Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Ameer Hamad

May 25, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Katharine Halls

Rockets have broken the bones of our planets

This week, we feature two poems from the Palestinian writer Ameer Hamad, including “Prayer” which was written during the most recent bombardment of Gaza, an austere appeal for an end to the violence that has seen the Palestinians, killed by Israeli airstrikes, form the overwhelming majority of the death toll. These two poems translated by Katharine Halls are small enough to carry in one’s palm; they utilise a mode of poetic witness attuned to distillation, frankness, and the startling force of an ending. Even as the recent ceasefire has struck a note of fragile peace, we read Ameer Hamad’s unflinching poems as a reminder that a people’s freedom can only come at the end of dispossession.

Prayer

Lord with your cloth wipe the smoke from our mirrors
Extinguish the fire at our windows with your tears
We have no strength not to trust in your mercy
Rockets have broken the bones of our planets
Bombs have shattered the glass of our air
And the fragments lie heavy on our eyes
As we hold them out to you
That you may set them on the scales. READ MORE…

Aesthetic Choices Are Political Choices: An Interview with Meena Kandasamy

May 24, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Torsa Ghosal

. . . a translator cannot remain a shy wordsmith alone.

Indian writer and translator Meena Kandasamy has always been interested in intimate human relations and historical lesions caused by caste, gender, and ethnic oppressions. She explores these topics in her poetry and prose with equal power and precision, most notably in her books of poems such as Touch (2006) and Ms. Militancy (2010), as well as her three novels, The Gypsy Goddess (2014), When I Hit You (2017), and Exquisite Cadavers (2019). Activism is at the heart of her literary work; she has translated several political texts from Tamil to English, and previously held an editorial role at The Dalit, an alternative magazine documenting caste-related brutality and the anti-caste resistance in India.

After translating political speeches, philosophical texts, and feminist poetry for many years, Kandasamy recently translated a novel for the first time. The novel, Salma’s Manaamiyangal (2016), translated by Kandasamy as Women Dreaming (2020), is a multigenerational narrative set in rural Tamil Nadu. Its opening thrusts readers into a woman’s nightmare, and the narrative goes on to explore the desires of a group of Muslim women and their intersecting lives. While delving into the women’s yearning for freedom, education, and dignity, Salma’s novel also unearths man’s enormous will to control by means of religious extremism, laws, and domestic restrictions. Like Kandasamy’s own novels, Women Dreaming defies the traditions of social realist fiction; if we hope for the novel to “acquaint us with characters” or offer “access to their feelings,” we will be frustrated. But Salma’s aesthetic project is a political one—the novel’s paratactic arrangement of short chapters and shifting perspectives convey the collective and interchangeable experiences of women who dream in the face of extreme adversities.

I recently corresponded with Kandasamy by email. Our conversation touched on her career as writer-translator, literary craft, and the stakes of translation.

—Torsa Ghosal

Torsa Ghosal (TG): You started translating nearly twenty years ago, beginning with the works of Tamil politician Thol. Thirumavalavan. You’ve called translation and writing “twin activities,” though you note that other people—I imagine critics, readers, publishers—saw your background in translation as an impediment to your writing career. In the last twenty years, you have written and published several books, including When I Hit You, which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. As you return to translation today, do you find cultural attitudes towards it have changed? Is there more scope for translation now than there was twenty years ago?

Meena Kandasamy (MK): Definitely. I think books of translation are now treated almost on par with books originally written in English, and translators and authors are continuing the fight to get their due. I do not think the landscape was so receptive twenty years ago—political translations from left-leaning marginalized groups would be seen as a curiosity alone and not something worthy of serious reception, engagement, discussion. This change is not an attitudinal change—it is a historical necessity if we want to prevent literature and the public sphere from becoming an echo chamber of posh English-speaking elites.

TG: Do you consider the sidelining of translation within the Indian literary sphere as related to the fraught nationalist project of marginalising the voices of certain communities? I’m thinking of your comment that you “see India as a prison house of nationalities,” given that ‘India’ was constructed for British administrative purposes.

