Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Yung Yung by Lo Yu

December 10, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Fion Tse

In truth you are her muse. She writes about you; she can only write about you.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you an excerpt from Hong Kong novelist Lo Yu, translated from the Chinese by Fion Tse. In this short, plainspoken tale, an unnamed member of the Hong Kong diaspora travels to Paris to spend Christmas with her girlfriend, all the while haunted by thoughts of another lover, her “Hong Kong girlfriend” who she has left behind in London. Lo Yu’s prose has an urgent, almost frantic quality, which perfectly captures both the desperation of the narrator’s girlfriend, terrified of being left for another woman, and the despair of the narrator herself, who has only just realized that her Hong Kong girlfriend regards their relationship as more than a fling. In a bittersweet allusion to the surrealist paintings of René Magritte, the narrator finally understands how mistaken she has been. Read on!

You, Your Girlfriend, Your Hong Kong Girlfriend

Perhaps you’re already on the EuroStar to Paris, hurtling towards the city you were born in. Next to you is your girlfriend, elegant yet lost. You have yet to break up. You’re headed to her family home because it’s Christmas, and Europeans celebrate Christmas with family. And of course she wouldn’t dare to leave you on your own for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day, all alone in London.

You probably won’t go back to your family home in Paris, possibly to avoid Cantonese—because when you talk to your family, you’re reminded of that Hong Kong girlfriend, like a character in the Hong Kong shows Grandma likes to watch.

How many girlfriends do you really have?

READ MORE…

The Dance of the Torn Skin: Arvind Krishna Mehrotra on the Indian Anglophone Essay and Prākrit in Translation

December 9, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I’ve always been slightly more interested in the less visible than I am in those who are always in the limelight.

As an essayist, literary historian, and critic, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra has been identified as one of the writers who wrestle with ‘what it means to connect the ideal of personal authenticity with wider forms of cultural identity’ by The Oxford History of Life-Writing (2022). As a poet, Modern Indian Poetry in English (2001) defines him as an experimentalist ‘who . . . has formed a poetic from local material, parody, and the conscious manipulation of chance’. In the late 60s, as a student at the University of Allahabad, Mehrotra started the avant-garde literary magazine damn you: a magazine of the arts, and later in Bombay, he founded ezra (1966-1969) and fakir (1966). In 1976, together with Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar, and Gieve Patel, he started Clearing House, a small press. Along with Eunice de Souza, they’ve come to be known as the Bombay Poets. Today, he is a renowned figure in contemporary Indian literature, with a voluminous bibliography spanning poetry, literary criticism, history, translation, and essays.

In this interview, I conversed with Mehrotra on The Book of Indian Essays: Two Hundred Years of English Prose (Permanent Black/Black Kite, 2020), an anthology he edited, its earliest essays appearing in periodicals that were, as Henry Derozio described them, ‘short-lived as bugs, and not so infrequent as angel-visits’; his translations of the fifteenth-century bhakti poet Kabir; and of  love poems translated from the ancient Indo-Aryan language, Prākrit. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Let’s talk about your selection process for The Book of Indian Essays: Two Hundred Years of English Prose (Black Kite, 2020). In an interview with Saikat Majumdar for Ashoka University, you commented that you had wanted to include V. S. Naipaul and Jhumpa Lahiri, but had to ‘narrow the field’.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (AKM): The suggestion to do an anthology of Indian essays came from Rukun Advani, the publisher of Permanent Black/Black Kite. We discussed a few names—perhaps also some essays to possibly include—but at the time nothing came of the idea. Then, in 2019, under a pile of brown paper envelopes, I came across one marked ‘Black Kite essays’. I’d recently finished reading the proofs of Translating the Indian Past and had been wondering what to do next. In that envelope was the answer: a bunch of photocopies, the beginnings of what became The Book of Indian Essays.

It was decided early on—more for practical reasons than parochial ones—to exclude writers who had spent most, if not all, of their lives outside India. The exceptions were Santha Rama Rau and Victor Anant, forgotten writers who I felt should be brought back into the conversation—not that any conversation was taking place. By leaving out Naipaul, Lahiri, and a few others, I was also able to bring in people like Gautam Bhatia, who is an architect, and the historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam.

