Place: Germany

What’s New in Translation: December 2021

December 13, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Jacqueline Leung, and Maddy Robinson

Czech women's writing, German autofiction, and Japanese mystery!

This month, our selections of the best in global literature present a bevy of questions to be answered—rectifying the neglect of Czech women’s writing at the end of the twentieth century, solving murders, and chasing that ever-wandering place of home. Read on for these pivotal texts that are taking place amidst the most sustaining inquiries of our time: of secrets, of memory, and of desire.

a world apart

A World Apart and Other Stories by Various Authors, translated from the Czech by Kathleen Hayes, University of Chicago Press, 2021 

Review by Maddy Robinson, Social Media Manager

Kathleen Hayes’s collection of fin-de-siècle Czech women’s writing, A World Apart and Other Stories, is to be granted a second edition—twenty years after its initial publication, and around a century after the heyday of its writers. As Hayes informs us in her introduction, despite the proliferation of women’s writing in Czech literary magazines and anthologies at the time, or the academic attention the period has received, there continues to be a distinct lack of English translations for feminine texts from the turn of the century. In an effort to combat this dearth of material, Hayes carefully selected and translated eight short stories written before the First World War, to offer English language readers entry into a literary movement that might otherwise have remained solely within the domain of Central European Studies academics. We are presented with invaluable insight into the societal and individual concerns which accompanied this turbulent period in history, especially viewed in the context of a people struggling with “the woman question.”

The book opens with Božena Benešová’s “Friends,” an evocative tale of childhood sensitivity to perceived social hierarchies, and a frank condemnation of anti-Semitism. Hayes remarks that this is rather unusual, given that “at the time it was written, negative references to the Jews were still the norm in Czech literature.” The story also constitutes an anomaly in this anthology, as from this point on, there is but one central theme around which each story revolves: passion, forbidden or otherwise.

She was a strange woman, but perhaps, after all, strange only from my point of view. I was totally incapable of getting close to her soul.

The titular story, “A World Apart,” was published in an anthology of the same name in 1909 by Růžena Jesenská and is perhaps the most striking and complex of the collection. Travelling by train, the protagonist Marta recounts the story of a friendship she once had with a Miss Teresa Elinson, an intense woman whom she also met on a train, and who convinces her to visit her manor house “A World Apart.” Miss Elinson’s attempts to seduce Marta are not initally met with outright rejection—however, there is a foreboding, Du Maurier-like sense that if she were to remain at A World Apart, she might suffer the same fate as her deceased predecessor, Berta. Though Hayes puts the unlikely subject matter of lesbian desire more down to “literary convention than psychological realism,” Jesenská’s depiction of the risks of breaking worldly norms, as well as her portrait of the passionate, Dandy-esque figure of Teresa Elinson, make for a fascinating contribution to any study of turn-of-the-century queer desire and its manifestations. READ MORE…

That Elusive Concept—Home: On Birgit Weyhe’s Graphic Novel of Mozambican Migrant Workers

December 8, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Maddy Robinson

The reader is left with the sensation that home is not a fixed thing, but something that must be made and remade.

Madgermanes by Birgit Weyhe, translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire, V&Q Books, 2021

The story of the Madgermanes, like that of so many displaced communities, is one likely to disappear into the footnotes of a war’s grand narrative. Having achieved independence from Portugal following the Carnation Revolution, the People’s Republic of Mozambique found itself once again thrown into armed civil conflict during the late 70s. Around the same time, in 1978, the German Democratic Republic sought to combat widespread labour shortages by reaching an agreement with the Marxist Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), which enabled them to contract workers from their heavily indebted socialist sister state. Spurred on by the spirit of independence and tempted by the education and employment opportunities which were so lacking in their war-ravaged homeland, around 20,000 young Mozambican volunteers left East Africa for East Germany. These volunteers would later be labelled the Madgermanes—a concatenated form of “Made in Germany,” used to taunt and belittle those who later returned to Mozambique after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Memory is a dog in heat . . . there’s no counting on it.

