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The latest news from India and Hong Kong!
This week, we bring you news from India and Hong Kong! In India, Suhasini Patni reports on recent controversies in the treatment of translators, while in Hong Kong, Charlie Ng highlights the opening of a politically charged museum for visual culture and the release of a new cross-genre poetry collection. Read on to find out more!
Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India
Translated literature has been enjoying a boom in India ever since the launch of the JCB Literary Prize. This year, the winning novel is Delhi: A Soliloquy, written by M. Mukundan and translated from Malayalam by Fathima E.V. and Nandakumar K. Although the JCB Prize is committed to honoring translated literature, many noted that the translators were not called onstage to receive the award with the author. Fathima E.V. tweeted: “Frankly, I expected to be called onstage, in keeping with the JCB foundation’s stated commitment towards translated literature. It would have been fitting finale for a graciously organised function in which all the authors and translators were well taken care of throughout.” This incident feeds into the larger question of how translators are treated globally and recent demands for fairer wages and due recognition.
Sanjoy Roy, of Teamwork, the company that organizes the Jaipur Literature Festival across the world, also noted: “Translations earlier were not necessarily good ones, they’re excellent now. The JCB Prize has brought that out,” when discussing the festival for 2022. The festival will return to the city in a hybrid mode, with online and in-person events, and the venue will change from Diggi Palace to Hotel Clarks Amer.
Certainly, translations have gained wider popularity in India during recent years. One of the most anticipated novels of the year was Resolve by Tamil writer Perumal Murugan. Translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, Resolve is about how marriage is turned into a social contract. Marimuthu, the protagonist, is on the quest to look for a wife. But he constantly must reevaluate his marital prospects when faced with rejections. The novel explores the challenges in a society afflicted by patriarchy and caste.
The story [of The Italian] is beautiful; it’s the story of my generation, that I myself witnessed when I was a student.
Shukri Mabkhout’s The Italian, an epic tale of romance and revolution in the tumult of 1980s and 1990s Tunisia, won the prestigious International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2015, making it the first Tunisian novel to achieve this accolade. As our Book Club selection for the month of October, Mabkhout’s wide-ranging novel gives an intricate look into the inner workings of young idealism under dictatorship, with all the brilliance and hardship that comes with hope. In the following interview, Rachel Stanyon spoke live to the translators of The Italian, Karen McNeil and Miled Faiza, on their working process, the representation of women in a literary scene dominated by men, and working towards a greater representation of Tunisian literature in the Arab world.
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.
Rachel Stanyon (RS): I’ve read in an interview on Arablit.org that your translation strategy involves Miled first doing a quite literal pass, and Karen then revising the draft for idioms, flow, etc. Did your translation of The Italian also involve a dialogue with the author, Shukri Mabkhout?
Karen McNeil (KM): Yes, it did, and that was really Miled’s role throughout the project. During both the translation and revision, we contacted Shukri a lot. There were sometimes words that we had no idea about! Miled was killing himself looking for this one word in every dictionary imaginable, and it turned out it was just this particular word that Shukri’s family uses, and probably no one else in Tunisia does. There are always these little idiosyncrasies. All the translations I’ve done have been in circumstances where we could work with the author—I almost can’t imagine it otherwise; there are just so many difficulties that require follow-up questions.
Miled Faiza (MF): Shukri was very supportive, which was really nice. I don’t think there are many passages that are difficult in the novel; we just wanted to be as accurate as possible—even with small things, such as recipes. I am from the central east of the country, and he’s from the north, the capital. Tunisia is a very small and culturally homogenous country, but there are a few small things that Shukri probably grew up with: what they cooked at home, or the clothes they wore, or things that are very specific to Tunis, the capital. He was very helpful with my queries about those specific questions.
I was able to find the word Karen mentioned in an Arabic dictionary; Lisan al-Arab, one of the oldest and largest dictionaries in the world, has an entire passage on it. But the meaning didn’t work in the context, so it was driving me crazy. I sent him a message, and he told me: “Oh, I’m sorry, that is a French word that my father used to say.” So it was a word very specific to his family, and he just threw it in there.
