translation describes Idoine as the ‘captive’ of her love Garsiles. On the first occasion, the French simply says that her love for him ‘preoccupies’ her; on the second, which occurs at a point in the poem when her father is literally holding her captive in a tower, the French simply says that she is still ‘taken with’ Garsiles. And when Garsiles fights to rescue Idoine, after which they will marry, I describe him as ‘an iron tower of strength’, though the French says merely that he has ‘prowess and strength’. By presenting Garsiles as a tower and Idoine as his captive, I try to suggest that Idoine’s plight as a wife may not be so different from what it was as a daughter.

Despite these changes in emphasis, my translation attempts to preserve the straightforward vocabulary and syntax of the original; to reflect the importance of rhythm in weaving songs, I have employed a fairly strict iambic pentameter.”

She sits beneath her father’s olive tree
And carries on a quarrel with her love.
Her sighing heart complains: ‘Such suffering!
No song, no flute, no music moves me now:
Without you here I have no will to live.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

How long must I endure this misery?
How long, my love, tormented by your love?
I am your captive, Count Garsiles, and I
Will waste my youth on weeping and on tears,
With no escape unless I feel your touch.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

I curse the hour in which my father called
For war, a war that brought your army to
This place, a war that you, by strength of arms,
Soon turned to peace—but not before it took
The lives of many knights. I curse the hour!
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

But all this country would have been laid waste
And all the common people left to die
If you had not brought peace—if you had not
With reckless charges, wild assaults, brought peace.
And now, in love, I lie awake at night.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

War at an end, peace in the land, and you,
Your army waiting, ready to depart,
Offered yourself, a blameless man, to me—
A blameless man, the robber of my heart.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

To trace your beauty is my greatest joy:
So elegant, so noble and refined—
You never seek to do me any harm.
Such is my love that I could never be
Distressed, or wish my heart my own again.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

What can I do, my love? I am in such
Distress! Your beauty, strength—your gentleness—
Have lodged love’s wounding arrow in my heart;
No one but you can cut it out again,
For both the arrow and the heart are yours.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

While beautiful Idoine weeps and laments
The man she loves, the man she would consume…
But look! Her servant, searching anxiously,
Comes running down the grassy path and finds
Her lady, overcome by misery.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

‘My lady, please, you must rein in your heart—
You have indulged your anger and your pain
Too much today. The king and queen have seen
How you behave. They say it lacks good sense.’
Too late! Now all is lost—her mother comes.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

The queen now grasps her hair—she has blonde hair,
Pale as a fleece—and makes her stand before
The king; she lists her faults—she knows them well—
And he replies: ‘Take her at once and lock
Her in the highest tower. But beat her first.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

He has the girl ungirdled and undressed
And any part of her his rein can reach
He strikes; he turns her flesh from white to red.
At last, believing that her punishment
Is just, he has her locked in a high tower.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

Now beautiful Idoine is left alone,
Locked in the tower; but even there her heart
Remains unchanged—such is her love for Count
Garsiles that she holds nothing dearer in
The world. He holds her captive and she weeps.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

Three years Idoine is kept locked in the tower,
Three years, three mournful, tearful, rueful years.
‘My love,’ she says, ‘how long I wait for you!
Such is my love—such is my rage—they hold
Me in this tower, where I will die for you.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

She cries aloud again; she weeps; she says:
‘Locked in this tower, my love, I have endured
For you so many weeks of pain-filled love…
I’m overcome by weakness…cannot stand…’
She speaks; she faints; she—voiceless, breathless—falls.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

The king now hears the cries and stands amazed—
He wonders that they do not die away.
Quick as a deer he comes, runs to the tower,
And finds Idoine, his daughter, in her faint.
He takes her in his arms, no longer glad.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

The king is speechless in his grief; the queen
Approaches, anguished, overcome. At last,
When beautiful Idoine, sighing, revives,
He says: ‘This love, Idoine, it sickens you.’
And when she can reply: ‘I know, my king,
That I must die, and die in misery.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