Since the essay is more pliable than poetry or fiction, it has been wielded with considerable style and effect by writers who might be widely known for their work in their professional fields—as Bhatia and Subrahmanyam are—but are less visible as essayists in English. I’ve always been slightly more interested in the less visible than I am in those who are always in the limelight. The latter can look after themselves and are doing it very well. There will, however, come a time when present limelight will fade into the harsh glow of oblivion, and they too will be forgotten—which is why we need literary histories and anthologies. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

December 6, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest in literary news from Southeast Asia, Bulgaria, and Chile!

In this week of world literature, our editors cover the influence of censorship and propaganda on literature, and look back on Southeast Asian literature released this year.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Southeast Asia

What a year in Southeast Asian literature! The Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand took center stage in Penguin Random House Southeast Asia (SEA)’s catalogues, with a range of texts published throughout the year. First off in March was Bleeding Sun by playwright-novelist Rogelio R. Sicat, translated by one of Sicat’s children, the translator and editor Ma. Aurora L. Sicat, from the original Dugo sa Bukang-Liwayway, which was serialised beginning 1965. Sicat, who came of age in the aftermath of the American Occupation, wrote novels which further revealed his belief in land reform and love for Tagalog as a literary language, veering away from his contemporaries who were influenced by Euro-American conventions.

READ MORE…

Moving in Circles: On Celebration by Damir Karakaš

December 5, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Robert Allen Papinchak

[The] translation is exemplary . . . Karakaš’s original language lends itself to vivid descriptions, figurative imagery, and crisp exchanges.

Celebration by Damir Karakaš, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać, Two Lines Press, 2024

An existential dilemma carries Damir Karakaš’s slim, engrossing Celebration, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać. Mijo—a former soldier of the famously brutal WWII organization Ustaše—is hiding in the deep, dark woods of a forest near his home, wondering if he will ever be able to come out. Connecting the dots of this character study is an intriguing exercise in a non-chronological narrative, which begins in 1945 before working its way back to 1935, 1942, and, finally, 1928. The structure allows for a series of carefully coordinated overlaps and repetitions, soaking the disturbing story line in the consequences and repercussions of an intergenerational fascism. Flashbacks and backstories included in each section gradually develop Mijo’s character, eventually revealing the lead-up to his seclusion.

In an interview with the Center for the Art of Translation, Karakaš provides a penetrating analysis of the historical and personal background of Celebration. When describing his birthplace of Lika, he speaks of “its poverty, its harsh winters, its wolves,” as well as the pervasive nature of war in the region; his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all served as soldiers, and Karakaš himself too is a veteran—though he has since learned to abhor war. The static nature of such an environment informed the author’s choice of the reverse narrative, which he applies to suggest that “we are always moving in a circle,” as products of all that precedes us.

READ MORE…

Here There Be Monsters: Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, Books I and II

December 4, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Matt Seidel

On the Calculation of Volume is a mix of pensive reflection, scientific reasoning, and bone-dry humor. . .

On the Calculation of Volume (Books I and II) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland, New Directions, 2024

Tara Selter, the narrator of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, takes a Roman coin out for walks and believes that a refrigerator is capable of sobbing: “It is quite permissible for a fridge that cannot hold onto its Christmas food to laugh—or cry—like a human being if it wishes.” A reader might reasonably infer that Tara has lost her mind, but there is a method to Tara’s madness, as her thoughts and behavior stem from wholly rational attempts to make sense of her absurd condition: each day, she wakes up on the morning of November 18.

