Translators on a Train: Translation Workshops at the O, Miami Poetry Festival

June 9, 2022  |  in Dispatches  |  by Layla Benitez-James

In the end, the translator must be the best reader of the text to bring it into a new language and context, but they can always have help.

The O, Miami Poetry Festival is a month-long celebration of verse in Florida’s capital, with the mission of establishing a series of events, performances, and public exhibitions, so that “every single person in Miami-Dade County [can] encounter a poem.” The festival’s programming included a translation workshop held by Layla Benitez-James and Jorge Vessel, consisting of two intensive sessions dedicated to studying, discussing, and building upon the complex art of poetry translation. In the following dispatch, Benitez-James gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the going-ons of the workshop, and presents the fruits of the translators’ labour: a poem by Colombian poet María Gómez Lara.

At the end of April, across two continents and various time zones, a group of translators met virtually to discuss, translate, and workshop the poem “palabras piel” by Colombian poet María Gómez Lara. Organized by O, Miami in partnership with the Unamuno Author Series (UAS), the creative task was set as part of a translation workshop lead by two members of the UAS team: award-winning Venezuelan writer, translator, and engineer, Jorge Vessel (pseudonym for Jorge Garcia) and myself, a writer and recent winner of an NEA in translation. Over two sessions in consecutive weekends, we discussed translation theory, inspiration, and collaborated on a wonderfully challenging poem.

The translation workshop was hosted by O, Miami Poetry Festival Founder and Executive & Artistic Director P. Scott Cunningham, who took part in the inaugural Unamuno Poetry Festival in Madrid—the city’s very first anglophone literary festival (Scott’s poem “Miami” from his collection Ya Te Veo was translated into Spanish by Jorge for The Unamuno Author Series Festival Anthology). While the aim of the O, Miami festival is to help each and every person in Miami encounter a poem throughout the month of April, our personal goal in 2019 was to introduce over eighty poets and academics to Madrid’s literary community; as such, translation between Spanish and English has become an important part of both organizations.

Our objective for the workshop was to inspire and embolden participants to take up a translation project of their own, as well as to broaden their ideas of what those projects might entail. While we would open up a discussion about basic elements of translation, we also wanted to expand upon how these writers and translators thought about the overlaps and symbiosis of their creative processes—how the act of translation itself can be the spark or jumping-off point for inspiration. READ MORE…

When the Cannons Are Firing: Q&A with Sergey Katran

June 8, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Caterina Domeneghini and Irene Kukota

It’s a constant struggle that I face as an artist: the futility of my efforts and, on the other hand, the wish to speak up, refusing to be silenced

Connections between meaning and visual representation can be puzzling, just like the multiple negotiations that occur between science and art, between natural phenomena and human attempts to grasp, control and even reinvent them through craft. Puzzles of this kind intrigue Sergey Katran. The art critic Vitaly Patsukov has defined the artist as the inventor of intricate “mechanisms” because of the complex ways in which he develops ideas integral to our modern civilization. A former graduate in chemistry and biology, Katran likes to experiment with Science Art and Bio Art in a variety of media, such as installation, sculpture, performance, and video. On the occasion of his most recent exhibition in the UK, currently on display in Wolfson College at the University of Oxford until October 2022, Caterina Domeneghini spoke with the artist and his interpreter, Irene Kukota, about the war in Ukraine, Katran’s country of origin. Their conversation also focused on his current situation, the stance of artists in times of war, and the ways in which his work has captured the growing tensions between two countries he has lived in and loved over the past twenty years.

Sergey, let’s start from where you are right now and what you are doing at this critical moment in our history.

I am currently in Moscow. For forty days I couldn’t do anything, the whole situation came as an overwhelming blow. What is happening to me is precisely what you have been describing, almost a split identity . . . I mean, that’s exactly how I feel, split. I’m in this slightly schizophrenic situation where my heart and all these worries that I experience are in Ukraine and at the same time I physically remain in Russia. And this situation continues, because for various reasons it has to remain like this.