Birgit Weyhe’s Madgermanes is a book of memories. Translated from the original German by Katy Derbyshire, it is infused with all the homesickness, adventure, and exploitation that economic migration entails, hypnotically rendered in black, white, and burnished gold illustrations. Divided into three sections, the graphic novel follows three fictional members of this dislocated community who each recount their experiences, offering a multifaceted perspective on the intricacies of their particular situation, as well as the life-changing repercussions of geopolitics and civil war for the individual. José, quiet and bookish, wants nothing more than to play by the rules of his new German bosses and learn as much as he can, while his roommate, fun-loving Basilio, is more intent on having a good time. Pragmatic Annabella arrives in East Germany three years later than her co-volunteers, driven by the prospect of an education and of sending money home to what remains of her family. She soon becomes aware of the true nature of the volunteer programme when she is assigned a role on the production line of a hot water bottle factory, a far cry from the kind of jobs they were promised.

José, Basilio, and Annabella’s memories are as similar as they are different. Upon reaching Europe, they are all faced with racial exclusion, little agency over their place of work, and economic hardship. The latter remains a direct result of the ‘agreement,’ which saw 60% of the workers’ wages retained—wages which are still yet to be received. Each character is painted, textually and graphically, with their own private passions and motivations for migration, as well as the deep sorrows of bereavement and loss. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, each person reacts to increasing hostility and racial discrimination in their own way—faced with the decision of returning to a home they no longer recognise, or attempting to struggle on in hopes of a brighter future in the new Europe. Commendably, Weyhe seems especially committed to underscoring the intersectional nature of the trauma faced by Annabella; hers is the last of the three stories, and it is arguably the most harrowing, visually portraying the entwined struggles of racism, misogyny, and gendered violence with horror-splashed drawings and unflinching honesty. One is reminded of The Unwomanly Face of War, Svetlana Alexievich’s polyphonic masterpiece in which she collects the memories of hundreds of Soviet women who participated in the second world war. Where Alexievich chose to create many voices, Weyhe has chosen to condense the variant struggles into one, though the effect is no less striking. Through Annabella, we can hear echoes of the voices of many other migrant women—forced to choose between their own agency and bodily autonomy in order to protect their own future and their closest kin.

READ MORE…

A Language Like Life Itself: An Interview with Chus Pato

December 6, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Chus Pato and Erín Moure

Poetry has no future because the time of poetry is always the present.

Chus Pato is one of Europe’s most significant contemporary poets. She lives in Galicia, in Northwest Spain, and writes in Galician, a language that over time has weathered censorship, dictatorship, colonialist policies, and administrative neglect, all aimed at impeding its survival. Here, she converses with Erín Moure, Canadian poet and her translator into English for twenty years, on the occasion of the 2021 Poesiefestival Berlin. They discuss the current situation of Galician, the ways that poetry allows us to think out or rethink our relation to politics, the language of the poem and its difference from the language of consensus, and her current explorations into articulated language and human action in her work-in-progress, Sonora, from which she read in Berlin.

The original Galician conversation and German translation by Burghard Baltrusch are available; the interview has been translated into English by Moure with permission from Poesiefestival Berlin. Chus Pato’s most recent book in English, The Face of the Quartzes, appeared in Erín Moure’s translation from Veliz Books in fall 2021.

Erín Moure (EM): We’ve often discussed your choice to write poetry in Galician and how it is a political decision, a demand for justice for the language of your people—a language prohibited under Francoism—as well as a resistance to the political undermining of Galician and subtle promotion of a single and compulsory language, that of the unitary state of Spain, which we in English call “Spanish.” What I’d like to point out is that on the other side of the Atlantic, for your audience that is not Galician and that reads you in English translation, Galician is not a minor or defective tongue but simply a European language, and you a European poet. How do you see your role as poet, in Galicia, in Spain, in Europe, and now in the city of Berlin, a European capital of poetry as well as meeting point of the west and the east of Europe?

Chus Pato (CP): I think that in Galicia and in general I am well known enough as a poet and am read by the community of those interested in poetry. I know many loyal readers read my books when they are published. This is what I most value. Even so, I still perceive resistance on the part of canonizing institutions that I think has to do with what these institutions see as the difficulties in reading what I write (hermeticism, experimentalism, etc.) and with issues related to my political stance, a position that coincides neither with the right that governs us nor with majority nationalism.

