Translation Tuesday: “The Most Beautiful Statue” by Víctor Hugo Ortega

January 12, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Georgina Fooks

You have to kiss her, he insisted. Do it respectfully, but kiss her all the same.

A bystander’s unsettling memory becomes an homage to a city monument in Víctor Hugo Ortega’s “The Most Beautiful Statue,” our pick for this week’s Translation Tuesday. Through a string of digressions that subtly parody the eyewitness voice, our narrator recounts the scene of a minor accident by fixating upon the minutiae leading up to the crash. We’re taken on a meandering sequence of explanations about football history, Channel 13 news, Chilean poets, and the chaotic beauty of Santiago. What results is an amusingly voiced vignette guiding us through a seemingly disconnected set of details and a closely connected set of events. “The Most Beautiful Statue” offers a narrative exercise redolent of Baker’s The Mezzanine or even Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain” for its dizzying compression of time and recollection.

Only once in my life have I seen a car crash with my own eyes. Luckily, it was nothing very violent or bloody. As I suppose is the case for crashes all over the world, this was out of the blue. I was at the scene of the accident, thinking of what I’d seen just before, and all of a sudden came the collision.

Unfortunately, I remember it often. More than I would like. If I add things up, I think I remember it three times a month, more or less, which doesn’t please me. On the contrary, it frightens me. If you do the maths, I remember it thirty-six times a year. And that’s a lot. I’ve asked myself why. The answer is that sometimes, when I walk through the city centre, I hear a vibration underfoot that distracts me from the purpose of my journey and brings me back to the memory of that deafening sound. It’s a sound that makes me nervous, makes me think that I could be witness to another crash. It’s a very strange thing. The pavement’s vibration serves as a sign of what might come, like an alert to be prepared for a possible collision. It’s like what they say about dogs and their earthquake-predicting behaviour.

Never again have I heard a sound so loud as the one I heard that day. Nor have I smelt that smell of smouldering tar, which made my nose and head ache. But I can’t be reckless. I have to be prepared. Santiago is a noisy city, overpopulated with cars, buses, and trucks, so the risk of seeing another traffic accident recurs day after day. Luckily for me, or for the good of the streets, lately all risks have turned out only to be vibrations.

There’s no doubt, I was affected by the incident. Maybe also a little traumatised. But it is what it is, what can I do. Also, to be honest, it wasn’t just because of the accident, but because of what happened after. Let’s take it bit by bit.

The first thing I should say is that there were no casualties. This makes the memory not so terrible. I don’t even want to imagine what would have become of me if the crash had left someone dead. I was lucky. Sometimes I think that because there were no deaths, I associate what happened before with what happened after, which to me seems marvellous. Although it’s a double-edged sword, because when the bad memory of the crash comes up, so does the good memory of what happened before. And when the good memory of what happened before comes up, so does the bad. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: January 2021

January 11, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ah-reum Han, Sabrina Parker Greene, and Shawn Hoo

The latest in literature from South Korea, Italy, and The Netherlands!

Amidst the uncertainty of what the new year will bring, one surety is that wonderful literature remains to be discovered. In our first selections of new translations for 2021, there is a masterclass in historical fiction about a chess champion whose awe-inspiring trajectory was regrettably tainted with prevailing prejudice; a Dutch memoir that reconciles public and private definitions of sexuality, personhood, and recognition; and a Korean novel that beautifully illustrates that median pain between a love of life and an acknowledgement of its ephemerality. Read on to uncover their discrete and distinct gifts!

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My Brilliant Life by Ae-ran Kim, translated from the Korean by Chi-young Kim, Forge Books, 2021

 Review by Ah-reum Han, WoW Editor

Meet Areum Han, the sixteen-year-old boy with a rapid-aging genetic disorder that is at the palpitating heart of Kim Ae-ran’s bestselling novel, My Brilliant Life, translated by Chi-young Kim. “This is the story of the youngest parents with the oldest child,” writes young Areum, in the prologue to his own story. Readers learn some simple truths about Areum from the get-go: he has an uncanny way with words, he loves his parents deeply, and he doesn’t have much time left. But don’t be fooled; this story is not about the sick, nor is it about overcoming suffering. This quirky, bighearted book crackles with life on every page.

