Place: France

The Indeterminacy of the Human: An Interview with Rainer Hanshe of Contra Mundum Press

March 31, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Rachel Allen

. . . we say to read for difference, for dissonance; read not to identify, or to sympathize, but from a principle of fascination.

Contra Mundum is a New York-based independent publishing house expressly committed to Modernist work and principles. Its catalog includes the dramatic writings and theatre criticism of Robert Musil; Celan’s posthumous prose as translated by Pierre Joris; two “pre-heteronymic” works from Pessoa; the generously-illustrated Letters of Otto Dix; and a late film script from Marguerite Duras. Preference is given texts with limited circulation, the under-translated and outré in particular. 

In 2012, for instance, Contra Mundum published Marginalia on Casanova, Tim Wilkinson’s rendering of Volume 1 in Miklós Szentkuthy’s cathedral-commentary-catalogus rerum, St. Orpheus Breviary. Contra Mundum is now five books into its tremendous project, bringing into English an immense cosmophagic-and-collapsing body of prose from a modernist still known as the “sacred monster” of Hungarian letters. In addition to works from the Breviary, Contra Mundum has so far contributed translations of Prae and Toward the One & Only Metaphor (also translated by Wilkinson, who died in October of 2020) and Chapter on Love (translated by Erika Mihálycsa, who will continue as translator for subsequent Szentkuthy works). That CMP should be the publisher to finally give Anglophone readers an adequate Szentkuthy is fitting: press and author share an understanding of zeitgeists alive—in art, in language—across history, unthreatened by chronology or multilingualism. Contra Mundum too experiences its periodic connection to modernism(s) without—or with different—temporal allegiances. In addition to Musil and Pessoa, CMP has published not only Baudelaire and Wordsworth and the Ghérasim Luca of Mary Ann Caws, but also Iceberg Slim, a new Gilgamesh (Stuart Kendall’s), Ahmad Shamlou, Maura Del Serra, and the collected prose of Robert Kelly. Many texts converge around performance, whether onstage, on screens, or in person(ae): CMP has published Elio Petri, Richard Foreman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, Rédoine Faïd, and Carmelo Bene. Adjacent to this swirl of codexical text and idea is Hyperion, CMP’s in-house and aptly subtitled journal: On the Future of Aesthetics.

Rainer J. Hanshe is the founder, editor, and publisher of Contra Mundum Press, as well as the author of two CMP titles, Shattering the Muses and The Abdication, and the translator of its three works by Baudelaire. We spoke recently about the nature of (his) modernism and its role in contemporary literature. Deviation, ambition, and heteroglossia were our major subthemes.

Rachel Allen (RA): How does Contra Mundum understand “modernism”? How do you recognize modernist work when you encounter it? (Is modernism limited, temporally? Geographically? Relationally? Formally? To whom is it available to be modernist?)

Rainer Hanshe (RJH): Although Modernism does occur within a specific epochal moment, I don’t see it as bound to that cluster of time, nor do I see it in absolute or purist terms. There is no kind of totemic Modernism with a unified set of precepts that every modernist abides by. Any kind of doctrinaire, sectarian, or dogmatic form of something cannot be abided. We are advancing modernism more as a kind of mobile act or event, like a type of living roving machine (not in a mechanistic sense but as a generative force) or combustion furnace and monster of energy. It is a question of extracting from any period, any event, any moment, its active, productive elements, like taking an arrow shot by Nature, picking it up where it has fallen, and shooting it in new directions, as Deleuze said of Nietzsche.

In that way, art is no different from science in terms of advancements—once a certain insight or knowledge has been developed, there is no reason to abandon it, let alone restrict it to its original moment. Modernism (let’s avoid the term neo-Modernism) is to us protean and metamorphic, an open, indeterminate constellation. Beyond seeing it solely as a specific movement in time then, consider its principal elements as if they were discoveries: a conscious break with tradition (abandoning outmoded elements of classicism); a rejection of historicism and the grand narratives of Western metaphysics, not to speak of its morals and values; the displacement of reason as a ruling force (the curse of the Enlightenment) and fostering in its stead a chiasmic fusion of the rational and the irrational; an abandonment of bankrupt forms of art, such as naturalism and realism (and so representation), which different scientific developments essentially undermined, and Enlightenment-type encyclopaedic projects of totality; related to consciousness and new conceptions of the self and the indeterminacy of the human: interior monologues; stream of consciousness; perspectivalist viewpoints; fracturedness, fragmentation, heteroglossic language, en plus.