RS: The language of The Italian tends to be quite descriptive, and involves a lot of very detailed information on things like philosophy, Tunisian cuisine, or the process of publishing a newspaper. Miled, I’m particularly interested in how you, as a poet, found translating what I found sometimes to be quite dry, academic passages. Did these aspects of the translation pose any problems for either of you, and, in general, what were the biggest challenges for you in translating this novel?
MF: Our great friend, Addie Leak, edited this book and worked with us very closely—it’s really important to always mention her because she is amazing. I asked her: “How did you find the novel? What do you feel about the section on the political history of Tunisia?” She told me she loved it, which was a little surprising. Certain sections, especially those with a lot of details about the union and the different branches of Tunisian student activists, I found dry—and maybe it would have been possible to just summarise and get rid of a lot of it. But that’s my point of view as a Tunisian. I was more interested in the story of Abdel Nasser and Zeina, with the background of everything going on in Tunisia. I thought the very small details—of every congress and every meeting, important dates from Tunisian history—were not that interesting; they were a little bit dry for me.
KM: I think the parts when Abdel Nasser is at university, and especially the philosophical points, are actually even drier in Arabic. It was very challenging to make that flow in English, because it’s very much like a lecture or a philosophy textbook. It was difficult to render that in English without doing harm to the integrity of the original. Even though it was painful while I was doing it, though, with a little perspective I think I can appreciate why it goes on for so long. In the structure of the novel, that activism was Abdel Nasser’s whole life, but once he graduates from university, one realises that all the things the university students are doing, thinking that they’re changing the country—none of it really matters. I think it captures Abdel Nasser’s viewpoint of it being very important. READ MORE…
It is a timeless work of watching life flow past.
Last Summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich, translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021
Gianfranco Calligarich’s Last Summer in the City tells the deceptively simple story of a young man drifting through life, searching for romance and success amidst the urban swelter. Newly employed at a medical-literary magazine, narrator Leo Gazzara moves from Milan to Rome—only to be fired a year later due to the publication’s imminent bankruptcy. As he bounces around various jobs and other heartless endeavors, brooding resignation and lethargy permeate Leo’s world; his life, utterly devoid of excitement, becomes simply a series of events to be accepted and passed through in their procession. For the most part, he is a drifter—a flâneur without the poetic possibilities of transcendence. Unambitious and apathetic as he might appear to be, however, the story of Leo is nevertheless one of delicate beauty that imparts the prevalent, existential angst that defined a generation of young men amidst the Italy of the 70s.
In the vein of postwar Italian neorealism, Calligarich spends much of the text on bringing texture and illustration to the humble details of everyday life, and the resulting cinematic effect can likely be referred back to the author’s experience as a screenwriter. Leo’s story counteracts the adulation of glamour and happiness in Fascist propaganda, which holds little to no concern for the personal difficulties of everyday life—boredom, failure, or grief. Instead of telling the simple, customary story of a powerful and desirable man amidst a cosmopolitan enchantment, Last Summer in the City presents a marginalized individual’s quotidian, melancholic tale in a provincial setting. The quiet, understated prose emanates an almost diaristic intimacy into the narrator’s mind, providing an avenue to access his inner vacuum of emptiness, and the terrible simplicity of his apathy.
The fire / of the love with which we see things
The Ultraist literary movement—of which Jorge Luis Borges was one of its most prominent core members—was an early-twentieth-century avant garde literary movement in Spain that, amidst the influences of multiple European literary trends, promoted the use of imagery and references to new scientific ideas and technologies in poetry. This Translation Tuesday, we are delighted to present two poems by a major figure of the Ultraist movement, Ernesto López Parra, in James Richie’s translation. The poems’ energetic typographic style and evocative metaphors combine to create a new field of perception that reflect how new-fangled technologies from airplanes to electric balloons had begun to shape the literary imagination. The poems of López Parra—who has hardly been translated into English—enhance our appreciation of an influential experimental movement that shaped Spanish poetry.
Color does not exist
Color does not exist. Color—
A vice of the retina
Everything is white
Like the moon and the stars.
If we see the sky as blue,
It’s because Hugo told us,
“And foolishly, we followed his trickery!”
