Place: Brazil

Winter 2024: Highlights from the Team

Get excited to dip into our Winter 2024 issue with these highlights from our team!

Ilya Kaminsky’s “Reading Dante in Ukraine” makes an impassioned case for the crucial role of art amid the horrors of war. What we need, as Dante’s journey shows us, is to defend ourselves with it: a tune to walk to, even in the underworld, as long as one still walks. In Miklós Vámos’s “Electric Train,”  translated by Ági Bori‚ the question-answer format gives the piece levity and rhythm, and the counterpoint of the humor interplaying with the troubled relationships brings it powerful depth. I found wisdom in the wry humor of Jaime Barrios Carrillo’s poems in David Unger’s translation. I love the image of angels spending the evening in their hotel rooms, ironing their enormous white wings.

—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor

The masterful language in Ági Bori’s translation, as though hand-holding the reader through a children’s story, and the simple act of gifting a present in the story belie the depth and complexity of emotional turmoil that wash over Miklós Vámos’s characters in “Electric Train,” a turmoil that seemingly hits out of nowhere like a wave yet in fact stems from a deep brewing well of built up memories and tensions. The contrast highlights all the more the challenges, and perhaps even limits, of recognizing and understanding another’s intentions, experiences, and feelings.

Rage, sorrow, resilience, helplessness, hope, a hunger for life and love and connection, grief, a numbing screaming despair: it is difficult to put into words the sensations that ran through me as I read Samer Abu Hawwash’s “My People” in Huda J. Fakhreddine’s translation. It cannot possibly compare to the feelings and thoughts of Samer Abu Hawwash and the Palestinian people, to the reality of having each day and moment narrow down to dried bread and tear tracks.

I was intrigued by Laura Garmeson’s discussion, in her review of Brazilian author Itamar Vieira Junior’s Crooked Plow, of the tongue as “both creator and destroyer. It has the power to make and unmake worlds.” It is a through line in Crooked Plow that reminds us of the power and possibilities of language and story to shape our lives. Garmeson’s review, in a way, is also a fire that kindles awareness of Itamar Vieira Junior’s work and the legacies, realities, and possible futures for Afro-Brazilian communities. The tongue as symbol also feels like a through line between these pieces in their rumination on what is gained and lost and pushed aside in the choices we make of what, how, and when we say (or write) things, or not.

—Julie Shi, Senior Executive Assistant

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Skin Has Two Sides: Bruna Dantas Lobato on Translating Jeferson Tenório

. . . racism and colorism affect all of us . . . there’s no interpersonal relationship that isn’t shaped by it.

In 2023, Bruna Dantas Lobato won a PEN Translates grant for her work on Jeferson Tenório’s The Dark Side of Skin, a moving, feeling novel of how relationships—between parent and child, between lovers, between a body and a city—change, develop, and intwine against powerful institutions and worldly violences. Through the story of Pedro—which is in turn told through the life of his murdered father—Tenório vividly inscribes the urbanity of Porto Alegre and the generations that move through it, along with the cruelty, the mystery, and the love. In this interview, Lobato speaks on the novel’s treatment of racism, its refractions of Baldwin, and how its author draws on Brazil’s rich aesthetic canon.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): You’ve spoken before about how passionate you are about translating titles from the northeast of Brazil, but The Dark Side of Skin takes place in in southern Brazil—Porto Alegre—and Tenório has spoken about how the racism it describes is one that is expressed more pointedly in regards to the city’s relatively homogenous population. Could you speak a little bit about how geography or regionality works in this novel, and also about what drew you to translate it?

Bruna Dantas Lobato (BDL): The Northeast of Brazil, where I grew up, is very underrepresented in literature both in Brazil and abroad. There are very few authors from that region available in translation, especially compared to the whiter metropoles. I’d love to see a greater range of stories from different parts of Brazil in English, so we don’t keep reading the same versions of Latin America over and over again. 

I was drawn to Tenório’s novel for similar reasons, for how it presents the experience of a Black man in a predominantly white city with insight and tenderness. It’s a beautiful and painful book, and to have Tenório join the slate of Porto Alegre authors widely available in English with a different kind of book was important to me. I hope the publishers who often tell me that they already have their one Brazilian author—or one author from a certain region—will see that one voice can’t possibly represent a whole country.

XYS: A significant portion of the novel is written in the second person, which is a literary point-of-view that I think is especially sensitive to each individual language and the culture it stems from (e.g. in terms of interpersonal hierarchies, categories of persons, speech-acts). How was it working with the second person here?

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A Year of Reading the World

Sometimes reality would seem unbearable if literature were not there to decipher it, to give it heart.

Every month, the Asymptote Book Club shares a newly published, translated title with readers and subscribers. From Nobel laureates to electrifying debuts, this selection features some of the most powerful voices writing in any language, opening up an entry into the immense archives of  wold literature. In this essay, we look back on the books of 2023 thus far. 

Sign up for the Asymptote Book Club here and have our curated titles sent to your door!