It is a literature of incommensurabilities, of a dynamism in signification, of a rejection of absolute truths, of an embracing of dissonance. A literature that is aware of language’s limits, of its fissures, of its cul-de-sacs and cracks, and it vigorously pursues such. Flaubert’s book about nothing; Mallarme’s Le Livre; Beckett’s search for a literature of the unword; et cetera. Modernism understands language as Bakhtin spoke of it: a dynamic entity consisting of an interplay between centripetal and centrifugal discursive forces. The combustive furnace. Heteroglossia. An amalgam of linguistic registers. The Tower of Babel is not a curse. READ MORE…

Breaking the Cycle of Indifference: Véronique Tadjo on Writing and Translating In the Company of Men

March 25, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

My intention was to have that space, which is at the same time recognizable and foreign.

In February, we introduced to Asymptote Book Club subscribers the multifarious, multivocal work of Véronique Tadjo. Her 2017 novel, In the Company of Men, fascinatingly combines document, and oration in a portrait of the West African Ebola epidemic, interrogating in turns how we as humans grapple with illness, as well as how the natural world—with its unseen forces—regards us. A pivotal read during this seemingly unending time of addressing our own pandemic, Tadjo’s unique linguistic style and sensitive artistry has introduced In the Company of Men as a text of both current relevance and long-lasting artistry. In this following interview, Assistant Managing Editor Lindsay Semel speaks with Tadjo on self-translation, personifying the non-human, and the inheritance of literary traditions.

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!  

Lindsay Semel (LS): I’m fascinated by the subject of self-translation. You’ve translated some of your own children’s fiction, but this is your first foray into translating your adult fiction. Even though you’ve lived in so many different places, and you function daily in so many different languages, translating your own work is a separate beast. I’d love to hear about, first and foremost, what the process was like for you.

Véronique Tadjo (VT): Yes, I function in two languages, French and English; I’ve been studying English and living in Anglophone countries quite extensively—the longest was in South Africa for fourteen years. So I’m used to speaking both languages.

This process with In the Company of Men was fairly long, and it was a collaboration. It started with a draft with a friend; we worked quite a lot on the text, but the result was still very close to the French original. Maybe because I’ve done a lot of translation, I could see that myself—that there was something stalling the text. The last stage of the collaboration was with John Cullen from Other Press, a translator with a very good reputation. He looked at the text and finally lifted it up, in the sense that he was able to give it a more oral quality than the first version, which was a little bit wooden. I just didn’t feel that it was flowing the way it should flow, especially because English is a much more direct language [than French]. French tends to go round and round—it takes a bit more time to get there. Whereas English has some sort of efficiency. I think that the original French book was more lyrical, whereas the English translation is more to the point.

LS: Do you happen to have, off the top of your head, an example of a passage that wasn’t quite hitting its mark? Do you remember what changed through those conversations about it?

VT: Very simple things. Like, for example, “He’s a tall man.” You can’t do that in French. You can’t contract. It’s just a small example, but when you look on the page, how the language is written down, it makes a big difference.

LS: There are very clear parallels between the events that you chronicle in this text and what a lot of the globe is experiencing now collectively, and so I wonder if current events contributed to your decision to translate yourself rather than bringing in a translator. What was it like for you to put yourself back into this story?

VT: Yes, I think that because of the pandemic, I had a sense of urgency. I had it in 2017 when I was talking about the Ebola epidemic, but with the translation, it came back. This time, what we had feared was becoming reality, so there was a renewed sense of energy, which compelled me to want to be very involved in the translation—to really put myself fully in it.

There were certain words that came naturally which I sometimes had to resist. For example, there’s a chapter in which a nurse plays an important role. You would be tempted to call her an “essential worker.” But you have to be careful, because “essential worker” is an expression that has taken strength from the COVID-19 pandemic, but I’m not sure we were using it that much before. You see, today you read it differently. I didn’t want to introduce this “foreign language,” which would signal a shift from Ebola to COVID-19. It would not be right. So, although there was temptation to use some of the terms that are being used today, I didn’t want that contamination, in a sense. I had to stay true to the period, the time, and the context. READ MORE…

Announcing Our February Book Club Selection: In the Company of Men by Véronique Tadjo

February 25, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

In the Company of Men beautifully articulates the tensions between old and new ways of existing.

Illness as subject is a challenge to writers not only for its dense manifestations and distinct physical consequences, but also for its realization of the physical body within the interconnected terrain of politics, relationships, and community. Originally published in 2017, Véronique Tadjo’s In the Company of Men takes as its subject the West African Ebola epidemic, choreographing a motley of voices in a humanizing portrait of how disease can define and obliterate boundaries both known and unseen. Instead of rendering the epidemic into metaphor, Tadjo realizes its immediate and tangible presence in our lives.

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! 