From afar, blue is the summit
Up close, the summit is gray,
But the only truth is that it is white.
The Sacred Books would tell us
That God made the colors.
Flowers are not red nor green
Nor yellow nor purple
The carnation and the violet
The rose and the daisy
Are white . . .
(The fire
of the love with which we see things
Makes us see them with different colors.)
Therefore, snow is cold
And we see it always as white . . .
(in LIFE, truth, and snow
White and cold)
God did not create color . . .
He (Ecclesiastes) tells us nothing
The commentaries silence . . .
Man invented color
To play the roulette! READ MORE…
The poems follow a coherent design, with themes and characters growing organically, coalescing in a cohesive atmosphere and view of the world.
Somewhere a Blind Child by Ion Cristofor, translated from the Romanian by Andreea Iulia Scridon, Naked Eye Publishing, 2021
Oh, what a sinister story, what bothersome spectres
my bedstead is creaking.
We will have to move in the night
to other rooms to other countries to other life-stories.
Spirituality, references to the Scriptures, and direct calls from God—Romanian poet Ion Cristofor is known as a “modern Christian poet,” but Somewhere a Blind Child exemplifies his idiosyncratic approach to faith. Drawn from nearly forty years of work, these selected poems are translated into English for the first time by Andreea Iulia Scridon, a translator and poet herself. They are spiritual, but also ridden by spirits; they frequently allude to the scriptures with reverence, but also do not refrain from ridiculing them at leisure—God calls in, but he himself “gets no erotic phonecalls.” Cristofor’s numbingly clear awareness around the contradictions of the modern world—in realms of religion, history, science, and death—keeps the reader from being lulled into any false sense of comfort, whether by confidence in faith’s power or excessive hope in reason. When earthly pleasures do barge in, however, their offer to distract from pain and worry is accepted with abandonment and sensual relish, no matter how ephemeral their soothing effect.
When she undresses on the couch
the blossom-laden trees all move into my bedroom
their love-sick leaves becoming delirious.
It’s autumn, Lord, it’s so late in heaven
and love is a blue orange in your hand
In this unusual meeting place between the chilly high planes of the spirit and the dirty warm ground of the senses, visions flourish. It feels oddly logical; wracked with doubt, a mind can become overattentive to extemporary signs—the shape of a cloud or the temperature in a room, taking them for premonitions or glimpses of the truth that lies behind the real, as they appear and disappear in the surreal and overheated atmosphere. The senses, if capable of guiding reason, can also distort it, making room for the incredible, the strange, and the eerie.
a white phantom passes through the rooms
reminding you of an hour of love
that once passed over you like a galloping herd of horses,
like a reckless ocean wave.
And now flocks of starlings proclaim you governor of the
province
and towards evening the clouds send you dark ambassadors.
The latest news from Thailand and Central America!
This week, our editors around the world report on the exciting developments in publishing and journalism. From expressions of the free press to Nobel laureates, read on for the latest from the ground in world literature!
Peera Songkünnatham, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Thailand
Launching this week, the web publication series Justice in Translation brings together urgent works from Southeast Asian languages; its first releases include an incendiary poem about children’s rights translated from Malay, a short story about how to write about dispossession translated from Filipino, and essays on legal reform and educational equity translated from Indonesian. Part of a five-year initiative on Social Justice in Southeast Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the series brings the institutional capacity of the academy in sustaining the practice of translation as advocacy in the region, giving both international exposure and small honorariums.
What “international exposure” looks like is being reconfigured through digital academy-fueled efforts like this one. As the anti-dictatorship three-finger salute drawn from The Hunger Games has spilled over Thai borders to Myanmar and other countries, so has the “broad” English-speaking audience for domestic issues, which increasingly includes people in one’s neighboring countries.
And as the “Milk Tea Alliance” spreads beyond East Asia, a sense of transregional solidarity has also pervaded public works of scholarship. Last week, the Southeast Asia-focused academic blog New Mandala, hosted by the Australian National University’s Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, announced a partnership with the Indo-Pacific-focused independent platform 9DashLine. One can hope to see more transregional essays such as this recent one by Show Ying Xin about literary translation in plurilingual Malaysia and Singapore, which troubles the distinction between translating “within” and translating “out.” READ MORE…
Successful science fiction, [Lem] believed, must treat problems and their solutions in a different, more earnest way.
