Place: France

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

February 5, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Clémence Lucchini, and José García Escobar

The latest news from Central America, Hong Kong, and France!

This week our writers bring you news from Central America, Hong Kong, and France. In Central America, renowned Guatemalan writer Eduardo Haldon has released his latest novel, Cancón, and Savladoran writer Claudia Hernández’s book Slash and Burn has been released in English translation by & Other Stories. In Hong Kong, literary journal the Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine has pertinently published a special feature about “Distance,” while in France, Italian writer Sandro Veronesi has won the Foreign Book Prize for Le Colibri, to be published in English translation in spring. Read on to find out more! 

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

Guatemalan poet Carmen Lucía Alvarado was recently nominated for the Rhysling Award for her poem El vacío se conjuga entre tus manos (The void blends in your hands), translated by Toshiya Kamei. Read the poem in English and Spanish here. Famed Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon released his new novel called Canción (Song). Published by Libros del Asteroide, his latest book tells a new chapter of the history of Halfon’s family, centering on his maternal grandfather and his kidnap during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996). You can read an excerpt of Canción in English at The New York Review of Books site.

Also in Guatemala, the veteran poet and journalist Ana María Rodas released a new collection of short stories entitled Antigua para principiantes (Antigua for beginners). This new book includes several of Ana María’s most renowned short stories, plus other unpublished stories. This marks Ediciones del Pensativo’s first book of the year.

Additionally, in early January, & Other Stories published Slash and Burn, by the Salvadoran short story writer Claudia Hernández. The book was translated into English by Julia Sanches, who has translated the work of writers such as Daniel Galera (Brazil) and Noemi Jaffe (Brazil). READ MORE…

A Quivering Disquiet: Karim Kattan Interviewed by MK Harb

February 1, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by MK Harb

Time coalesces again into something dense; something, perhaps, boring at times. It’s a real pleasure, to feel time again.

Karim Kattan is a writer and researcher who lives between Bethlehem and Paris. In 2014, he cofounded el-Atlal, an international residency in Jericho for artists and writers. His first collection of short stories, Préliminaires pour un verger futur, was published in 2017 by Elyzad. His first novel, Le Palais des deux collines, is forthcoming in January 2021.

Karim’s writing is like a rupture. He has the ability to discuss uncanny and often uneasy topics with a literary beauty. It would be limiting to categorize him solely as a “fiction writer,” as his writing spans across genres from nonfiction to academic, with works published in The Funambulist, +972 Magazine, and The Maine Review. I first discovered his writing on The Paris Review, in an essay about an abandoned and haunting yellow building on the road from Jericho to the Dead Sea. In it, he blurs the lines between fiction and reality, all while intertwining elements of storytelling and oral history. Karim weaves worlds together, creating a tapestry of ideologies that often seem on the verge of colliding, yet somehow converge. For Karim, the personal can be political, and he often skillfully uses oratory and intergenerational stories to address the fraught subject of erasure. A particularly alluring quality to his writing is his ability to play with transience, often expanding brief moments into larger and absorbing experiences.

The craft of writing is of tantamount importance for Karim. He often talked to me about the importance of humility both in writing and in general practice. He holds a devotional importance to editing and crafting sentences that both have a purpose while retaining an aesthetic beauty to them. He approaches the written text like a precarious manuscript that needs to be made relevant. In this interview, we discuss the craft of writing, desert landscapes, and the language of belonging.

—MK Harb, Editor-at-Large for Lebanon

MK Harb (MKH): Karim, tell me more about your writing process. How do you navigate writing for multiple audiences? You once said your PhD training has positively influenced your writing as a novelist. How is that? I view literary writing as expansive and breathable, while academic writing as compact . . .

Karim Kattan (KK): The best academic writing I have encountered is both compact and expansive. I used to be worried that academic writing, specifically the long-term process of a PhD, would have a negative impact on my fiction—that it would dry it up, as it were . . . Perhaps it has. But I don’t see a contradiction between the two, except insofar as they fall within different professional fields or industries.

Academic writing is a beautiful thing: at its best, it is concise, straightforward, and elegant. My fiction writing tends to be rather rambling, a bit all over the place. I think the discipline of academic writing has helped shape this into something that is at least readable.

