Translation Tuesday: “Parwana” by Lida Amiri

March 5, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Lida Amiri

One glance at the sky finally connects her with infinity, where she belongs.

This Translation Tuesday—three days before International Women’s Day—we bring you a tragic story self-translated by former Afghan refugee Lida Amiri—centering on the plight of a woman who is not free to pursue love. In her language, parwana refers to a creature that has wings but cannot fly. It is a fitting name for our despairing protagonist, who, up against forces larger than her, stages her escape. 

The night is her sole protector, her only companion. It represents shelter from the stares and noiseless chatter of passersby on the streets. People who recognize her whisper, “That’s the general’s daughter that I saw with another young man! How dare she stain the impeccable reputation of a national hero?”

To Parwana[1], her father’s military background has become a curse. With a swift and vigorous hand motion, she desperately tries to delete each of these stinging judgments from her mind.

Suddenly, Parwana stops her agonizing train of thought and notices her immediate surroundings. She sighs and has a last look around her lovingly furnished room. She is just one step away from a pile of mattresses without a bedframe, which she sometimes fell off of when the nightmares reminded her of her wrongdoings. The only piece of furniture in her room is the wooden chest of drawers next to her bed, which is decorated with her perfume bottle and her Surmi—a Kohl used daily to protect her from evil looks because, according to her neighbors, she has all a young woman could wish for: a loving family, a room in her parents’ house, a job as a midwife. Is she actually willing to risk it all? While her heart races as she reminisces, she looks in the small mirror on the chest of drawers before taking a deep breath addressing herself. “The situation can’t continue like this, and you know it. He will be the right one,” she says softly while sighing heavily.

READ MORE…

Spontaneity Through Ambiguity: An Interview with Chia-Lun Chang

March 4, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Anne Lai

[H]ere is where I can explore my limited English as a vehicle, within this ambiguity.

I met Chia-Lun Chang when we were both enrolled in the Poets House fellowship program in 2016, when I had only been writing for a few years and was hesitant to call myself a poet. We bonded over how new we were to writing poems. In this following conversation, we retraced her unconventional introduction to writing poetry and how English as a second language offered her a newfound identity to be playful and purely honest. Her book Prescribee (Nightboat Books, 2022) wields humor like a dagger, rife with cutting repartee that reveals how cruel, yet liberating life is for her in America. Her poems from the book have appeared in Granta, The Brooklyn Rail, and BOMB online.

Chia-Lun Chang (CC): In Taiwan, the genres are not as distinct as in America, but I noticed that many high-profile writers in Taiwan primarily write non-fiction prose, expressing their opinions. Readers think of it as culturally significant; it provides a getaway into the lives of another world, a world full of writers or cultured individuals. During our conversation, I’ve also realized that many novelists are telling one story. They have numerous novels, but it’s one same story from a core idea because it originates from their body. 

Anne Lai (AL): Do you feel like you’re also in pursuit of one idea when you’re writing?

CC: Because of my experiences, I tend to question my identity. But, aren’t we all, in some ways, asking ourselves, “Who am I?” In that very question, I’m afraid of finding the unknown. There are moments when I write in English, where I create a new persona that reflects this nation and the body that I inhabit within it. That is the direction I’m heading and it’s tied to my identity, this very new role that I’m cultivating.

AL: This reminds me of your experience in trying to get your green card, and eventually getting it.

CC: Yeah, both of those experiences—applying for a green card and learning the language that I speak most of the time. The green card process was brutal so I was constantly facing a blackhole answer: what’s necessary for me to stay? I’m terrified of my desire. I don’t believe I have the opportunity to create art in Taiwan, I’m not talented enough or I don’t have space to do what I’m doing here, and many may disagree. But I’m grateful that I can be playful and try different things in this new language and space.

AL: I’ve never asked you this, but have you written poetry in Mandarin? How did you start writing? 

CC: Never. Growing up, I was always interested in writing, but I saw myself more as a reader. There were times when I would write essays for school; the requirements of exams in Taiwan were like the SAT tests in the States, but they asked for more melancholic and metaphorical compositions. Those were my experiences in building my first language. I remember the question on my college exam was, “Who is your idol? Who do you look up to?” I actually wrote about the poet Su Shi. In my society, I felt that people had a moral obligation in writing; they had to be heroic—even in love, in pain, or struggling. Deep down, I have a cynical personality and worry about not being accepted by society. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 1, 2024  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, José García Escobar, and Kathryn Raver

The latest literary news from Central America, France, and the United States!