MK: The project of sidelining is not so simple with a clear-cut manifesto: let us sideline all regional languages. Voices in the Indian languages that maintain caste supremacy and Brahminical hegemony have always been translated and rendered into English—in fact, they (dangerously) become the only voices which are heard from these regional languages. This is directly connected to preserving Brahminical hegemony, and because the Indian nationalist project was in many ways only a takeover of the British administrative construct of India and a resultant consolidation of caste-class supremacy at a broader level, we find this gatekeeping rampant in the Indian literary sphere. But that’s only one way of looking at translations, and only looking at translations into the English. Militant, anti-caste thought and revolutionary content has travelled across languages without being hindered by these oppressive gatekeepers; I am thinking of Periyar’s translation and publication of the Communist Manifesto into Tamil, and of him introducing the work of Dr. Ambedkar to Tamil readers. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

May 21, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Kwan Ann Tan, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest news from China, the USA, and Malaysia!

In China, the literary establishment celebrated “China’s Thoreau” on the twenty-second anniversary of his death. In the USA, virtual events raised issues in the field and craft of literary translation, and in Malaysia, an upcoming poetry contest promises to shed light on the country’s multilingual literary landscape. Dive in!

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting from China

“One day, mankind shall look back on the origins of his failure to survive on earth. He will find that, in 1712, an Englishman named Thomas Newcomen—a predecessor of James Watt—tried to create for this world the very first steam engine.”

The above words, taken from the Chinese writer 伟岸 Wei An’s essay, “大地上的事情” (The Earth’s Happenings), indicate towards how the late essayist, thinker, and diarist came to be known as “China’s Thoreau.” In characteristically attentive, ruminative, and exacting prose, Wei An’s moralist sensitivity to humanity’s presence and existence on earth sought to honor and preserve the organic nature of life, leading his contemporaries to believe, as writer Lin Xianzhi said: “The life of Wei An has given Chinese literature a direct and elucidating fact: that the writer must first and foremost be a person of excellent virtue.” On May 19, the twenty-second anniversary of his death, an event entitled “The Philosophy of Earth” was held in Wei An’s honor, with discussions revolving around the posthumous collection of the author’s diaries from 1986 to 1999, entitled 泥土就在我身旁 (The Dirt Is Beside Me), as well as the revised edition of his total collected works, edited by Feng Qiuzi and published last year.

READ MORE…

Writing in Organic Formation: Federico Falco and Jennifer Croft on A Perfect Cemetery

May 20, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Shawn Hoo

I always thought about what else a short story could be beyond the usual. What would happen if I mixed short stories and poetry?

In our Book Club selection for the month of April, A Perfect Cemetery, Federico Falco’s writings do not tell so much as unfold, gently and masterfully, to elucidate the relationships between the human, the non-human, and the spaces in which such meetings take place. In precise and rich evocations, Falco plumbs the rich vocabularies and intrigues of landscape to lend delicacy, sensuality, and vividity to his prose, bringing his protagonists to life with a knowing rootedness. In the following interview, transcribed from a live Q&A hosted by Assistant Editor Shawn Hoo, Falco and translator Jennifer Croft share their thoughts on the cinematic aspects of A Perfect Cemetery, the relationships between the body and the land, and the pervading theme of isolation.

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 Q&As with the author and/or the translator of each title!

Shawn Hoo (SH): I thought we could begin with the question of place. I read this book in Singapore, a dense city, and noted how A Perfect Cemetery has a distinct sense of place; Federico, you conjure a landscape of sierras, rivers, and forests across disparate short stories that belong to this very single novelistic world. In an interview with The Paris Review, Jennifer, you emphasize the importance of translators visiting the country they are translating from. How does your sense of place affect your approach to these stories?

Federico Falco (FF): Landscape transforms us and makes us different people; the people who live in big cities have one kind of experience of life and the people who live in different landscapes have another. There is an Argentinian writer, Juan José Saer—one of my favorites—who says that the poor who live in cities near the ocean, they have a heaviness; they become used to strange, different people arriving and leaving all the time. And the people who live in the mountains always think that there’s another place beyond the mountains. They can change their point of view because they can see things from a different point of view. The people who live in the plains here in Argentina, the Pampas, they see the same landscape all the time. They can walk ten kilometers, and the whole scene shifts ten kilometers.