It’s true that academic writing seems to have bad press in some circles (circles that, themselves, tend to value nonsensical, elitist writing—in much of the art world, for instance), as if it were an oppressive force or something, when it is the exact opposite of that. It is a process of liberation. Academic writing should make thought available to all, hence its simplicity and its demonstrativeness. Now, the university as an institution—especially the North American for-profit model—surely is oppressive in many ways. But not research.

Now the question of audiences is different; it has more to do, in my opinion, with the languages that one chooses to write in. I do not write the same thing for an English-speaking audience than I do for a French-speaking one. Especially as a Palestinian, I know that, whether I want it or not, my writing will be taken as representative of Palestinians in general (It’s not! It shouldn’t be!). For instance, I usually steer clear from some subjects when I write in French, because I know how they can be recuperated. However, that is a whole other debate. READ MORE…

A Full Zola Cycle: England Welcomes the Rougon-Macquarts

January 6, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Samuel Kahler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s New in Translation: December 2020

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

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

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

salt water

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

December 4, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Clémence Lucchini, MK Harb, and Thuy Dinh

The latest news from Lebanon, the Vietnamese diaspora, and France!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Lebanon, the Vietnamese diaspora, and France. In Lebanon, Jadaliyya has published an essay on the late Lebanese poet Iliya Abu Madi and Lebanese author Nasri Atallah has been included in a new anthology, Haramcy; in the Vietnamese diaspora, December 6 marks the 183th birthday of Petrus Ký, a prominent Vietnamese scholar who helped to improve the cultural understanding between French-colonized Vietnam and Europe; and in France, whilst bookshops have suffered from national lockdowns, a new translation of poems by contemporary poet Claire Malroux has been released. Read on to find out more! 

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

Arab sci-fi lovers rejoice! An Arabic translation of the late American science fiction author Octavia Butler’s Kindred is coming out with Takween Publishing. Dr. Mona Kareem Kareem, a writer, literary scholar, and Arabic-English literary translator, worked on the Arabic manuscript during her residency at Princeton University. She will be holding an online talk, “To Translate Octavia Butler: Race, History, and Sci-Fi,” on December 7. Tune in as you wait for the manuscript with sci-fi jitters! In other translation news, Kevin Michael Smith, a scholar and translator of global modernist poetry, translated two poems by Saadi Youssef for Jadaliyya. Yousef is a prolific writer, poet, and political activist from Iraq and we are delighted to see more of his work profiled in English. Also on Jadaliyya is this beautiful rumination on the late Lebanese poet Iliya Abu Madi and his political imagination. Abu Madi wrote spellbinding poetry and was part of the twentieth-century Mahjar movement in the United States, which included the renowned Lebanese author, Gibran Khalil Gibran.

In publishing news, Bodour Al-Qasimi, founder and CEO of Kalimat Group, an Emirati publishing house for Arabic books, has been announced as the president of the International Publishers Association! Al-Qasimi has tirelessly worked on expanding the scope of the Arab publishing industry and we are happy to see her achieve this feat. Award-winning artist and cultural entrepreneur, Zahed Sultan, is seeking to release Haramcy, an anthology with twelve writers from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, including Lebanese author Nasri Atallah. It is set to be published with Unbound Books and the anthology addresses pertinent themes of love, invisibility, and belonging. In the spirit of the holidays, if you are feeling generous and capable of donating, then consider contributing to the Haramcy Fund.

We know the holidays are upon us and you are looking forward to cozying up with a book or two (or five in our case!). We have some new Arabic literature in translation for you to read during the holidays! The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize shortlist has been announced! Another shortlist we are excited about is the Warwick Women in Translation Prize, which features Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Sudanese author, Rania Mamoun, translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette.

Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Vietnamese Diaspora

December 6, 2020 marks the 183th birthday of Petrus Ký, also called Trương Vĩnh Ký, whose prolific achievements as scholar, translator, and publisher helped broaden the cultural understanding between French-colonized Vietnam and Europe. His vanguard efforts popularized chữ quốc ngữ, or modern Romanized script—leading to its official adoption as Vietnam’s national language in the early twentieth century. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2020

November 16, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel, Marina Dora Martino, and Samuel Miller

Our favorite selections for the month, featuring David Diop, Yi Lei, and Pergentino José!

