Place: France

The Intricacies of Human Experience: Natasha Lehrer on Translating On the Isle of Antioch

January 25, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Ruwa Alhayek

There's a collective responsibility in engaging with these stories, reflecting on our own roles, and finding meaning in the midst of uncertainty.

On the Isle of Antioch is lauded Lebanese-French author Amin Maalouf’s philosophically rich take on the end-of-days novel. Told through the journals of Alexander, an artist living out his days on an island he shares with only one other person, this solitary existence is suddenly upended by a total communications blackout and power failure, followed by growing threats of global nuclear warfare. Through this narrative that builds on our contemporary forebodings, Maalouf weaves in the grand resonances of history and delicate moments of human connection to gather the touchpoints between consciousness and civilization, reality and belief. Skillfully taken into English by award-winning translator Natasha Lehrer, this modern myth was our final Book Club selection for 2023, and in the interview below, we speak to Lehrer about On the Isle of Antioch’s massive range, the novelist’s role, and the importance of ambiguity.

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.  

Ruwa Alhayek (RA): On the Isle of Antioch resonates strongly with contemporary events like the COVID pandemic or current geopolitical tensions; it’s intriguing how the novel captures such fears, then deviates from initial impressions. Did ongoing events have an impact on your process of translation?

Natasha Lehrer (NL): The narrative absolutely echoes real-world concerns like the Ukrainian invasion and geopolitical tensions between the U.S., Iran, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Sardar Sardarov initially appears as a Central Asian warlord, a nod to figures from the former Soviet Union. The theme of missing nuclear warheads also aligns with post-Soviet anxieties, cleverly naming and then subverting those fears.

But personally, translation is more of an intellectual exercise for me. I focus on achieving the right tone and voice for characters, especially when translating philosophical dialogues. For instance, translating an American character from French back into English is quite interesting, and Maalouf’s characters often speak in a philosophical manner rather than realistic dialogue. Reading the novel again after a year, I’m struck by the atmosphere of dread, fear, and eroticism. It’s exciting to realize that it works well, even though I wasn’t consciously conjuring specific atmospheres during translation. It’s more about accurately conveying Maalouf’s ideas. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

January 19, 2024  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Andriana Hamas, and René Esaú Sánchez

The latest literary news from Mexico and Bulgaria!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us to bi-national experimental poetry festivals and a community for children’s literature. From prize-winning novels to poetry that spans genres and mediums, read on to find out more!

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

On Monday, January 15, Mexican poet Rocío Cerón launched the online series of panels “Diálogos Bifrontes” (Bifrontal Dialogues), alongside digital artist and poet Carlos Ramírez Kobra. Their conversation was the first of several upcoming chats about experimental, transmedial, and expanded poetry, a genre of literature that combines sounds, performance, and visual elements with poetic writing. They talked about how the transformation of poetry into different artistic and sonic registers entails a process of thinking, reflection, and attention that dissolves traditional boundaries between genre, media, and performance. They also reflected on their creative processes, highlighting how their works consist of — paraphrasing Cerón — an infinite codifying and re-codifying of language and symbols.

These Dialogues complement last year’s special, celebratory 13th anniversary edition of Enclave, an annual festival of expanded poetry founded by Cerón, which ran between November 23 and 25. As a bi-national event, Enclave 2023 was co-sponsored by several Mexican cultural institutions and the Goldsmiths University of London, and co-curated by Cerón and the German-British sound artist Iris Garrelfs. It invited collaborations between Mexican and British artists and poets exploring intersections between poetry, sound, music, and visual art.

Diálogos Bifrontes builds on Enclave’s mission of bringing together poets, artists, and musicians. Like the festival itself, the series will feature conversations by cutting-edge poets from Mexico and the U.K. who are redefining what poetry can mean. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: January 2024

January 15, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Bridget Peak, Iona Tait, and Rubén López

New titles from Japan, France, and Mexico!

The new year is all dressed up with a powerful display of voices in translation: a Japanese epic, a tri-lingual edition of Mexican poetry, and the latest collection of prose from one of France’s most spiny and entertaining voices. Read on to find out more!