So when I write, I try to think about where the character lives, where they grew up, what they need, where they differ, what was new for them—if they grew up in the plains and now live in the mountains. I used to live in the city, now I’m living in the mountains, and there are some things that you can feel in the body. Your body starts to change. The air is different. The muscles change because you’re climbing all the time. The way you relate to people in the city is really different from the way you relate to people here in the mountains. If I meet a stranger here in the street, I say hello, which I never do in the city.

Jennifer Croft (JC): I really loved listening to Fede talk about place. Obviously, translating these stories influenced me as well, and I have been thinking a lot about place in fiction. Right now, I’m working on a book of creative nonfiction called Notes on Postcards, and part of the question of this text is: why does it matter where we are when we’re communicating with someone? Or why does it matter where we are in general? I started thinking about this question in 2020, when all of my travel plans were cancelled. I felt really cut off from all of the places that I care about—first and foremost among those is Buenos Aires. I feel very panicked that I’m not allowed to enter Argentina right now because of my US passport. I’m currently in upstate New York at a writing residency called Yaddo, and I’ve had a hard time working on my project, but thanks to these conversations with Fede over the last week or so, I’ve been relaxing into it.

I like comparing my obsession with places to Fede’s, because mine is less about landscape and more about cities and cultures. Even though culture is such an extremely fluid thing, it is much more about how one feels in the context of other human beings. I’m more of a flaneur kind of writer, and it’s great for me to be able to incorporate these landscapes into my thinking too. READ MORE…

Physical Object and Metaphysical Destiny: To the Lake Journeys to the Heart of the Balkans

May 19, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Andriana Hamas

Kapka Kassabova’s English-language travelogue invites readers in the Balkans to consider local culture with a fresh perspective.

On a website called Lost Bulgaria, anyone curious enough can browse thousands of carefully preserved and curated photographs depicting the poignant yet essential ways in which the people, customs, and landscape have transformed or been transformed from the last quarter of the 1800s until 2010. About a dozen of the blurred images kept in this time machine take us back to the first half of the twentieth century and Lake Ohrid, one of the world’s oldest and deepest, which nowadays is split by the border between North Macedonia and Albania. The majority of the visuals reveal everyday life near the shores, the monasteries that dot the mountainous terrain, the traditionally clad locals, or the passers-by who felt the need to extend a prayer to Saint Naum of Ohrid. Kapka Kassabova’s latest travelogue with distinct autobiographical elements, To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace, offers a similar but much more powerful passage through the lake’s past and present.

The book, which reviewers often place in the travel fiction genre, is pronouncedly personal, even though the disclosed memories, both on an individual level and as an outlet for the collective subconscious, undoubtedly remind readers from diverse regions of the globe of their unique roots and unending voyage of self-discovery.

The author (b. 1973) spent her childhood and teenage years in Sofia and later moved with her family to New Zealand, only to finally—or at least for the time being—settle down in the Scottish Highlands. Her extensive travels have informed her writing, which encompasses poetry collections and novels, in addition to literary travelogues. Although Kassabova’s mother tongue is Bulgarian, she writes in English, a practice that evokes the likes of Vladimir Nabokov, Khalil Gibran, and Joseph Conrad and makes her Bulgarian translations all the more fascinating.

Located on the edge of her grandmother’s homeland, Lake Ohrid is where she passed a few of her summer holidays. Once considered the pearl of the Balkans, nowadays it is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site and boasts endemic species and unique prehistoric remnants. Despite this international protection however, its pristine waters are still threatened by climate change and widespread pollution. While making a convincing case for immediate preservation action of global scale, Kassabova’s fictionalized reportage can also be perceived as a continuation to her previous one, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, in which she sets on a quest to comprehend the meaning of the separation points not only between countries, but also between people. In a similar fashion, To the Lake prompts us to tag along as she traces the ancient Via Egnatia and dives into the bloody history of the region, where Bulgarians, Macedonians, Albanians, and Greek are always at crossroads, especially in the aftermath of the two Balkan wars and the ensuing decades under communist rule. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Goodbye, Lebanon” by May Ziadeh

May 18, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Rose DeMaris

Egypt called in a serious voice, / and already my boat’s rocking

While better known for her correspondences with Khalil Gibran, the Lebanese-Palestinian writer May Ziadeh was a leading figure in the early-twentieth-century Arab literary world and feminist movement in her own right, whose work inspired generations of writers including the Egyptian writer and activist Nawal El Saadawi. Despite her lasting influence, no full-length work of Ziadeh’s—neither her French nor her Arabic writing—is available in English translation and she remains relatively unread in the Anglophone world. This week, we are pleased to feature one of Ziadeh’s earliest French poems, “Goodbye, Lebanon”—with its elegiac adieus for her landscape-lover homeland as she looks back from her new home in Cairo—rendered in Rose DeMaris’ creative translation that revives Ziadeh’s Romantic sensibility and revisits that exilic feeling which knows that, in separation, “grief goes on”; a poem which will resonate across time with the contemporary moment.