There’s plenty to get excited about in the latest offerings from around the world, bound to satisfy the desires of any reader—from the emotionally visceral, to the patiently curious, to the surreal and the hallucinatory. In scoping for the finest translations, we bring you reviews of anti-colonialist fiction by a Prix Goncourt des Lycéens winner, a new collection from a leading figure of contemporary Chinese poetics, and the first ever literary translation from the Sierra Zapotec into English by a thrilling new voice. 

at night

At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop, translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020

Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

David Diop’s brutal sophomore novel, At Night All Blood Is Black, translated elegantly by Anna Moschovakis, is a relentless indictment of the colonial power structure. Through the utter dissolution of the protagonist, Alfa Ndiaye, the novel demonstrates its ripples and rhizomes throughout society—from the individual to the geopolitical to the environmental—rotting away what does not serve it. Though heavy and dark from beginning to end, this is a highly specific, deftly illustrated, poetically rendered critique that justifies the emotional slog.

Alfa is a chocolat soldier, a Senegalese man who has voluntarily travelled to fight on the side of France in the first World War. During the ensuing battles, Mademba, his childhood friend and “more-than-brother” is disemboweled before his eyes by an enemy soldier. We meet Alfa shortly after he has watched Mademba die slowly, refusing his pleas for mercy. In these scenes of articulate gore and moral anguish, Moschovakis reveals her poetic side in the restraint and somber vivacity with which she renders Diop’s descriptions. Alfa then finds himself in the throes of both deep regret and liberation from the moral conventions which had prevented him from acting in Mademba’s best interest. “No voice rises in my head to forbid me: my ancestors’ voices and my parents’ voices all extinguished themselves the minute I conceived of doing what, finally, I did.” The horror of both bearing witness to and being complicit in the suffering of a loved one silences the voices of morality in his head and marks his entrance into a world of alternate, competing guiding forces: his own tortured impulses and the abstract interests of the narcissistic state. He begins performing solo operations late at night in no-man’s land, disemboweling enemy soldiers and keeping one hand and a weapon from each kill.

A progression that functions on multiple planes expands the novel upwards and outwards from where it remains firmly rooted—in viscera spilled. As time advances and settings shift, Alfa’s psychological state, the narrative mode, the realms of reality, the overarching value system, and the gender coding of these spaces evolve in conjunction. Generally speaking, the trajectory is from the concrete to the abstract, the sober to the unhinged, the current to the eternal, the “real” to the mythological, the individual to the collective, and the masculine to the feminine. Alfa remains our guide, however unreliable, through this uncertain terrain, until his psychological coherence evaporates entirely, leaving the reader stewed in his reflections and testimonies. READ MORE…

On Meaning and Black Holes: Reading, Writing, and Translating with Marguerite Duras

November 4, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Georgina Fooks

Duras would have us remember the gaps between what is said and what is meant: between signifier and signified.

Renowned French writer Marguerite Duras published, amongst many highly regarded novels, plays, and screenplays, a fascinating text about the art of writing. Écrire (Writing), published in 1993, is a series of fragmented meditations on her experience of writing and what impels her to do it. Duras takes the reader into her confidence, tracing the complexities and contradictions of her artistic practice that leads to a profound reflection on the limitations of the written word. In this essay, Georgina Fooks, Asymptote’s Social Media Manager, explores Duras’s philosophy of writing laid out in Écrire, and considers how her thoughts on writing’s inherent contradictions and limitations might also be applied to translation practice.   

Writing and translating could be described as sister arts. Writers become translators, and translators become writers. After all, what is writing but the translation of ideas, experience, and memory onto the page? As writer-translators, we might seek guidance and models to follow—a way out of the text to be translated, or a way through.

One writer I turn to again and again to help navigate the complex threads tying together reading and writing—both so key to a sustainable translation practice—is Marguerite Duras, the celebrated French writer and experimental film-maker. Best known for The Lover (a hybrid work that is best described as fictionalised autobiography, which won the 1984 Prix Goncourt), her oeuvre is distinctive, addressing themes of desire, loss, and death, in a style that can be repetitive, sparse, but striking all the same.

Duras enjoys a certain infamy as a public figure in France—born in French Indochina (modern-day Vietnam) in 1914, she moved to her parents’ native France at aged seventeen. During World War II, she was a member of the Communist Party and of the French Resistance, alongside François Mitterrand (who later became President of France). Her husband was deported to Buchenwald, the notorious concentration camp—an experience she later drew on for her work The War. Later in life she was a notorious femme de lettres, known for her alcoholism and at times controversial opinions, as well as her literary success.