‘Daughter, how pale you have become, how changed—
This is no feigned, no counterfeited love!
A love so true that it will be your death.’
‘Without Garsiles I am already dead.
There is no need for this imprisonment.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

‘But if you wish to marry I could find
Some royal son, some proud and powerful prince.’
‘I will not marry any man but him,
The count Garsiles—so wise, so beautiful,
And (but for you) as brave as any knight.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

At last he understands—she will not look
Elsewhere. The king declares a tournament—
Why wait?—to be held there in the broad space
Beneath the tower. He offers as a prize
Idoine, refined, beyond the least reproach.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

Word of the trial—word of the prize—soon spreads,
More pleasing to the ear than harp or viol.
All say that they will go to win the girl,
To shatter lances in the name of love.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

The knights arrive from many far off lands—
Driven by love, not one remains behind.
Their gorgeous banners crowd around the tower—
Garsiles is there, and all his company.
The tournament begins and all fight hard.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

Idoine—is there a purer name in France?—
Now watches from her window as the knights
Advance and, out of love, she gives her love
Her sleeve; he throws himself into the fight—
No purer knight has ever held a lance.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

The Tournament beneath the Ancient Tower—
A noble tournament. Each does his best
To win Idoine, but she cries out for help:
‘Garsiles, you must not hesitate to fight
With any knight and throw him from his mount.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

An iron tower of strength, Garsiles fights well;
He breaks the shield of every knight he meets—
Breaks it like bark—and with the shield the man;
All this for love of beautiful Idoine.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

Garsiles has won the tournament; the king
Gives him the prize; the prize becomes his wife.
He takes her back in honour to his lands.
Their love is faithful, sweet, and true—at last
Idoine has won all that her heart desires.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

Translated from the French by Timothy Perry

Audefroi le Bastart was from Arras in Northern France and was active in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, but beyond that little is known of his life. Of the twenty or so poems identified as belonging to the genre of weaving song, five have been securely attributed to him, more than to any other poet. Arras was an important literary centre during Audefroi’s life and he may have had ties with other well-known poets from the town, including Jean Bodel, Conon de Béthune, and Adam de la Halle.

Timothy Perry is the Medieval Manuscript and Early Book Librarian at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. He holds a PhD in Classics and has published on ancient and medieval Greek literature and the history of the book. His current project is a translation of the complete surviving corpus of Old French weaving songs.

***

Read more from Translation Tuesdays on the Asymptote blog:

Compass and Rifle: On Roque Dalton’s Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle

August 21, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by José García Escobar

No one escapes Dalton’s inquisitive pen . . .

Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle by Roque Dalton, translated from the Spanish by Jack Hirschman, Seven Stories Press, 2023

On Thursday, July 6, 2023, the inaugural day of Guatemala’s International Book Fair (FILGUA), the government of El Salvador requested organizers to exclude Salvadoran author Michelle Recinos’ Sustancia de hígado (F&G Editores) from the fair. The next day, online news outlet elfaro revealed that El Salvador’s ambassador in Guatemala had said, “It would’ve been an unpleasant thing for the government of El Salvador if this book had been a part of the fair.” Details are scarce, but presumably, this action was related to Michelle’s story Barberos en huelga, winner of the 2022 Mario Monteforte Toledo Prize, which openly criticizes sitting president Nayib Bukele’s war on gangs. 

Hearing this, I can only imagine what Roque Dalton would have written about Bukele. 

Roque Dalton’s Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases (Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle) dates back to 1975, and remains as timely as ever. In a time when most Central American countries are under authoritarian regimes and have experienced backslides of democracy, the life and work of Roque Dalton is at once a beacon of hope, an inspiration, and a warning sign. Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases is a book filled with courageous testimony, the poet’s typical dry humor, and bone-chilling depictions of state violence. Here, Dalton is hyperaware of the pain and plight of his compatriots, but in addition to his typical grittiness and social critique, we also find tenderness, softness, beauty, and frailty; Dalton’s acute perception is both a rifle and a compass, manifesting in words of both rebuke and encouragement. 