My Brilliant Life is a bildungsroman in fast-forward. We enter Areum’s life on the cusp of his final act—and, incidentally, at the age that his own young parents had him. What ensues is a tale that is tender and funny, startling and sad. He writes about his condition:

People say it’s a miracle that I’ve lived this long. I think so, too; not very many people in my situation have lived past their sixteenth birthdays. But I believe that the larger miracle exists in the ordinary, in the living of an ordinary life and dying at an ordinary age. To me the miracles are my parents, my aunts and uncles, our next-door neighbors, the middle of summer and the middle of winter. I’m no miracle.

We become familiar with this enviable “ordinary” through Areum’s watchful eyes, meeting his father, Daesu, who is equal parts foolhardy and brash but with a boyish charm, and Mira, his proud, sharp-tongued, and fiercely protective mother. We see how they each grieve privately and publicly; how they fight, curse, and joke; how they keep secrets to be kind. We watch their simple moments of ordinary miracles: eating shaved ice together, or laying on the living room floor with face masks on.

With Areum’s growing medical expenses, Daesu and Mira struggle to make ends meet, and reluctantly agree to let Areum go on a television show. Through this national exposure, Areum has new encounters with the ordinary. For one, he meets Seoha, a seeming kindred spirit and young girl who reaches out to him after seeing him on the show. Their email exchanges soon bloom into something more—the thrill of first love, tempered with the gravity of impending loss. As Areum’s circumstances quickly unravel, we ache for him to be a teenager with teenage-sized problems. We wish him the mistakes and failures, the freedom to pout and sulk.

In all this, Daesu and Mira do what they can to give Areum a normal life, and Areum knows it. This stereo vision—Areum’s awareness of his parents’ struggles and their lives both before and beyond his own—shows us how Daesu and Mira were also unceremoniously thrust into adulthood. My Brilliant Life is a coming of age tale, not just for Areum, but also for his parents, whose stories bookend his. This is a story that is very aware of its own symmetry: the two unlikely seventeen-year-olds who became parents; their child destined never to outlive them; and the stirrings of a newborn as their first slips away. The story folds into neat patterns that amplify life’s indifferent poetry. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

January 8, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Clémence Lucchini, and Darren Huang

2021's first roundup brings you news from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States!

Asymptote‘s Weekly Roundup is back for 2021 and this week our editors bring you news of major prize events in Taiwan, an event honouring the renowned writer Xi Xi in Hong Kong, and a refreshing online poetry series in the United States. Read on to find out more! 

Darren Huang, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Taiwan   

On December 15, the winners of the 2021 Taipei International Book Exhibition (TiBE) Book Prizes and the 17th Golden Butterfly Awards for book design were announced by the Taipei Book Fair Foundation. Both awards are major events at the annual TiBE, which starts on January 26. The winners featured a variety of forms and themes by writers from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, whose works reflect the prize’s investment in the “freedom of expression and freedom of publication as well as the tolerance and openness of this land.” Fiction prize winners include Huang Chun-ming, whose fiction has been featured in Asymptote, Kuo Chiang-sheng, and Pam Pam Liu’s graphic novel, “A Trip to Asylum.” Kuo’s novel concerns a piano tuner who bonds with the widower of a dead pianist, while Liu’s work, the first graphic novel to win in the fiction category, describes the experiences of a man who is admitted and finally released from a psychiatric hospital. In the nonfiction category, Hong Kong writer Hon Lai-chu won for her essay collection, “Darkness Under the Sun,” in which the author reflects on Hong Kong’s 2019 democracy protests.

In late November 2019, President Tsai Ing-wen awarded a posthumous citation to the nativist poet Chao Tien-yi for his contributions to contemporary Taiwanese poetry and children’s literature. Chao was one of the founders of the Li Poetry Society, a collective of Taiwanese nativist poets. Chao worked in a realist mode, through which he lyrically portrayed Taiwan’s landscape and the everyday lives of the working-class in such poems as “Cape Eluanbi,” an ode to the Pacific Ocean, and “Song of the Light-Vented Bulbul,” a nostalgic portrait of his hometown of Taichung. In 1973, the poet suffered a disappointing setback in his career when he lost his position as acting director of National Taiwan University’s (NTU) Department of Philosophy due to false accusations of Communist sympathies. Chao transformed his despair into the poems, “Daddy Lost His Work” and “Don’t Cry, Child.” The Ministry of Culture cited Chao’s works as “both mirror and window for reflecting upon a particular era in Taiwan for generations to come.”