Whenever a major event transpires, anywhere in the world, the instinct of many is to reach into the annals of writing—for explanation, ruminations, solace, transcriptions of history, glimmers of what’s to come, stories of people and their ordinary or extraordinary lives. . . On January 1 of this year, Croatia officially joined the Schengen Area, making it the twenty-seventh member to benefit from the region’s removal of border controls—and the search for Croatian books and literature went up 30%. During the surprising and intermittently absurd “Chinese balloon incident” in early February, searches for books on Chinese espionage went up a full 100%. Interest for Ukrainian literature stayed at a high amidst the ongoing conflict, and peaked when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin for committing war crimes regarding the illegal deportation of children. As a devastating civil war broke out in Sudan in mid-April, the world immediately sought out writing from and about the region, and when Niger’s government was overthrown in a military coup on July 26, searches for Nigerien books and authors also saw a significant surge. And as writers from Palestine and Israel continued, over the decades, to release texts around nation, land, exile, occupation, humanity, and violence both physical and psychological, we all watched in horror as the devastation grew almost unimaginably—and we looked for those books.

Books and the world they’re written in, books and the worlds they give us—sometimes reality would seem unbearable if literature were not there to decipher it, to give it heart. As the poet Adonis said, “My homeland is this spark this lightning in the darkness of the time remaining. . .” (translated by S.M. Toorawa); with language, such texts lend us that brightness, and we are rendered able to discover the many narratives and landscapes of our long, shadowy era.

In this year’s Book Club, we’ve thus far featured eleven titles: eleven authors, eleven countries, eleven languages, and eleven translators. Each brought their own entrancing energy of storytelling, whether taking history or the human psyche as material, building on myth or fearlessly experimental. There were titles that sought to give us a vivid portrait of a certain neighbourhood, a certain period. Others dove into the intricate channels of thinking to paint a picture of the mind. READ MORE…

Translating the Non-Existent

[W]hat if you wanted to translate a poem that can no longer be found in its original language?

Poems and stories have murky histories—the older, the more obscure. In the following essay, we follow a translation team from the College of Mexico as they work to unearth an ancient love poem by way of its later translations, delving into the question of what constitutes of an original.

It is accepted that our ancient texts do not come to us intact; from the poetry of Sappho to the second part of Aristotle’s Poetics, we can only know these works thanks to quotations or references by many other authors. As such, a question plaguing translators of history remains: what if you wanted to translate a poem that can no longer be found in its original language?

This is precisely the problem facing certain translators from the College of Mexico, who had decided to embark on the colossal journey of translating the first love poems of over fifty languages. Francisco Segovia, the leading editor of Primer Amor, the book that reunites these texts, stated that they actually “wanted to translate the first poems ever written, but it seemed like and unfathomable task, so we focused just on the love poems”. From there, Segovia, along with Adrián Muñoz and Juan Carlos Calvillo, gathered over forty translators, academics, and poets to ensure the texts were not only well translated, but also accompanied by a brief critical comment of the translation work and the poem itself. Included are poems written originally in Sanskrit, Latin, Náhuatl, Awadhi, Medieval French, Tamil, and more, include excerpts from the Bhagavad Gita, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and even Homer.

However, one text in particular was set apart from the others, and required a distinct approach. The “Song of the Serpent” is a poem originally written in Tupinambá, a native language from present-day Brazil. The community has been deeply described in André Thevet’s The New Found World, or Antarctike and in Jean de Léry’s History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, but the most prominent figure who has written about the Tupinambá was actually Michel de Montaigne; in his essay “Of Cannibals”, he delves into the otherness of the community in an attempt to understand the nations that “are still governed by natural laws and very little corrupted by our own”. As Carlo Ginzburg has pointed out, Montaigne’s unique perspective led him to see Brazilian natives not as animals or savage people, but as “belonging to a distinct and different civilization, although the word civilization did not exist as yet”. Not only that, but Montaigne refused to regard their poetry as barbarian, and defied the paradigms of natural anthropology that deemed American natives as inferior, stating: “I do not believe, from what I have been told about this people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.” READ MORE…

Many Bridges To Cross: Sandra Tamele on Mozambican Portuguese and Unfolding a Publishing Scene

. . . translation plays a pivotal role in terms of making [Mozambican] borders more permeable to culture and knowledge and the circulation thereof.

Having envisioned a publishing infrastructure for Mozambicans and by Mozambicans after becoming the first published literary translator in her country, polyglot Sandra Tamele established a literary translation prize, attended the Breadloaf Translators’ Conference, obtained a diploma in translation from the Institute of Linguists Educational Trust in the United Kingdom, and eventually co-founded consortiums of literary translators and book publishers. She did all this while translating works from the English and Italian into the Mozambican Portuguese, from Premio Strega-winning Italian novelist Niccolò Ammaniti’s Eu não tenho medo (I Am Not Scared) to Jamaican poet Raymond Antrobus’s A Perseveranca (The Perseverance), and learning other languages—including the Mozambican Sign Language. 