Goodbye, Lebanon

Goodbye, Lebanese mountains.

I’m going far
from your pink rose garlands,
your bright red satin strawberries.

Egypt called in a serious voice,
and already my boat’s rocking
bears new fruit—

READ MORE…

An Interview With Tomasz Zaród, Head of the Polish Publishing House Książkowe Klimaty

May 17, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Julia Sherwood

Another feature of the books we publish is that they break stereotypes and show the relations between communities.

Książkowe Klimaty, a publishing house based in the Polish city of Wrocław, has been gradually carving out its distinct and variegated literary footprint since its founding in 2013. In accordance to their mission statement, which states a passion for presenting what is “close and unknown at the same time”, Książkowe Klimaty has continually serviced Polish readers with a rich variety of contemporary European texts, publishing translations from the Czech, Romanian, Turkish, Hungarian, and more. In the following interview, Editor-at-Large for Slovakia, Julia Sherwood, speaks with Książkowe Klimaty’s founder, Tomasz Zaród, on the house’s incidental founding, the award-winning titles available, and the house’s southward expansion. 

Julia Sherwood (JS): Poland has no shortage of publishing houses. Many of them also publish translated literature but, as far as I know, yours is the only one that focuses solely, or almost solely, on translations. How and when did it all start?

Tomasz Zaród (TZ): You are right, most of the books published by Książkowe Klimaty are translations, although we have also published some by Polish writers. It all started by chance. A friend of mine with a small publishing house had acquired the rights to a few works, including a novel by the Slovak writer Pavol Rankov, Stalo sa prvého septembra (alebo inokedy), which we translated as Zdarzyło się pierwszego września (albo kiedy indziej, and which can also be found in English translation as It Happened on the First of September (or some other time). I had an online bookstore with well-developed logistics, so we decided to join forces. This was in 2013, and when my friend left after a year, I was left with a publishing house. I had no previous experience in this field but had learned a great deal during that first year. And I was very lucky to have a great team. There were three of us at the start: one in charge of editorial matters (finding translators, editors, copyeditors, etc.), another dealing with promotion, while I tried to tie everything together in Excel. None of us were very experienced, but maybe that is why we dared to do things people with more experience might not have done! Right now, the permanent staff consists of two people responsible for commissioning, promotion, and sales, while I handle the business side of things. All the other work (editing, copyediting, typesetting, and graphic design) is done by freelancers. Looking back on the eight years since we began, I believe that the gamble has paid off: we have published more than ninety books translated from well over a dozen languages.

JS: The literal translation of the name of your publishing house—Książkowe klimaty—is “Book or literary atmospheres”, which doesn’t sound so good in English, but your mission becomes clear from the explanation on your website, which says that every series you publish aims to convey the unique atmosphere of a country or a region. What are the criteria you use to select the countries and books that you publish?

TZ: Most of the books we have published come from Central and Southern Europe, in the widest sense. These are countries not that far from Poland—places where we spend our holidays or that we visit at weekends, but at the same time, we know nothing about the great literature written there. We started with Slovak and Czech, then moved on to Greek and then Romanian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, and then further south. We try to select books that are critically acclaimed and have won some awards. Ten of the books we have published have received the European Union Prize for Literature, many are recipients of prestigious local awards, such as the Magnesia Litera in the Czech Republic and Anasoft Litera in Slovakia. Another feature of the books we publish is that they break stereotypes and show the relations between communities. For example, It Happened on the First of September features the multi-ethnic mix in southern Slovakia, while Księga szeptów (Cartea soaptelor / The Book of Whispers) by Varujan Vosganian deals with the history of Armenians in Romania. Imaret. W cieniu zegara (Imaret: Three Gods, One City) by Iannis Kalpouzos deals with Greek-Turkish relations, while Bulgarian-Turkish relations are the subject of Requiem dla nikogo (Requiem for Nobody) by Zlatko Enev, translated by Hanna Karpinska. We also rely on suggestions from our translators. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