Marshland_1024x1024@2x

Marshland by Otohiko Kaga, translated from the Japanese by Albert Novick, Dalkey Archive Press, 2024

 Review by Iona Tait, Copy Editor

In a 1986 article published in Japan Quarterly, the Japanese psychiatrist-turned-novelist Otohiko Kaga wrote about his captivation with the Japanese marshes, describing them as “a wasteland, totally resistant to human attempts at exploitation.” These same untouched regions make up the setting of his novel Marshland, originally published in 1985 and translated now into English by Albert Novick. In this sprawling epic, the marshes, as a virgin land, act as a counterpart to the oppressive state structures of the metropolis. They—being of no use—allow Kaga to explore his central theme: space, and the reclamation of space for freedom and freedom of thought.

Hailing from the marshes, the protagonist, Atsuo Yukimori, is a middle-aged former convict whose job as an auto-mechanic in Tokyo keeps his life together—but only barely. Spending the majority of his life “as a slave to the state,” he lives in fear of the army and the police, and his job security depends on the whims of his boss, to whom the former speaks “like a puppy dog.” All the while, Atsuo’s criminal past lingers in close quarters, with a burn on his finger (punishment for stealing as a child) standing as a reminder. The delicate order of this life—his tidy bedroom, his punctuality—soon begins to unravel, however, when he meets a young student called Wakako Ikéhata at an ice rink. The pair develop an intense relationship, and eventually find themselves entangled in the violent student protests of 1968. Falsely accused of placing a bomb on a train, Atsuo and Wakako are detained by police and imprisoned, spending ten years in prison waiting for a judicial appeal.

Spanning over eight hundred pages, Marshland details governmental abuses of power in post-war Japan through various narrative perspectives, various institutions, and across a vast period of time. Kaga masterfully demonstrates the grueling legal process that kept Atsuo and Wakako in prison, including their detention before being forced to give a confession (detaining individuals before they were sentenced was a feature of Japanese criminal law until it was overturned in 2023). Repeating the details of the trial throughout the majority of the novel, Kaga shows the mentally and physically taxing effects, ranging from psychosis to suicide, of institutionalization and detention on every victim involved—which include Atsuo’s nephew, Yukichi Jinnai, and Wakako’s former lover, the radical student Makihiko Moroya. Whilst this technique does result in a few tedious episodes in which legal particularities are rehashed at length, the approach heightens the all-consuming nature of the trial for the convicts, and succeeds in conveying the lengthy passage of time; the novel alternates between the day-to-day pace of scenes in Tokyo, visits to the marshes, long periods in prison, and swift logs or diary entries which reveal the laboring process of the trial and work done by Atsuo’s lawyers.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

January 12, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, José García Escobar, and MARGENTO

Literary news from Central America, the Philippines, and the Romanian diaspora!

Join us this in this week of literary news from Central America, the Philippines, and the Romanian diaspora! From recent publications of women writers, to a collection of electronic-inspired poetry, to movements against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, read on to learn more.

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

In December, Nicaraguan novelist and poet Gioconda Belli announced that Libros VISOR had just published a 900-page book collecting all her poetry books. Titled Toda la poesía (1974-2020), it includes a prologue written by Spanish poet Raquel Lanseros. This publication came only weeks after Belli won this year’s Premio Reina Sofía de Poesía Iberoamericana, one of the most prestigious awards given to poets of the Spanish language. 

Earlier, in late November, Alfaguara put out a book entitled Desde el centro de América, Miradas alternativas, which includes short stories by twenty one Central American women. The collection includes the likes of Nicté Sierra, Marta Sandoval, and Ixsu’m Antonieta Gonzáles Choc, from Guatemala; María Eugenia Ramos and Jessica Isla, from Honduras; and Madeline Mendienta and Carmen Ortega, from Nicaragua. The book was put together by writer and researcher Gloria Hernández, who, in 2022, received Guatemala’s highest literary honor: the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature. 