In the Company of Men by Véronique Tadjo, translated from the French by the author, Other Press, 2021

Côte d´Ivoire, where Véronique Tadjo grew up, borders two of the three West African nations that suffered the 2014–16 Ebola outbreak. She wasn’t there at the time; she had finished a teaching position in South Africa and began to share her time between London and Abidjan. Tadjo is a chameleon of an artist. She works across genres, speaks various languages, and traverses cultures. At once fact and fiction, myth and reportage, the novel meets this contemporary moment in which borders and boundaries can feel like anachronistic global millstones and “some lives seem as worthless and irrelevant as the bruised fruit left over at the end of a market day.” Her amoebic narrative voice, both one and many, recounts the horrors of the epidemic and its aftermath, singing an ominous warning and calling for a modernized version of our lost solidarity cultures.

Many comparisons come to mind in describing the narration of In the Company of Men, which she recently self-translated from the 2017 French edition: a Greek chorus that guides the reader’s emotional responses, invoking the primordial without entangling itself in the individual; a spirit that possesses one after another; a mycelium with distinct fruiting bodies. We hear from, to name just a few, a Baobab tree, a gravedigger, an NGO volunteer, a woman who adopts an Ebola orphan, a researcher, a bat, and the virus itself. Though the writing inhabits so many different bodies, the voice still feels somehow cohesive, characterized by lyricism and gore, anger and compassion, helplessness and resilience. It rails and it soothes. The gravedigger reports quite literally, “The path ahead of us has been doused with chlorine,” and his words resonate with accounts from other narrators. Disinfectant becomes the flashlight that precedes each step in the dark and unfamiliar wood of the epidemic, the loitering of its scent paralleling most of our own accounts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Other features of the metaphorical wood include dangerous rumors. A medic laments, “the President of the Republic had supposedly paid the large sums of money to reduce the local population and thus get rid of the poor. Ebola, they said, didn’t exist.” It is populated by ghosts of the hastily laid to rest: “Actually, they’re lost souls, reluctant to leave the earth, hoping we’ll help them to return.” Resonance between the novel’s narrators replicates the resonance between them and the readers, reinforcing themes of interconnectedness and appeals to solidarity.

READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Persepolis

February 17, 2021  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Sarah Moore and Xiao Yue Shan

Persepolis stands out for being able to narrate the political through this fierce character.

“Although this film is universal, I wish to dedicate the prize to all Iranians,” spoke Marjane Satrapi as she accepted the Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival for Persepolis. Adapted from her bestselling graphic novel of the same name, Persepolis is the autobiographical story of young Marjane as she comes of age against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution. Although she left Iran for Europe as a teenager (briefly returning to Tehran at the age of nineteen) and has lived in France since 1993, her words clarify Iran’s continual importance to her, as well as its enduring presence throughout her work. Written in French, Persepolis is both a memoir about the challenges of growing up and finding an identity and a fierce, intelligent, and nuanced depiction of Iran following the 1979 Revolution. It is at once enlightening, wise, funny, horrific, melancholy, and profound. In the following conversation, Blog Editors Xiao Yue Shan and Sarah Moore consider this groundbreaking graphic novel, which has sold more than two million copies worldwide, and its 2007 film adaptation. 

Sarah Moore (SM): Interestingly, Marjane Satrapi co-directed and co-wrote the film, so in Persepolis we can see how the author wanted to transform the drawings to animation. Satrapi recreates her own work, and she does so in a way that is loyal to the graphic novel, whilst clearly making use of what a new form can offer. Marjane is not a typical heroine. She is bold, honest, relatable, and she is blunt about the uncertainties she experienced growing up. The film transfers her to the screen with remarkable success, without losing any of her spark, humour, or complexity; Persepolis stands out for being able to narrate the political through this fierce character. It is the story of Iranian politics and life, as well as the story of a girl traversing through adolescence. Satrapi has often stated that one individual is the only universal thing—so whilst we witness the Iranian Revolution, the killing of political prisoners, and the Iran-Iraq War, we also follow Marjane as she dreams of being a prophet, goes through puberty, falls in love, has her heart broken, and suffers depression. I think Persepolis is rare in being able to move so much of the atmosphere and energy of a text into film, and one that genuinely works as a cinematic narrative as well. Of course, the plot is condensed, especially during Marjane’s time in Vienna. But the subtlety of emotion and the fullness of the characters carry through to the film, as well as the blend of humour and tragedy. What did you think of the move from book to film in a general sense?

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): There is something more automatic in the transition between graphic novel to film; in textual adaptation, a director must enforce their own visions in a discrete—albeit secondary—architecture, but the graphic novel has an established visual vocabulary. It is a transition that is made with minimal sacrifice. Still, I think there is a certain magic that is rendered between the pages of a graphic novel, in which two frames are juxtaposed by not the logic of movement or chronology, but mimics instead how a scene is pieced together in the mind—with interrupting segments of memory, reference, and unconscious categorization. The rationale of film narrative has to preserve a certain logic: the sense that something is always coming up next, much more resembling the way that biography proceeds—in the distinct knowing that a life continues.