READ MORE…

F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry (and the verse as an explosion, the book as an island)

January 7, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by José García Escobar

We wanted gender politics to enter literature as if it was its native part, as an irreplaceable part of reality.

The new poetry anthology F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry is the second work published in isolarii, as series of “island books,” released every two months by subscription. Edited by Galina Rymbu, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Ainsley Morse (with forewords by Eileen Myles and Amia Srinivasan), the groundbreaking collection features the work of twelve feminist Russian women and members of F pis’mo. As well as co-editing this anthology, Galina Rymbu is a famed Russian poet, whose own work was published by Asymptote in 2016 and whose poems are included in F Letter. Rymbu formed the F pis’mo poetry collective with other feminist and LGBTQ poets in 2017 in order to use language as a form of political protest. F pis’mo‘s work has since inspired a new generation of Russian poets to challenge patriarchal society by giving voice to their own personal experience through poetry. In this essay, Asymptote‘s editor-at-large for Central America, José García Escobar, speaks with Galina Rymbu as well as other F Letter poets, translators, and editors to discuss the collective’s work.

Saint Petersburg. January 2, 2017. Poetess Galina Rymbu was in her house, waiting for a knock on her door. Hopefully several. Galina had sent out an invitation to everyone interested in talking about feminism in literature.

“We thought that only a few people would come,” she writes, from her house in Lviv, Ukraine, where she has lived since 2018.

In the end, more than forty people crammed inside Galina’s tiny kitchen.

“Some were standing, some were sitting on the floor.”

Not only poets and writers went. Activists, artists, and theatergoers were there as well. Galina says that there were no feminist literary communities in Russia at the time. It is a country where the work of heterosexual, cisgender male authors sits, untouched, at the forefront, and where women and LGBTQ authors are often ignored. Galina describes Russia’s literary community as conservative and patriarchal.

“During that first meeting, we said that we didn’t want to be locked in our small circle of ‘feminist literature,’” she says. “We wanted to change literature to make it more gender-sensitive.”

In Russia, according to Galina, only artists working for the state receive financial support. They work under a set of rules, naturally. Don’t write about the LGBTQ community, don’t write about the occupation of Crimea and Donbas, cooperate with Putin’s regime, for example. Poets, writers, musicians, and film and theatre directors who abide by these rules have access to public platforms, large publishing houses, and galleries. These spaces must also follow the rules. Galina says that censorship is everywhere—in the media, television, literary, and film festivals—and compares it to Kafka’s Der Process. Those outside the cultural circuit of Russia’s state, like Galina, resort to independent publishing, where there’s no censorship, but also no visibility—much like Russian writers did before 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The existence of these artists is a political act. Their work is often, and by definition, dissident.

“It was impossible for us to remain feminist poets and express our views only in the space of political activism,” Galina says. “We wanted gender politics to enter literature as if it was its native part, as an irreplaceable part of reality.”

And thus, F pis’mo was born. READ MORE…

A Full Zola Cycle: England Welcomes the Rougon-Macquarts

January 6, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Samuel Kahler

Many . . . translations bear [the] unfortunate marks of censorship, which more broadly detract from the impact of Zola’s naturalism and integrity.

Émile Zola, master of nineteenth-century naturalism, was revered by most but reviled by some: his unflinching account of social decadence during the Second Empire didn’t sit well with France’s more puritan neighbors across the Channel. For decades, English translations of his Rougon-Macquart cycle were bowdlerized in the name of good morals, depriving readers of the full scope and weight of his social critique. Over twenty-five years ago, one of Britain’s most reputable publishers began to make amends, and it has recently completed the mammoth task of fully and faithfully translating Zola’s famed cycle into English. In this incisive historical essay, former Communications Director Samuel Kahler walks us through what was lost to undue censorship, and why it’s such a joy to get it back.

Fans of French literature, it’s time to read and be merry! With the recent publication of Doctor Pascal by Oxford University Press, those at work on new English translations of Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle have at last—after more than a quarter century—completed their epic and honorable task. For the very first time, anglophone readers may fully appreciate the scope and vision of the twenty-part masterpiece as its author intended it.