The Truth and Other Stories by Stanisław Lem, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, MIT Press, 2021
One cannot overstate how profoundly our relationship with computers has changed since the mid-twentieth century. Once upon a time, the notion of a mechanical brain was as alien as the notion of, well, an alien. Similar to research of extraterrestrial life, there were then a few elite scientists, sequestered in institutions, who were better informed to predict what an encounter with a mechanical brain might entail than the general population, for whom such a concept was nothing more than fantasy.
Stanisław Lem was of that class. Son of a doctor, he studied medicine until his transition to literature. As a newcomer to Lem’s copious body of work, what surprised me most about this collection of previously untranslated stories was how, with very little attention to character development, he manages to render this scientific class with as much fidelity as their fields of inquiry. I expected their curiosity and ambition, even obsession, but not their yearning, inquietude, or melancholy. How disappointing that, when confronted with the other, we might not be able to communicate. But how utterly devastating that, when confronted with one of our own, we never are able to truly communicate. In The Truth and Other Stories, it is often this precise pathos that catalyzes action.
There’s inherent value in the defamiliarization of technology that comes from reading literature—especially speculative fiction—from a previous era. Lem luxuriates in the weight and texture of his machines. His favorites occupy rooms and require trips to many types of stores to build. Gels, wires, soldering . . . they are so tactile, until the moment—signaling the beginning of the end—they become more than the sum of their parts. In “The Friend,” a young member of a Short-Wave Radio Club gets caught up in the mysterious mission of a rather haunted man, Harden, who is driven to complete it for a highly secretive friend. While building the electrical structure called “the conjugator,” the boy’s affection for Harden grows as he tries to solve the mystery of the project, yet simultaneously begins to doubt the terms of Harden’s relationship with the absent friend. “The word ‘conjugator’ had come back to mind, which was what Harden had called the apparatus. Coniugo, coniugare—to join, to connect—but what did it mean? What did he want to join, and to what?” he wonders. The real possibility of friendship with Harden is constantly frustrated, ironically, by the bizarre circumstances of this connecting machine. What the technology promises of connection gets in the way of intimacy’s reality.
Harden pressed my hand to his chest with his eyes closed. In any other person it would have looked theatrical, but he really was like that. The more I cared about him—as I was fully aware by now—the more he exasperated me, most of all because of his lethargy and the cult of the ‘friend’ he nurtured. READ MORE…
[C]onfronting biases you didn’t realise you had is a lifelong exercise, and it’s painful but necessary, especially in work like this.
Leri Price commands language, and—similar to the narrator in Syrian author Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay—does so with a prowess for invention. Furthering Price’s accomplishments as an award-winning translator of contemporary Arabic fiction, her translation of Planet of Clay was recently named as a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. The novel is a haunting exploration of the Syrian civil war, as seen through the eyes of fourteen-year-old girl named Rima. At a checkpoint one afternoon in Damascus, Rima’s mother is killed, leaving her and her older brother alone to survive. To escape from the surrounding horrors, she turns to reading, drawing, and daydreaming—creating her own magical universe à la her favorite book, The Little Prince. Though an unflinching account of war, Planet of Clay is, in many ways, a hopeful novel: a testament to the power of our own imaginations in the alleviation of suffering. In the following interview, Price graciously shares her thoughts on the importance of translator visibility, the nuances of translating from Arabic, and the books that have changed her life.
Rose Bialer (RB): Last month, Planet of Clay was announced as a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature—just two years after your translation of Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work was a finalist for the same prize. How has your journey as a translator been up to this point? Have you noticed any changes or shifts in the literary translation field?
Leri Price (LP): It’s genuinely an honour to be counted among such amazing colleagues on the longlist and shortlist. Like most people in this industry, literary translation is not my only field of work, so it has been hard at times to maintain—especially when holding down full-time work in a completely different area. I’ve been so lucky that I have been able to translate authors like Khaled Khalifa and Samar Yazbek; a translator is a reader first of all, and having the chance to engage so deeply and intimately with a text is a privilege when it comes to writing like theirs.