May 14, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Eva Wissting, and Vivian Szu-Chin Chih

The latest news from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Sweden!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Sweden. In Hong Kong, theatres are returning with performances of work by Martial Courcier and Harold Pinter; in Taiwan, novelist Gan Yao-ming talks about their latest work; and in Sweden, a new exhibition is opening at Junibacken, based on books by Tove Jansson. Read on to find out more!

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

Inter-disciplinary connections between literature and art are often a kind of inspiration that fascinates artists and engenders unique artworks. In late April, Jockey Club New Arts Power presented to the audience the exhibition, “Before a Passage,” which comprised “visual arts, interactive installations, soundscape, movement performance, site-specific writing and reading,” based on Hong Kong poet Leung Ping-kwan’s eponymous poem, “Before a Passage.” The exhibition took place at the North Point Pier, which was also the setting for Leung’s poem. In the exhibition, the audience could experience interactive installations that concerned themes such as awaiting, travelling, leaving, and the anxiety and struggle that come along with these to reflect on their own life experience of passage.

Theatrical performances are also returning to the theatre while the pandemic in Hong Kong eases down. As May comes, the annual French cultural and art festival, The French May, returns with a series of programmes, including a Cantonese performance of French writer Martial Courcier’s play, Larger Than Life. It will be staged from 13-15 May in Hong Kong City Hall. Theatre du Pif will perform Harold Pinter’s Old Times in early June in Cantonese as well. A play-reading and interactive commentary session was already organised in early April. READ MORE…

Distance Shapes Memory: An Interview with Karla Suárez

May 13, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Dorothy Potter Snyder

In my case, at least, I look first, get muddy and sweaty, and walk away. Only then do I write.

As I coordinated this interview with Karla Suárez, I had the impression that she was in constant motion. She is an inveterate bike rider and, even while working, takes “virtual trips by pacing around [her] writing table.” Her abundant energy is evident both in her productive career (nine books and participation in no less than forty-two anthologies during the last decade and a half) and in her female characters, canny women who are the architects of their destinies.

For Suárez, the mind’s attempt to understand is best complemented by a strong dose of the physical, because the body offers its own truths: “The best thing to do is to make love,” declares brainy Julia, the protagonist of Havana Year Zero. “. . . not think, offer up the body, the body, the body, the body, to the point of exhaustion . . . and the next day another body, and not thinking, not thinking, not thinking.”

Suárez’s background as an electrical engineer and a classical guitarist is evident in her novels which have the timing, complexity, and structural elegance of the proverbial Swiss watch. She likes her chapters to be about the same length to offer the reader rhythmic consistency, and intertextual gems await the attentive reader. But she is also something of an imp. She likes to have fun—and so do her characters.

I started our interview with word association, just as friends Lucía and Circe do in Suárez’s second novel Viajera, and she played right along. Then we talked about writing about home through the twin lenses of time and distance.

— Dorothy Potter Snyder

Dorothy Potter Snyder (DPS): Let’s play word association.

Karla Suárez (KS): Okay.

DPS: City?

KS: Should have an ocean.

DPS: Ocean?

KS: Motion.

DPS: Body?

KS: Sweat.

DPS: Stranger?

KS: What I am sometimes.

DPS: People call you a Cuban writer, but above all you’re an urban writer, whether the setting is Havana, Mexico City, Sao Paolo, Rome, Paris, or Lisbon where you live now. Can you imagine writing a novel that doesn’t have anything to do with a city? Or are they—and Havana in particular—indispensable to you?