During his lifetime, Zola enjoyed widespread popularity in France and abroad (wherever translations of his novels, stories, and plays were available); he was viewed as the standard-bearer for a groundbreaking style of literary naturalism that presented an unflinching, often critical view of society through its portrayal of vice and corruption across all strata.

The clearest examples of this approach are found in the novels that comprise Les Rougon-Macquart. Similar in certain ways to Honoré de Balzac’s earlier La Comédie Humaine—a compendium of novels which were grouped together and sorted by theme—Zola’s cycle differs crucially in its design: it follows the members of one family rather than miscellaneous characters, and it was purposely conceived by its author from the onset (he initially planned a series of ten works, but soon expanded its scope). Inspired by breakthroughs in psychology and theories of heredity, it was further fueled by Zola’s desire to candidly portray life during his time.

The opening novel, The Fortune of the Rougons, makes no subtle hints about the author’s ambitions for the larger project. By weaving the family’s origin story into a larger plot, Zola announces to readers that the Rougon-Macquarts are not just a family; they serve more broadly as avatars for the passions and qualities of the era. His preface to the work states that “the dramas of their individual lives tell the story of the Second Empire, from the ambush of the coup d’état to the betrayal of Sedan” (indeed, the cycle’s subtitle is Natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire).

The Rougon-Macquarts are by and large—though not universally—a cutthroat clan of dreamers and schemers who stubbornly pursue grand ambitions, short-sighted affairs, and noble sufferings. When their passions lead them down dangerous paths, they do not stray or turn back; that would seem to be against their nature. Their behavior is part and parcel of Zola’s vision, which he delivers through vivid portraits of their interior and exterior landscapes, warts and all; he shows no prudery in depicting their immoral thoughts and acts.

But Zola’s intention was not simply to titillate audiences with sketches of naughty pleasures, bitter rivalries, and lavish excesses. Though the novels may foreground a mad rush of egos and appetites, the theme of nature’s cycles undergirds them; indeed, this theme frames the entire corpus. The subtleties of Zola’s overarching vision, however, did not make a strong enough impression on those who viewed his novels as cheaply sensational and injurious to society’s moral wellbeing. Many thought his works vile and opposed their publication, especially in England. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Gogol” by Musa Effendi

January 5, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Musa Effendi

Try to understand his situation by this single explanation—he couldn’t hug anyone.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, a disabled youth’s love of football is hindered by his supposed friends in Musa Efendi’s short story “Gogol.” Though our narrator attempts to convince us (or perhaps himself) of his empathy for his friend Gogol, it’s not long before the petty worries of children mirror the cruel pragmatism of the adult world, all at the expense of their friend’s wishes. Through deceptively simple prose, we’re taken through a string of childhood vignettes chronicling the titular character’s ostracization. The narrator’s excuses, deflected upon the reader (“You would do the same thing, too”) segues into a haunting and almost surreal final image, a scene tinged by the narrator’s remorse and subdued sense of awe.

“Turtles can fly.”
–Bahman Ghobadi

I do not like Balzac-style narratives; I do want to know a lot, yet I never dreamed of seeing everything. So I choose to talk about the near side of the Moon.

 

*

We talked about this with the guys during the nights before the actual play. Despite the name of the game, hands play an important role in football; it is the hands that help you speed up when you are running. It is the hands that help you to keep your rival away when you have the ball. It is the hands that help the goalkeeper to not let the ball pass through the door. In football, you get penalized because of a hand, but you can’t play without it either. Elchin was the one who told us all this. This was the reason we didn’t let Gogol play and assigned him as commentator of the game instead. We called him Gogol because while commentating the game, he used to get excited when a goal was scored and would make a noise like this: Go-go-go-gooooal!

He wasn’t stammering. It is just that he didn’t have hands. Try to understand his situation by this single explanation—he couldn’t hug anyone.

*

Our yard was surrounded by the neighborhood of strong football teams. There was Boka’s team on the opposite street (I don’t remember the name of it); they used to play very well. Nemeczek, Csónakos played in his team as well. Timur and his team were another bunch of strong players. So we didn’t have a chance to actually let Gogol join us in the game. You would do the same thing, too; for us, our games were more like training. But it would be waste of time to try him out by giving him a chance to play. True, his loss was greater than ours, but it is not worth sacrificing or compromising in such matters. Grown-ups do this, too—they prefer to save time and money rather than noticing other people’s losses. Necessity of life—my father would say.