This week, our team brings you literary news from around the world, including an experimental poetry reading and a festival celebrating comics! From cross-continental prize to a new exhibit at the Centre Pompidou, read on to find out more.

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the United States

On February 7, I watched as the internationally-renowned Mexican poet and recent Asymptote contributor, Rocío Cerón presented a spellbinding performance at New York University’s KJC Center. Through sound, voice, and moving images, the performance expands on Cerón’s 2022 book Divisible corpóreo, a poetry collection that thematizes the relationship between language, poetry, and the body.

While Cerón read from the book, the screen behind her projected images featuring her bedroom and herself. These visuals were not static. Rather, they transformed in rhythmic syncopation along with Cerón’s voice. In addition, Cerón not only read the book out loud. She also brought her poems to a further experiential dimension through several resources grounded in her voice: she raised and lowered her pitch and volume, repeated words and phrases with different speeds, and sometimes elongated vowels and stuttered consonants. The effect was dreamlike. I was immediately thrown into a trance, a characteristic effect of Cerón’s awe-inspiring transmedia readings.

After the audience’s applause, Cerón was interviewed by Irma Gallo, a student in NYU’s Spanish MFA program. During this Q&A, Cerón reflected on her creative process and approach to live readings, noting that her performances often include improvisation, which makes each one of them a unique, ephemeral experience. She also talked about the feminist elements in her poetry, such as references to lineages of women writers and reflections on the mitochondrial DNA, only transmissible from mother to child. To conclude, she specified that the book Divisible corpóreo is the second installment of a trilogy that explores the connection between poetry and different senses. The other two books are Spectio (2019) and Simultáneo sucesivo (2023). Paraphrasing Cerón’s own words, these collections explore the interrelation between what we can observe and what we can hear. Each text establishes an intertextual dialogue with the other two “creating,” in Cerón’s words, “a network of signifiers and symbolic fields that touch and traverse one another.” READ MORE…

Announcing Our February Book Club Selection: Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek

February 29, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan

Where the Wind Calls Home sidesteps the instant of carnage and cruelty, focusing instead on its shattered aftermath. . .

Where the Wind Calls Home, Syrian author Samar Yazbek’s latest novel to be translated into English, is a stunning offering of spirituality, memory, and all those implacable, liminal spaces wherein only the mind may venture. Written from the perspective of a young soldier as he lays dying from his wounds, Yazbek describes both the unthinkable wreckages of conflict and the translucent totems of faith with her singular musicality and vividity, tracing backwards through recollections and reveries to collage all the brute realities of civil war with the individuals whose rich internal lives pattern the battlefields.

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. 

Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price, World Editions, 2024

There is an unforgettable moment in Adania Shibli’s Touch when the child narrator, through whose eyes the world arrives in intensities of colour and sensation, attempts to decipher words emanating from the TV. Amid the flotsam and jetsam of indistinct syllables, she finally makes out “Sabra and Shatila”. She thinks then not of the horrific massacre in Beirut but of the sabr cactus growing in her vicinity; the name, stripped out of the matrix of history, can only signify as something tangible, close at hand.

Such strategies of defamiliarisation came to mind while I was immersed in the free-floating atmospheres of Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home. Its oneiric rhythms, elegantly recreated in the English translation by Leri Price, mimic the roving consciousness of an adolescent soldier, known only as Ali. Forcibly conscripted into the frontlines of the Syrian Civil War, he survives an enemy attack in the Latakia mountains only to hover on the edge of death. As he struggles to regain a feeling of where his injured, possibly dismembered body might begin and end, his mind takes flight; memories of childhood creep back into him. Time on the narrative surface runs the course of a single day, blue sky shading into a “raw and tender” moon. Beneath reality seethes the inexpressible current of remembrance, obeying its own laws of sequence and cadence.