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 18, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Marina García Pardavila, and Zohra Salih

The latest in festivals, awards, and literary developments from Spain, Mexico, and India!

This week, our editors are bringing some very exciting news from the ground. In India, a working-class writer has been lauded by the prestigious Kerala Literary Academy, and a new documentary has been unveiled with one of our favourite publishers, Seagull Books, as its subject. In Mexico, the country celebrates its most promising young writers with a week-long festival. And in Spain, a comics festival sees the medium undergoing some radical new developments—including, surprisingly, a venture into audiobooks. 

Zohra Salih, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

Without a doubt, the most heartening literary news we received this month was that of Akhil Kavintarikath being feted by the Kerala Literary Academy. Akhil, at twenty-eight years old, won the academy’s annual Geetha Hiranyan endowment award for his 2020 short-story collection, Neelachadayan. This is an especially significant recognition because of Akhil’s unconventional background; he works as a JCB construction operator at a sand mine by night and a newspaper delivery man in the morning—quite contrary to the popular image of a young and upcoming novelist these days. As a fellow aspiring writer and friend commented while forwarding the link to the news to me, “Now we don’t have any excuses for not practicing our craft!” I completely agree, what better incentive can there be!

Akhil, who hails from a small village in Kannur in the southern state of Kerala, dropped out of school at the mere age of sixteen to support his family by doing odd jobs, all the while sustaining a deeply personal passion for literature and writing. He found inspiration in the mundane, managing to read a few lines here and there from the stories in the newspapers he would deliver, and then, with curiosity getting the better of him, filling in the blanks through inventive speculation. It was this curiosity to delve into the lives around him that drove him to write. This was further bolstered by his time spent working in the mines during night shifts, where the same imagination served as an antidote to the fear and loneliness that accompanied the dark.

Akhil has since authored Story of Lion in 2021, which draws from the ancient practice of theyyam, followed by Tharakanthan in 2022, which is inspired by the epic Ramayana; both are released by Mathrubhumi Books, one of Kerala’s foremost publishing houses. However, winning the prestigious honor has not meant that the tides have completely turned for Akhil, as the reality is that the award money is not enough for him to leave his job and commit to writing full time. This only underscores the need for more avenues in India to support such talent, through both monetary and social encouragement, lest we lose their brilliant voices to the margins.

Speaking of unconventional news, it is not often that one comes across a film celebrates an independent publishing house, so I was surprised to learn about the release of the documentary Of Books and Other Stories—but I was not surprised that the subject of this film is Seagull Books. I came across this publisher while working for the Jaipur Literary Festival in India back in 2019; Naveen Kishore, Seagull’s founder, was an important panelist for the event, and I had the privilege of witnessing his genius in person. While the saying does caution us against judging a book by its cover, I have to admit that I have often been drawn to literary works based on their aesthetics, and this is something that Seagull Publishers understands fully. Their commissioned books are works of art in themselves; you want to have one in your room as you would a gallery piece. Seagull works are distinctive, painstakingly curated, and the attention reflects in their design. The palette is astonishingly wide in breadth, with translations culled from across the world, on topics ranging from philosophy, art, theater, to literature. Fittingly, Seagull Books was awarded the Cesare De Michelis Prize this year for their contributions to the publishing world, and the film, directed by Pushan Kripalani, is an ode to this landmark literary institution, as well as to the joys of publishing and participating in the exchange of books across all barriers.

Marina García Pardavila, Editor-at-Large Spain, reporting from Spain

The Viñetas desde o Atlántico Comic Festival, which takes place in A Coruña (Spain) from August 7 to 13, has opened up its twenty-sixth edition to a striking response from the audience. Streets have been crowded and many visitors dashed to engage in the workshops, book discussions, exhibitions, and literary events organized in the city center, displaying an eager interest for the refreshing ventures of this artform—which will certainly continue to proliferate in the future. The festival highlights the narrative brilliance of authors such as David Rubín, who has been nominated four times for the Eisner Prize; the artistic couple Teresa Radice (screenwriter) and Stefano Turconi (illustrator); Emma Ríos; Xulia Vicente; Luis Yang; as well as the underground pioneers of the female scene—Ana Miralles, Roser Oduber, and Laura Pérez Vernetti. But it does not stop there; as the festival makes clear, times are changing in the comic world.