On the Calculation of Volume is a septology, the first five books of which have been published in Balle’s native Denmark. This fall, Books I and II had their English debut in Barbara J. Haveland’s elegant translation from New Directions. The work begins in medias res—as much as is possible for a plot in which time fails to advance—the narrator having already lived with her curious predicament for 121 days. The first sentence is a tonal feint that wouldn’t be out of place in a suspense novel, but, here, primes the reader for the sense of estrangement that plagues Tara’s recounting: “There is someone in the house.” Identified solely by the sounds he makes, that someone is not an intruder but her husband, Thomas, with whom she runs a rare books business. By the time the novel opens, Tara has abandoned explaining her predicament each day and opted to avoid him, thoroughly estranged from a man to whom she once felt molecularly bonded:

Our love has always been microscopic. It is something in the cells, some molecules, some compounds outside our control, which collide in the air around us, sound waves that form unique harmonies when we speak, it happens at the atomic level or even that of smaller particles…

After four months of November 18ths, her husband has been abstracted into a “someone” and reduced to mere noise, “just sounds in the house.”

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Childhood” by Maria Karpińska

December 3, 2024  |  in Translations, Uncategorized  |  by Jonathan Baines

Right there, in a setting so much like a fairy tale that it felt unreal, we would imagine the end of the world.

A single season can completely upend everything you used to take for granted—at least, that’s how it often feels when you’re young. This week’s short story, “Childhood”, by Maria Karpińska and translated by Jonathan Baines, depicts one such formative period. Over the course of a summer vacation, a boy is increasingly caught up in the escapades of his magnetic new friend, who sweetly conceals her taste for cruelty. Together, the children dream of apocalypse. If chaos were to invade the pastoral setting of childhood, what form would it take? Karpińska’s piece quietly hints at the looming shadows of global crises, cast over those who are too young to make sense of them.

As a child I loved the steady rhythm of trains. It sent me to sleep. The whole family, laden with provisions and luggage in extraordinary quantities, would board the train and within a quarter of an hour I’d be asleep. I’d settle down on a pile of suitcases, or on my mother’s generous thighs, and drift off, lulled by the rattling of the wheels. 

It was high summer. The trees outside the window were such a luscious green, that you could sink your teeth into it, and it would dribble down your chin. The picture postcard quality of the season had not yet been spoiled by the heat. Cottages were scattered here and there. The scene was peaceful, idyllic. Everything was blurred around the edges, smudged with dirt, like a windowpane smeared with the grease of a hundred different hands, imperfectly cleaned up by Polish State Railways. 

And who should step into this picture, but a wee girl. That’s how everyone referred to her. I can still hear my mother saying, “There’ll be a wee girl there. You’ll get along.” We were on the train then, too, on our way to see my uncle’s family, or some in-laws, I don’t recall. I’d never met the people we stayed with and I haven’t seen them since. I don’t know what the thinking was behind that trip, but then one’s childhood is packed with events for which one receives no explanation, things happening for no reason and with no goal in view, coming to pass abruptly, with no introduction. A blissful world of ignorance with no decisions to be made. 

READ MORE…

Uncovering Truth Through Fiction: Liliana Corobca and Monica Cure on Too Great a Sky

December 2, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Regan Mies

I think optimism is a solution to our very deep trauma­ . . . If you didn’t view life that way, you just wouldn’t survive.

After The Censor’s Notebook, winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for debut translation, and Kinderland, about a village of children abandoned by parents working abroad, Too Great a Sky is Moldovan author Liliana Corobca’s third novel to be translated into English by Romanian-American translator and writer Monica Cure. Beginning with a harrowing deportation by train from Bucovina, Romania to the steppes of Kazakhstan, the story chronicles a girl and a people who are forced to find their way amid unspeakable conditions and political change. I spoke with Liliana and Monica about working between academic research and fiction; navigating culture and language across borders both contemporary and historic; and the ways in which faith, optimism, and humor are instrumental to survival.

Regan Mies (RM): Too Great a Sky opens with its narrator Ana telling her story to her great-granddaughter, beginning when she’s eleven and facing Soviet deportation from Bucovina. What was it like to write in the voice of a much older woman recalling experiences from her youth and adolescence?