READ MORE…

Announcing our December Book Club Selection: On the Isle of Antioch by Amin Maalouf

December 29, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Ruwa Alhayek

[Maalouf] offers us a human way to experience cataclysm without masking the confusion and desperation that takes hold. . .

For our final title of 2023, we are proud to present the latest novel by acclaimed French-Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf, whose extraordinary work weaves fantasy and history with a powerful reckoning of contemporary issues. In On the Isle of Antioch, Maalouf turns to dystopian narrative to explore the frailties and failures of human empires, drawing a surreal evolution of events that escalate from the very real threat of total global destruction. With a philosophical richness that finds footholds in Maalouf’s elegant, nebulous depictions of desire and connection, the novel is a beautiful, necessary rumination on what survival means on the precipices of so much devastation.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.  

On the Isle of Antioch by Amin Maalouf, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer, World Editions, 2023

There is something eerie about reading Amin Maalouf’s On The Isle of Antioch during the same days described by its narrator’s journal entries. In four sections, or “notebooks”, that date from November 9 to December 9, Maalouf’s surreal, thrilling novel is told through the experiences of Alexander, an artist and one of two inhabitants on the titular island of Antioch, as he travels in this brief window of time through isolation, doom, communion, and the unexpected orders and disorders of a dying world.

Having inherited the land from his father, who had refused to sell the deed despite financial difficulties, Alexander decides, in the wake of his parents’ death, to change his life. He begins drawing, releasing work under the pseudonym Alec Zander, and moves to Antioch in a reprieve of his childhood fantasies, calling it his “ancestral island.” Believing himself to be the only inhabitant and sole owner, he’s surprised to find, while waiting for his house to be built, that a woman and writer by the name of Ève had long ago purchased the remaining portion of the island that he did not own, and, being “eager for solitude”, she too has made it her home. Ève’s been in a rut, having published one masterpiece—a novel titled The Future Doesn’t Live Here Anymore—before losing her job and retiring to Antioch, where she sleeps all day and is awake all night, trying to work.

What drives these two loners together, after months of avoiding each other’s company, is a sudden blackout. When all the lights and appliances in Alexander’s house turn off, and even the radio plays only an ominous whistling on every station, he goes to see Ève, suddenly overwhelmed by a solitude that now weighs more heavily on him than ever, and feeling “for the first time in twelve years, [that he] slightly regret[s] not living in a town or a village like an ordinary mortal.” Having previously thought of Ève only as a “silent, ghostly, almost nonexistent” presence, it is only after this incident—which turns out to be a full blackout of all communication systems—that Alexander and Ève are able to find themselves in one another’s company. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Fly” by Linda Lê

December 5, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Alex Nelson

Cervantes, Panizza, Soseki, and Hoffmann had all talked of dogs and cats; why shouldn’t I make a fly my muse?

A writer is stuck, buzzing with contempt for his departed wife. Suddenly, he is liberated by an uncommon muse. Words fly! stories swarm! This Translation Tuesday, we present an at once deeply sympathetic and totally absurd short story by Linda Lê. Hear from translator Alex Nelson on the influence of diaspora on the author’s repertoire, including The Fly:

“Within the ranks of other diasporic writers, Lê recontextualizes her postcolonial exile in her work by considering the blurred lines between language, representation, and form. Lê addresses themes such as the figure of the double, of the relationship between hosts and guests, of the danger of strangers through unexpectedly light-hearted prose, resulting at once in an entertaining story for the reader and a glimmer of the profound. This quality of Lê’s writing was both my priority to translate with fidelity and my greatest challenge when translating.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: from “My Father’s Cité: An Adolescence in Social Housing” by Mehdi Charef

November 7, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Clayton McKee

My mom, my sister, my brother, and I have waited in France for ten years to get this privilege.

This Translation Tuesday, Mehdi Charef recounts his father’s teenage experiences in a newly-built Parisian banlieue. Social housing holds undreamed of comforts for his migrant family, and apprehension quickly turns to delight. Comfort! Safety! Privacy! Hot water! A new, fuller life beckons in the projects, and it involves quantities of rock ‘n’ roll, girlfriends and Carson McCullers.