In collaboration with the actor Xosé Barato, David Rubín presented an audiobook of his last work O lume (The Fire)—his most personal comic up to this day. This new medium has the great potential to spark interest among new readers, who perhaps have not considered the comic, beyond its visual stimulation, as a thrilling opportunity to find good stories. It also fosters a more inclusive audience, as the acting work conveys a vivid feeling which mirrors the exact tone of the comic book. When the theater lit up, I witnessed an overwhelming applause, filling the room with excitement.

Laura Pérez Vernetti guided the exhibition surrounding the release of the Spanish poet Luis Alberto de Cuenca‘s comic, Vive la vida y otras poesías (To live life and other poems). The exhibition, curated by Asier Mensuro, originated from the question: “And why not meld the poetic language with the comic form?” Vernetti has a long track record in the visual translation of poetry into comic strips, having transformed Vladimir Mayakovski, Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Schwob, and Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry into eye-catching comics.

Going along with his astonishing passion for the Greco-Roman classics, Luis Alberto de Cuenca regards comics as a perfect medium wherein the clash between high and low culture is blurred. Despite its underground beginnings, the comic form has reached outstanding recognition in the last decade. In this regard, Vernetti remarked on the anti-academicist nature and thought-provoking power behind this hybrid art.

From this quick contact with the vibrant comic industry, I dare to claim that comics are in the process of reshaping our literary landscape.

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

In recent news, the diverse literary communities in Mexico have proved that they remain vibrant and dynamic forums for both established and emerging voices. Between August 12 and 18, the prestigious cultural center, Xavier Villaurrutia, will hold the Semana de Letras Emergentes (Week of Emerging Literature). The event will give center stage to young poets from all over Mexico: Leopoldo Orozco (Baja California), Mónica Licea (Jalisco), Fabián Espejel (Ciudad de México), Marjha Paulino (Oaxaca), Rebeca Favila (Chihuahua), Delmar Penka (Chiapas-Tseltal), Luis Alberto Mendoza (Colima), Diana Mireya Tun Batún (Quintana Roo-Maya),  Ángel Vargas (Guerrero), Diana Domínguez (Oaxaca-Ayuujk), Roberto López (Tamaulipas), Gabriela Muñoz (Sinaloa), Anaid Gálvez (Hidalgo), and Yolanda Segura (Querétaro). Though all of the presenters have already shown their promise with publications of work accesible online, the most famous name in the lineup is Yolanda Segura. Self-decribed as “a lesbian-queer transfeminist writer,” she has been at the forefront of contemporary queer poetry in Mexico, with three published books under her name and a raft of prestigious awards.

Segura is from Querétaro, the state that hosts the annual Hay Festival, which just announced its lineup for this year. Running between September 7-10, the Hay will feature diverse panels, books readings, and presentations with acclaimed writers from around the world. Among the most well-known participants this year is the Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra, whose short stories have been featured in Asymptote several times. But the ambitious event will also feature other famous individuals from beyond the literary world. One of them is the Mexican actor Gael García Bernal, known worldwide for starring in internationally acclaimed films such as Y tu mamá también and Amores Perros. Bringing together these cultural luminaries, this years’ Hay Festival is poised for an exciting and vivacious edition.

*****

Read more on the Asymptote blog:

What’s New with the Crew? (Aug 2023)

August 17, 2023  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Find out what our staff members have been up to when we’re not editing your favorite literary journal!

Editor-at-Large for Palestine Carol Khoury will be the guest editor of a special issue of the Jerusalem Quarterly, titled “Write-Minded: Jerusalem in Literature”; check out her call for submissions here or email her for further details.