Yazbek is more interested in the sensuous immediacies of embodiment than in the airy abstractions of power. Her previous offering, Planet of Clay—a finalist for the 2021 National Book Awards, also translated by Price—inhabited the perspective of a mute girl, similarly caught starkly within the crossfires on the Civil War. Against its barbarities, she seeks a sanctuary in crayoned drawings and imagined planets. Even in Yazbek’s non-fictional accounts of revolutionary betrayal, ranging from the diaristic to the journalistic, she retains a similar sensibility: “Oh spinning world, if my little heart, as small as a lump of coal, is wider than your borders, I know how narrow you are!” READ MORE…

An Unexpected Lurch of the Heart: An Interview With A. E. Stallings

February 28, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Sebastián Sánchez

It’s an awareness of diachronic time, of the present and the past coexisting in the same space.

In the world of contemporary English poetry, A. E. Stallings is a giant. Known for both her innovative, various work within traditional poetic forms as well as her extraordinary translations of ancient Greek and Roman texts, her poems celebrate both the timelessness and resilience of technique, as well as how ancient constructions can continually metamorphose and evolve to enliven contemporary internalities and realities. In this following interview, she speaks to the allure of the classics, the essential work of keeping words alive, and the symbiotic relationship between translation and poetry.

Sebastián Sánchez (SS): Although you’ve spoken on writing poetry from a young age, you did not start to learn Latin until you were an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, where you switched from an English and Music major to a Classics major. What was it about Classics that attracted you?

A. E. Stallings (AES): I think I probably always had a sneaking attraction to it… to anything a bit arcane or out of the ordinary. My grandfather had studied Greek in seminary (he was an Episcopal priest), and was proud of his accomplishments in that regard. My Dad had wanted me to take Latin in high school (having been quite good at Latin in high school himself), but in the end, defiantly, I took Spanish—which I also much enjoyed. But I think I started to feel I was missing out, missing something. You know, you would run into these Latin or Greek tags in English literature, and feel that this was something you really ought to know. In the end, I thought I’ll just take Latin 101 and get a taste for it, but I had an extraordinary and extraordinarily eccentric professor, Dr. Robert Harris (at the University of Georgia). The class was riveting. And my classmates were interesting too, harder to pigeonhole than the average English major or even music major.

I then just kept taking Latin classes (because what was the point, Dr. Harris would say, unless we were going to get as far as some Virgil, which he recommended we read in the graveyard), until one day the department head (Dr. Rick LaFleur) took me aside and suggested I might as well change my major at that point. As an aspiring poet, I also appreciated the rather old-fashioned close reading we did of poems—scanning the meter, memorizing, looking at allusions and sound effects, rhetorical devices. This felt useful to me as a writer. I was not particularly interested in theory, which perhaps was having an ascendance in other literature courses at that time.

SS: In 1999, you moved to Athens and have lived there ever since. What led you to make this decision, and how did this impact your development as a writer?

AES: It was supposed to be, like so many things in life, a temporary decision. My husband is Greek, and he wanted to try moving back to Greece and living there a while. I think we said two years. Two children and two decades later, of course, it seems more momentous than it did at the time. It is hard to say how it may have affected me as a writer. It did probably affect how I wrote about Greek mythology (it all seemed less… mythological, I guess), and no doubt made me more aware of modern Greek literature. It probably pushed me more towards Greek generally, even though I had trained more as a Latinist. It has affected me in other ways; being in Greece and married to a journalist, I felt like I was both on the edge of where things are happening and at the forefront of some more general trends—the economic crisis, the migration surge, and climate change, all of that seemed more visible and more towards the surface of things in Greece, which is on the border of so much. That in turn has changed how I read classical literature, with an understanding of the geography: the placement of Greece, in the Aegean, is further towards the East and the global South than Western classics departments tend to place it, at least theoretically. It has re-oriented my sense of Classical literature quite literally. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Dymov” by Yuri Serebriansky

February 27, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Sarah McEleney

The parachutes activated, and Dymov swung from the cords, examining the lines of the converging rivers below. . .