READ MORE…

Announcing our December Book Club Selection: Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli

January 4, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Allison Braden

Dissipatio H.G. is . . . an opportunity to unspool our own reaction to the loss of mankind—and perhaps find in it an unexpected sympathy.

Quietly, almost as if afraid to disturb, a new year has made its way into the world. The recession of 2020 into the distance of the past presents an opportunity to not only evaluate the changed world, but also to contemplate our responsibilities in readjusting, amending, and moving on. In a fitting selection, our last Book Club title of 2020 is Guido Morselli’s acclaimed novel, Dissipatio H.G., a text that reconciles the stark realities of mourning with poignant examinations of presence in and amidst so much absence. It is a rare feeling that has somehow, incredibly, become common: What is one to do upon waking up to an unrecognizable 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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli, translated from the Italian by Frederika Randall, New York Review Books Classics, 2020

Near the outset of Guido Morselli’s short and surreal 1977 novel, Dissipatio H.G., the unnamed narrator sits in a cave at the edge of a steep drop into an underground lake, getting up the nerve to end it all. Meanwhile, down in the valley, in the invented, industrious city of Chrysopolis, the economy booms, not unlike the growth Morselli observed in post-war Italy. Leery of society’s so-called progress, the narrator has retreated to an isolated property in the mountains—but even that is threatened; he’s pushed to the lip of nonexistence when he finds a cluster of numbered stakes in the ground “a couple of hundred paces from my mountain retreat.” After a fever and a frantic investigation, he uncovers that a company plans to build a highway there, complete with entrance ramps, a cloverleaf, and a motel. “As Durkheim might say,” the narrator reflects, “there’s your trigger.”

In the end, he abandons his plan after contemplating the quality of the Spanish brandy he’s brought along for liquid courage. His body’s physical matter simply refuses to accede to his will; he bangs his head on the way out of the cave, just as a powerful groan of thunder rolls through the valley. “The truth is,” he thinks, “a man who draws back from killing himself does so (and Durkheim didn’t see this) under the illusion that there is a third way, but in fact tertium non datur—there is no third possibility: it’s either a leap into the siphon or a dive back into daily life, where the rhythm of everything has stayed exactly as it was and you must hasten to make up for the progress lost.”

But when he returns from the cave, the narrator discovers an entirely unexpected third possibility: while he has chosen to live, the human race has vanished. He inspects the newsroom where he once worked as a journalist, placing calls across Europe and across the Atlantic to determine that for all functional purposes, he is the last man alive. “I’m now Mankind,” he says. “I’m Society (with the capital M and the capital S).” He is, he says, “Incarnation of the epilogue.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

December 18, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Julia Sherwood, Quyen Nguyen, and Shawn Hoo

The latest news from Austria, Singapore, and Vietnam!

This week our writers bring you the latest news from Austria, where the annual European Literature Days took place; Singapore, where Singapore Unbound has launched a new translation imprint; and Vietnam, where Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk has been translated into Vietnamese. Read on to find out more! 

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-large, reporting from Austria