 I decided to resume my artistic work after a while, even though I might not be feeling entirely up to it. Many artists are leaving the country. I decided I am not going to leave for now. Instead, I am planning to make an artistic project at an independent art platform, dedicated to the current situation. Rather than fearing it, I want to still be able to express what I feel, though I cannot tell you much more for now.

You said that many Russian artists are leaving the country. Many artists, too, have withdrawn their participation from important international events, like the Venice Biennale. Does art still have reasons to exist in times like this?

You know, when the whole thing started, I was talking to some good artists, quite well known, and many of them were expressing different sentiments, emotions, thoughts. Some of them were saying, “What have we done wrong? How could we not prevent this from happening?” A couple of them were saying they didn’t want to be artists anymore.

It’s the usual thing, as clichéd as it may sound: art works with rather fine substances or fine energies, if you like this expression. It works with a certain germination of thought. Do you know the phrase “When the cannons are firing, the Muses are silent?” Art seems irrelevant in situations like this. Artists feel that their voices are not going to be heard, because there are other, more pressing issues of survival on people’s minds. Perhaps art should be using other media in times like these. It might need to be more performative, more poster-like, as it’s closer to action and speaks more directly about the current situation. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Katrine von Hutten

June 7, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Cristina M. Burack

gladly would I write two three / sentences that look like you

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you two poems by the German writer Katrine von Hutten, including her poem “Description”, which won the Leonce and Lena Prize in 1969. In an elegant and plain style rendered by translator Cristina M. Burack, these two poems convey the simplicity and mystery of approaching another person through one’s private vocabulary. 

Description

gladly would I write two three
sentences that look like you
that are as you are
at best I can describe you

you are a wolf
in wolf’s clothing
and a sheep
in sheep’s clothing
but you know that

the circles under my eyes look like you too
when you jump through I have to laugh
you often say whoopsie
even when you don’t say it
better to say: you mean it

it is only half past six
but already wholly dark
you’re like that too

READ MORE…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

June 6, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Andriana Hamas and Suhasini Patni

This month’s edition takes us to India and Mexico!

With Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand in frequent contributor Daisy Rockwell’s English translation taking the International Booker Prize recently, Indian literature is having its moment. Editor-at-Large Suhasini Patni’s contribution to this edition of A Thousand Lives could not be more timely then, spotlighting as it does another pioneering female Punjabi author. Sign up for our newsletter to get these recommendations delivered right to your inbox.

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Amrita Pritam, the first female poet to win the Sahitya Akademi Award, is one of the most prominent feminist figures in Indian literary history. Not only did she take a public stance against marriage, she also openly wrote about female sex and desire, and questioned gender-enforced roles. According to writer and translator Khushwant Singh, her poems about the plight of refugees made her “immortal.” Written in 1950, the book’s title, Pinjar, means ‘skeleton’ in Punjabi. In this radical novel, a Hindu girl, Puro, is abducted by a Muslim man, Rashid, as an act of revenge against her community. She’s given a new name, Hamida, and her life from before is erased. When she tries to go back to her parents, she is seen as tainted and turned away. Forced to return to Rashid and settle into a new life, she eventually has a child with him. During the fraught years of partition, women had to become skeletons, “with neither a face, nor mind, nor a will, nor identity.” Hamida is enraged at the condition of women like herself: “Some had been forced into marriage, some murdered, some stripped and paraded naked in the streets.” The book details unexpected brutality, acts of desperation, and highlights the struggles faced particularly by women in 1947. It was adapted into a successful Hindi-language film in 2002.

—Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large for India

 

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Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World (2015), and its unsettling opening paragraph, which would doubtlessly throw the reader into a vertigo-like state, is a captivating read bound to make you question (if you haven’t done so already) the significance of borders, their concrete reality, and multiple figurative dimensions. Makina, a switchboard operator, is sent on a mission to find her older brother, who, lured by the empty promises of a substantial inheritance, had chosen to undergo a dangerous water crossing in order to reach the neighboring country—an almost mythical land to which his fellowmen flee in search of the so-called “better life.” The Mexican author’s use of symbolism and his timely focus on the issues of migration, immigration and war reveal the fragility of one’s identity and the various traps that await the self. As for the language of the book, I would simply like to mention translator Lisa Dillman’s note, which informs us that the Spanish original “is nothing short of stunning, and translating it is both fulfilling and daunting.”

—Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large for Bulgaria 

*****

Read more on the Asymptote blog:

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

June 3, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Charlie Ng, and MARGENTO

Book fairs, award shows, and passings from Hong Kong, Spain, and Iraq.

This week, our editors from around the globe report on recent literary awards in Hong Kong, examine the links between the literary scenes in Spain and Romania, and reflect on the passing of a revolutionary Iraqi poet. Read on to find out more!

Charlie Ng, editor-at-large, reporting from Hong Kong

The awards ceremony of the 16th Hong Kong Arts Development Awards was conducted online on 22 May. Renowned Hong Kong writer Xi Xi (the pen name of Cheng Yin) was honored with the Life Achievement Award for her tremendous contribution to Hong Kong literature. Moreover, essayist Tung Chiao won the Award for Outstanding Contribution in Arts, and fiction writer Dorothy Tse Hiu-hung was awarded Artist of the Year for the literary arts category. While two works by Tse, Snow and Shadow and The Door, are available in the English language, Tung Chiao’s works have yet to be translated, despite the fact that he is already a highly acclaimed author in Chinese literary circles.

READ MORE…

The Work of Feminism: On Elena Medel’s The Wonders

June 2, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

Alicia and María constantly think about the other women missing from their lives.

What makes us who we are, what shapes and defines us? Is it the country that we come from or the language we speak? Is it our sex or sexual orientation? The generation or political system into which we were born? Is it our job, the class we belong to, or the education that we are privileged with or denied? Is it our family, and, if so, as one character from Elena Medel’s The Wonders puts it, “What if genes determine your character, not just your eye colour or the shape of your mouth?” And in all this, how much is pre-ordained, what role is there for choice and free will?

Medel’s debut novel,  translated from the Spanish by Lizzie Davis and Thomas Bunstead, does not presume to offer a single, clear-cut answer to these questions, but one thing is obvious right from the start through the Philip Larkin quotation she has chosen as an epigraph: “Clearly money has something to do with life.” Weaving together the stories of three generations of women from a single family over the course of half a century, from the ’50s to the death of Franco in 1975 to the 2018 Spanish Women’s Strike, the novel seems to suggest that gender clearly has something to do with it, too.

As the novel opens, Alicia (the third generation in the family), finding herself without “so much as a used tissue,” feels uncomfortable from the sense of material limbo. Even at the age of thirteen, she understands that “money tempers [mediocrity], helps to conceal it.” Although she defines her life through money, or the lack thereof, her experience has also been shaped by another great absence that is inextricably linked to financial ruin: that of her father, who feigned the life of a successful businessman while getting increasingly into debt and committed suicide after a bungled attempt at life insurance fraud. From thereon out, Alicia is denied the expensive school and new apartment she’d expected and must move back to the suburbs of Córdoba, eventually moving to Madrid and a mundane life of insecure work and an unsatisfying relationship of convenience punctuated by anonymous casual sex with men who she can approach cynically as “safe bets.”

READ MORE…

The Blurriness of Intimacy: On Caio Fernando Abreu’s Moldy Strawberries

June 1, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Georgina Fooks

Abreu has the ability to narrate big emotions while undercutting them with a self-consciousness that means these moments never feel trite.