This Translation Tuesday, a hostile confrontation ensues when an astronaut inadvertently kills a cow—or two—during his Earth-landing. Here is translator Sarah McEleney on Serebriansky’s startling work of imagination: “This short story by Kazakhstani author Yuri Serebriansky reflects upon the indirect costs of space travel. While the story is meant to take place somewhere in Russia, Serebriansky considers it very much connected to Kazakhstan, as it was inspired by his trip to an area near the Baikonur cosmodrome. The author was traveling in the middle of spring when people were tending to their gardens in the countryside, and suddenly, he noticed shiny silvery containers everywhere, which reminded him of the tripods belonging to the aliens in H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. People had gathered parts of rockets that had fallen to the Earth and were using them instead of typical garden containers. At the time, Serebriansky already knew that these pieces of rockets emitted geptil, a rocket propellent hazardous to human health and the environment. With this in mind, a contemplation of the unforeseen consequences of space travel is embedded in “Dymov,” in which the protagonist’s thirst for personal heroism is dashed by his calamitous reentry to Earth.”

I’m a bird in a cuckoo clock. Soon I’ll jump out and say my “cuckoo!” to everyone. No. Not aloud. Because, after all, everything is recorded. The whole country considers you a hero, and you’re the next laboratory mouse in line, and everything is recorded. More important than a dog, of course. Dymov. The “cuckoo!” will be long, since I’ve got something to say. They’ll write: “he conducted experiments.” And really, I conducted them. I beat my heart when I had to, I ran blood through my veins. I was in a spaceship for three days without a spacesuit. Every one of us is the first in something. And what I am is a cuckoo bird, and also, codename “Fog”. Do I want anything else? Yes, I want to go to the moon. I want to climb out of here in a spacesuit, I want to go home. To my daughter. And to church. To Father Anisim, to Anisim.

 “Fog’, we’re going to prepare for descent, put on your spacesuit, we’re checking the telemetry before braking. Everything’s in order here.”

“Got it. I’m getting back into my spacesuit.”

That impossible silence is broken. Come on, speak, guys. I’d listen to your sputtering for a century. In an airplane you at least feel the engine, but here there’s just inertia. Space. It’s a heavy word. But howl. Everything is recorded.

The cabin of the spaceship becomes more claustrophobic in zero-gravity. But what can you do? There’s a lever attached to a cord, flying like they had warned. The planet below looks astonishingly lifeless, no traces of life from here—who says that on the radio? Maybe I didn’t hear it there? The globe above the control panel seems like it was made by Neanderthals. But you have to believe in it. Falling to it out of curiosity, into the clouds, from this, not even height, but rather, void—it’s scary, comrades. READ MORE…

Between Languages: The Politics of Class, Race, and Translation in the Novels of B. Traven

February 26, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Josh Todarello

Such is how the frontier in Traven functions: an arena of capital that both equalizes and reproduces extant racial hierarchies.

The identity of novelist B. Traven has spawned a delightfully layered and debated array of theories, stipulations, and investigations. Best known as the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, later adopted into a well-loved film by John Huston, Traven was the pseudonym of a German- and English-language writer who, in various hypotheses, has been the collaborative result of several individuals, an imprisoned actor, an enthusiastic explorer of Mexico, and a translator from Acapulco and San Antonio. The most fascinating aspect of this mysterious identity, however, lies not solely in the individual’s life, but also in the entangled multiculturalism and various iterations of his works, which render American landscapes in German language, examine the intersection of class and race politics, and create narratives in which complexities of social agency are examined in both local and international contexts.

If you’re reading B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in its English translation, it would be be hard to guess that it was written by a German author, let alone intended for German-speaking leftists, living in German-speaking countries in the interwar period. Even in the original German, the book bears no obvious trace of Europe or European culture—aside from the language, of course. It feels, on the contrary, quintessentially American, falling easily into the category of the western and full of the genre’s tropes and generic dictates. At least for this reader, it felt odd to be reading one’s way through many of the familiar elements of the western, in a language not commonly associated with it.