That my work is known at all in the Spanish state is due in great measure to the efforts of my publishers and translators, and my feeling is that they have been remarkably successful. I can’t really gauge how I am perceived elsewhere in Europe. I feel I’m read more on the American continents. In Europe, my gratitude goes to Frank Kaizer, my Dutch editor at De Vrije Uitgevers, for his efforts and courage, and also to the Rotterdam festival and its former director Bas Kwakman.

EM: How would you describe the current situation of the Galician language, both in cultural milieus—where Galician figures prominently—and in daily life?

CP: The situation of Galician is dramatic, really. The Council of Europe, in its recent report on the fifth evaluation of Spain’s implementation of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, warns that only 23.9% of children in Galicia under the age of fifteen can express themselves in Galician.

Galician continues to suffer from a covert criminalization that has prevented generational transmission. The linguistic policies of the political party that systematically wins Galician elections are largely responsible for putting us in this extreme situation. Today, we can no longer say that Galician is strong in the private sphere, at least not in the case of younger generations.

We have to distinguish diverse political positions on linguistic diversity of the State: the Spanish right is always intolerant, and within the left there are degrees of tolerance. In the forty years that separate us from the end of the Franco dictatorship, we have not advanced much toward what is desirable, at least in my opinion.

What matters to me is what happens in Galicia, what the majority of Galicians think of their native language, and the reasons that lead them to turn away from it and not transmit it to their children as their mother tongue. These reasons have to do with the economic policies of the State, which has always viewed Galicia as a land from which to extract raw materials and labour. Two centuries of emigration and of the continual destruction of the values that constituted and still constitute us as distinct as Galicians largely explain the situation that faces us now.

READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2021

October 25, 2021  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Our blog editors pick their favourite pieces from the Fall 2021 issue!

Asymptote’s Fall 2021 issue is here, featuring new work from thirty countries and nineteen languages! To help guide you through the latest issue, our blog editors are offering their top recommendations. 

The Fall 2021 issue transcends the boundaries of culture and time through foreign encounters, explorations of personal and cultural memory, and novel ways of approaching the act of translation. One of the themes that emerges from this wide-ranging and deeply probing issue is the transformative potential of speech, song, and music. In the title story of Ham Chŏngim’s 2015 story collection, “After Dinner,” music, whether sung, played, or imagined, stirs memories of joy and loss for the central character, Sunnam, a blocked writer hosting a dinner party in Pusan with the death of her close mentor, P., on her mind. The piece is elegantly translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, who capture the author’s hushed yet lyrical tone, while eruditely rendering this piece’s many intertextual and cross-cultural references to Western authors and music. Like James Joyce’s The Dead, which is aptly referenced at its start, the symphonic piece interlaces multiple threads of memory like different strains of melody within Sunnam’s roving mind while she prepares for the dinner party. These threads are related through their transformative encounters with music, moments of intimate connection, and losses of beloved people from her life. Her meditations suggest the fickleness of memory—both the ways it disappears and the ways it lingers. The fleeting quality of memory is evoked when Sunnam reflects on the first time she used her candlesticks for a party: “The memory of that first time comes tantalizingly close and then poof, it’s gone. But finally it comes back . . .” Through the intricate paralleling of narrative threads, Chŏngim maps Sunnam’s vast interior world across time and place, conjuring a textured history of love and loss within just the few hours before her party. 

The transformative possibility of speech and song is also central to Caitlin Woolsey’s intimate account of translating spoken and sung poetry in “If my heart were a stone, it would drop down to meet you”: Bedouin Oral Poetry and Translation as Reciprocity, a featured piece in this issue’s edition of “Brave New World Literature.” Woolsey describes her experience translating and documenting Jordanian Bedouin oral traditions, while living with an extended family from the Zawaideh tribe in the village of Disah. The genre-bending piece combines memoir, critical analysis, and meditations on the practice of translation to form an illuminating inquiry into Bedouin oral traditions. Woolsey is perceptive yet culturally sensitive in her readings of these poems—noticing, for example, the poems’ practice of employing generalized descriptive language and recurring symbols and characters. She does not dismiss this practice as repetitive or uncreative, but links it to the communal function of the poems, which are recited and must therefore participate in certain descriptive traditions to be understood and retold by its listeners. In this manner, Woolsey performs important critical work by situating this historically overlooked literature within its people’s culture and history. One of the most moving aspects of this piece is the way that oral poetry functions not only as a means of personal creative expression, but as a vital repository for these tribes’ memory and history, a method of preservation for a “historical and cultural record” in the face of erasure by time and modernization.  READ MORE…