Liliana Corobca (LC): My novel is based on the real testimonies of people from Bucovina deported to Siberia, and these were from survivors who were very old. My main character is not a real person, but because someone like her would have been deported in 1941, it wouldn’t be realistic to imagine a survivor as a young woman or child today. But my novel is also about memory, about remembering the experiences of past and childhood. During the journey on the train, Ana was a child—that’s why I move between ages. We have an old woman who tells the story, but we also have a young girl who feels the experience of deportation.

RM: In her translator’s note, Monica writes that you had previously edited over eighty of these oral testimonies of Soviet deportation during World War Two. What did the journey look like between working with those texts in an academic capacity and deciding to write this novel?

LC: At the time when I was editing the documents, I thought that documentation would be enough, and then I moved on. I decided not to write a novel. Almost ten years passed after that, but when I was working with those testimonies, I discovered certain themes. They said, like the refrain of a song, “We survived because we believed in God.” I was educated in a communist society, which wasn’t religious at all. For me, it was complicated to write from inside the skin of a believer. These people who believed so profoundly and seriously in God had a very religious way of speaking. Even if they weren’t mentioning God by name, he was still present in their stories. I was impressed that, in the worst conditions, their hope and faith allowed them to survive. I began to read religious literature, and I learned to pray. I also began reading orthodox prayer books. Even though it wasn’t very usual to read the same prayers over and over again every day, it was through that practice that I learned to say my own prayers, which was what I needed to be able to write this story in their voices.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

November 29, 2024  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury and Wambua Muindi

The latest literary news from Palestine and Kenya!

This week, our editors-at-large report on the intersection of literature and politics, from a pledge by leading others to boycott Israeli cultural institutions to a book launch by a prominent Kenyan political figure. From a historic call for solidarity with Palestine to an alleged abduction following a book launch, read on to find out more.

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

In a historic move, over 6,500 authors and literary professionals have pledged to boycott Israeli cultural institutions, citing their complicity in the oppression of Palestinians. This unprecedented commitment, initiated by more than 1,000 signatories, underscores a growing global response to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The open letter articulates a collective moral stance: “We cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement.”

Notable figures among the signatories include Nobel laureates Annie Ernaux and Viet Thanh Nguyen, alongside prominent authors such as Sally Rooney, Arundhati Roy, and Michael Rosen. The letter draws parallels to the cultural boycott against apartheid South Africa, emphasizing the role of culture in normalizing injustices. It states that Israeli cultural institutions have historically obscured the realities of Palestinian dispossession and oppression.

The authors express that working with these institutions would contribute to harm against Palestinians, urging fellow writers and industry professionals to join their cause. They call for a recognition of moral responsibility and a refusal to support entities that perpetuate systemic injustice. This movement represents one of the most significant cultural boycotts in recent history, reflecting a profound commitment from the literary community to advocate for Palestinian rights amidst escalating violence and humanitarian crises. READ MORE…

Announcing Our November Book Club Selection: Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki

November 28, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Bella Creel

Izumi feels emotions at their extremes, and she considers ideas to their ends.

When the cult writer Izumi Suzuki debuted in the English language with stunning, subversive short stories of counterculture and fantasy, critics and readers alike were astounded by her utterly individual voice, speaking candidly about emotional heights and lows, womanhood, and the chaotic world of drugs, music, and dreams in which her narrators found themselves. Now, we are given the chance to learn more from Suzuki’s own tumultuous life in the newly published autofiction, Set My Heart on Fire, written in the same mesmerizing, phantasmagoric tone of brusqueness and vulnerability that gave reality to her imagination. As our November Book Club selection, this novel enlivens the sharp mind, loves, and frivolities of a woman who sought and fought for her individuality, as well as the decades in which Japan was also undergoing changes of both revel and devastation.

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.   

Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, translated from the Japanese by Helen O’Horan, Verso, November 2024

Strung-out bass, clunky keys, psychedelic vocals. Abundant patterns, colors, and substances. Dancing, libating, popping, fucking. The groovy, knocked-out backdrop to 1960s Japan. In Honmoku, a district in Yokohama known for its American military base, Japanese youth had reveled in the abundance of American-influenced music, rock and roll, and rebellion, fueled by the financial prosperity of the “Golden Sixties” and its reigning youthful, nonconformist spirit. Izumi Suzuki, a prolific science fiction writer in the late 1970s, moved to Tokyo in 1969 with a year remaining to soak in that rhythm, as in the following decade, Japan would face the first hint of its coming economic breakdown as GDP growth slowed significantly during the global oil crisis. The former revelers, strung out and blissed out, were suddenly thrust into a decade of fading glory and no direction.