Throughout all this, establishing The London Book Fair award-winning independent press Editora Trinta Nove Zero (30.09) and the As Sete por Quatro (7×4)—which champions works by marginalised Mozambican writers writing in Mozambican Portuguese, English, and other local languages such as Makhuwa, Sena, and Changana—seems to be her career’s crown jewel so far. In this work, she has engineered a landscape more consequential than any edifice and armature: the new age of Mozambican literature, translation, and publishing. “Literary translation is still underrated in Mozambique,” Tamele laments in her essay ‘Desassimilar: Decolonizing a Granddaughter of Assimilados,’ “But I have chosen a different path now, and this work is too important for me to give up.”

In this interview, I conversed with Tamele on the intricacies of translating from English and Italian into the Mozambican Portuguese language; finding readership in the Mozambique and the rest of the Lusophone world; and being one of the architects of Mozambique’s literary and publishing scene. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Did you have a road map to develop a publishing infrastructure with your many contributions to Mozambican literature? What went unmentioned behind the scenes?

Sandra Tamele (ST): I have to admit that I did not have a roadmap, but wish I had one when I decided to become a ‘PublisHer’ back in 2018; most of the shifts in my career, through this past decade, were a result of my restless, problem-solver spirit. In hindsight, I think that I never expected or even dreamed that today I could win any literary or publishing awards, nor act as a PublisHer advisory board member and president of the Mozambican Publishers and Booksellers Association, among others. 

Long story short, I left a career where I felt unwanted for one where I felt invisible—and with less prospects of succession because I had never heard a single child say they wanted to become a literary translator when they grew up. The solution: a literary translation competition to raise the profile of language professionals, while promoting reading and literary translation practice among young people in Mozambique. Three years later, we had this amazing collection of stories that no publishing house in Mozambique was willing to invest in, in spite being written by award-winning authors like Alain Mabanckou, Marguerite Abouet, and Imbolo Mbue, to mention a few. 

Establishing 30.09 was the solution. It went from strength to strength and now encompasses a creative writing initiative for women, workshops for illustrators, the transcription of children’s and YA books to build a Braille library, agenting for Mozambican writers, and the project of a groundbreaking bookshop and community library. I guess I am The Architect without a plan. Despite the steep learning curve and the many hats I have to wear, I believe that I’m gaining focus as I grow as a publisHer. 

In 2024, I plan to be more intentional in working with my peers to provide training for a cohort of female high school graduates in key publishing and related fields, to start building the book sector infrastructure in Mozambique. A roadmap for those who follow on my footsteps is also on the agenda, in addition to building a database and statistics for the sector. I’m now also in the position to advocate for book and literacy policies with key decision makers.

AMMD: You disclosed that most Mozambican writers do not share your views about the potentials of literary translation. In what ways has 30.09 been a solution to the many challenges you previously outbraved and myths you tried (and are still trying) to dispel as a translator and publisher? 

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What’s New in Translation: November 2023

Discover new work from Brazil and the Basque Country!

In this month’s round-up of new and noteworthy titles from around the world, our editors dive in to a lyrical, transcendent, and multidisciplinary collection from the founder of neoconcretismo, Hélio Oiticica, and a sensuous, genre-bending queer love story of from José Luis Serrano. Read on to find out more!

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Secret Poetics by Hélio Oiticica, translated from the Portuguese by Rebecca Kosick, Winter Editions/Soberscove Press, 2023

Review by Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large for North Macedonia

How can we eternalize the moment without petrifying it? How can words convey its temporal unfolding while retaining the anatomy of that process, a duration that has no discernible borders? A possible answer can be found in Hélio Oiticica’s Secret Poetics, translated from the Portuguese by Rebecca Kosick. In this collection, the reader is invited to experience a gallery of the ephemeral: the motion of a plunge into water; the cold, vexing, soon-to-be-over wait for the arrival of a lover; the tidal separations and interlacings of limbs and lips in an amorous embrace… Like a gifted translator, Oiticica recasts the transient into another medium—words and silences—while remaining true to that fleeting essence: to, in his own words, “immediacy that becomes eternal in lyrical poetic expression”.

In the preface, where she thoroughly examines the correspondences between Oiticica’s poetry and his visual work, Kosick reveals that his output has been termed “unclassifiable”. Its hybridity goes deeper than the blurring of genre distinctions (Oiticica’s practice “included painting, sculpture, installation, performance, filmmaking, and writing”), and this artistic output itself constitutes moments of coalescence and transformation. While his earlier pieces, a series of paintings, contained “a suggestion of movement, even dance,” Kosick notes that his “later artworks would literalize this proposition”. In 1959, Oiticica and a group of his contemporaries launched the “neoconcrete” movement, creating three-dimensional art installations designed to be interacted with by the audience. Composed of objects that could be rotated, worn, opened, and reached into, these installations “not only dissolved the distance between spectator and art object but collapsed the very binaries structuring the differentiation of subject and object”. Kosick explains that the experiences of the pieces redefined “the work of art as ‘a being’ whose meaning would ‘flourish’ via phenomenological encounter with its audience-participants”. READ MORE…

Merely Looking: On Orides Fontela’s One Impossible Step

Fontela compares language to a stone, dense and infinite in possibility.