The novel takes place in a post-revolutionary Mexico during the interwar years, and its protagonists are white American vagabonds, property-less and looking for work. There are oilmen, Mexican “Indians” and Mexican ladinos, or mestizos. There are bandits, train heists, and Federales. There is gunplay. And there is gold. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was originally written and published in German as Der Schatz der Sierran Madre by Büchergilde Gutenberg in 1927, and was part of Büchergilde Gutenberg’s mission to provide impoverished workers with access to cheap entertainment and Bildung. The current Büchergilde Gutenberg website tells us, for example, that the publisher was founded in 1924 to facilitate easier access to Bildung for members of the working class, doing so by means of affordable but well-crafted, premium books. Bruno Dreßler, Büchergilde’s first chairman, had in mind the idea of a proletarian cultural community, a “proletarische Kulturgemeinschaft”; the publisher saw itself as part of proletarian literature and culture at a time when such a thing perhaps still existed, though its contours and possibility—or impossibility—were, even then, debated by Marxist critics and thinkers of every stripe. Even Diego Rivera, a card-carrying communist, argued that, properly speaking, there could be no such thing as proletarian art within capitalism. Only after the dictatorship of the proletariat has “fulfilled its mission,” Rivera writes, after it has “liquidated all class differences and produced a classless society,” can there be a proletarian art. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

February 23, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Bella Creel, Ibrahim Sayed Fawzy Elsayed, and Wambua Muindi

The latest in literary news from Japan, Egypt, and Kenya!

This week, our team from around the world brings news of literary award shortlists and winners! From the launch of the inaugural issue of Debunk Quarterly, to the winners of the Sawiris Cultural Awards, to the recent closure of a historical bookstore in Tokyo, read on to learn more!

Bella Creel, Blog Editor, Reporting from Japan

Where are Japan’s bookstores going? In the last two decades, the number of bookstores in Japan has nearly halved, dropping to only 11,495 in 2023. The figure speaks to the many locally-owned bookstores that have had to close over the years, unable to keep customers in a rapidly digitizing era. Some of these closures have garnered international and domestic attention, the latest of which was the historical “Bookshop 書楽” (Shogaku) in Tokyo’s Suginami ward. 

Owned by Mitsuru Ishida, Bookshop Shogaku has a long history in its small corner of Tokyo, located just outside of Asagaya Station for the past 43 years. The area of Asagaya itself—dubbed 文士の街, or “Literati Town”—has been a hub for creatives for well over a century, lined with jazz clubs, Showa-era coffee shops, and of course, bookstores. While famous literary figures such as Dazai Osamu and Masuji Ibuse once frequented the street and its many shelves, playing shogi and drinking as the “Asagaya Club,” over time Bookshop Shogaku became the last bookstore selling new titles in the area, until it closed as well. 

READ MORE…

Where the Change Comes From: Saskia Vogel on Translating Balsam Karam

February 22, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

Here are the losses. Just listen this time. That directness is so wonderful.

In The Singularity, Swedish author Balsam Karam instills a startling and deeply profound gravity within the devastating fractures of life—mothers who lose children, migrants who lose countries, and the emotional maelstroms stirring at the precipice of disappearance. With an extraordinary style that exemplifies how poetics can search and unveil the most secret aspects of grief and longing, Karam’s fluid, genre-blurring prose is at once dreamlike and harrowingly vivid, with the remarkable sensitivity of translator Saskia Vogel carrying this richness through to the English translation. We were proud to select this novel as our January Book Club selection, and in this following interview, Vogel speaks to us about how Karam’s writing works to destabilize and shift majority presumptions, as well as how literature can echo, verify, and perhaps change the way we live.

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. 

Rachel Stanyon (RS): How did you come to Balsam Karam’s work?

Saskia Vogel (SV): I first encountered Balsam’s work through Sara Abdollahi, one of my favorite literary critics in Sweden—she’s full of integrity, and really cares about literature and its transformative potential. She had done a podcast with Balsam, and their conversation really struck me, especially Balsam’s extraordinary representation of solidarity. This is exemplified in her first novel, Event Horizon, which, as I understand, is connected to The Singularity like a kind of diptych; they’re of the same world, and written with the same sorts of strategies—for example, a lot of the details of place, location, and identity are unstated. I find this aesthetic really compelling.

Balsam assumes that she’s writing into Sweden and a majority white culture, and she doesn’t want to give people an easy out where they can say, “I’ve been to Beirut. It’s not exactly like that.” She instead strips away detail and, in The Singularity, focuses on loss and the effects of war on individuals, as well as on migration and racism.