Duras never wrote directly about the art of translation, but her work does testify to an interest in foreign languages. Non-Francophone names populate her work, as in The Ravishing of Lol Stein, whose protagonist Lol V. Stein falls in love with Michael Richardson and frequents S. Thala and T. Beach. This interest in language as a tool and practice is evidenced in her essay on writing, Écrire, a reflexive piece that provides fruitful new ways of thinking about translation as a mode and as a discipline. It’s a piece full of contradictions—thought-provoking statements that lead us towards a Durassian conception of writing and style, which is in turn fruitful for our thinking about the arts of reading and writing, and their impact on translation. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Whalesong” by Aurélia Lassaque

October 6, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Madeleine Campbell

And her child would have asked her one day why isn’t the Earth called Sea when it’s covered by all that water?

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, a mother’s heartbreak echoes the mournful music of the Earth in Aurélia Lassaque’s hybrid story “Whalesong.” Our protagonist is a prodigious scholar processing a loss so excruciating and traumatic that our narrator frames it via global atrocities and cataclysms. The Earth’s persistent gravity seems absurd, even obscene. Mass extinctions are viewed as unimportant. Through the speaker’s close-third reveries, we witness the massacre of the French Cathars—a gnostic community burned alive by the Church—and meditate upon the world’s cruelty as their ashes are washed away by a seemingly divine rain. Even the sea’s withdrawal evokes a desert’s emptiness. Excerpted from Lassaque’s forthcoming novel, “Whalesong” marries poetry with music, verse with prose—its aural artistry is preserved and accented by Madeleine Campbell’s exquisite translation, which strategically leaves passages in French, Occitan, and Latin to preserve bits of the source language’s sound. Just as our protagonist writes love poems in Occitan (the “language of secrets”), Lassaque’s prose itself reads like verse. A hauntingly beautiful selection by a contemporary troubadour.

She doesn’t know what to pack in her suitcase . . . Toothpaste. A translucent comb with a broken tooth.

When do milk teeth start to grow in? Why this amnesia of our early years? Why don’t our memories reach back to our birth? We are born, and then we step out on a tightrope without a net. We survive infancy. It takes so much effort there’s no room left to remember them. No room either for the future save for the thirst.

What is she to do with all the things they’ve given her? If only she could track the objects passing from nursery to nursery, outgrown in a matter of weeks. Why do people discard them so readily? What would a map of their journey look like?

She has fluoride toothpaste. She thinks it’s silly to deny herself a microwave yet use a toothpaste that causes cancer.

To lose your parents is to become an orphan. To lose your child, what is that? Why is there no word to express it?

*

Outside, it’s pelting down. In the South it rains less than in Paris. The rain is striking. In the tongue of Oc they say it’s raining millstones, raining anvils. A Christian god wouldn’t pelt them with anvils. Mind you . . . He did allow men, women, and children to gather in his temple, be massacred in his temple, even though the stones bleached out, all the blood had dried off centuries ago. That god had let it be known: Kill them all, God will know His own. The river of blood might be flowing still. There may be the odd mistake. A tiny martyr disappears down the river. Does God really welcome all innocents? The god who imposes baptism to save one’s soul, what does he do with the stillborn?

Dehors il pleut à coup de pelles. Plòu a palas.

It’s raining shovels. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 18, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Barbara Halla, Chamini Kulathunga, and Jacqueline Leung

This week's latest news from France, Hong Kong, and Sri Lanka!

Our writers bring you news this week from France, Hong Kong, and Sri Lanka. In France, a government official’s attempt to silence Pauline Harmange’s defence of misandry has turned her book Moi les hommes, je les déteste (I Hate Men) into an overnight bestseller; in Hong Kong, Chenxin Jiang was one of four winners of the Words Without Borders Poems in Translation Contest for her translation of poet Yau Ching; and in Sri Lanka, the Colombo International Book Fair is taking place, with the announcement of major literary awards such as the Svarna Pustaka Award. Read on to find out more! 