The rolling hills of Austria’s Wachau are usually alive with the sound of music and literature in November as writers from all over Europe converge on the picturesque wine-growing region on the banks of the Danube for the annual European Literature Days. This year, however, since Austria went into lockdown just days before the festival began on 19 November, the words and the music emanated from the empty auditorium of the sound space (Klangraum) of the Minoriten Church in Krems. Writer Walter Grond and his colleagues from Literaturhaus Europa, joined by co-hosts Rosie Goldsmith from England’s Wiltshire and Hans-Gerd Koch from Berlin, linked up digitally with writers and musicians across Europe for four days of readings and discussions. The last-minute switch to digital format went without a hitch and the loss for those who had been looking forward to meeting old friends and enjoying autumn walks and the delicious local wine proved to be a gain for the rest of the world, as the entire festival was live-streamed (the recordings are available on the Elit YouTube channel). More Wilderness!—the festival theme that, as had happened so often before, proved to be uncannily prescient in view of the pandemic—was introduced by Austrian writer Robert Menasse in conversation with German philosopher Ariadne von Schirach, who continued exploring the wilderness inside and outside the following day in a dialogue with biologist and biosemiotician Andreas Weber. Over the weekend, a dizzying range of authors discussed and read from their works: from stars such as Sjón, Petina Gappah, and A.L. Kennedy (the recipient of this year’s Austrian Booksellers’ Prize of Honour for Tolerance in Thinking and Acting); through those who made their name more recently, like Olga Grjasnowa (Germany), Filip Springer (Poland) as well as Polly Clarke and Dan Richards from the UK; to writers who have yet to make their name in the Anglophone world, such as the Hungarian Gergely Péterfy, the Italian Fabio Andina, the Czech-born Austrian writer and musician Michael Stavarič, the Slovak Peter Balko, and Miek Zwamborn, a Dutch author based on the Scottish Isle of Mull. In addition to Menasse and Grond, the home-grown talent included writer and musician Ernst Molden, whose balcony concerts helped to keep up the spirits of his neighbourhood in Vienna during the first wave of the pandemic, and Daniela Emminger, whose reading from her dystopian novel set in Hitler’s birthplace, Braunau, was enlivened by the appearance of a banana-munching gorilla. Emminger’s succinct summaries of the whole festival can be read here. READ MORE…

Asymptote Podcast: Hiromi Itō on “Living Trees and Dying Trees”

December 18, 2020  |  in Interviews, Podcast  |  by Steve Lehman

For our final podcast episode of the year, we sat down with Japanese poet Hiromi Itō, whose essay was one of Fall 2020’s highlights.

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In this episode, podcast editor Steve Lehman chats with acclaimed poet, essayist, and novelist Hiromi Itō about her development as a feminist writer, the importance of the environment in her life, and the moving experience of reading her own work translated into another language. Plus, hear an excerpt from Itō’s essay “Living Trees and Dying Trees,” translated from the Japanese and read by Jon L. Pitt. You can check out the full essay, along with new work from 32 countries, in our Fall 2020 issue.

Call for Submissions: Brave New World Literature

December 17, 2020  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Don’t miss this chance to be a part of our tenth anniversary issue!

For our upcoming issue, we seek critical or even celebratory essays from readers, critics, authors, publishers, and of course translators discussing and problematizing the ways in which non-English texts reach Anglophone readers, perhaps envisioning a “brave new world literature” for the next decade. Details here. Deadline: 10 January, 2021. ⁠

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Adam Sorkin and Romanian Poetry in 2020

December 16, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Andreea Scridon

Sorkin’s corpus demonstrate[s] exceptional verve and dedication—two especially valuable traits in a sometimes thankless publishing industry. . .

“All Romanians are born poets,” goes a local saying, but far too few are published in English. Among their faithful champions, award-winning translator Adam Sorkin stands out: while some of us forwent productivity in favor of survival this year, he managed to put out a whopping three Romanian poetry translations. In times of collective confinement, they fittingly tackle the self’s relationship to space: the city, the countryside, the foreign land. They hone in on different forms of love and fear, too, from the romantic to the maternal to the religious—the love and fear of God. Beyond these and other commonalities, however, they differ in structure and style: the first is an emotional bildungsroman, the second an epic, the third a hymn of sorts. This formal range attests to Sorkin’s chops, which Assistant Editor Andreea Scridon is only too happy to extol.

It’s always contentious to name someone the best translator of a language, a claim that is perhaps more trouble than it’s worth. I, for one, tend to shy away from such absolutisms, but Adam Sorkin gives me second thoughts. Undeniably, he’s at the top of his game, having published over sixty books of Romanian poetry in English translation (even in the year of the plague, he’s managed to publish several).

Of the three most recent ones—Mircea Cărtărescu’s A Spider’s History of Love, Ioana Ieronim’s Lavinia and Her Daughters, and Aura Christi’s The God’s Orbit—I must admit I’ve only read the first in the original (among contemporary authors, Cărtărescu is a firm favorite of mine, so the stakes were especially high). All three, however, merit attention.

I have no interest in writing a sycophantic or fawning piece; in fact, I would be embarrassed to be so generous with praise if I didn’t feel that Sorkin’s corpus demonstrated exceptional verve and dedication—two especially valuable traits in a sometimes thankless publishing industry that doesn’t necessarily have an interest in promoting a minor language. To put it simply, having worked with Sorkin myself, I knew he wouldn’t disappoint.