Another extraordinary feature of her prose is that the white gaze is decentered, which works to shift how the presumed audience reads and perceives some of the most pressing and potent human experiences of our time. She moves us away from the particularities of politics, and tries to make us understand what it feels like to be in a certain position. In that way, she really encourages and facilitates a deep growth and compassion—if you’re open to it, I guess. READ MORE…

The Richness of the Fragment: An Interview with Oksana Vasyakina and Elina Alter

February 21, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Jaeyeon Yoo

I don’t believe in wholeness and I don’t believe in Chekhov’s gun. Language . . . isn't enough to reflect the fullness of the world.

What does it mean to hold grief—to physically carry your mother’s death with you in daily life? 

Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound documents the journey of a queer poet as she delivers her mother’s ashes from Moscow to Siberia. Translated from Russian by Elina Alter, the novel is an auto-fictional exploration of processing grief through language, and also a meditation on the Russian lesbian lyric—a polyphonic conversation with feminist thinkers across time and space. While making her way across Russia, the narrator weaves together a cycle of poetry, composed of recollections of her past sexual experiences and fragmented essays. Wound then began as a few pages typed alone in the dark, when Vasyakina was writing during the pandemic, and this sense—of both intimacy and intensity—persists throughout the book. Vasyakina writes, as Alter puts it, with a brutality and directness that feels “exceptionally clear-sighted.”

Wound is Vasyakina’s first novel and the winner of the 2021 NOS Prize. Since then, she has published Steppe and Rose, books that also center on family figures. In addition, her works include two collections of poetry: Женская проза (Women’s Prose) and a cycle of poetic texts titled Ветер ярости (The Wind of Fury). 

Alter is the editor-in-chief of Circumference, a journal of international culture and poetry, and has also translated It’s the End of the World, My Love by Alla Gorbunova. Her translation of Wound has been listed as one of Nylon’s Must-Reads of the Month and LGBTQ Read’s Most Anticipated Titles of the Year. 

This interview, conducted with Oksana and Elina separately, has been edited for clarity.

Jaeyeon Yoo (JY): How did Wound begin? 

Oksana Vasyakina (OV): As I rode a bus through Volgograd while carrying the urn [containing my mother’s ashes], it occurred to me that I would never be able to describe this experience. It wasn’t because the situation was tragic; I just saw how complicated it was, and I felt that I wasn’t equal to the material. This was in early 2019. 

A bit later, in the summer, I wrote a cycle of poems—which are included in the book—called “Ode to Death.” I had the desire to write, but I understood that poetry wasn’t sufficient for the challenge I saw before me. And then the pandemic began. I was shut up in my apartment, all events were canceled, all work went on Zoom. One night, I opened up my laptop and wrote the first few pages of Wound. I was writing in the dark, because it wasn’t clear to me how to write long prose, and before this I’d only written short poems, I didn’t know how to put together a novel. A week later I pulled up my draft, reread it, and understood that this was what I wanted to do, that I had to continue. 

I’m superstitious, so when I start writing a text, I name the file with a random combination of letters, just in case I never finish. But as I continued writing, I thought that the novel needed a simple name. The simplest word. The first word a child utters when it learns to speak is mama, and that was the original title of the manuscript. But some time later, I thought that mama rhymes with the word rana [“wound” in Russian]. It’s just as simple, and contains many meanings. After I wrote the scene in which the mother is lying in her coffin, I renamed the file. Since then, the book has been called Rana: Wound. 

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: The Garden of Tomatoes by Esther Karin Mngodo

February 20, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Jay Boss Rubin

Tuntufye had already made clear that he didn’t believe in such nonsense. Blood drinkers didn’t exist.

This Translation Tuesday, we deliver gripping fiction from Tanzania, a short story of domestic deception that spawns an unspeakable being, a sinister spirit. Who is to say who is at fault? Hear from translator Jay Boss Rubin on bringing Esther Karin Mngodo’s The Garden of Tomatoes into the English:

“In this story, I was fascinated with how it contains genre elements but is not really genre fiction. There’s a genre element, for sure, but we stayed away from terms such as “vampire” and “zombie” because of all the associations those carry. There’s also an element of free indirect discourse, one that I was aware of in the Swahili, but that came out more in the translation, toward the end of the revision process. Esther was also especially helpful in drawing my attention to moments in the story where the main character’s own words, or her words and actions, might contradict each other. These moments of ambivalence, or rich ambiguity, really, are central to my understanding of the characters in “Atuganile,” the forces that push and pull on them.“

Tuntufye Mwasakyeni raised his cup of milky tea to his mouth and sipped. The house was quiet, different than most Saturdays. Two days had passed since his wife, Atuganile, had left to go see her mother’s ailing brother over in Chunya District—around two hours away by automobile.