It’s the Chinese building manager who told us that we had to move.  The immigrant families who had lived in shacks—think shipping containers turned ruins with wear and tear over the past eight years—in the cité de transit, or transitional social housing, on Rue de Valenciennes in Nanterre would now need to pack their bags. Two feelings arise with the announcement of the news: anxiety and melancholy. This move represents a separation. We know where we came from but not where they are taking us. They didn’t ask us about anything, and they aren’t telling us about anything. We are leaving our most recent safe place.

In the bidonville, I had learned that there were Algerians outside of the ones in the village where I was born. In the cité de transit, I had learned Berber and African expressions as well as all the Portuguese curse words.

It isn’t the shacks that I liked but the people who lived in them. In front of them, I kept my head held high because I was like them. It’s only in front of my French classmates that I was ashamed…

Our housing project is going to be demolished. The construction of a large industrial park is set to take its place:  la Défense.

Our new apartment is in Cité Rouge. The neighborhood is named that because of the brick façades of the buildings. It’s in the city Gennevilliers surrounded by small, old houses. We are no longer the isolated immigrant population. People walk down our alleys, underneath our windows. We are no longer the shame of those who were kind to us. We became visible before we were heard… READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

October 27, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar, Rubén López, and Thuy Dinh

The latest in literary news from Guatemala, Costa Rica, and the Vietnamese diaspora!

This week in world literature, we hear from our Editors-at-Large reporting on the latest in literary developments! In Guatemala, we’re covering the literary community’s response to threats to the electoral process, as well as the country’s most recent award-winning authors. From the Vietnamese diaspora, we take a dive into two authors’ recent publications. Read on to learn more!

Rubén López, Editor-at-Large, Reporting on Guatemala

On August 31, sixty-two Guatemalan writers, editors, and artists signed a statement calling for the resignation of María Consuelo Porras, Head of the Public Prosecutor’s Office. Ms. Porras, who was included in the Engels List of 2023 for obstructing investigations against corrupt political allies, has been the main actor in the attempt to sabotage the Guatemalan electoral process of this year. 

On June 25, the progressive presidential ticket composed of Bernardo Arévalo and Karin Herrera surprisingly made it to the second round of the election. This started a series of legalistic arbitrariness from Ms. Porras in an effort to prevent the duly elected candidates from taking office democratically on January 14. 

READ MORE…

Four-in-the-Morning Literature: On Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq

September 20, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Meghan Racklin

Insomnia does strange things to time, or time does strange things to insomniacs—it estranges, stretches, slips.

Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq, translated from the French by Penny Hueston, Semiotext(e), 2023

While writing this review, I began making a list of everything I’ve tried in my attempts to fall asleep. The first was reading, which didn’t help me fall asleep at all (though not sleeping has helped immensely with reading). The second, which I tried after the first time I told a doctor about my trouble sleeping at age eleven, was melatonin, and I took it dutifully, in varying doses, until stopping cold a year ago. I sleep no better and no worse since. Over the years, I have also tried: valerian root, passionflower, marijuana, CBD gel, NyQuil, keeping my phone in another room, counting sheep, white noise, earplugs, Xanax, watching the same six television shows over and over again, an eye mask, new sheets, exercise, an early and consistent alarm. I have a prescription for trazadone but don’t take it (the benefits of simply being in possession of sleeping pills are often extolled to insomniacs, though I haven’t noticed any). I often end up listing all the people I love, and this last is perhaps least helpful—I always end up imagining what I would say if asked to give a eulogy, or what they would say if they gave one for me. Sometimes I end up in tears, still sleepless.

This is insomniac thinking: each line on a list bends and branches outwards. Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq, in Penny Hueston’s translation, is written in this “totally insomniac mode.” The book, a meditation on this condition, is comprised of lists, footnoted investigations into the history of sleeping and not sleeping, worries about the meaning and morality of insomnia in the face of genocide and climate catastrophe, and a compendium of quotes and anecdotes about sleepless writers or the characters to whom they’ve lent their insomnia. It includes a two-page spread of photos of hotel rooms Darrieussecq has stayed—though often not slept—in. Researching, worrying, organizing, reading: all insomniac activities, which lead as easily away from sleep as towards it.