Izumi Suzuki’s latest work in English, translated by British linguist Helen O’Horan, is a novel titled Set My Heart on Fire—a notable deviation from the original title’s reference to The Doors’ “Light My Fire.” Song-inspired titles are a near-constant in Suzuki’s oeuvre, and her first novel in translation is no exception, with each chapter taking its name from a track from the sixties. While the references are upheld throughout much of the translation, O’Horan’s choice to alter the title better reflects the broader, underlying sense of desperation—for a dying age, a lost youth—and self-destruction that runs through the novel. READ MORE…

The Burden of Bearing Witness: In Conversation with Burmese Poets

November 27, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Charlie Robertshaw

The possibility of a non-political Burmese literature gaining a foothold was brought to a halt overnight by the military's February 2021 coup.

In the following essay, Charlie Robertshaw analyses the influence of Myanmar’s civil war on Burmese poetry, interrogating the expectation for writers and poets to bear “witness” to atrocities. Robertshaw concludes the essay in dialogue with eight Burmese poets, discussing the advent of the internet, gender and sexuality, and censorship in Myanmar’s literary scene. 

For a more detailed historical overview of Burmese poetry, Robertshaw recommends Ruth Padel’s preface and Zeyar Lynn’s introduction to Bones Will Crow: An Anthology of Burmese Poetry, selections of which have been published in Asymptote.

No one
bears witness for the
witness.

— Paul Celan (“Aschenglorie/Ashglory.” Trans. Pierre Joris, 1942) 

Are you still a writer if you don’t publish? Are you still a writer if you keep your writing locked in a drawer and only show it to people you trust? Are you still a writer if you destroy every word you write?

— Eula Biss (“The Price of Poetry.” The Massachusetts Review 42.1 (2001): 9-11)

 For Burmese poets, to be able to fly the little kite ‘poetry’ high in the sky, they must start from very far away.  

— Anonymous Burmese poet (personal interview, 2022)

The shock of Myanmar’s 2021 military coup has faded and global media attention has waned, but within the country, economic turmoil, forced recruitment, and the junta’s atrocities persist. As part of an ongoing campaign to intimidate, disgust, and dishearten onlookers, in October 2024 soldiers displayed the heads and limbs of dismembered civilians on stakes outside Si Par village, Budalin township, Sagaing division. Even recounting these atrocities provokes conflicting impulses—to “look” or to “look away”—and in the background, the longstanding ethical question, particularly prominent today as the the Gazan genocide is essentially livestreamed: what responsibility do we have to witness the suffering of others?

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Gyula Jenei

November 26, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Diana Senechal

there will be something irrational in the way i stop, thirty years later, on a corner, not knowing where to go from here.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you two poems by the Hungarian poet Gyula Jenei, in spare, elegant translations by frequent contributor Diana Senechal. In Senechal’s words, “Jenei’s poems convey at least three kinds of outsiderness: societal outsiderness, where he holds a distinctly different view from others; temporal outsiderness, where he returns, disoriented and unsure, to places of the past; and existential outsiderness, where he doubts even himself.” At once laconic and expansive, Jenei’s poems present a fascinating existential struggle, the speaker simultaneously overwhelmed by the ravages of time and the solitude they impose, yet trying all the same to distinguish past and present, to make plans, to “imagine the future” in a chaotic and indifferent universe. Read on!

After a While

ever since my father died, it’s all one whether he
was happy or unhappy. nothing matters to him
anymore. just to us, who remember him, clashed
with him, used him, didn’t love him enough.
only we feel pain if others hurt us: hit us,
ignore us, abandon us in our suffering. READ MORE…

To The Beginning of Everything: Elton Uliana on Brazilian Lusophone Prose and Untranslatability

November 25, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas and Elton Uliana

We often encounter undecipherable difficulties in translation, but it is also true that we never entirely fail to translate.