KS: Four novels (Silencios, La viajera, Habana año cero, El hijo del héroe) compose what I call “my Havana Symphony,” because the characters in them are either from Havana or live there. In those novels, I wanted to deal with themes that concern the country and the city where I was born and raised, a Havana that goes from the 1970s to the ’90s. They are independent stories, of course, but there are subtle links between them. For example, some secondary characters appear in more than one novel; there are scenes in which the protagonists of several novels meet without knowing each other; and there is an object (a backpack) that passes from one character to another and thus travels from novel to novel. I wanted to create a micro-world where my characters cross paths—and even I with them, because I also appear in a very subtle way (though not as a protagonist) in some of these stories. This symphony is now complete, and I’ve started another cycle. The story I’m writing now, for example, does not take place in Havana nor does it have anything special to do with the city. It’s part of a different symphony. READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones

May 12, 2021  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Allison Braden, Suhasini Patni, and Xiao Yue Shan

Capturing "the porousness between Hindi and English," Arundhati Roy's film is a triumph of voice.

Of her 1989 film, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, Arundhati Roy writes: “I loved the quirky, spontaneous performances. I loved the fact that there were no ‘beautiful’ people in it. I loved the egalitarian friendships between the boys and girls. I loved the corny clothes, the absurd glasses, the ridiculous hairdos, the uncertainty, the joy and the sadness of it . . . It was from another time . . . I ache for the innocence of it.” Indeed, the film is potent with the tender touches of youthful idealism, fearlessly authentic to its characterisations of young architecture students in 1970s India, and an early emblem of Roy’s intrepid criticisms against the evils of her time. In this edition of Asymptote at the Movies, Editor-at-Large for India Suhasini Patni speaks with Blog Editors Allison Braden and Xiao Yue Shan about the complex role Hinglish plays in the film, the depictions of class and social mobility, and how art can arise from the myriad places in which various languages meet.

Suhasini Patni (SP): Before Arundhati Roy became famous for her Booker Prize-winning novel and Pradip Krishen became an important environmentalist, they worked on the film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, which was screened late at night on Doordarshan in 1989, then largely forgotten by the Indian audience. However, it later went on to win two National Awards (both of which were returned to protest the government’s growing intolerance) and became a cult classic.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first Hinglish film ever made in India. Critics found it difficult to categorize the language of the film; some called it an English language film—which does disservice to the mouthfuls of Hindi and Punjabi that form an integral part of the dialogue—and some called it a trilingual film, which doesn’t showcase the Indianness of the English spoken. English that is remolded to include mispronunciations and Hindi slang (“Kya maal hai. Hello sweetheart lovely,” says a catcaller to Radha).

Screen Shot 2021-05-11 at 12.46.42 AM

Discerning commentators found it difficult to admit an entire film existed in this “nonsense” language. Even the title itself is gibberish: In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones. The students in the film let us know what “those ones” are, but at the time of its release, the title was allegedly seen as inaccessible and alienating, and Roy was asked not to use it. But it’s exactly this mismatched, nonsensical language which makes for an endearing experience—a film ahead of its time, as people say.

The dialogue captures the porousness between Hindi and English. Code-switching in bilingualism is not new, but Hinglish, as Roy has written it, really grasps the way social mobility operates in a cosmopolitan city like Delhi. For the upwardly mobile, Hinglish is a language of survival. For those who cannot speak the hegemonic, pure, Sanskrit-ised Hindi, Hinglish helps to adapt to life in the capital. And in any case, North Indians have always spoken Hindustani, a Hindi that generously accommodates Urdu and other languages and dialects. Hinglish is arguably a “modern” version of Hindustani.

I’m interested in knowing what you think about the film, especially considering you’re not native Hindi speakers.

Allison Braden (AB): What a charming film! I agree that the movie’s collegial atmosphere and the students’ easy rapport depends largely on the code-switching; omitting the Hindi and Punjabi in favor of English only would have done away with one of the story’s most authentic elements. For viewers who don’t speak Hindi, some of the linguistic diversity naturally gets lost behind the subtitles, which appeared for the English, Hindi, and Punjabi dialogue in the version I watched, but the languages’ relationship to class remains evident. Arundhati Roy’s character, Radha, clearly struggles with the social mobility issue you bring up, which she articulates toward the end of the movie. She specifically mentions how her position as a student at the National School of Architecture requires her to speak a language that ninety percent of the country can’t understand. Social mobility is also explicitly referred to in the eponymous Annie’s initial thesis project—a plan to line India’s extensive train tracks with fruit trees and encourage the country’s flood of rural to urban migration to reverse course. Despite his enthusiasm for the idea—he even writes to the prime minister about it—his classmates respond dismissively. I was struck by the moment when his partner rebukes him after interpreting the plan as a suggestion that she return to her village. He explains that he’s speaking about a general issue, not her individual situation, but the exchange was such an effective illustration of how those larger issues affect so many individual lives.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Far from being objectionable, for those of us who find language to be an object of fascination, the varying, generous, and emancipated dialogue of the film is one of its overarching attractions—endearing, as you say, Suhasini. Though, of course, I can imagine how difficult the melange may have been to navigate sans subtitles. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “I, The Executioner” by Srđan Miljević