One Impossible Step by Orides Fontela, translated from the Portuguese by Chris Daniels, Nightboat Books, 2023

In 1624, the English poet John Donne wrote that “no man is an island,” a line intended to succinctly describe the relational existence of individuals in the world. In One Impossible Step, a new collection of the work of the Brazilian poet Orides Fontela, the focus is not upon the relationship between individuals in the world, but rather in the connection between man and his island. The collection, translated from the Portuguese by Chris Daniels, compiles works from across Fontela’s entire corpus and is buttressed by a section titled “Poetics,” which explores her literary style through a thoughtful translator’s note, interviews with the poet, and several critical essays—all of which serve to form a clear understanding of the poet’s fascination with the natural, physical Others that compromise our world, ranging from a bird, to a rose, to a star. In the very first poem of this work, “Speech,” the reader is told that “all will be aggressively real,” but that the consequence of this realness will be our wounding.

From this fascination with the natural emerges Fontela’s idea of the poem as “an idea expressed in a very concrete image . . . something closed, a strong defined image.” The question then arises: why does this image wound us? Perhaps because it exists only through language, the collection suggests. Any mode of expression divides the poet from the world, and if language is the tool that allows for communication, it is also the obstacle between the elements of the world and the poet. The sequencing of the poems in this collection is worth noting here. Daniels, in his translator’s note, describes the translation as following the original texts by beginning with sound and ending with silence, almost as if each section is an exploration into the futility of language as it meets the elements of the natural world. Indeed, in the fittingly titled “Poem,” Fontela writes about the subject thusly:

To know silence by heart
—and profane it, dissolve it
in words

She takes this a step further in the poem “Rose,” describing writing as akin to murder:

             I murdered the word
And hold my living hands in blood.

For Fontela, the act of writing is an act of profanity against life itself, reducing it to the image alone. That profane act of reinforcing the impossible distance between the world and the writer is further complicated, then, by the act of reading, and particularly the act of reading in translation. The poet is necessarily separated—always an “impossible step” away from the bird, the star, the rose—and language concretizes this “distance of looking”; the reader is never able to see what the poet sees, while the reader of the translation will never even see it in the same language. The natural world is understood through perspectives all at a degree of separation from each other, and the bridge of translation, here, is a reconfirmation of the distance between one side and the other. But what is left behind is a longing that can never be fulfilled. “[T]he real,, Fontela writes, “will ache in us forever.”

That is, to the poet, man is an island and yet distinct from the island itself. The paradox lies in being part of the world—being able to observe the flight of a bird, the twinkling of a star—and knowing that one is wholly separate from it:

The star completes
the unity it does
not inhabit.

The state of isolation is also one that leads to unrecognition:

the stars do not interconnect
and the greatest distance
is merely looking.

This “distance” that “is merely looking” is a gaze that only serves to highlight the lack of recognition, even when the other is a sister star or brother strangers. To Fontela, the star may be forgivenshe has no mirror and therefore necessarily lacks empathy and knowledge of her shared form. However, when Fontela turns her attention to humanity, her poetry becomes far more barbed:

It is the stranger (the brother) who knocks
But there will never be
a reply:

welcome’s country
is far to go.

The stranger has a face one can recognizeperhaps even a tongue one can understand as well, if only one chooses to stay in “welcome’s country.” But the fact that the Other may share your face and your tongue does not reduce the isolation of one’s existence. Nor can it reduce the inherent narcissism of perspective. Unlike the star, we may look in the mirror—having the capacity to recognize the commonality between ourselves and others—but in the mirror, only “I” exists only “I” stares back.

A god
I eye
eye
to
eye . . .

. . . We see by mirror
And riddle
. . . but would there be another
way to see? . . .

the mirror devours
the face.

At one point in this collection, Fontela compares language to a stone, dense and infinite in possibility. That infinity, however, can only exist within silence, or within the wholeness of the stone. To borrow heavily from the philosophy of John Searle, the tool of chiselling is perspective. Individual consciousness is necessary to move from the dense silence of the totality of language into speech. The stone, when it is simply the raw material for a sculptor, has the possibility to become anything. It is the artist’s perspective which creates the sculpture and the poem, but it is the very act of chiselling, or rather the tool of perspective, that the isolation of the impossible step is reaffirmed:

To construct abstract towers
yet the struggle is real.

The poet can never understand the flight of the bird nor its settling, despite an endless observation of the Other. In constructing the poem, the image is created, an image that profanes the real; the actual language of flight is one that we, as readers of this English-language collection, must encounter through translation, through the perspective of the translator. Language, here, is an isolating act of love.

The translator’s situation itself is indicative of this “deep, profound love,” as Fontela puts it. Daniels must face the difficulty of translating poetry that is, at its core, concerned with both languages beyond those of the human and with the grammar of silence. How do you approach these images knowing they are marked with isolation, that such a mark must be made visible to another audience? How do you translate a work that is so focused on the silence of the world?