Moldy Strawberries by Caio Fernando Abreu, translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato, Archipelago Books, 2022

Moldy strawberries: just past the point of ripeness, bursting with life until they exude decay. Sweet yet bitter, delicious yet spoilt, nourishing yet rotten. It is this dichotomy that sustains Caio Fernando Abreu’s Moldy Strawberries, tenderly translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato: a collection of short prose pieces and stories that brims with life even as its flesh bruises.

Abreu (1948-1996) came of age in a turbulent time in Brazilian political history. In 1968, the Department for Political and Social Order put him on the watch list they used to target their ideological opponents, and Abreu subsequently spent time in exile across Europe—in Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, England, and France. While his writing was heavily censored by the Brazilian authorities, he nonetheless became one of the country’s most beloved queer writers, winning the prestigious Jabuti Prize for Fiction three times for his luminous work.

Moldy Strawberries is considered by many to be his magnum opus. Published in 1982, its vivid depictions of queer communities amidst the perils of the military dictatorship, rising homophobia, and the looming AIDS crisis serve to affirm life even when the threat of death feels ever-present. In eighteen prose pieces, which range from dialogues and vignettes to fully developed stories, Abreu’s writing bears witness to humanity in all its fragile glory. His prose affirms the possibility of love, desire, and connection—or at least indulges that dream. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Flowerie Dream” by Hàn Mặc Tử

May 31, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Phuong Anh

I beg, please empty out words and let yourself be present

This Translation Tuesday, treat yourself to a poem by the poet Hàn Mặc Tử, a celebrated figure of the New Poetry Movement in colonial Vietnam. Translator Phương Anh—whose interview with Vietnamese writer Thuận we recently featured—brings to us this poem with its modernist and mist-like qualities. “Flowerie Dream” is a meditation on the quality of presence from the early twentieth century that refracts the influence of French symbolism. 

“Hàn Mặc Tử’s poetry, with his surreal and ambiguous imagery, has often been considered untranslatable. It doesn’t help that, with each printing, there have been tweaks in punctuations and even words. In my opinion, his poems invite multiple translations, with mine being one of the possibilities, based on the version found in the bilingual edition Le Hameau des Roseaux by Hélène Péras and Vũ Thị Bích. My approach for this poem was mainly to bring out that meditative and quality of mystique in the Vietnamese, and to take liberties in changing the structure, particularly in the first stanza. In Vietnamese you can often create a double action in a very short space, but when translating into English (or French), in unpacking all actions, sometimes the line becomes too long, taking away that succinctness from the Vietnamese. Therefore, I decided to move a few words around—but only when it fits the effect. For example, instead of directly translating the word ‘không gian’ (space), I left the line hanging on ‘staining.’ Partly because I felt the line was getting too long, but also because I wanted to bring out the idea of the staining movement of the smoke by having it intrude onto the next line. This adds to the mystical quality of the ‘khói trầm’ (smoke) which also can refer to the agarwoods sometimes present in spiritual practices. Similarly, I moved the verb ‘daring’ up a line, and placed it at the enjambement to underscore both the speaker’s confidence and hesitation.” 

—Phương Anh

Flowerie Dream

Low-hum smoke gently ripples across, staining
Bluish time spills into golden dream
This evening’s dress is too formal—daring
To kiss chrysanthemum soul’s in the dew

Can you water the flowers with your warm tears?
Count a petal for each loving time
Can you bury the pieces of withered spring?
And please, bury them in the depths of the heart. READ MORE…

Announcing Our May Book Club Selection: Mister N by Najwa Barakat

May 30, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

A poetic and intricate labyrinth of a book that subtly explores trauma, mental illness, language, and the art of writing.

Dissipating the border between fiction and reality, Najwa Barakat’s Mister N is as much a traversal through the cartography of Beirut as it is one wandering the avenues of the mind. We are proud to present this the Lebanese author’s most recent release as our Book Club selection for the month of May, a singular and genre-defying look into where histories, memories, narratives, and psychologies coincide.

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 USD15 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.