She circles around sleep, doubles back, spiraling like a Louise Bourgeois drawing (the artist, a prolific insomniac herself, often drew spiraling shapes when awake late at night, but spiraling which way?). Darrieussecq enacts insomnia in her style; the book is fragmentary, intense, shifting. Her metaphors are hypnagogic, caught between reality and analogy: “we insomniacs plummet into horrendous ravines and the bags under our eyes are bruise colored.” Metaphor, incidentally, is one of the things on Darrieussecq’s list of things she’s tried to help her sleep. “I tell myself that a good sleep would be to sleep like a mountain,” she writes, “Oh, metaphors, metaphors.” This effort, of course, failed.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2023

September 11, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Meghan Racklin and Samantha Siefert

New translations from the Catalan and the French!

This month in newly released translations, we’re featuring two authors of inimitable voice and style. From the Catalan, a surrealist masterpiece by Ventura Ametller sharply blends history with mysticism in an epic retelling of the Spanish Civil War; and from the French, the latest text by Annie Ernaux returns to some of the author’s most central themes—sex and memory—in a poignant examination of corporeal and psychological navigations.

Summa Kaotica by Ventura Ametller (Bonaventura Clavaguera), translated from the Catalan by Douglas Suttle, Fum d’Estampa, 2023

Review by Samantha Siefert, Marketing Manager

A monstrosity of a fish gnashes at a tiger, the tiger leaps towards a gun, the gun is aimed perilously at the prone body of a nude woman. . . It’s all so unexpected and moving, but what do these objects have to do with one another—or with anything at all?

Such is surrealism: the challenge of reconciling the disparity of absurdity. “Everything leads us to believe that there exists a spot in the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the high and the low, the communicable and the incommunicable will cease to appear contradictory,” declared André Breton in his manifesto. Riding on the coattails of Dadaism, surrealism emerged as an impulsive reaction to the tragedy of the First World War: If reason had resulted in such great suffering, then what good was a movement rooted in realism?

The antithesis of reason, then, was the way forward, and the efforts of the avant-garde were so resonant that they continue to exist today as comfortable figures of popular culture, where the discordance of fish, tiger, and gun feel almost familiar in Salvador Dalí’s famous painting, “The Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening.” The surrealist world of letters, however, leave room for discovery.

In Catalonia with Dalí at the beginning of the twentieth century, the writer Ventura Ametller—the pen name of Bonaventura Clavaguera—was hard at work, producing a prolific collection of poetry, essays, and novels that turn the world upside down in raucous prose, described by essayist Lluís Racionero as “Dalí in words.” His work has remained only quietly appreciated, but perhaps the time has come for that to change with the new publication of Ametller’s groundbreaking magnum opus, Summa Kaotica, in a masterful translation from the Catalan by Douglas Suttle. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “She Sits Beneath Her Father’s Olive Tree” by Audefroi Le Bastart

August 22, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Timothy Perry

Whoever has love’s grief and pain / Should also have love’s joy.

This Translation Tuesday, a melodic love story for the ages floats in the air, transporting us to a time of dueling knights and castle towers. Hear from Timothy Perry, translator of “She Sits Beneath Her Father’s Olive Tree” by Audefroi Le Bastart, on appropriation in the layered histories of France’s medieval weaving songs: an oral tradition of working women recorded in writing by men:

“The weaving songs of medieval France do not survive. Which is to say, the traditional songs of women engaged in textile work—a largely oral tradition—do not survive. In their place, we have approximations to this genre written by men in a purely literary context. These literary weaving songs, with their themes of courtly love, (artfully) simple language, and repetitive rhythms, attempt to preserve the ‘feel’ of the oral tradition, but their appropriation of it results in a problematic shift in perspective—narratives involving the objectification and abuse of women take on an entirely different tenor when taken from a context of women’s work and transformed into a male literary exercise. The resulting poems have been considered among the finest lyrical creations of medieval French literature, but their casual misogyny raises timely (and timeless) questions about how we should read aesthetically accomplished but morally tarnished works, and how we should translate them.