Barbara Halla, Assistant Editor, reporting from France

In the beginning there were only 400. That was the initial print run that the French indie publisher Monstrograph had planned for Pauline Harmange’s Moi les hommes, je les déteste (I Hate Men) when it was released in late August. As its provocative title belies, this ninety-six-page volume is essentially a defence of misandry, of women’s right not to like men. Harmange purportedly argues that in the face of thousands of years of subjugation and violence, women have not simply the right to hate men, but should also focus on building a life that decentres them. I say purportedly because I have not read the book yet. By the time I tried to get my hands on a copy, it wasn’t simply out of stock: the publisher had stopped publishing it altogether, unable to keep up with demand.

From those who have read it, I Hate Men has received mostly positive reviews, but it became a phenomenon thanks to a failed attempt to silence it. In a perfect example of situational irony, Ralph Zurmély, a French government official working, funnily enough, for the French ministry of gender equality, requested that the book be banned for inciting violence. He even threatened the publisher with legal action. Alas, thanks to him, the book has now become an overnight success, drawing plenty of international attention and depleting the original publisher’s resources. A few days ago, I Hate Men was acquired by Éditions du Seuil, a more established publishing house, whose head, Hugues Jallon, will be following the project personally. No word yet as to how long readers will have to wait for their copies. READ MORE…

WIT Month: An Interview with Ariana Harwicz

August 27, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Josefina Massot

I try not to be labeled as a feminist writer because I don’t want to be pigeonholed.

It seems fitting to crown our triple Women in Translation feature with something of a triple threat. On the one hand, Argentine Ariana Harwicz’s work has been published in fifteen languages, most notably English: her debut novel Die, My Love (translated by Carolina Orloff and Asymptote’s own Editor-at-Large Sarah Moses) was a 2018 International Booker and 2020 BTBA nominee. And yet, despite a hailed career in writing, Harwicz feels almost closer to translation—a love partly fueled by her experience as a longtime expat in France. Her latest book deals with exactly that: in the short and deliciously sweet Desertar (forthcoming in Spanish from Mardulce), she and French-Argentine translator Mikaël Gómez Guthart ponder the twists and turns of the craft.

But Harwicz isn’t just a woman in (and in love with) translation; adding to her appeal here is that, much to her chagrin, her work has been routinely couched in terms of her womanhood. In this interview with Blog Editor Josefina Massot, she talks about how even well-intentioned feminism can be used for literary profit, what it’s like to give voice to a man, and why she views her translators as lovers. Dealing no cheap punches or punchlines pour la galerie, Harwicz isn’t afraid to ruffle some feathers—and that is, in part, what makes her such a welcome voice in the context of WIT: thoughtful criticism is arguably the highest form of respect.

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Josefina Massot (JM): In Desertar, you claim books are no longer a linguistic fact but a “thing,” a product of the publishing market—which, in turn, often bows to ideological trends. One of these trends is a somewhat bastardized feminism—a particular strand of feminist discourse that you’ve also questioned. I can’t help but ask, then, at the risk of stirring up controversy: how do you feel about Women in Translation Month to begin with? No one doubts the good intentions of many of its advocates (Asymptote among them), but it’s worth asking whether it might not be exploited by others.

Ariana Harwicz (AH): It’s a very complex issue, and any attempt to annul, minimize, reduce, or stifle that complexity leads to a dangerous trap. If I told you that I straight-out condemned this celebration, this month devoted to women in English translation, I’d be sabotaging a literary movement that I, too, celebrate: at the end of the day, I’m one of these women, and being translated into English has opened many doors to other languages, cultures, and translations (pretty much all of them, in fact, except for Hebrew); there’s nothing more interesting to me than infiltrating these new environments. Some of my opinions are pretty different from those of many female colleagues, or just people I run into in general, but in order to be heard, read, or access the ongoing literary and political conversation, I must first be translated. If I get wrapped up in my own thoughts or turn to ostracism, I’ll only lose.

So, do I support the increased visibility of female literary discourse and poetics through initiatives like WIT? Absolutely. Do I support the application of gender-based discourse to literature? No. Do I support the marketing of women or social, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities? No. Do I think this rhetoric is a sign of the times? Yes. Do I think the publishing market profits from it? Yes. Do I think some presses abuse it? Yes, many do. But again, to be clear, I don’t condemn the drive for visibility—merely its exploitation.