Newsletter Editor Cody Siler published an essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books about  the impact of the American suspense writer Patricia Highsmith’s diaries on her critical reputation.

Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania & Moldova, chaired in June the 5th edition of #GraphPoem at Digital Humanities Summer Institute, a “data commoning” hyper-platform performance involving hundreds of participants and watched by thousands of viewers online.

Nonfiction Editor Ian Ross Singleton translated four poems by Marina Eskina for Barzakh.

M.L. Martin has a new translation of the pre-10 c. Anglo-Saxon queer, feminist poet in the latest issue of Cordite.

Assistant Editor Megan Sungyoon‘s translation of The Cheapest France in Town by Korean poet Seo Jung Hak is scheduled to be published by World Poetry Books in October 2023.

Blog Editor Meghan Racklin’s essay on sore throats as illness and as metaphor was published in Full Stop and her review of The Light Room by Kate Zambreno was featured in The Brooklyn Rail.

Assistant Editor (Fiction) Michelle Chan Schmidt published a review of Owlish by Dorothy Tse, translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce, in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.

Editor-at-Large for North Macedonia Sofija Popovska‘s Macedonian translation of the novella Im Kopf von Bruno Schulz by Maxim Biller was published in July by Makedonika Litera Press; additionally, “Thaumatropes”, a poetry collection she co-authored with Jonah Howell also appeared in July, published by Newcomer Press.

Copy Editor Urooj recently had two poems published in Gulmohur Quarterly‘s Issue 10, released in June 2023. They were also invited to share their poems at the Bangalore Poetry Festival, in Bangalore, India as one of four young, emerging poets in a panel called “Poems in Progress.”

*****

Interested in joining us behind the scenes? We’re still finalizing our mid-year recruitment drive—hurry and apply if you’d like to help power the world’s literature! 

Writing from the Ghosthouse: Maria Stepanova on Postmemory and the Russian Skaz

August 16, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Now I understand that catastrophe is never a one-time event; it’s a sort of a pendulum, destined for a comeback.

Maria Stepanova’s award-winning work, In Memory of Memory (2021), translated into English by Sasha Dugdale from the Russian original Pamiati, pamiati (2017), seamlessly blends transnational history, private archives, and memoir-in-essay—an oscillation beyond autofiction that the nonfiction reader in me had previously thought impossible. Also embedded in the novel are texts from various sources—from Phaedrus to Paul Celan, Heraclitus to Thomas Mann’s diaries, Orhan Pamuk to Nikolai Gogol—blended smoothly in Stepanova’s sinuous prose.

Already an author of ten volumes of poetry, Stepanova’s debut was described by Dmitry Kuzmin as a display of “brilliant poetic technique and a purity of style.” Now, known as a chronicler of her Russian-Jewish lineage, Stepanova had written: “I would become a stranger, a teller of tales, a selector and a sifter, the one who decides what part of the huge volume of the unsaid must fit in the spotlight’s circle, and what part will remain outside it in the darkness.” She is now widely regarded as both an important and popular contemporary writer—or in the words of Irina Shevelenko, “one of the most original and complex poets on the literary scene in Russia today.”

In this interview, I asked Maria about the genre-defying In Memory of Memory, political poetry since the Silver Age of Russian literature, and the literary tradition of folktales.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): In a previous interview, you spoke about being an eyewitness to a generation of writers who “were traumatized by the crash of the Soviet system of literary education and literary work,” stating: “You could live for three years after publishing a book, but it had to be a bad book, because it was the result of an inner compromise.”

Can you speak on that moment in time—when literary bureaucracy and censorship was prevalent, when Social Realism and traditional genres and forms were requisite, and at the same time, artists thrived?