My first encounter with Prêmio-Jabuti-winning Brazilian writer and dramaturg Carla Bessa was through Elton Uliana’s translation of her “After the Attack, the Woman,” published in the first volume of The Oxford Anthology of Translation, for which I was also a contributor. In Elton’s translation, Carla’s genre-bending prose—part crime noir, part narrative poetry, part journalistic account—stretches its numbing hands towards the Anglosphere, cutting across the enclosures of language and making us rethink the ever-evolving questions of genre. Active in the Lusophone translation scene, Elton is also part of the Brazilian Translation Club (BTC) at University College London (UCL) and the Portuguese-English Literary Translators Association. In the HarperCollins anthology Daughters of Latin America, he has translated the prose of Carla Bessa, Alê Motta, Carolina María de Jesús, and Conceição Evaristo. His translation of Evaristo into English is also included in the Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction (out last September from UCL Press).

In this interview, I spoke with Elton, currently in London, about his translations from and into the Brazilian Portuguese language, the landscape of contemporary Brazilian Lusophone prose, and the necessary confrontations among translators regarding ‘untranslatability’ and ‘equivalence’.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): There is multiplicity to the Brazilian Lusophone writers and texts you translate—actress and theatre director Carla Bessa, novelist and scholar Jacques Fux, short story writer Alê Motta, journalist Sérgio Tavares, children’s book author Ana Maria Machado, among others. I’m curious about your translation process: Are there parallelisms and variances, process-wise, in translating across the differing genres, aesthetics, and movements from which these writers write?

Elton Uliana (EU): I absolutely love working with the diversity of writers that are currently emerging from Brazil, like Carla Bessa, a writer that I have been working with a lot recently who has become a leading force in contemporary Lusophone fiction. (Bessa won the 2020 Prêmio Jabuti, the most prestigious literary prize in Brazil, and is currently being published globally).

I am also delighted to be working with Alê Motta, a master in concise social critique with a unique style of micro-fiction, and Conceição Evaristo, whose stories irresistibly incorporate the accents and oral tradition of Afro-Brazilian culture. All of them were recently published in Daughters of Latin America: An International Anthology of Writing by Latine Women, edited by Sandra Guzman and published by Amistad and HarperCollins.

It has also been wonderful to work with the incredibly talented Jacques Fux and his worldly-wise autofiction that, with touching lyricism and humor, takes us into a detailed and complex world of Jewish culture. Other favourites of mine that I have recently translated include Mário Araújo, Sérgio Tavares, and Ana Maria Machado, all prize-winning authors in their own right.

I am always interested in looking at authors who are doing something completely different with form. A common feature of my translation method, regardless of author, has to do with the musicality of the piece, the fine-tuning procedure of finding and developing appropriate aural features such as voice, rhythm, and tone in such a way that the translation becomes seductive and attractive to the reader.

For me there is a huge difference between translating, for example, a dramatic text, where words become physical and affect the body immediately, and a children’s story, which, even if it is meant to be read out loud, does not necessarily involve a performance. I guess it’s the same with poetry or a dialogue in a novel. I’m always aware of the context from which the piece I’m translating emerges and also the genre or kinds of genre it incorporates. Indeed the form develops and grows in the translation because of the context and the literary conventions and devices the author is exploring, experimenting with, or setting aside.

Another important translation focus for me is the dialogue. Patterns of speech in Portuguese are completely different to those in English. I find a useful technique is to read the speech out loud to myself—indeed, it is even more enriching and useful when I have other people or fellow translators to read the words out loud for me. Reflecting on how the rhythm can be configured and how the words sound and even feel in the mouth is something I am constantly considering as I progress with any translation, regardless of genre, sub-genre, or writer’s style.

AMMD: You are also a translator of legendary Afro-Brazilian storyteller Conceição Evaristo. Could you tell us about the experience of translating her work? READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

November 22, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou, MARGENTO, and René Esaú Sánchez

The latest from Greece, Spain, Romania, and Mexico!