JM: Speaking of exploiting feminist rhetoric as a marketing strategy, you’ve also complained about editors’ attempts to promote you as a female writer. You’ve said that you’ve had to fight in every language to avoid blurbs like “a feminist novel by a female rebel,” and that you weren’t always successful. How have publishers in different countries handled the promotion of your work in this regard?

AH: When the French translation of my first novel, Matate, amor (Crève, mon amour) was published by Seuil in January, I met up with several distributors. This is typical in France: the author holds a meeting with all the small bookshop owners. There are tons of independent bookstores here (which I guess is also the case in Germany and other European countries), and of course, they’re ultimately more important than the big chains in promoting non-commercial, non-bestselling literature. When I met with them, my editor (a wonderful editor and translator, too) described my book as “feminist punk” or something. I remember half-jokingly correcting him, but in doing that, I was also taking a political stance. We then had a chat and took a close look at the front and back covers of the book, after which I told him to scrap the term “feminist.” I always weigh in on this kind of thing, because it’s ultimately all about politics—the author’s and the text’s. For instance, if someone tries to push a sexy picture of me, or some crowd-pleasing slogan or a title that just doesn’t fit, I’ll have my say and they’ll usually listen.

I think I had the same issue everywhere. The novel has been translated into fifteen languages and published in Spanish by different presses, and I think they all tried to capitalize on the current moment, which clearly benefits female writing—especially if it’s strong, violent, and combative, which mine is. Still, there are differences among editors, because even if they all think this kind of marketing will benefit the book, some are not willing to make literary concessions to accommodate it; they’re not ultimately crowd-pleasers. Others are. READ MORE…

WIT Month: An Interview with Aneesa Abbas Higgins

August 26, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Moore

Fear makes fools of us all—I believe passionately in the power of literature and books to help break down the barriers that divide us.

According to the Index Translationum, a database published by UNESCO, texts written originally in French are the second most frequently translated, with over two hundred thousand titles published since 1979. Though the numbers exhibit a disappointing hierarchy, the fact that French occupies such a large presence is unsurprising; after all, as today’s interviewee, Aneesa Abbas Higgins, informs us: “French is a world language.” Spoken in diasporic populations around the world, the French of today is a linguistic carrier of resistance and individualism just as it once was a language of oppression.

Aneesa Abbas Higgins has translated numerous works from the French, including Seven Stones by Vénus Khoury-Ghata (Jacaranda, 2017) and Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin (Daunt Books, 2020). In her efforts to represent a variety of original French voices, her contributions to English-language readers have been invaluable. Now, in our second feature for Women in Translation Month, blog editor Sarah Moore speaks to Higgins about her most recent translation, All Men Want to Know by Nina Bouraoui (Penguin, 2020), how French female authors are represented in translations, and the challenges of translating today.

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Sarah Moore (SM): You translate from the French into English—could you talk about your relationship with French and how you learned it?

Aneesa Abbas Higgins (AAH): I started it at school at the age of eleven—I’ve always loved languages, and I added German, Latin, and Russian over the next few years. I’ve also dabbled in Italian and Spanish and made a real effort to learn Urdu; I even tried Japanese at one point. But French was the one that really stayed with me, and I’ve spent a good part of my life going back and forth between London and various parts of France. I did my MA in French and taught French at an American school in London for more than thirty years, so I’ve spent most of my adult life immersed in French language and literature in one way or another. Learning another language is a lifelong project, and I think of myself as still learning. As a translator, one learns more and more about one’s source and target languages all the time.

SM: How did you come to be a translator?

AAH: Translating was something I’d always thought about. I’ve been fascinated by it all my life and have vivid childhood memories of my father, an Urdu speaker who was working on translating Shakespeare at the time, talking about the endless challenges of conveying such rich, figurative language. I’ve been a reader all my life, and have also always loved to write. So when I decided to retire early from teaching, it seemed like a natural progression. I took some courses in translation and creative writing, sought advice from the wonderfully generous and supportive translation community, and set about researching, translating samples, and pitching books I wanted to translate to publishers. I was lucky enough to find a publisher and obtain a PEN grant for one of those books, and I went on from there.

SM: Which books did you initially want to translate when you began your career?