My first translation was ten years ago, and I would say there has certainly been a shift in the field since then, in no small part thanks to translator/activists like Anton Hur and Deborah Smith. Among translators from Arabic, you have people like Sawad Hussain, Yasmine Seale, Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, and Lissie Jacquette (among many others) who all advocate for the incredible richness and variety of texts written in Arabic. Prizes like the National Book Award in the U.S. and the International Booker in the U.K. acknowledge that a translated work of literature requires recognition of the translator (without whom the work would not be accessible to English-speaking readers). There are more presses devoted to translation and more acceptance among others that translated literature is something that people are interested in reading. Maybe it’s part of the broader social movement to seek out and amplify voices that have been overlooked in the past—I certainly like to think so.
I also think that current conversations about the visibility of translators is long overdue— not (just) because translators deserve more credit for their craft, but because readers deserve to know how the text came to be in their hands. For instance, given how influential editors can be in the final version of a text, I actually think they should also be noted prominently. The final book is the result of so many people’s work, so much discussion and negotiation, and I wish that was recognised and celebrated more often. Jennifer Croft recently made excellent points about this issue.
RB: What was your relationship like with Samar Yazbek? Was there a collaborative element to the translation?
LP: I always consult with authors where possible; I think it’s vital to get author input, but personally speaking, I need to have a strong sense of how I see the text first. It’s much easier to go back and revisit things after a conversation with the author than having two or three versions of scenes or characters in your head while drafting the English version. (Of course, that can happen anyway, especially in a text like Planet of Clay!) I tend to consult authors after I have a draft in fairly good shape, and then again during the editing process, as many times as needed. So I don’t know that I would call it a collaboration as such, but I would never feel comfortable producing a translation without consulting the author as long as I have a chance of doing so. Samar and I had two or three long phone calls, as well as email exchanges, and they all took place in a sort of mishmash of Arabic, English and French, which was fun. READ MORE…
For the first time in my life / I washed my eyes clean with bird droppings.
Arguably South Korea’s most well-loved poet, we are thrilled to feature the award-winning Jeong Ho-seung and Brother Anthony’s translation of his poems in this week’s Translation Tuesday. All five poems, gathered from the poet’s 2020 collection Dangsineul chajaseo (Seeking You), move quite literally between the bird’s-eye view and the human’s-eye view—depicting a speaker who is learning to look at the world through a less anthropocentric, more hybrid and expansive set of eyes. Jeong’s poems show the reader what poetry can achieve through this expanded view of the world: his diction is at once sparse and emotive, his vision at once child-like and invested with wisdom. A skilful blend of the humorous and the philosophical, these poems invite us to shed our human ego and behold the landscape in ways that can centre not us but the world.
Bird Droppings 1
Bird droppings got into my eyes.
For the first time in my life
I washed my eyes clean with bird droppings.
It stopped me seeing the human landscape
that I finally wanted to see
but did not need to see.
Thank you.
Bird Droppings 2
When I see bird droppings on the ground
as I walk along,
it rather makes me feel relieved.
Since among human paths there’s a beautiful path
where birds leave their droppings,
by walking along that path
today once again I become a beautiful human being. READ MORE…
Our blog editors take you through the shortlist!
The announcement for the National Book Award for Translated Literature is right around the corner; the 72nd ceremony is due to broadcast live on November 17. On the shortlist are five varied and individual titles: Elisa Shua Dusapin’s Winter in Sokcho, translated from the French by Aneesa Abba Higgins; Ge Fei’s Peach Blossom Paradise, translated from the Chinese by Canaan Morse; Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West; Nona Fernández’s The Twilight Zone, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer; and Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price. Whom will the judges smile upon? Read more for our take.