Maria Stepanova (MS): Well, it was not exactly a good time from an artist’s point of view, as practically all the significant writers—not even mentioning the really big names—were pushed into the margins by this system. Some of them were killed, some jailed, some scared into silencing themselves, some forced to start writing in a “normal” realistic mode. And there are a couple of individuals who were appreciated by the Soviet system; though heavily censored, they were published after a lifetime of fear and loss, like Akhmatova—whose first husband was killed, third husband died in jail, and only son spent years and years in the concentration camps. It was long before the 1990s, but the Soviet utopia of Writer’s Unions, those big honorariums and that enormous audience, was actually shaped in the 1930s, over the backdrop of so many deaths, and it never transformed into anything that would allow arts or artists to thrive. Even later on, when the times became more or less vegetarian, there was an enormous split between independent culture and the official, “publishable” one that appeared in state-funded exhibition spaces or in bookshops. If you were willing to make an official career out of writing, you had to prepare yourself for the lifetime of compromises—to agree that your writing would get cropped and reshaped according to the Party line. But, of course, the benefits were significant, and the life of an underground author was not the easiest—still, the most interesting poetry and prose being written in Russia in the twentieth century were produced by the authors who had chosen such a life, who were writing “v stol”: unpublishable books that were kept in the desk.

It’s important for me to say it, banal as it is, because lately, one might hear people referring to the Soviet times with some weird sort of nostalgia; as if the books we are able to read and quote now were a result of that system, and not a desperate attempt to resist it. The very names of the writers who had perished or were silenced in the 1930s (or remained in danger and unpublished in the 70s and 80s, until the Soviet empire crashed) are used as showcases for how an oppressive society might produce great works of literature. It somehow reminds me of the way ducks are tortured to produce foie gras: the amount of pain involved in the process is unjustifiable, whatever the results are. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Matryoshka” by Marzia Grillo

August 15, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Julia Pelosi-Thorpe and Lourdes Contreras

Mothers’ lease contracts are printed in tiny, almost illegible fonts, punctuation arbitrary.

Rounding off our Translation Tuesday feature’s little Italian sojourn, we present the lilting prose of Marzia Grillo. “Mother” and “shelter” are her twinned themes—each contains the other perfectly, like synonyms, tautology, or an infinite matryoshka, and she demonstrates her point neatly with a text full of recursions, in which a mother’s housing houses housing mothers. Cosy!

My mother called to tell me my mother is dead?
—A.M. Homes

Houses were this: mothers. And matryoshkas were: continents, countries, cities, and wooden apartments—mothers’ furnished rooms.

All around she could see women carrying the future forward. Newborns hiding newborns yet to come, life germinating deep in springtime.

*

Seated at a coffee shop belonging to another generation, she leafed absent-mindedly through PortaPortese. The rentals section was filled with ads for mothers—one-bedroom apartments, studios, central heating, fireplaces. She’d have liked some above-fireplace shelving, for knick knacks and keepsakes. As she warmed herself she could watch a parade of her old mothers inside the Panasonic frame they’d given her years ago. Mothers small, big, bright, ancient. Mothers different to one another; some welcoming, others bare. She’d not need a television.

On her finger she wore a wedding ring that wasn’t hers: inheritance or hereditary? Her parents had been as mistaken about her as they had about themselves, cradling after their own bad choices as if she could right a wrong. And since apples don’t fall far from the trees that nourished them, she’d decided to live in a rose garden. She’d covered herself with thorns, starving but intoxicated by her self-sufficiency.

*

Since receiving the eviction notice, she’d started losing weight. At first strikingly, and then gradually, one pound at a time. Her first step was to stop drinking alcohol, as if she were pregnant. She’d say to waiters: “I can’t drink. It’s not official yet, but…” They’d congratulate her, serve more attentively, with fervour, voraciously beaming, dazzled by life. Since hearing she’d no longer have a home, she’d become hope in the eyes of the world. She carried this in her womb as she dwindled.

Do you remember sardines? she’d say to the mirror. She remembered this was what you called the residents of crowded houses but it was a misnomer. Cans aren’t mothers. They are just cans, no matter how crowded. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2023

August 14, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Irmak Ertuna Howison and Sofija Popovska

New work from Uruguay and South Korea!