May 11, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Svetlana Milivojević-Petrović

She did not think of how people, even the richest, humiliated themselves by picking up their own small coins off the street.

Today, we’re thrilled to debut in English the runner-up of the 2017 Festival of the European Short Story, “I, The Executioner” by Serbian writer Srdjan Miljevic. Distilled in nine bracing vignettes, the flash fiction centers on former prostitute Jasna who, on the brink of literary success, meets a gushing reporter—except, her mind elsewhere, she finds herself unable to concentrate. Through the stilted interview questions, which recall the stilted essay assignments she was given in a childhood disrupted by refugeedom, we are given to understand that Jasna’s life from the margins is one that does not fit the neat checkboxes that society has imposed.

*

In Sarajevo, in her second year of primary school, she got a D on her essay on the topic: “When I grow up, I want to be . . .” 

She never found out why a D, because the very next day she became a refugee.

*

A man in a worn-out McCloud jacket stopped in front of her. He bent down, trying to pick up a coin that fell out of his pocket from the pavement. He made it on his second attempt. Two dinars. She did not think of how people, even the richest, humiliated themselves by picking up their own small coins off the street. She thought how good it would be to try not to smoke more than one pack of cigarettes today. Up to two drinks. And one joint max. 

She had been smoking for nineteen years. More than half her life. On a daily basis. She could burn through up to three packs. Theories about what a cigarette was a substitute for and what processes occurred in your brain were comprehensible to her, but she could not think about that now. She would quit one day. And she would take more care today. It was different with alcohol. She had no craving for it, but she did not refuse it either. She did not like to lose control. The same went for ganja. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: May 2021

May 10, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Jacqueline Leung, Lindsay Semel, and Sarah Moore

New work from Iceland, Chile, France, and Argentina!

We take our jobs of bringing you the best new releases from the realm of world literature very seriously, and this week, we have four astounding texts from authors notorious for their intelligence, their variousness, and their ability to captivate. From Iceland, Sjón explores the banality of evil in a charged, probing character study. In Argentina, the legendary Norah Lange comes to new light as she evolves beyond her reputation as a literary muse, and tells her story in her own, singular language. The latest from French writer and playwright Yasmina Reza is a poignant meditation, guided by oratory, on selfhood, aging, and human frailties. And lastly, Chile’s award-winning Lina Meruane comes out with an exploration of illness and intergenerational trauma that is at once dreamy and deeply grounded in physicality. Read on to find out more!

red milk

Red Milk by Sjón, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb, Sceptre, 2021

 Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

Sjón, one of Iceland’s most internationally recognizable literary figures, is a lifelong cultural miscegenationist. Since his earliest days as a neo-surrealist poet and musician, he has drawn proudly and liberally from global artistic lineages. In Red Milk, his latest collaboration with long-time translator Victoria Cribb, he employs an intentional, methodical restraint to examine the survival of Nazism post-World War II through the life and early death of Gunnar Kampen, a fictionalized version of a real, small-time Icelandic neo-Nazi. Sjón’s policy of omission—of drama, psychology, violence, grandeur of any kind—results in a delicious tension. He tempts us to expect so much of the novel, and though he never provides the relief of clean culminations, he manages to keep the reader wanting.

More than anything, we want Gunnar to either damn or to redeem himself, but he refuses to be anything more than a tempest in a teacup—a chess piece carved in ivory rather than ebony. He passes his brief life engaged in the mundane building of a movement that never comes to fruition. He stumbles into nationalist socialism the same way any young person stumbles into their solidified adult identity. This is not a psychoanalytic assessment of what draws him to Nazism so as much as a collection of images, inputs, choices, and feedback that nudge him there. One such curious image comes from a party he attended with his parents as a child. Bored with the adults, he wanders through the house until he encounters “a human figure, sitting in the shadow thrown by the curved back of the armchair,” in the library. He marvels at her brown skin and colorful clothing.