A friend, not too long ago, once told me that he feels guilty whenever he reads fiction. Just seems a bit indulgent, he said. Yes, I admitted in turn, when pleasure and beauty mix, it feels incredibly indulgent. It was early autumn, dawn was a glorious thing, and we were talking about the first novels we loved—ones I remember for their intelligent presences, their human authority, but most of all, for the distinct, almost secret, pleasure they brought. The indulgence of excellent fiction feels luxurious precisely because of this intimacy: a sense of understanding passed via that most hidden method, of mind to mind. It seems to me that when pleasure and beauty mix, we allow the precocious lies of fiction to move through us, and become truths.
The five titles that make up the finalists for this award are all, in their own respect, remarkable emblems of fiction’s capability to create truth through duplicity. They achieve this through vivid, personal recollections—as in Planet of Clay—or through intensive research—as in When We Cease to Understand the World—or perhaps in what Borges described as “magic, in which every lucid and determined detail is a prophecy”—something I suspect to be at work in The Twilight Zone. The worlds for which these works contribute their imagination are various, wonderful, horrible, and mercilessly true; it makes me think something else about this triangulation of pleasure, beauty, and truth—that it is in the conciliation of the latter two where the incomparable pleasure of fiction is found.
Beauty is not reliably something one can stand to look at for long, but it always leaves something searing. Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay—the most lyrical and poetic of the five selections—is gorgeously written, and its translation by Leri Price is a definitive work of art, but it feels sick to talk about the pleasures in reading this story of Rima, a young, mute girl in Syria, as she loses one solid fact of her life after another amidst the atrocities and miseries of war. Instead, Yazbek’s prose is a holding thrall, channelling the child’s voice which springs between stark lucidity and dappled abstraction. Elegantly hanging in the balance between the wounded reality and the salve of her reveries, Rima draws an excruciating impression of the pain she experiences and witnesses, intensifying the horror with an unsparing visuality: “I am afraid of the meanings of things when they turn into words, as it is hard for me to understand bare words without turning them into pictures.” The coarse red of blood, the acrid taste of poison gas, the dusty pallor of a face in death—the words of Planet of Clay are both pictures of unflinching witness, and figures of breathtaking reverie. READ MORE…
News this week from the Czech Republic, Taiwan, and Serbia!
This week, our editors are bringing news of their vigorously alive world literatures. From a celebration of Czech letters at the Warsaw Book Fair and the Prague MicroFestival, to a commemoration of iconic Taiwanese writer Li Qiao, to a push for Serbian women’s voices in a collection of short stories—the ongoing efforts of writers, presses, and translators around the world indicate always towards greater and greater realms of understanding.
Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Czech Republic
Held from September 9 to 12, the Warsaw Book Fair was one of the first major industry events to make a comeback after the pandemic-enforced hiatus, with the Czech Republic as the guest of honour. The timing was quite fortuitous, since barely two months after the event, cases were again surging in these two countries, as well as in most of Europe.
Czech literature has been enjoying a real boom among Polish readers, and this was reflected in the strong contingent of leading Czech writers who came to Warsaw. They included Michal Ajvaz, Bianca Bellová, David Böhm, Petr Hruška, Alena Mornštajnová, Iva Procházková, Jaroslav Rudiš, Marek Šindelka, and Kateřina Tučková. Past Asymptote contributor Radka Denemarková—who drew the largest crowds—felt that “in recent times, it has been particularly important for us writers to show solidarity—especially with countries such as Poland and Hungary—creating a kind of enclave of humanism.”
Also popular with Polish readers was a meeting with Petra Hůlová, who presented the Polish translation of her 2018 novel Stručné dějiny hnutí (A Brief History of the Movement), a book she describes as “a feminist manifesto and critique of feminism rolled in one.” Her “provocative satire of a feminist future challenges and unsettles in equal parts” (Kirkus Reviews) has just been published by World Editions as The Movement, in Alex Zucker’s English translation. You can read an excerpt from the book here as well as in BODY.Literature, the Prague-based English-language literary journal whose fall issue also features poetry by Karel Šebek (trans. Ondřej Pazdírek) and Pavla Melková (trans. Joshua Mensch), as well as a chilling absurdist story by Vratislav Kadlec (trans. Graeme Dibble).