The ‘weaving song’ translated here tells the story of Idoine and the obstacles to her love. The poem upends the conventions of courtly love by presenting everything—even martial pursuits—though Idoine’s eyes, resulting in a complex layering of gender: a male poet writing in a female genre presents male activities through the eyes of a female character. Despite this complexity, the misogyny outlined above remains very much present and I have tried both to draw attention to and undercut it. For example, the French text mentions the aesthetic qualities of Idoine’s hair even as she is being dragged by it, but in an unemphatic way: ‘[the queen] takes her by the hair, which she has blonde like wool’. I have heightened this aestheticization of Idoine’s suffering by overtranslating the prosaic ‘takes’ as ‘grasps’ and by expanding the description of the hair from half a line to a whole line and setting it off between dashes. Elsewhere, however, I employ vocabulary not found in the French to undercut the poem’s ‘happy’ ending. Twice my translation describes Idoine as the ‘captive’ of her love Garsiles. On the first occasion, the French simply says that her love for him ‘preoccupies’ her; on the second, which occurs at a point in the poem when her father is literally holding her captive in a tower, the French simply says that she is still ‘taken with’ Garsiles. And when Garsiles fights to rescue Idoine, after which they will marry, I describe him as ‘an iron tower of strength’, though the French says merely that he has ‘prowess and strength’. By presenting Garsiles as a tower and Idoine as his captive, I try to suggest that Idoine’s plight as a wife may not be so different from what it was as a daughter.

Despite these changes in emphasis, my translation attempts to preserve the straightforward vocabulary and syntax of the original; to reflect the importance of rhythm in weaving songs, I have employed a fairly strict iambic pentameter.”

She sits beneath her father’s olive tree
And carries on a quarrel with her love.
Her sighing heart complains: ‘Such suffering!
No song, no flute, no music moves me now:
Without you here I have no will to live.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

How long must I endure this misery?
How long, my love, tormented by your love?
I am your captive, Count Garsiles, and I
Will waste my youth on weeping and on tears,
With no escape unless I feel your touch.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

I curse the hour in which my father called
For war, a war that brought your army to
This place, a war that you, by strength of arms,
Soon turned to peace—but not before it took
The lives of many knights. I curse the hour!
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

But all this country would have been laid waste
And all the common people left to die
If you had not brought peace—if you had not
With reckless charges, wild assaults, brought peace.
And now, in love, I lie awake at night.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

War at an end, peace in the land, and you,
Your army waiting, ready to depart,
Offered yourself, a blameless man, to me—
A blameless man, the robber of my heart.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

To trace your beauty is my greatest joy:
So elegant, so noble and refined—
You never seek to do me any harm.
Such is my love that I could never be
Distressed, or wish my heart my own again.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

What can I do, my love? I am in such
Distress! Your beauty, strength—your gentleness—
Have lodged love’s wounding arrow in my heart;
No one but you can cut it out again,
For both the arrow and the heart are yours.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

While beautiful Idoine weeps and laments
The man she loves, the man she would consume…
But look! Her servant, searching anxiously,
Comes running down the grassy path and finds
Her lady, overcome by misery.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

‘My lady, please, you must rein in your heart—
You have indulged your anger and your pain
Too much today. The king and queen have seen
How you behave. They say it lacks good sense.’
Too late! Now all is lost—her mother comes.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

The queen now grasps her hair—she has blonde hair,
Pale as a fleece—and makes her stand before
The king; she lists her faults—she knows them well—
And he replies: ‘Take her at once and lock
Her in the highest tower. But beat her first.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

He has the girl ungirdled and undressed
And any part of her his rein can reach
He strikes; he turns her flesh from white to red.
At last, believing that her punishment
Is just, he has her locked in a high tower.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