This week’s literary round-up include groundbreaking publications of Romanian literature, what to look forward to in the upcoming annual Guadalajara International Book Fair, and the passing of a Greek lyrical poet. Read on to find out more.

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Spain and Romania

It’s the age of rediscoveries and revisitings in contemporary Romanian literature, both at home and abroad. In his singular indefatigable and all-inclusive manner, past Asymptote contributor Felix Nicolau has launched the first volume of the monumental anthology Grandes escritores rumanos (Great Romanian Writers), previously presented on our blog. The event took place on November 15 in Madrid at the Romanian Cultural Institute, where Nicolau presented the collection together with co-editor Alba Diz Villanueva.

While introducing Romanian classics to Spanish-speaking audiences—and thus marking a huge milestone in Romanian literature in translation, the impressive release has received accolades regarding its unique approach and framework amidst the entire Spanish-speaking literary world, specifically regarding its multifaceted richness fusing translation, literary commentary, didactic utility, and cross-cultural interpollination.

Felix Nicolau has also been involved in what is perhaps this year’s most sensational rediscovery in Romanian literature: De dor de sufletul lui Andersen (On Missing Andersen’s Spirit), a collection of fairy tales by Nichita Stănescu, published by Rentrop & Straton. Nicolau authored the preface to the text, and recently contributed an astute review of the same book to the literary magazine Astra. Famously known for his neo-modernist poetry of intriguing sophisticated imagery and memorable, abstractly paradoxical formulations that both stylistically revolutionized Romanian letters in the 1970s and implicitly opposed Communist social realism, Nichita Stănescu has been rediscovered in a staggeringly surprising capacity. These one-of-a-kind fairy tales verge on potentially best-selling children’s literature without relinquishing the radically imaginative innovativeness and the hypnotizing oracular diction of his poetry, with Nicolau placing them at the crossroads of Perrault, Saint-Exupéry, and Terry Pratchett. Additionally, argues Nicolau, there is so much more to these tales, as they are informed by avant-garde poetics and retain a cultural relevance within the digital age. READ MORE…

By Way of Dreams: Annie McDermott on Translating Mario Levrero

November 21, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Georgina Fooks

One of Levrero’s first publishers described him as a realist writer who lives on another planet.

The world is strange, and we make it stranger by living here. Uruguayan author Mario Levrero knew that better than most, and in his debut collection of short stories, The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine, one is guided by extraordinary vision and delightful humour along the writer’s gallery of fantasies and absurdities, impossible events and otherworldly journeys, all of which are made real and cemented into reality by thought and emotion. In this interview, translator Annie McDermott speaks about being drawn into Levrero’s singular voice, working with co-translator Kit Schluter, and distinguishing imagination from invention.

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.   

Georgina Fooks (GF): How did you first encounter Mario Levrero’s work, and what drew you to his writing?

Annie McDermott (AD): It was through a series of strange coincidences—which seems fitting. I was living in Brazil at the time, and I happened to go for lunch with a Mexican writer called Juan Pablo Villalobos, who was also living in Brazil at the time, and he is a great fan of Levrero. He wrote a great piece for Granta about how he became a fan before he’d even had the chance to get his hands on any of Levrero’s books—because they used to be so hard to get hold of—and he became a fan based on the titles alone.

He recommended him to me, and I happened to be going to Uruguay on the way home from Brazil, and I picked up a copy of one of Levrero’s novels. I remember that as soon as I started reading it, I realised that I’ve never read anything else like it. He has this amazing voice, this kind of strange, absurd, quite deadpan voice that is like nothing else. It’s also very warm, and also really engaging, and also very companionable and a really pleasant narrator to spend time with.

At the same time, Juan Pablo Villalobos had also been enthusiastically recommending Levrero to Stefan [Tobler] from And Other Stories, so it all happened in parallel in a very pleasing way, and that was how I came to end up doing some samples and eventually translating Levrero’s books. READ MORE…