On October 18, Hůlová and Zucker read from and discussed The Movement in an event organized by Czech Centre New York. Their conversation (now available to watch on YouTube) also included the writer-translator pair Kateřina Tučková and Veronique Firkusny and the novel Gerta, published by AmazonCrossing earlier this year. On November 22, Firkusny will be featured again as part of European Literature Night, organized by the Czech Centre; she will appear with Elena Sokol, as their joint translation of the final part of past Asymptote contributor Daniela Hodrová’s trilogy, City of Torment, is soon to be published by Jantar Publishing. READ MORE…
Who’s behind your favorite journal and what have they been up to? Here’s a glimpse!
After presenting a transmedia computational poem commissioned by RCI New York, Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, guest-edited a special issue of Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties on “Literature and/as (the) Digital.”
Educational Arm Assistant Katarzyna Bartoszyńska has two new online publications: a piece entitled “Modern Transit: A History of Feeling in the Polish People’s Republic” and a review of Doireann Ni Ghriofa’s A Ghost in the Throat.
Assistant Editor (Fiction) Laurel Taylor recently published an essay on radical translation practices in Mentor & Muse.
Assistant Editor (Poetry) M. L. Martin’s Theater of No Mistakes won the 2021 Rick Campbell Chapbook Award and is now available for purchase on the Anhinga Press website and through her own website.
Chief Executive Assistant Rachel Farmer has translated German author Katharina Bendixen’s short story “The Third Wolf” for the latest issue of Berlin-based SAND journal.
Assistant Editor Shawn Hoo’s poetry chapbook Of the Florids won the 2021 Diode Editions Chapbook Contest and is forthcoming in 2022.
Editor-at-Large for India Suhasini Patni has been selected as the Toto Fellow for the Sangam House Residency. She will be in Bangalore in December working on a collection of short stories.
Editor-at-Large for Vietnamese diaspora Thuy Dinh’s review of poet Victoria Chang’s Dear Memory was published in NPR in October.
In addition to being featured in the current issue, Assistant Editor (Poetry) Whitney DeVos’s translations of Nahua poet Martín Tonalmeyotl appeared in the Fall 2021 issue of Michigan Quarterly Review and, on behalf of Latin American Literature Today, in a chapbook commemorating the winners of the Whiting Foundation’s 2021 Literary Magazine Prize.
Want to join our dynamic international team? We’re wrapping up our final recruitment drive of the year—hurry and submit an application today!
“The Dolls” leaves you with a simple, haunting feeling—what is enough for a life?
The Dolls by Ursula Scavenius, translated from the Danish by Jennifer Russell, Lolli Editions, 2021
Ursula Scavenius has created an inexplicable environment in The Dolls, a collection of four stories that render the common traditions of narrative into cerebral mystery. Perhaps our characters are in Denmark, but what iteration of Denmark is it? She does not seem to call upon any particular reality or time period in which to place her characters; even the mention of actual years or eras, be they 1888 or 1999, don’t seem to hold much meaning. Amidst this ambiguity, you might say something is rotten in the state of Denmark. The epigraph of the text, deftly translated from the Danish by Jennifer Russell, reads: “I’ll tell the story, even if no one is listening.” While not necessarily a unique sentiment, it aptly sets up a book that comes to us in English translation, which has found itself a new set of readers who are ready to listen.
Fittingly, this book is part of Lolli’s New Scandinavian Literature series—and it does seem to live within that hint of reinvention, avoiding any stereotypically Danish or Scandinavian elements. There’s no hygge—that adulated brand of upper-middle-class coziness—here: everyone is decidedly uncomfortable. Nor can they be categorized under the beloved genre of Nordic noir—no outright crime exists in these stories. Instead, we have paranoia, dread, perhaps some doomsday prep, but no hardboiled investigation or detective work. Although Scavenius may not explicitly belong to the traditions of Scandinavian literature, you could thread her particular type of psychological penetration and sense of displacement with the likes of Clarice Lispector, Wuthering Heights, perhaps Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss or Amparo Dávila’s The Houseguest and Other Stories (translated by Matthew Gleeson and Audrey Harris), taking part in a global narrativization of women who find themselves in archaic or alternative lifestyles, or otherwise alone—either by their own accord or against their will. A timeless situation.