In an interview published in Fourth Genre, Marjane Satrapi says: “When you watch a picture, a movie, you are passive. Everything is coming to you. When you are reading comics, between one frame to the other—what is happening, you have to imagine it yourself . . . It is the only medium that uses the images in this way.”

persepolis 1 READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

February 12, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by MK Harb, Sarah Moore, and Vivian Szu-Chin Chih

The latest news from Lebanon, Taiwan, and France!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Lebanon, Taiwan, and France. In Lebanon, translator Dr. Mona Kareem has won the National Endowment for the Arts Award and the Barjeel Poetry Prize winners have been announced; in Taiwan, the February issue of INK literary magazine presents work by sixteen Taiwanese authors on “A Memo for Literature of the Next Decade”; and in France, Vanessa Springora’s bestselling memoir about sexual abuse will be released in English translation. Read on to find out more! 

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

In Lebanon, the cultural world and the literary sphere has been rocked by the news of the assassination of Lokman Slim. Slim was a prolific writer and intellectual, and was an influential member of the cultural and political community, opening his research and documentation practice UMAM in southern Beirut. A celebration of his life and work was held on February 11.

In translation news, Dr. Mona Kareem, translator of Octavia Butler’s Kindred into Arabic, won the National Endowment for the Arts Award. Her award supports the translation from the Arabic of the poetry collection Falcon with Sun Overheard by Ra’ad Abdulqadir, a pioneer of Iraqi poetry. Here is Dr. Kareem’s haunting translation of his poem “A Song for the Lightning Bird.” Interested in learning more about the Arabic prose poem? Then listen to author Huda J. Fakhreddine’s online talk about it at Dartmouth College!

In more thrilling translation news, Sawad Hussain’s translation from the Arabic of A Bed for the King’s Daughter is being published by University of Texas Press. Written by Syrian author Shahla Ujayli, whose past work was long-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, this collection of short stories is experimental, witty, and loaded with uncanny images dealing with modernity, alienation, and patriarchy.  READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2021

February 8, 2021  |  in News  |  by Bassam Sidiki, Caridad Svich, Eva Heisler, Garrett Phelps, Lee Yew Leong, and Sam Carter

Our section editors present their favorite works from our Winter 2021 issue!

Our Winter 2021 issue marks a decade of diving into the languages of the world (our archive now boasts 113 of them!) in all their incredible singularity and variegation. Spanning thirty-one countries, this milestone edition feels like a fitting way to honor a decade of hard work behind the scenes. After hearing from our blog editors last week, let’s pass the mic to the very editors who had a hand in putting together the issue itself.

“Is it a Comedy? Is it a Tragedy?” Thomas Bernhard asks in our debut issue from January 2011. Ten years later, Brazilian author Adelice Souza’s fever-dream of a story (in Padma Viswanathan’s pitch-perfect translation) provides a direct enjoinder: “The play wasn’t a comedy, nor was it a tragedy . . . It was a drama very specifically for those two women.” Just as in Bernhard’s story, the point is not the play at all—we hardly know what the play is about, other than the fact that its two actresses play a lonely woman and her dog, and that tragedy ensues when one demands to switch roles with the other. In contrast to Bernhard, who focuses squarely on the theatre-goer, Souza makes it all about the two actresses whose eight years of traveling with the play to multiple cities have “put them through every type of relationship.” It’s not a story one imagines being plotted out; rather, the work feels like it has been ejected, like toothpaste from a tube, sentence by exhilarating sentence. In the “Brave New World Literature” Special Feature, we also come full circle but in a different way via the return of frequent contributor Jeremy Tiang, who debuted as a translator in our first issue. Combining pop-cultural references with theory, “The World Is Not Enough” is full of quotable gems, but nowhere is Tiang more on-point than when he muses, “Perhaps if the dominant anglophone culture actually acknowledged itself to be part of the world, rather than treating ‘world literature’ as a spice rack to save itself from total blandness, more than three percent of books published in the United States would be in translation?” Finally, anyone who is curious about the workings of a magazine of world literature other than our own will find plenty of food for thought in John Freeman’s riveting piece on how he remade Granta into a global publication.

—Lee Yew Leong, Fiction Editor and ”Brave New World Literature“ Special Feature Editor

Max Rojas is a constant enthusiasm of mine and so I was thrilled to showcase a pretty sizable excerpt from Zane Koss and Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz’s translation—the very first in English—in all its shining, breathless glory. Even though it’s a mere sliver of a doorstop-sized poem, it’s an excellent sample of Rojas’ talent and an overdue introduction for the Anglosphere. The language of Bodies is both baroque and ephemeral, rugged and philosophical, and its tone swings between that of a theologico-political treatise and a declaration of war. It’s some of this last century’s densest and most sophisticated Spanish-language verse, and some of the most woefully unknown.

—Garrett Phelps, Poetry Editor READ MORE…

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…