AAH: Looking back, I was definitely looking mostly at female authors, but I was primarily interested in works that originated beyond the confines of mainstream metropolitan France. French is a world language, just as English is. There are many, many authors who write in French and whose relationship with the language is complex. French, the language of the colonial oppressors, becomes the vehicle for voicing anti-colonial sentiment and raising black consciousness worldwide, in the same way as English has been used by writers from the Indian subcontinent and diaspora. I wanted to help bring more of those voices, the inheritors of the original mantle of the Négritude of Senghor and Césaire, into English. And for me, it’s personal. I’ve always been drawn to writers and books that express what it means, and what it feels like, to be both an insider and an outsider in the society one lives in. READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2020

July 27, 2020  |  in News  |  by Eva Heisler, Garrett Phelps, Lee Yew Leong, Sam Carter, Sarah Timmer Harvey, and Varun Nayar

From Misty poetry to texts both visual and conceptual, our latest issue is bright with offerings.

As testament both to our times and to Asymptote’s ongoing commitment to accentuating the richness and value of global literature, our Summer 2020 issue is replete with texts that vary in their gifts but are unified in their resonance. To help you navigate this selection, our section editors are here with their top picks.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction Editor and “Vignettes” Special Feature Editor:

Less diverse than a typical Asymptote lineup, I’m nevertheless proud of the five pieces I curated for the regular Fiction section: Each one wrestles with despair—even if it’s a different timber of dread than the one we’re currently in. In Italian author Christian Raimo’s “No More Cult of the Dead for Twentieth-Century Italy,” two men, haunted by dreams of dead bodies, set out to find and bury one. It’s an exhilarating tale of redemption set against the backdrop of a financial crisis—rendered in Brian Robert Moore’s tonally perfect translation. Don’t miss Czech novelist Daniela Hodrová’s Puppets (Living Pictures); cotranslators Elena Sokol and Véronique Firkusny took home a 2020 PEN Translates Award for their masterful work. In the hypnotic excerpt that we were lucky to present, the reader is whisked across time via a jump-rope. Featuring translations from the Arabic, Chinese, Macedonian, Portuguese, Russian, and Telugu, our more diverse wildcard Special Feature shines a spotlight on the humble vignette. From conventional shorts to metafictional haikus, there’s truly something for everyone. My favorite is perhaps Marianna Geide’s People and Other Beings. Via translator (and past contributor) Fiona Bell, Geide conjures up bizarre creatures—insects shaped like bird droppings, predators shaped like human ears, uselessly decorative bugs, mushroom people—and examines each of her specimens with the precision of a jeweler.

From Garrett Phelps, Poetry Editor:

“Dead Sea” by Yang Lian feels about as close as a piece of writing can get to its subject. Even more impressive is that he does this in two hundred and seventy words, and that the subject is a country gripped by a modern plague. It’s a vision of hell illustrated with “a dense tessellation of images, often hard for the translator to disentangle, which build and build to powerfully symphonic effect,” in the words of translator Brian Holton. Despite the obscurity, however, it’s oddly tangible and even familiar at times, probably because this same hell has become global.

dead fishies drift with the tide     with no high hopes of escaping underwater
there is no underwater in your world

From Sam Carter, Criticism Editor:

In a review of Dmitri Prigov‘s Soviet Texts, Dan Shurley makes the Russian conceptualist writer’s work come alive by grounding an analysis of his work in broader trends both inside and outside the former Soviet Union. Prigov was, as Shurley explains, “a shape-shifter and a master of appropriating the lofty rhetoric of Soviet authority in whatever form it took,” and Shurley carefully guides us through the many offerings and intricacies of the collection that was published by Ugly Duckling Presse and translated by Simon Schuchat with Ainsley Morse.

Another collection, this time of work from multiple writers, is discussed in Ysabelle Cheung‘s review of That We May Live, which contains seven stories of Chinese speculative fiction that delve into alternate realities not entirely separate from our own. Cheung walks us through examinations of particular concerns that, taken together, allow this anthology to “reference global philosophical quandaries and anxieties.” READ MORE…

The Beauty of the Original: Sam Taylor on Translating Jean-Baptiste Andrea’s A Hundred Million Years and a Day

July 23, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Barbara Halla

. . . it’s always a special pleasure to translate someone who writes perfect sentences, which I think is the case with Jean-Baptiste.