Mister N by Najwa Barakat, translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren, And Other Stories, 2022

Najwa Barakat’s Mister N, translated by Luke Leafgren, is a poetic and intricate labyrinth of a book that subtly explores trauma, mental illness, language, and the art of writing. Traveling through the streets and modern history of Beirut, Barakat’s psychological metafiction still manages to maintain a tone both light and entertaining, enthralling the reader in its twists and turns and propelling them through its pages.

As the novel opens, our protagonist, the titular Mr. N, is writing a story about Lazarus, who has just been awoken from death. As the book progresses, however, we discover that the main narrative being written by Mr. N actually concerns his attempts to resurrect his authorial self by unpicking and then piecing together fragments of his memories, following a period of writer’s block that has lasted fifteen years. The novel regularly shifts in time, mood, and even self-referentially in its narrative point of view, but it quickly becomes clear that everything we are shown is through Mr. N’s very subjective lens. As his behaviour becomes more erratic, the reader must decide how much what he writes can be trusted and whether they should suspend their disbelief to the point where it would be possible for a character from one of his novels to appear in flesh and blood.

Much of the power and pleasure in Mister N is in its meditations on language and the act of writing, as well as the poetry within its pages. The novel is full of rich metaphor and simile, and Najwa Barakat’s study of cinema is evident in the detailed and evocative scenes she paints: the garden beneath his hotel window with its “three beautiful sisters clothed in green leaves”, which later, in the cover of pitch black night, becomes the stage for a macabre performance by his neighbours; the dirty and overcrowded streets of the refugee and migrant-filled districts where Mr. N “navigated high, dilapidated buildings, haphazardly placed, pushing against one another, tottering together, like man-made cumulus clouds locked in combat as they floated along with scents of decay from the slaughterhouses and the mountains of trash”. The potent combination of Mr. N’s poetic imagination and his illness allows the narration to glide seamlessly from the serious to the slight in the span of a sentence and then back again, reflecting a state of trauma in which the relative significance of things can be inverted, and a numbness to death and loss that can put the trivial on equal footing with the terrible. Midway through witnessing his neighbour’s suicide, for example, he becomes distracted by a mosquito and begins meditating on the best ways to get rid of it. On the one hand, such shifts and tangents contribute to the novel’s grim humour; on the other, as the novel progresses, and Mr. N grows less confident in his fiction of a comfortable hotel life and increasingly paranoid and delusional, they also reflect his inability to piece together a coherent narrative that might reveal the supposed truth of his life’s history. As he explains to one of his psychologists, “the malady lies in my fatal recalling of every detail and my brain’s refusal to take in the full picture. So here I am, not grasping realities except through successive glimpses of the horizon, momentary flashes that reveal disparate, disjointed things, before putting them back together again.”

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

May 27, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa and Julia Sherwood

The latest news from the Czech Republic and Mexico!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on new translations of Czech poetry, as well as books fairs and celebrations of acclaimed writers in Mexico. Read on to find out more!

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting on the Czech Republic

On 19 May, Bianca Bellová launched the English translation of her award-winning novel The Lake at the Czech Centre in London. “Whether The Lake is better described as dystopian or realistic depends, I suppose, on one’s opinion about the state of the world and what can be done about it,” said the book’s translator Alex Zucker. For him, the book “stands out for the incisiveness of its style and the evocativeness of its setting,” he told Alexandra Büchler in an interview published as part of Parthian Books’ Talking Translation series.

Meanwhile, Büchler’s own translation of the poetry collection Dream of a Journey by Kateřina Rudčenková has been longlisted for the coveted Oxford Weidenfeld Prize. You can read a tribute to Büchler, a tireless advocate for the translation of literature from Wales in both English and Welsh into languages across Europe through her role at Literature Across Frontiers. Those in the UK can catch Rudčenková and her fellow Czech poet Milan Děžinský at the Kendal Poetry Festival on 25 June, while poets Stephan Delbos and Tereza Riedlbauchová will be reading translations of each other’s poetry in Prague on 26 May.