A Spider’s History of Love was published by New Meridian Arts in July, making it the first of three Cărtărescu books to come out in English around this time (Solenoid, translated by Sean Cotter, will be published by Deep Vellum in 2022, and Nostalgia, translated by Julian Semilian, is forthcoming from Penguin in 2021). The book’s title is Sorkin’s doing, a phrase he took from a poem included in the volume, which encompasses selections from multiple collections; these are curated into three sections, entitled “Once I Had . . . ,” “Bebop Baby,” and “Prisoner of Myself.”

Considered cumulatively, these poems do not seem to represent an overarching epic odyssey in the same obvious way that Ioana Ieronim’s Lavinia and Cărtărescu’s own Levantul do; rather, they resemble an emotional bildungsroman with porous boundaries, entirely dictated by the inner life of the poetic narrator as he bends, with force and delicacy, the world to his perception, and not vice versa.

In “Once I Had . . .” and “Bebop Baby,” the microcosm of the poet’s Bucharest serves as the stage for various amorous pursuits. With obvious erudition, indicated by winks to his forerunners in Romanian literary history, Cărtărescu combines Romantic and Levantine elements with communist shabbiness. Thus, contemporary banality, even poverty, are seen through an euphoric eye and become savoury for those who understand how to look the right way, thanks to the poet’s almost rabid attention to detail:

. . . and deep down in the digestive tract I could spy
death herself.

I saw her leaning against the iron fence of the TB hospital next to the police headquarters
stopping a kid on the sidewalk to send him to fetch a newspaper or a fresh bun
and I saw her shopping for bread and newspapers in the pinkest, most incomparable
xxxxxxxxxsunset.

(“Love Poem”)

Everything becomes effervescent and iridescent for this narrator, a master of the art of sublimation, who seems to be eternally in love. His are confessional narrative poems—a form which suits the sentimental experience, with its varied shades and seasons. Long as they may be, they read quickly, engaging with reality and avoiding excessive abstraction. The rhyme is ingenious thanks to both the author and the translator (“. . . the evening / deposited thin sheets of lapis lazuli / the parked cars seemed folded from tinfoil and smelled of patchouli”; “. . . and your figure reminds me so little of aesop / that I wrote you a bebop”). READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Juan Andrés García Román

December 15, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Nick Rattner

You’re the blonde girl who all morning long turns her desk like a sunflower.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, the awe and dread of winter are at once historical and timeless in these selections by Spanish poet, translator, and scholar Juan Andrés García Román. In “The Hour,” a looming sense of nostalgia-fuelled Weltschmerz—allegorized here as passing seasons—prompts our speaker to recognize the fleeting joy of life and youth, while also imploring the importance of “staying” in the face of melancholy. In “For the First Time, You Feel Sad (Belisarius Sends His Troops Up Into the Trees),” our speaker deploys allusions and anachronisms—everything from Byzantium military history to Roman mythology to contemporary French children’s literature—to illustrate the love and longing of a winter-born absence. The cerebral maximalism of García Román’s verse is done justice here by Nick Rattner’s adroit translation of the poet’s layered metaphors and embedded historical/literary references. A learned take on the season-change poem which warrants a careful, meditative read.

The Hour

for Antonio Mochón

Who, after tossing and turning a winter
night while snow
covered the peaks, honored the refrain,
the brave old songs,
and the postcards of mountains
displayed in mountain lodges,
who, I say, did not this way pass
through a cemetery and, feeling a quaver
in their legs, partly from
fatigue of another world,
and partly to shield against wind and lightning,
did not slip themselves into an empty niche
to wait out the storm, and from this feel
suddenly tired of the path, READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2020

December 14, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Allison Braden, MARGENTO, and Sarah Moore

The latest in literature from Spain, Romania, and France!