Now beautiful Idoine is left alone,
Locked in the tower; but even there her heart
Remains unchanged—such is her love for Count
Garsiles that she holds nothing dearer in
The world. He holds her captive and she weeps.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

Three years Idoine is kept locked in the tower,
Three years, three mournful, tearful, rueful years.
‘My love,’ she says, ‘how long I wait for you!
Such is my love—such is my rage—they hold
Me in this tower, where I will die for you.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

She cries aloud again; she weeps; she says:
‘Locked in this tower, my love, I have endured
For you so many weeks of pain-filled love…
I’m overcome by weakness…cannot stand…’
She speaks; she faints; she—voiceless, breathless—falls.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

The king now hears the cries and stands amazed—
He wonders that they do not die away.
Quick as a deer he comes, runs to the tower,
And finds Idoine, his daughter, in her faint.
He takes her in his arms, no longer glad.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

The king is speechless in his grief; the queen
Approaches, anguished, overcome. At last,
When beautiful Idoine, sighing, revives,
He says: ‘This love, Idoine, it sickens you.’
And when she can reply: ‘I know, my king,
That I must die, and die in misery.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

‘Daughter, how pale you have become, how changed—
This is no feigned, no counterfeited love!
A love so true that it will be your death.’
‘Without Garsiles I am already dead.
There is no need for this imprisonment.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

‘But if you wish to marry I could find
Some royal son, some proud and powerful prince.’
‘I will not marry any man but him,
The count Garsiles—so wise, so beautiful,
And (but for you) as brave as any knight.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

At last he understands—she will not look
Elsewhere. The king declares a tournament—
Why wait?—to be held there in the broad space
Beneath the tower. He offers as a prize
Idoine, refined, beyond the least reproach.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

Word of the trial—word of the prize—soon spreads,
More pleasing to the ear than harp or viol.
All say that they will go to win the girl,
To shatter lances in the name of love.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

The knights arrive from many far off lands—
Driven by love, not one remains behind.
Their gorgeous banners crowd around the tower—
Garsiles is there, and all his company.
The tournament begins and all fight hard.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

Idoine—is there a purer name in France?—
Now watches from her window as the knights
Advance and, out of love, she gives her love
Her sleeve; he throws himself into the fight—
No purer knight has ever held a lance.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

The Tournament beneath the Ancient Tower—
A noble tournament. Each does his best
To win Idoine, but she cries out for help:
‘Garsiles, you must not hesitate to fight
With any knight and throw him from his mount.’
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

An iron tower of strength, Garsiles fights well;
He breaks the shield of every knight he meets—
Breaks it like bark—and with the shield the man;
All this for love of beautiful Idoine.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

Garsiles has won the tournament; the king
Gives him the prize; the prize becomes his wife.
He takes her back in honour to his lands.
Their love is faithful, sweet, and true—at last
Idoine has won all that her heart desires.
XXXXXWhoever has love’s grief and pain
XXXXXShould also have love’s joy.

Translated from the French by Timothy Perry

Audefroi le Bastart was from Arras in Northern France and was active in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, but beyond that little is known of his life. Of the twenty or so poems identified as belonging to the genre of weaving song, five have been securely attributed to him, more than to any other poet. Arras was an important literary centre during Audefroi’s life and he may have had ties with other well-known poets from the town, including Jean Bodel, Conon de Béthune, and Adam de la Halle.

Timothy Perry is the Medieval Manuscript and Early Book Librarian at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. He holds a PhD in Classics and has published on ancient and medieval Greek literature and the history of the book. His current project is a translation of the complete surviving corpus of Old French weaving songs.

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Summer 2023: Highlights from the Team

August 7, 2023  |  in News  |  by Catherine Xin Xin Yu, Heather Green, José García Escobar, Matilde Ribeiro, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Rachel Rankin

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 Vertigo of Blue: On Mariette Navarro’s Ultramarine

June 15, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Annilee Newton

With Ultramarine, Mariette Navarro gives us an eerily beautiful portal into the submerged depths of our own interior worlds. . .