There is more Czech poetry just out from Karolinum Press as part of its Modern Czech Classics series: The Lesser Histories by Jan Zábrana (1931-1984). In the words of its translator Justin Quinn, the collection “at times resembles a loose, shifting congregation of voices, some talking clearly, others muttering indistinctly, on occasion shifting from one language to another.” Quinn’s foreword, excerpted in LARB, provides a great introduction for Anglophone readers to Zábrana, a towering figure in Czech literature who, in addition to being a poet, was an outstanding translator from Russian and English, as well as a diarist whose “thousand pages or so of selected diaries bear witness to a splendid, if bitter, solitude.”

READ MORE…

Everything is Permitted in Dreams: Corinne Hoex and Caitlin O’Neil on Gentlemen Callers

May 26, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

This book is more about feminine desire than erotic consummation, so it’s not pornographic at all.

Diving without abandon into the realms of sexual fantasy and desire, Corinne Hoex’s Gentlemen Callers is a series of vignettes that follows the erotic as it traverses into the pleasurable, the humorous, and the absurd. As our Book Club selection for the month of April, Laurel Taylor described Hoex’s text as “a truly astonishing outlier.” In the following interview, Taylor speaks to Hoex and her translator, Caitlin O’Neil, about the multi-layered operations of the epigraph, the difficult of translating wordplay and idioms, and writing with joy.

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 USD15 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.

Laurel Taylor (LT): The construction of Gentlemen Callers was really interesting—can you tell us a little bit about what your inspiration was for the novel?

Corinne Hoex (CH): Each time, it’s the situation—of the dreaming woman—that drives the inspiration. It always begins with the concrete, and from there on it’s a mixture of fantasy and reality; something comes from reality and introduces a rupture, an entry into dreams. Whenever the vignette was too realistic, or didn’t abandon reality through some kind of glitch or unexpected detour, I didn’t keep it.

There were texts with characters who were much too banal—a pizza delivery man, a doctor. . . There wasn’t that sparkle, that possible transformation, so I didn’t continue with those dreams. So even more than inspiration, it was an exercise in the material, in the writing process.

But a lot of the dreams, of course, correspond to anecdotes from my own life. For “The Astrologer,” for example, I had taken some astrology classes, and all of it—the books, the Ephemeris, all of those calculations—I found horrid, boring. I imagined this situation where she [the dreaming woman] is seated across from an astrologer, and this astrologer is trying to seduce her, but he’s tactless, he’s insufferable. He says: “My Mars is on your Venus,” and all that, but he isn’t pleasing her, so she waits and tries to find a way to escape. There have often been times in my life—at school, at conferences—when I would like to escape; in this fantasy, since we’re dealing with the stars, the comet comes in through the window and takes the woman away. It’s not the man who seduces the dreaming woman, but the comet.

Similarly, when the narrator’s with the geographer and he bores her, she sees a beautiful polar bear that’s much more pleasing to her. There are sometimes elements which are not human; everything is permitted in dreams. 

LT: Caitlin, how did you first encounter this text? And what made you want to translate it?

Caitlin O’Neil (CO): This is my debut book-length translation, so it was very much my own choice of what text to pursue. When I started, I got some very good advice, which was: for your first translation, make sure that it is a work that you love wholeheartedly. Because you’re going to be working more closely with this text than you have ever worked with any text before in your life, and you are going to work very hard for this text as well. There may be rejections, and you need to love this text so much that you are willing to work through all the rejections that come your way. When I first started, I was coming from an academic background, so this was really a chance for me to dive deep into the world of Francophone literature, and hunt down a book that wasn’t known in the US yet. READ MORE…

On Women Who Refuse to Die: Who Will Win the 2022 Booker International?

May 25, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

What worlds have we been missing in prohibiting or dismissing women’s writing?