This month, we take a look at two brilliant titles that embody the acts of interpretation and evocation. In Silvia Guerra’s poems, nature is given voice in stunning scenes of linguistic complexity. In Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s retelling of a Korean classic, beloved characters are brought to life in the graphic form. 

sea

A Sea at Dawn by Silvia Guerra, translated from the Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas, Eulalia Books, 2023 

Review by Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large for North Macedonia

What constitutes a translation? Thinkers like Mikhail Bakhtin and Jacques Lacan have argued that every utterance is a deeply intimate expression channeled through shared, culturally standardized verbal structures; that is to say, every time we speak, we are translating.

As with speaking, so with listening, as well. Bakhtin describes the act of conversing with someone else as a (re-)construction of our concepts upon the “alien territory” of the other’s mind. In A Sea at Dawn (Un mar en madrugada), a poetry collection originally published in 2018 and now out in English translation from Eulalia Books, the Uruguayan poet Silvia Guerra manages to push against even these (admittedly broad and inclusive) boundaries of defining translation. In her panoramic, evocative poems, she invites all kinds of life, organic and inorganic, to speak, thereby creating a delightfully strange linguistic landscape that is equally alien and welcoming to the voices of the world, all at once.

Given the vertiginous and heterodox nature of the book itself, it’s helpful to start with the afterword written by the translators Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas, which illuminates the process of recasting Guerra’s captivating and difficult voice into English, and offers various ways to think about her poetry. For those that have read her in Spanish, it might seem that translating Guerra might seem an exercise in futility, leading to “disappointment and outright lamentation”; however, Kercheval and Pitas’ exquisite translation evokes neither of those things. Instead, contemplating Guerra’s intricate verbal designs allowed the translators to experience “lost and found” moments—instances where English revealed its ability to produce accomplices to Guerra’s “extremely innovative soundscapes” and formulations. Kercheval and Pitas cite an instance where they rediscovered the potential of English words to be “sonically evocative,” in which editor Michelle Gil-Montero offered “hacked in half” as a match for “pensamiento imbricado hendido”—instead of the initial idea, “thought interwoven split.” Later, quoting Walter Benjamin’s notion that “translation makes one’s native language foreign to itself,” Kercheval and Pitas’ afterword shows that reading Guerra in translation not only allows one to experience her mysterious Spanish transformed into English (A Sea at Dawn being a bilingual edition), but leaves our image of English irrevocably altered by her expansive, multipotential approach to language. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 11, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Carol Khoury, and Wambua Muindi

The latest literary news from Palestine, Kenya, and the Philippines!

This week, our Editors-at-Large offer a fond remembrance of a recently-departed literary icon, and report on book fairs and BTS. From books on boats and boy bands to the changing texture of Ramallah mornings, read on to find out more.

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

Early mornings in Ramallah are varied, except for one scene: an older man, back almost fully straight, all-white head lowered, walking slowly towards one specific coffee house in the old city. A serene smile below a deep gaze, the man would sit in his friends’ company, not for long—just enough to empty his coffee cup, and his head from the thoughts that weighed him down on his way.

Since last week, the beloved older man has not appeared in the streets. Zakaria Mohammed, a celebrated poet and a Palestinian literary icon, now resides in his admirers’ hearts. At the age of seventy-three, Zakaria’s body was lowered to rest, but his soul will continue to visit Ramallah, reminding everyone that:

There is no death
There is only a tiny cloud that passes and covers your eyes
Like a friend who comes from behind and blindfolds you with his hands
There is no death
There is a black goat and a tattooed hand milking an udder
White milk fills your mouth and flows in your eyes
Again, there is no death
There is a Raspberry tree
It holds your shoulder and hurts you
because it wants to open the way for turtles
There is no death
There isn’t
at all

Read more of Zakaria’s poems, translated here by Sinan Anton.

Zakaria Mohammed - Apr 2023 - photo by Ahmad Odeh READ MORE…