In One Impossible Step, the approach is to explore, chronologically, a few select subjects in Fontela’s oeuvre before moving to a study of her poetics. The resulting benefit is that the reader is provided an opportunity to consider Fontela’s evolution as a poet, as she plays with form and plumbs for deeper insight into the world. In this collection alone, the bird is mentioned eighteen times; yet, for all those eighteen poems, the reader understands that the poet is unable to move closer to the subject itself. Every poem takes her away from the hermetic language of flight, and the bird will never know of her desire for it.

For though the “impossible step” is the central preoccupation of this collection, none of the poems themselves use this term; it is an implicit understanding, constructed through the conspicuous absence of the poetic figure of an “I.” The ache of perspective cannot be avoided, but the struggle to get beyond oneself, to reduce the step to the world, is ever present. The focus may be on the image and the ethical struggle involved in its crafting, but it is ultimately a struggle made all the more powerful for its backgrounding of the poet. Daniels captures this effect when he writes, in his translator’s note, that:

. . . she wished to express ideas, to write about the world, the universe, and perception itself, while taking herself out of the picture, however impossible that may be.

One Impossible Step is a lonely work. Yet, paradoxically, its loneliness is that of any living being; we are able to understand it and empathize with it, while never getting away from the fact of our own seclusion. “Lucidity / maddens.” We will never be able to sing with the bird, nor with the poetthe privilege is to be told the story of the birdsong through the voice of the poet and her translator.

Meenakshi Ajit is currently a MA student at the University of Chicago. She is interested in comparative literature and theatre studies, particularly the drama of the ancient world.

*****

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Summer 2023: Highlights from the Team

Still looking for entry points into our brand-new Summer issue? Members of our multi-continental team offer you several!

From the Indonesian Feature in the Summer edition, I was intrigued by the poems of Nirwan Dewanto, in vivid translations by John H. McGlynn, including “The Way to the Museum,” which begins with “All eyeballs dipped in the vinegar of the bourgeoisie will become pickled eyeballs” and continues, in long lines, to contemplate class, blindness, and revolution. It resonated against the pathos and absurdity in excerpts from Ulrike Draesner’s Schwitters, translated by Sharon Howe, and Tatiana Niculescu’s play Brancusi v. United States, fresh portraits of European Modernist artists Kurt Schwitters and Constantin Brâncuși, respectively. In each case, as the exile of the artist comes to the fore, the language of their place of origin is woven into the text, along with glimmers of humor. I particularly appreciated the note from Niculescu’s translator Amanda L. Andrei, which describes the process of working, as a heritage speaker, with her father Codin Andrei: “The emotional challenge [of translating this work] lies in my own hang-ups of being a non-native speaker due to political and historical forces beyond my control. When we co-translate, my father and I converse about Romanian culture from a perspective free of Western stereotypes of communism, vampires, and oppression, and we are delighted.” Finally, I was swept up in the atmospheric excerpt from Habib Tengour’s Women of the Odyssey (tr. Teresa Villa-Ignacio) while listening to Tengour’s mellifluous reading of the subtle text in French, describing those who console themselves by “sticking ear in seashell” or the “Unfinished / Wave bringing you to the threshold.”

—Heather Green, Visual Editor

I adore the rush of the speaker’s voice in Enrico Remmert’s The War of the Murazzi (tr. Antonella Lettieri), and its syntactical verbality, meandering but never losing control, digressing into tightness, into an accumulation of narrative stress. I love as well the narrator’s contextualisations of the backdrop of Turin and its historico-social problems with violence, particularly in a refugee context: Turin feels masterfully integrated into the plotline, like a combattant in the Murazzi war itself, and the vivacity of its violence continues running, naturalistic, organic, as the “river never stops running.”

The textuality of Mateo Díaz Choza’s Precipitations (tr. Lowry Pressly) is staggering: the dual columns that inform multiple methods of reading the poem, as well as the materiality of the poem, almost transforming it into an object itself. The way the words waterfall down the screen mimic the “drop,” a kind of fall from heaven, in a mode that lends itself to the digital form undoubtedly better than it would a magazine or a standard-format book, in the “depths of the page” that ultimately do not supercede the infinite scroll of the screen. When the poem’s substance and words meet and meld into each other, the poem’s two columns also merge into one, into the “weather,” “snow-mute” but “beautiful” in the void of its meaning. Choza creates an aesthetics of decay, of death, of abandonment, but of regeneration as well. The drop recurs again and again; the speaker will continue to recognise his lover, again and again.

I love the adventure of Amyr Klink’s One Hundred Days Between Sky and Sea (tr. Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren), the sense of movement through space and time that underpins the narrator’s paradoxical stillness, immobility. It is remininescent of Jules Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires, venturing beneath the sea or into the heart of volcanoes, on a journey pushing against the boundaries of human capacity. Klink melds the joy and exuberance of a child discovering the world with a practical, didactical style of writing that underpins the veracity of his voyage. I find this piece particularly apt for Asymptote as a vessel in the sea of understanding, a buoy of translation in the archipelago of languages.