As we countdown to the 2022 Booker International Prize announcement on May 26, the contenders for the award offer new indications and perspectives by which to think about the world of literature and translation. In the following essay, our resident Booker expert Barbara Halla considers the digressive and variegated realm of “women’s writing”—that five out of the six titles on the shortlist were works by women authors is both evidence of the work’s scope and diversity, and also an overwhelming rejection of that old and tired idea: that women’s writing is simply of any gender-specific experience.

Since 2019, I have been relentlessly punished by the memory of this essay by an Albanian critic who argued in favor of the inherent superiority of men’s writing. His reasoning went like this: men write to triumph over life, whereas women write to survive. And for that very reason, the author claimed, men’s literature has universal appeal, as men are able to overcome the limitations of their own lived experiences and perspectives, while women’s writing focuses only on their painfully limited (i.e., domestic) existence.

My frustration with this article was compounded by finding its logic replicated elsewhere, in other books about the history of women in literature, and even during a conversation with another Albanian male writer a few months after reading that article. In the ensuing Q&A, the writer in question issued a complacent mea culpa about his lack of interest in women writers—he simply found their writing too limited and introspective. Of course, this is understandable. After all, it is easier to relate to Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei or Goethe’s Faust when one spends their days in the battlefield before making a deal with the devil and are whisked away for a night of debauchery with witches. After all, this is what “real” life is actually about, and it’s not like men ever write about minor concerns like marriage or childcare.

I’m being facetious, but this understanding of literature is pernicious—this desire to determine artistic value along essentialist gender lines. It also seeks to explain the existence of global and local literary canons as meritocratic, rather than the result of conscious policy decisions that have contributed to the erasure and devaluing of women’s writing. I was wondering about this argument as I made my way through the six books shortlisted for the Booker International 2022—five of which were written by women and published in the past fifteen years in South Korea, India, Poland, and Argentina. To be straightforward to the point of being trite: these five books undermine the notion that there is anything akin to a universal “women’s writing.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Chemistry Lesson” by Hagit Zohara Mendrowski

May 24, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Dana G. Peleg

In our room we are delivering / each other

Revel in the sensuous yearning of “Chemistry Lesson” this Translation Tuesday, a poem by the pansexual Hebrew poet Hagit Zohara Mendrowski’s that itself enacts a pedagogy of queer desire. In Dana G. Peleg’s translation, the linguistic aspects of gender between Hebrew and English unfold in poetic time to elongate and stretch the modes of desire latent in Mendrowski’s poem. Read this poem today and hear from the translator on the choices she made: 

“The love poems of Hagit Zohara Mendrowski, a pansexual Hebrew poet, reflect a great yearning. In many of her poems, the lover she yearns for is non-existent or a fantasy male or female lover. In this poem, the female lover is real, tangible. Furthermore, the gendered conjugation of verbs and prepositions in Hebrew does not leave any doubt regarding the type of the lovemaking depicted here. When using second person singular in Hebrew poets are forced to choose a gender. English, on the other hand, allows room for interpretation. I took the liberty of leaving readers with a question mark for a while. That question mark becomes an exclamation point when Mendrowski writes “pigeons” in the feminine. This is a grammatical error, or a children’s word, since “pigeon” in proper Hebrew is pluralized in the masculine. This usage adds another layer to the yearning expressed in this poem, for turning lesbian lovemaking into an act of procreation, of recreating.” 

—Dana G. Peleg

Brilliant formulae you have developed
Insist on impregnating me

When you squat on all six
my tongue draws infinite figures of eight
inside you. The whole room is lit. I drop into
The world of my childhood, scared
to sprout
but your obstinate womb pushes away—

Outside people continue to
Spit, swear, drag their heavy baskets.
Honk their limping cars.

In our room we are delivering
each other. Wander READ MORE…

Reaching for a New Home: An Interview with Alexander Dickow

May 23, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Lee Yew Leong

I’d rarely encountered a work that seemed to draw at once on so many different registers and languages; it’s an incredibly heteroglossic work.