Our final selections in excellent translations for the year of 2020 are fittingly full of thought. Throughout these texts, one finds the endless potential roadmaps that chart out from the individual mind’s interrogation and contemplation of their surroundings, and one’s own place within them. From a wandering mind, everything is a pool for endless reflection; a Catalan collection draws from the sea, a Romanian notebook is filled with musings and defiances of authorship, and a French diary novel tells the lives of many through the life of one. 

salt water

Salt Water by Josep Pla, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush, Archipelago Books, 2020

Review by Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large for Argentina

On a recent virtual happy hour, my friend described a weekend camping trip on a secluded barrier island off the coast of Georgia, in the southern US. My envy verged on rage as I listened from my living room, which doesn’t get enough natural light. He said that after he and his wife kayaked over and set up their tent (annoying a resident heron in the process), they had done absolutely nothing—not even read. They sat on the shore and watched the sea. It’s easy to believe how that could have been enough.

Josep Pla would understand. In Salt Water, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush and released by Archipelago Books this month, Pla writes that “the mere presence of the sea is enough to sink into the deliquescent bliss of the contemplative life.” His curiosity courses through the book, a series of ten sketches that revolves around the coast of Pla’s native Catalonia: he describes shipwrecks, submarines, and harebrained sailing schemes. He relates stories from a salty, one-handed raconteur and imbues the rambling tales with strikingly lifelike texture. Though his plots unfold on or near the sea, human culture is ever present. Pla revels in detail, describing at length the joy of nearly black coffee on a marginally small boat: “That beverage makes an almost immediate impact: your mind projects itself onto the outside world, you are fascinated by everything around and a gleam comes to your eyes.” This book is a product of that fascinated, caffeinated gaze.

In the preface, Pla describes the stories as writings from his adolescence. In the translator’s note at the end of the book, however, Bush clarifies that they were written in the 1940s and hypothesizes that the preface was a canny attempt to evade censorship. He points out that Pla’s “articles containing veiled critiques of the dictatorship made him the most censored journalist in Spain.” Indeed, his biography offers helpful context for the conflicting claims that bookend the collection.

As a university student a century ago, Pla developed a clear, intelligible writing style and deployed it throughout his career as a journalist. He traveled widely across Europe as a foreign correspondent and served briefly as a member of Parliament for the Commonwealth of Catalonia, a short-lived assembly notable for its symbolic value. Over its eleven years in existence, the Commonwealth promoted Catalonia’s unity and identity, and evinced strong support for the Catalan language—Pla’s language. He became a chronicler of Spain’s tumultuous early twentieth-century history and spent multiple stints in exile. In the 1940s, he took to exploring his native coast and writing dispatches for Destino, a Burgos-based magazine at the forefront of the reemergence of Catalan-language culture. Throughout his peripatetic career, Pla never stopped writing: his complete works, compiled shortly before his death in 1981, stretch over thirty-eight volumes. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

December 11, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, José García Escobar, and Josefina Massot

The latest news from Central America, Sweden, and Argentina!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Central America, Sweden, and Argentina. A poetry festival featuring Latin American heavy hitters has just wrapped up in Guatemala, where, in addition, a new YA title draws from a military coup and a reprint tackles guerrilla warfare; Sweden’s most prestigious literary prize has been awarded in the fiction, non-fiction, and children’s book categories, and the Swedish Arts Council is trying to keep the literary sector afloat; a series of sundry voices gathered at a non-fiction festival in Argentina, where they spoke about how hard it is to narrate the pandemic—and how easy it is to honor another viral phenomenon. Read on to find out more!

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America

Guatemala just finished the sixteenth edition of the celebrated Festival Internacional de Poesía de Quetzaltenango (FIPQ). As a virtual festival, it included readings and presentations of notorious poets including Cesar Augusto Carvalho (Brasil), Isabel Guerrero (Chile), Yousif Alhabob (Sudan), Rosa Chavez (Guatemala), and Raúl Zurita (Chile). Relive FIPQ’s closing ceremony with a performance of the Guatemalan indie-pop band, Glass Collective, here.

Guatemalan novelist and translator David Unger just put out a new YA book. Called Sleeping with the Light On, it is based on how the author and his family experienced the 1954 US-backed military coup, which overthrew the democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz. Sleeping with the Light On (Groundwood Books) is illustrated by Carlos Aguilera.

Finally, before the end of the year Catafixia Editorial will reissue two essential books of Guatemalan history and literature, Yolanda Colom’s Mujeres en la alborada and Eugenia Gallardo’s No te apresures en llegar a la Torre de Londres porque la Torre de Londres no es el Big Ben. READ MORE…