I appreciate Asymptote‘s continued dedication to featuring Ukrainian writing in each issue, particularly Ukrainian writing about the Russian invasion. In my view, this is one of the most essential tasks of literature in translation: to continually draw attention to the diversity of global experiences; to remind us that our lives are not insular, that we are not islands. To that end, I found Anton Filatov’s Finding Myself at War (tr. Patricia Dubrava) both heart-wrenching and vital. As his “eyes bleed” before the cruelty of false news stories, so do readers’ eyes before the horrors of Ukrainian soldiers’ war experiences. They are given voice not in those news stories, but in literature. Sharing their stories—and I love the detail of the abandoned cat, ironically (or not?) named Death, as well as the final section on cinema—is an act of taken care.

I find Nicole Wong’s discussion of translation theory in The Terroir of a Single Work: Redefining Scope in Approaches to Translation incredibly pertinent and eloquent, and I particularly enjoy the ‘close reading’ section where she dissects her own translation of Proust. It’s a priviledge to experience the clarity and sharpness of such a mind through this piece. Her style is reminescent of Kundera’s narrator in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: playful, heavy on metaphor without falling into abstraction, clear, enlightening (and bearably so!). Since reading this piece, I’ve found myself returning to it as I internalise and integrate her analysis into my own understanding of translation.

 —Michelle Chan Schmidt, Assistant Editor (Fiction)

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The Summer 2023 Issue Is Here!

Featuring Amyr Klink, Enrico Remmert, Diana Garzas Islas, and Rio Johan in our Indonesian Special Feature

Wedged between sky and sea is the thin line we all know as the horizon, ever-present in Brazilian explorer Amyr Klink’s nail-biting account of survival in shark-infested waters—just one of many new works from this Rubik’s Cube-like Summer edition. Though this particular horizon is “defined” against a clear sky on the day of Klink’s wondrous salvation, the same line is also “dun-colored” in Ecuadorian author Solange Rodríguez Pappe’s profound fiction; “lacerated” in frequent contributor Habib Tengour’s Homer-inspired sequences; mottled with “dung heaps” in Nobel laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez’s poetry; or simply a vortex toward which the ocean ebbs in award-winning short story writer Nukila Amal’s description of the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami. Within the same Indonesian Feature, organized in partnership with the Lontar Foundation, Rio Johan’s brilliantly inventive “Fruit Maps”—about a drunk bioengineer!—finds a thoughtful echo in Nicole Wong’s Brave New World Literature entry invoking terroir and fruit to further problematize the mediating role of translation in world literature beyond mere tropes of “domestication” or “foreignization.” In Romanian playwright Tatiana Niculescu’s laugh-out-loud drama, on the other hand, it’s one particular foreigner with a very specific request who gives a museum guide grief; the museum is also the setting for Chapman Caddell’s thrilling review of Argentinian novelist César Aira’s latest “flight-forward” creation. All of this is illustrated by Singapore-based guest artist Eunice Oh, whose stunning photography graces our cover.

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Since the ongoing support of cultural institutions—or, in Asymptote’s case, lack thereof—makes a huge difference in what translator David Williams has wryly compared to the Olympics for being essentially a pay-for-play arena, we return to an interview series initiated two years ago and hear from four more fearless advocates who “work more backstage than onstage” to catalyze the transmission of their national literatures: Susanne Bergström Larsson from the Swedish Arts Council, Wenona Byrne from Creative Australia, Marieke Roels from Flanders Literature, and Shun Inoue from the Japan Foundation, the last sharing the same enthusiasm for manga as our Visual section’s Alexa Frank. “Because literature is such a powerful medium with which to explore the human condition and connect with one another,” Inoue says, “we must continue to look outward, not inward.” Hear, hear.

While we take some time off our issues to regroup and plan for a double milestone in January 2024 (the edition after this will mark both our 50th issue and 13th anniversary!), we hope you’ll join us in looking outward: apart from subscribing to our newsletter and international Book Club, following us in our daily blog, on Facebook, Twitter, our two Instagram feeds, and our newly launched Threads account, we invite you to come on board behind the scenes (apply by Aug 1st) or submit your own translations—who knows? you might share the same fate as contributor Anton Hur, double 2022 International Booker Prize longlistee and, as of eleven days ago, translator of BTS! Finally, if the work we do has similarly changed your life for the better, please consider advertising on our platforms, partnering with us on a Special Feature, or signing up as a sustaining or masthead member.

A toast to horizons in all their myriad forms—especially those that broaden perpetually!

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Translation Tuesday: “Clarice” by Marília Arnaud

During the day, the Girl would look at the chicken for a long time, sitting on the doorstep, her chin resting on one hand, smitten.

This Translation Tuesday, we present a child’s eye view of the habits of a beloved pet hen. Marília Arnaud’s girl is filled with the intense curiosity that true love engenders; watching her Clarice for hours on end, she is alert to every detail, her wonder unending. Compassion abounds in this story, which has been translated by Ilze Duarte with all concomitant warmth and care.