Without releasing her grip on his left hand, she raises his right hand and pulls it under the lampshade, holding it up to the strong bulb until the light shines red through the child’s flesh, revealing the silhouettes of the bones inside.

            ‘Only possible with such a hand.’

The woman nods at him. The filigree brooch on her shoulder gleams, exposing the pattern from which it is made: a myriad tiny swastikas that differ from the hated one only in that they stand upright rather than tilted on their side.

            ‘Only white people let the light into themselves.’

The imagery is not attributed any meaning besides its own aesthetic potency. The woman’s exoticism is a neutral source of intrigue for Gunnar, unrelated to his blossoming racial beliefs. The woman—as an ideologically educated Gunnar discovers later—might well have been Savitri Devi, the all too real mother figure of contemporary neo-Nazism, but Gunnar’s brush with history is told with the same tone as if she had simply been Reykjavik’s witchy spinster. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

May 7, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Carol Khoury, and Jovanka Kalaba

The latest news from Bulgaria, Palestine, and Serbia!

This week our writers bring you the latest news from Bulgaria, Palestine, and Serbia. In Palestine, the Sheikh Zayed Book Award winners have been announced, including Iman Mersal taking the Literature Award; in Serbia, a new anthology of Miloš Crnjanski’s poetry has been translated into English; and in Bulgaria, a conference about Bulgarian Literature as world literature was held at the National Book Center. Read on to find out more! 

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

It is an unusually hot spring, Ramadan is in its last third, and the country has been under partial lockdown for a long time, which leaves no reason to wonder that the literary scene in Palestine is suffering from Frühjahrsmüdigkeit (aka springtime lethargy)! One cannot but wonder how people in hotter regions, such as in the United Arab Emirates, not only manage to get through with their days, but also make international literary news.

Seven authors and researchers, from Egypt, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, and the US, as well as a publishing house from Lebanon, have been declared the winners of this year’s Sheikh Zayed Book Award. The winners were selected from a pool of more than 2,300 submissions, the most the annual award has received since it was founded in 2007. The awards will be formally presented via a livestream ceremony on Youtube during the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair (23–29 May 2021).

This year’s Literature Award went to Iman Mersal for her 2019 work of creative nonfiction Fee Athar Enayat Al Zayyat (In the Footsteps of Enayat Al-Zayyat). This look into the life of the Egyptian writer Enayat al-Zayyat, who killed herself in 1963, illuminates the challenges of writing while female, of attitudes toward mental health, and life in mid-20th-century Egypt. It is part detective story, part biography, and part memoir, and unfolds tender and surprising connections. It recently came out in Richard Jacquemond’s French translation as Sur les traces d’enayat Zayyat. READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (May 2021)

May 6, 2021  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

From getting shortlisted for (or winning!) prestigious prizes to publications and performances, we were busy making waves this quarter!

Contributing editor Adrian Nathan West’s translation of Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World was shortlisted for the Booker International Prize.

Senior Copy Editor Anna Aresi’s Italian translation of a poem by Anna Akhmatova won the 2020 All-Russia State Library for Foreign Literature & The Institute for Literary Translation’s “Writers of the Silver Age about War” translation contest.

Nonfiction Editor Bassam Sidiki was awarded a Graduate Nonfiction Hopwood Award from the University of Michigan for two essays, one of which is forthcoming in Wordgathering. The Hopwood Awards are a major scholarship program at the University of Michigan, founded by Avery Hopwood.

Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, will be giving on June 11 for the third year in a row a computational performance titled #GraphPoem at the world’s most important digital humanities event, DHSI 2021.

Editor-at-Large for Japan David Boyd’s new co-translation with Sam Bett of Mieko Kawakami’s novel Heaven will be published later this month on May 25.

Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has a new short story in Arts & Letters and a short craft essay on Tobias Wolff in Fiction Writers Review.

Chief Executive Assistant Rachel Farmer‘s translation from the German of an extract of We Have Lived Here Since We Were Born by Andreas Moster appeared in the anthology Elemental, published in March by Two Lines Press.

Interested in joining the team? Watch this page next week for a very important announcement!