Longtime readers may remember our Close Approximations international translation contest, which saw Asymptote give away more than USD20,000 to twenty-five best emerging translators (over four iterations in 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2019)—some of whose translations we promoted to a wider readership through our partnership with The Guardian. One of my thrills as editor-in-chief is to see texts that we have championed—with money we raised by ourselves, or out of our own pocket, since we are not supported by any institution—find permanent homes with publishing houses. Among these is Alexander Dickow’s translation of Sylvie Kandé’s The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore, which judge Eliot Weinberger picked as runner-up in the inaugural contest back in 2014, and which was finally released as a book with Wesleyan University Press three months ago, eight years after its debut on our website. Naturally, I was curious about the journey Dickow, also a former Communications Manager between 2017 to 2020, undertook to publication. Here is the conversation that ensued after I reached out to him.   

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief

How did you first encounter Sylvie Kandé’s poetry and what drew you to translate her The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore?

In fact, poet Susan Maurer posted an excerpt on a listserv—WOMPO, the Women in Poetry listserv, I believe. I’d rarely encountered a work that seemed to draw at once on so many different registers and languages; it’s an incredibly heteroglossic work. I was impressed enough with the excerpt that I sought The Neverending Quest out shortly after, and then reached out to Sylvie to compliment her on such a remarkable epic. We entered into conversation, and I ended up translating the portion for Asymptote’s contest without the intention of translating the whole book—but then got drawn into the project further, and decided to tackle the entire thing.

Much like, say, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, Neverending Quest offers readers an alternate history—in this case, what would have happened had explorers dispatched in pirogues by Malian Emperor Abubakar discovered America before Christopher Columbus; in the final canto, though, there is a fascinating pivot: from the ordeal of the fourteenth-century voyager to that of the twenty-first-century migrant crossing treacherous waters. What do you think the poet is trying to achieve with this?  

As for the comparison with modern-day migrants, it postulates that Abubakar’s outsized heroism (dangerously close to pure folly) is similar to the heroism of these men and women searching for their destiny. A common misperception is that African migration happens because of economic or political desperation. But in fact, that migration, which mostly happens within the African continent, is more a kind of initiation, an Adventure! rather than an act of desperation, and that’s true even when economic or political hardship may be present also. Alassane, the migrant of whose name we are unsure and whose name echoes that of Ulysses, is very much this kind of hero: we see him leaping into the ocean to swim for shore, evading the coast guard and deportation. Does he make it to shore? I don’t know! But he is likely to look more and more like a hero in days which will see huge numbers of climate refugees striving for a home. Alassane is reaching for a new home. Abubakar also, or the people of Mali who accompany him, in their own way. Aren’t we all?

I want to give credit where credit is due: the above response comes as much from hearing Sylvie speak, and from conversations with her, as it does from my own imagination.

The edition that Wesleyan University Press released three months ago sets the French original with your English translation side by side, and it was great to be able to compare the two. It’s thrilling to see how much you were able to get across in the English translation—plus, it also sings! What were some of the challenges you faced in the translation process? I’m eager to find out about the nuances that were perhaps sacrificed, in your opinion. 

Nuances I sacrificed: at the end of certain “laisses” (groups of verses of unequal length that constitute the epic’s segments, modeled on the laisses of the Song of Roland for instance), Sylvie turns to metrical verse. I decided that would be a bit jarring in some cases for Anglophone readers. In other works, such as my translation of Max Jacob’s Central Laboratory (Wakefield Press, forthcoming around July 2022), I translate in metrical verse, as well as I can. But it didn’t seem worth the risks in this case. I waffle about whether that was the right decision, and still can’t really decide. Another thing that doesn’t translate as well are the Africanisms of the French, borrowed from linguistic habits of West Africans who speak French, particularly in Senegal. I did my best, but there are obviously no direct equivalents. The same ultimately goes for some ordinary French colloquialisms—slang and the like is always challenging in translation! READ MORE…