Tuntufye placed the index finger of his left hand on the table in front of him so it mimicked the second hand of the clock on the wall. Departing for her trip, Atuganile had promised that she’d be back by Saturday at nine. It was now eight minutes to 9am. He wasn’t worried that something bad had happened to her—not in the least. He was well aware that if there were some shrewd, intelligent women there in Isyesye, Atuganile was one of them. She was a known quantity, especially in Uyole, where she vended fruits and vegetables. But it wasn’t like her to be late.

When it reached nine on the dot, Tuntufye stood up and went outside through the door in the living room. He leaned against one of the white, exterior pillars, keeping his eyes peeled for Atuganile. When he saw her, he grinned. She was striding forward like a champion athlete, her kanga coming undone and starting to fall down as she ran. Colonnades of trees to Atuganile’s left and to her right framed the scene of her arrival. Their branches swayed in the wind like giant claws—as if to swipe at her and sneer, today, Atu, you’re going to get it.

Once she’d drawn close, Atuganile set down the load she’d been carrying on her head and began explaining the reasons for her delay. “Forgive me, my husband. Forgive me, Baba,” she gasped. “The bus broke down. I had to hop aboard a different one. You know how difficult transportation can be here in Mbeya. Forgive me, Baba, for being late.”

Her husband said nothing. He jutted his lip forward, returned to the kitchen, sat down at the table and poured himself another cup of tea. Then he took his Bible and began reading. Atuganile sat with him and started sorting kisamvu, separating the good greens from the bad. In the middle of sorting, she picked up a sheet of Isyesye Oye!, the newspaper that had been used to wrap the cassava leaves. Alert: Blood Drinker on the Loose in Isyeye, the headline warned. Atuganile read on:

An individual in Isyesye is being sought by police for abducting children younger than twelve. According to the information available, five children have now disappeared as a result of coming into contact with the suspect, who is said to be a drinker of blood. Parents are advised to keep close watch over their children, and see that they don’t roam about after dark.

The newspaper described the child of one woman, known as Mama Samweli, who’d been missing for five days. When Mama Samweli went for a consultation with a local healer, the mganga advised her not to bother searching—her child had already had the life sucked out of them. When news of the blood drinker reached the Regional Police Chief, he stated that the government does not officially recognize witchcraft, so he was unable to comment on the rumor any further. But he assured the citizenry that efforts were ongoing to locate Samweli, along with the other four children who had gone missing over the past five months.

READ MORE…

‘Obliged to Serve a Memory’: A Review of Vera Mutafchieva’s The Case of Cem

February 19, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Kathryn Raver

Cem . . . is silent, an inanimate object in his own story, only moving when and where other powers will him.

The Case of Cem by Vera Mutafchieva, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel, Sandorf Passage, 2024

Cem—born in the burgeoning Ottoman Empire, the second son of the legendary Mehmed the Conqueror, and in the eyes of history, the exiled prince. In his time, Cem was lauded by storytellers the world over for who he might become and what he might accomplish, until finally he was pitied for all that he endured. But these portrayals of Cem, some true and others exaggerated, have all but faded from the public eye over time—a fact that renowned Bulgarian author and historian Vera Mutafchieva sought to remedy with her comprehensive account of his struggle in her novel, The Case of Cem.

Mutafchieva’s works have been published in nearly a dozen languages, the most recent being Angela Rodel’s English translation of The Case of Cem. Originally published in Bulgarian in 1967, the story follows Cem as he tries and fails to usurp his older brother at the behest of some of his countrymen. He is forced into years of exile that take him far from home, from Rhodes to France to Italy. His imprisonments—though those holding him would call it refuge—turn the almost-sultan into an unwilling pawn and bargaining tool for European powers, and eventually lead to his tragic downfall. 