The questions and ideas that Jean-Baptiste Andrea tackles in his lauded novel, A Hundred Million Years and a Day, beautifully inform the wisdom that all searches for truth are equally intrinsic as they are extrinsic. As our Book Club selection for the month of June, the work delves into psychological complexities with erudition and poetry. A Hundred Million Years and a Day is translated into English by the award-winning author and translator, Sam Taylor, who graciously spoke to our assistant editor, Barbara Halla, about his process and methods.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

Barbara Halla (BH): While reading A Hundred Million Years and a Day, I was reminded of another recent translation of yours: Hubert Mingarelli’s Four Soldiers. In both books, unlikely friendships develop under strenuous circumstances, and there is a certain reverence for the small interactions that make human connection possible. To the extent that you are able to pick which books you translate, do you find yourself drawn to specific themes?

Sam Taylor (ST): I hadn’t thought about that connection, but you’re right: there are similarities there. Both authors also share a very simple, controlled, vivid prose style that makes you feel as though you’re inside the minds and bodies of the characters. More generally, I’ve also translated quite a few books set in or referencing World War Two. However, this isn’t down to a conscious choice on my part. In fact, it probably has more to do with publishers ‘typecasting’ me to some extent. Thankfully, I’ve translated enough very different authors and books that it’s not really a problem. What I enjoy is the variety that comes with translation, rather than constantly being drawn to the same themes. On the other hand, it’s always a special pleasure to translate someone who writes perfect sentences, which I think is the case with Jean-Baptiste.

BH: How different is it to translate a book like this one from, say, Laurent Binet’s The 7th Function of Language? Do you conduct any substantial research before translating texts that rely heavily on a specific type of knowledge, be it palaeontology or semiotics?

ST: No, I think that kind of in-depth research is the author’s prerogative. When I wrote a novel set in Renaissance Italy, I spent a whole year researching it (including a two-week trip around Italy), but I don’t have that kind of luxury—in terms of time or money—when it comes to translations because I regularly translate between six and twelve books/screenplays every year. Some ‘research’ is needed for books with specialist vocabulary (as with this novel) and/or lots of quotes and references (e.g. for The 7th Function), but I do it online as I’m translating the book; I don’t read through lots of reference works beforehand. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2020

July 20, 2020  |  in News  |  by Edwin Alanís-García, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Oral poetry, plague journals, and surrealist masters: our blog editors are here with their selections from the Summer 2020 issue!

With our Summer 2020 issue, Asymptote has brought together new work from thirty-one countries drawn under “This Strange Stillness,” acknowledging all the fearful, sorrowful, and newly arriving things that are in great need of language. It is a timely collection, though we also hope that it is a lasting one, as the texts of this issue remains full of beauty, grace, craft, as well as a knowledge of these unnerving times. If you are in need of a place to start, let our blog editors be your guide.

In these varying todays that blend into one another, I am thinking of Audre Lorde: “seeking a now that can breed / futures.” With the daily cycles of news, statistics, and corresponding tides of political turbulence, the act of reading is accompanied by the weight of scrutiny into factual truths, and the attempts to form a set of principles out of them. All this in the hope that the formidable now will be rescued into a manageable, comprehensible future. As readers and thinkers, we find ourselves in the position of insisting on the importance that literature has always taken, yet literature that thinks only of its utility is powerless—any potency can only result from a craft that knows equally of its form as it does its function.

In perusal of the Asymptote Summer 2020 issue, I returned to indulging in the pure pleasures of reading—linguistic play, secret collaborations of words, and the mysterious harmony of object, image, sound, and divinity that culminates in the sublimity of poetry. I took a particular joy in the Iranian lickos, an anonymous collection of the indigenous, oral poetic form. They are brief, curious, and contain both the wideness and aliveness of a language meant to be passed between two people. The couplets and tercets, translated brilliantly and cohesively by Mahdi Ganjavi, Amin Fatemi, and Mansour Alimoradi, possess a fluidity and attention that draw the beauty of simple conversation, and the immensity of a single day’s emotions, sharply into view. From petty humour to profound loss, their visual simplicity are an entryway into the profound origins of a poetics.

There is also a great vivacity in Sanja Mihajlovik-Kostadinovska’s “(In)Finite Models of the Short Story,” in which the concept of narrative itself is taken on a wild spin throughout its wanderings into people, places, things, feelings, and myths. Too often we are distracted by semantics, and Mihajlovik-Kostadinovska, along with translator Igor Popovski, bring the reader back into the exhilarating disarray of imagining, reorienting the story back into control of itself. READ MORE…