Ultramarine, by Mariette Navarro, translated from the French by Cory Stockwell, Héloïse Press, 2023

“There are the living, the dead, and the sailors.”

From the very first words of her short, poetic novel Ultramarine, Mariette Navarro restructures our expectations. We are entering another place where the rules of existence have changed. By challenging one of the most ingrained dichotomies of perception that we have—a person is alive or a person is dead—she begins to weave the shroud of mystery that is cast over the entirety of Ultramarine. The introduction of the sailor sketches out a third liminal space between our assumptions, destabilizing us and setting a tone of wonder and dread that will carry throughout the text. What could it possibly mean to be a sailor?

Our main character is an unnamed female captain of a cargo ship crossing the Atlantic, her life fractured into two pieces. In one part, she lives on solid land, waiting uneasily for the moment when she will be reunited with crew and ship. The second part of her life is spent traversing the water, navigating the places between chunks of earth. Strict adherence to protocol has brought her success in a male-dominated career. She now manages a crew of twenty men and the portable world of her metal ship. 

Then, one day, she briefly abandons her own protocol. The crew asks her to stop the ship for a few moments in the middle of the crossing so that they can swim naked in the deepest blue of the ocean. She doesn’t know why she agrees, but she agrees, and this one strange acquiescence sets off a chain of inexplicable events. 

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Translation Tuesday: “To Invite All Creatures to Praise God” by Anne de Marquets

June 13, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Annick MacAskill

Would I not be incredibly ungrateful, / If I didn’t treasure him above all others— / Such a lover, a master, and father?

This Translation Tuesday, we present a devotional sonnet of striking intimacy and palpable gratitude in praise of “this great God who fashioned me so well.” The brilliantly “fashioned” author in question is the 16th century French sonnetist, translator and nun, Anne de Marquets, whose own craftsmanship has been brought into a vivid and forceful English by Annick MacAskill. Her translation sees the very fibers of creation exhorted to sing the praises of their creator, and gives the ardor of de Marquet’s “amour divin” a strange intensity.

O sky and earth, and you, furious seas,
O fields and meadows adorned with blooms and trees,
In short, all things in this great universe,
Praise him, the one whom I love—

He who defeated inglorious Death,
Destroyed sin, and toppled Satan,
Who died through so many martyrs,
To grant me most fortunate redemption.

O such a singular and perfect reward
From this great God who fashioned me so well,
And who will make me as I wish it!

Would I not be incredibly ungrateful,
If I didn’t treasure him above all others—
Such a lover, a master, and father?

Translated from the French by Annick MacAskill

Anne de Marquets (1533?-1588) was a French poet, translator, and Dominican nun. Originally from Normandy, she spent most of her life in the priory of Poissy, where she produced translations of Latin poetry, as well as her own poems on spiritual themes. During her lifetime, several notable French authors, including Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), wrote poems praising her literary talents. Today, she is most famous for her posthumously published Sonets spirituels (Paris, Claude Morel, 1605), a suite of 480 sonnets organized around the liturgical year.

In 1568, Anne de Marquets published her Divines Poesies de Marc Antoine Flaminius (Paris, Nicolas Chesneau; reissued in a slightly expanded edition in 1569), a collection that presents not only her translations of verse by the Neo-Latin writer Flaminio (1498-1550), but original compositions by Marquets. These include her Sonets de l’amour divin, forty devotional sonnets that adapt the language and forms of Renaissance love poetry.

Annick MacAskill is a poet and translator living in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada), on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq. She is the author of three full-length poetry collections, the most recent of which, Shadow Blight (Gaspereau Press, 2022), won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for English-Language Poetry. Her poems have appeared in journals across Canada and in the USA, the Netherlands, and Ireland, as well as in the Best Canadian Poetry anthology series.

MacAskill holds a PhD in French Literature from Western University, where she completed a thesis on the poet and translator Anne de Marquets, and has published several peer-reviewed articles on Marquets and other sixteenth-century French poets. She is currently translating Anne de Marquets’ Sonets de l’amour divin into English and teaching in the Department of Languages and Cultures at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.

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