The Case of Cem is a daring blend of court intrigue, tragedy, and historical fact that masterfully captures complex layers of history in its prose and reads like an epic. Just as prevalently, though, it is a reflection on memory, identity, homeland, and what it means to lose them.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

February 16, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Thuy Dinh

Dispatches from the Philippines, Bulgaria, and the Vietnamese Diaspora!

This week, our editors report on (attempts) at elucidation in the humanities and the cruelties of historic expatriation; the instating of Living National Treasures in the form of indigenous practitioners and their singular crafts; and a word that is meant to sum up a year. 

Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting on the Vietnamese Diaspora

The National Museum of Immigration History in Paris, France is currently offering a sobering exhibition on the history of Indochinese workers-soldiers, called les lính thợ or les công binh. As colonized subjects, twenty thousand men from Indochina—i.e., Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia—were brought to France at the onset of World War II to help with the war effort. Aside from a small percentage of educated volunteers who wished to escape the colony’s lack of social advancement, the majority, ranging from ages 18 to 30, was forcibly recruited from the poor peasantry to work in France’s defense industry.

Besides the exhibit, recollections by surviving workers have been compiled in recent years by various sources, such as the photographic essay “The Forced Oblivion” by Alejandra Arévalo, the graphic memoir “Les Lính Thợ: Immigrés de force, les travailleurs indochinois en France 1939-1952” (2017) by Pierre Daum and Clément Baloup, the film Công Binh, la longue nuit indochinoise (2013) by Lê Lâm, and the Vietnamese-French monograph, Những người lính thợ – Les travailleurs indochinois requis by Liêm Khê Luguern (2010).

When Germany invaded France in June 1940, the Indochinese workers were evacuated to the free zone in Southern France, where they worked in forestry and pioneered the rice-growing industry in the Camargue region. Both state-run and private companies employed these workers, but salaries were either paid to the French government, or distributed to the workers at rates significantly below those paid to locals. When Germany invaded the free zone in 1942, the workers were conscripted by German occupation troops to work in weapon factories. Besides harrowing working conditions, the men suffered physical and mental trauma due to prolonged exile and mistreatment by their superiors. READ MORE…

Visual Spotlight: Mounira Al Solh on War, Refugees, and the Scatter

February 15, 2024  |  in Visual Art  |  by Mounira Al Solh

My work is a collection of hundreds of encounters, captured by writing and by drawing the moments with each individual and family I met. . .

The liquid condition of being stateless—whether as a refugee, a migrant, or a individual living on occupied territories—means that one’s life begins to revolve around questions: questions of where to go, how to act, what to claim, who the opposition is, who oneself is. In Lebanese-Dutch artist Mounira Al Solh‘s work, these inquiries are given vivid sonic and visual resonances, in the dizzying and hypnotic shot of a boat swaying back and forth, in the slow panning over an animal’s exposed ribcage, in a man that continually raises a foot to step forward or backward, before returning it to its place. Working with her own narrative of migrating from Beirut to Damascus as a child, and overlaying it with a contemplative blend of cultural archive, enactment, and linguistic sensitivity, Al Solh places a beating heart in the centre of displacement’s immense, abstracted web, illustrating not only origins or destinations, but the individual in the middle of becoming.

In any case, in the year 2006, as I was finishing my studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, I made a video piece, Rawane’s Song, in which I stated that “I have nothing to say about the war,” meaning the Lebanese civil war. At that time, everyone expected Lebanese artists to speak about that war. It was also generational, as people who grew up during the Lebanese civil war found the only way to survive was by not speaking about the war, but about survival instead. When I was a young teen, I had the privilege to live the changes that occurred on the ground in Lebanon, the abrupt and absurd end of fifteen years of civil war, and the shift to a postwar time (or perhaps to a suspended civil cold war, as some people called it).

Ironically, when I had finished making Rawane’s Song there was a war again in the summer, when Israel invaded Lebanon and bombed its bridges in a fight against Hezbollah, who had kidnapped a couple of soldiers to tease and provoke Israel. After this war, fighting factions would strengthen and become more popular. Anyway, at that time, I did not refrain from showing Rawane’s Song, and I did not refrain from taking a highly ironical position towards “speaking about the war,” even though we were being bombed and the country was devastated. READ MORE…