“Why don’t we eat chicken feet?”

“Don’t you know who pecked at the straw where Jesus was born?”

No animal should be cursed, innocent as it was of its own existence, the Girl mused in her own, peculiar musing way, while Esmeralda treated the chicken’s wounded foot.

Clarice, as the Girl decided to call the chicken, arrived on a Saturday. Esmeralda had bought her at the street market, and Mother didn’t seem to mind, maybe because chickens were animals of little noise and presentation. She would always move about in the green, sun-bathed rectangle behind the laundry area in the back of the house, pecking at worms in the dirt here and there in her silly way, shaking off the rest of the world with her indifference.

Clarice was a chicken of much elegance in her reddish-brownish color. Her comb, a bit paler and drooping to one side, gave her a playful look. She would hop on her spring-coil feet when the Girl came near her. Teek, teek, teek… Clarice would scratch the warm dirt and swallow corn kernels as the Girl threw them on the ground for her. Then, she would wet her beak under the dripping faucet and close her eyes in a trembling of the greatest pleasure.

The Girl soon found a place for Clarice. The unoccupied kennel at the edge of the backyard, set up with a pole and everything because Esmeralda said chickens only liked to sleep perched up. The Girl herself would sweep and wash the little henhouse every other day so that Clarice could spend her nights in comfort.

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Visual Spotlight: Guga Szabzon on keeping the world safe between pages

Every single thing, when taken seriously, is transformed and becomes eternal.

After a two-year hiatus during the COVID-19 pandemic, Carnaval do Brasil was poised to return in all its colorful pageantry across the country this past February. Yet, flooding across Brazil’s Sao Paulo state forced many cities to cancel their scheduled festivities as hundreds flee their homes. In a month that has witnessed devastation on a large scale stemming from catastrophic natural disasters, from the deadly quakes in Turkey and Syria to forest fires in Chile, it can feel like an unrelenting onslaught of uncontrollable circumstances. Enter the work of Guga Szabzon, a visual artist and educator from São Paulo, Brazil, whose works speak to the impossibility of naming experience even as they offer a way to keep the world “safe between . . . pages.” In the first installment of a new series spotlighting the stunning visual content from our archives, we revisit our interview with the artist from the Fall 2018 issue.

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The lines in a notebook, in general, have a clear utility: to organize the text, to make the text comprehensible with a clear and sequential reading. I’ve never really followed that rule, but I always opted for notebooks with ruled pages. I discovered after some time that what attracted me to this choice was not having a blank page waiting for me. The lines were already a design. As time went by, I realized that the organizational forms of the world interest me. And I realized that there was a similarity between ruled lines and the coordinates of a map. Both have latitude and longitude. One organizes a text and the other organizes space.

The sensation that I had with this project was the same that I had with my notebooks. My own world kept safe between the pages. Everything I had lived. How many stories fit inside a notebook? How many stories can be written on the blank pages? An entire world awaiting the next word.

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Celebrate International Women’s Day with Women’s Writing!

Join us as we highlight the vital contributions of women to literature and translation.

March 8th is International Women’s Day, and we wanted to take the opportunity to lift up the work of women in world literature. Below, find a selection of pieces published on the blog in the past year, across essays, reviews, translations, and interviews, curated to represent the breadth and brilliance of women working in writing.

Interviews

A Conversation on Kurdish Translation with Farangis Ghaderi
by Holly Mason Badra

But when you look deeper, when you look at archives, and look at early Kurdish periodicals, you find women. You discover these forgotten voices. An interesting example of that is Zeyneb Xan, who published under the pseudonym of Kiche Kurd (“Kurdish girl”). In 2018, when a publisher was reprinting Galawej (the first Kurdish literary journal published in 1939–1949), they decided to have sections on contributing writers. They came across this name, and one of the researchers working on the project uncovered that the identity of the writer was Zeyneb Xan (1900–1963), the eldest sister of Dildar—a very well-known figure of Kurdish literature who wrote the Kurdish anthem. Although her family was a literary family and at the center of literary attention, her manuscript remained unpublished until 2018. Her truly fascinating poetry collection covers a wide range of themes from patriotism to women’s education and liberation.

Wild Women: An Interview with Aoko Matsuda and Polly Barton
by Sophia Stewart

For me, films and television programs, as well as books and comics, have always been the places where I can meet outsider women, weirdo women, rebel women, sometimes scary women. When I was a child, I didn’t care if these women were human beings or ghosts or monsters, and I didn’t care if they were from Japan or other countries. I was just drawn to them, encouraged by their existence.

To Protect Oneself From Violence: An Interview with Mónica Ojeda
by Rose Bialer

Maybe if I was born in some other place, I would be writing about something else, but I do believe that Latin America is a very violent continent, especially for women, and in all of our traditions of women’s literature, there have always been women writing horror stories in Latin America. . .  I do believe that it’s because you can’t write about anything else. That’s how you live life. You are afraid for your life. You are scared of the violence in your family, the violence between your friends, the violence in the street. You can’t think about anything else except how to protect yourself from violence.


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Writing Against Tradition: A Conversation with Stênio Gardel and Bruna Dantas Lobato

I’d like to think that when people read my book and looked at that environment, they could perhaps question their own privileges and prejudices.

In his debut novel, The Words That Remain, Stênio Gardel’s draws out the sublime transformations that language enables. Written in the vivid mind of Raimundo, an illiterate, gay man from rural Brazil, the novel depicts the after-effects of violence, the burden of shame, the pain of unrequited love—and movingly, how learning how to read and write in his old age has transformed all these experiences. We were proud to present this one-of-a-kind novel as our January Book Club selection, and in this following interview, Gardel and his translator, Bruna Dantas Lobato, talks to us about underrepresentation of Brazil’s northeastern region, queer literature, and combating prejudices with writing. 

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. 

Rachel Stanyon (RS): Firstly, I’d like to congratulate you on this wonderful debut novel. Could you tell us a bit about your paths here?

Stênio Gardel (SG): I started really dedicating myself to writing at the end of 2016. Before then, I’d only had a strong desire, and was storing everything I’d tried to write in computer files or drawers. I had carried this desire for a very long time—since I was twelve or thirteen years old—but never had the courage or the initiative to start, nor the dedication required to become an author. Then, at the end of 2016, I started taking classes with the writer Socorro Acioli, and everything changed from there. I learned a lot from her, and that was where The Words That Remain started.

Bruna Dantas Lobato (BDL): Like Stênio, I was also born and raised in the northeast of Brazil, but when I was about seventeen, I got a scholarship to go to a boarding school in New Hampshire for a while—I had the colonized dreams of speaking French and Latin—and then ended up going to college in New England. I stuck around, went to grad school in New York, and somehow became an immigrant in America.

I’d wanted to be a writer since I was a child, but it was when I found myself as a foreigner for the first time that I realized I was also already a translator; I didn’t really get to choose it. There were so many books I loved that I wanted to share with the people around me in my new life, and I was also continuously writing, so translation—translating Brazilian literature—felt like a way to be my full self again. I was an English major and then a comparative literature major, but it was still very Western, and it felt like I had renounced this huge part of myself. To feel like my full self again, I started translating a bunch in my free time, and took translation classes.

That’s what eventually brought me to Stênio’s work. I was committed to translating books from the northeast of Brazil, which is so underrepresented both in Brazil and abroad, because obviously writing from the big metropolises like São Paulo and Rio always gets a lot more attention. I really wanted to bring the kind of life I knew into the life I live now and into the English language. It’s an honor to translate a book like this one. READ MORE…

Poetry Beyond Words: An Interview with Patrícia Lino

. . .the traditional academic essay will never be able to say so clearly what the “infraleitura” does not say.

In this whirlwind and evocative interview, Asymptote contributor Alan Mendoza Sosa sits down with poet and professor Patrícia Lino to discuss just one of her many innovative approaches to poetry critique and response, the “infraleitura.” Based in expanded poetry, in which the word is not the ultimate form of expression, the “infraleitura” bypasses text to reach a visual, sonic, and tactile dialogue between poetic works as well as between poets. The “infraleitura” is ultimately a work of community; here, we are brought into the dialogue with a call to—in Lino’s words—“use it and transform it endlessly.”

Alan Mendoza Sosa (AMS): Could you tell our readers who are unfamiliar with expanded poetry what it is? 

Patrícia Lino (PL): On the one hand, the association of the terms “poetry” and “expanded” is paradoxical. Poetry, since its beginnings, has always been expanded and has been linked to the idea of ​​making something both corporally and intermedially. On the other hand, the association between “poetry” and “expanded” contradicts the logocentric and occidental tendency of modern poetry and reminds us, at the same time, of the importance and validity of the plural, unoriginal, and infinite qualities and possibilities of the poem, which, in addition to being verbal, can be visual, audiovisual, three-dimensional, performative, interactive, olfactory, gustative, or cinematographically conceived—as is the case for the poem in comics. In other words, the expanded poem is a composition contrary to the hierarchy of expressions, in which the word traditionally (and colonially) occupies the top, and image, sound, or gesture are relegated to, respectively, second, third, and fourth places.

AMS: You coined the term “infraleitura”; what does it mean and how does it relate to expanded poetry?

PL: The analytical tools of traditional literary criticism, which developed in the context of the aforementioned logocentric inclination, do not, by focusing primarily on the word, account for the various dimensions and materials of the expanded poem. The “infraleitura” arises, against interpretation, to respond to the absence of a bodily and decolonial way of reading poetry. It could be defined as an-impossible-to-define form of intermedial and creative essay, in which, as well as the poet’s body that expands to make the poem, the essayist’s body expands itself to understand. This other method of comprehension considers not only the word, but also any other useful means to grasp the poem in analysis. It is about reading with the whole body.

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