Our Fall 2021 Issue Is Here!

October 21, 2021  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Octavio Paz, Sara Stridsberg, Wolfgang Cordan, and Marian Schwartz on Nina Berberova, amid new work from 30 countries!

In Asymptote’s just-released Fall 2021 Edition, “Beings in Time,” headlined by Octavio Paz and Marian Schwartz, time is painfully distended for many of the narrators in this issue as it has been for us. With Jakuba Katalpa and Wolfgang Cordan, in particular, revisiting dark chapters in recent human history, it was a deliberate choice to bookend the Fiction and Poetry sections with Patrizia Cavalli’s irrepressibly joyful “Dancing Shoes” and Ricardo Zelarayán’s thrilling narrative poem “The Great Salt Flats.” Kim Bo-Young’s I’m Waiting for You, reviewed with gusto by Cristy Stiles, sets time travelers in endlessly inventive scenarios. In Brave New World Literature, Caitlin Woolsey encounters, at age twenty-one, the timeless Bedouin oral tradition of Jordan’s people. Elsewhere, in Drama, Anna Carlier transports us to a future ecological nightmare, where “half the world is drying up” and “the other half . . . drowning,” with no way to tell if the clock is “counting up or . . . down.” All is illustrated by our guest artist the brilliant photographer Genevieve Leong.

Our wildcard Special Feature this issue spotlights the work of institutional advocates: Russia’s Institute for Literary Translation, the Lithuanian Cultural Institute, Catalan Culture’s Institut Ramon Llull, and the Literature Translation Institute of Korea agreed to take the same set of ten questions posed by our editor-in-chief. The result is a fascinating cross-cultural snapshot of the role of an otherwise mostly invisible player in world literature.

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Translation Tuesday: “Stranger’s Life” by Yu Müller

September 28, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Yu Müller

A four-part palindromic poem written and translated from the Chinese by Yu Müller

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you a four-part impressionistic poem translated and written by Yu Müller. Instead of yielding to the seeming untranslatability of the palindrome in Chinese, Müller’s act of self-translation invents a curious way out of the original poem’s stubbornness towards any attempted act of linguistic border-crossing. As the English’s double translation would have it: when one has “agreed to write poems,” they should have “no worries about poetry”—for it can be infinite malleable. Hear from Müller as she describes how the poem arose from a pedagogical encounter, which in turn teaches us what creative acts of translation can achieve. 

“Stranger’s Life” is a series of poems that hold a special place in my heart. While teaching, I wrote Chinese on the white board, and when my eyes were forced to look at them backwards, it felt like tracing back the words to another reality from a different perspective. That’s when I indulged myself in collecting those altered palindromic words in Chinese and composing poems. However, in the attempt to translate them into English, translation became inadequate because it is impossible to retain the original form of the altered palindrome style from Chinese. As a compromise, I provided two ways of reading the poems in English—left to right and top to bottom and then backwards, but one can try to read them in a “zigzag” or “S-shaped” manner as well.”

—Yu Müller

Stranger’s Life

 

i

adult and me
agreed to write poems—
after car moves, then make faraway departure

sentimental Shanxi
family members get tough on you
what if I

steep myself in liquor on the Broken Bridge
and write books abroad in heartaches

listen
to the singing of boys and girls
an ode to each other while young

the Tomb Sweeping Day
                                       bringing debut homage to the grave mound
wind sweeps
                    rain pours
                                    snow buries
are you afraid?

—

afraid of you?
                        Great Snow
       heavy rain
gale

turn around at the grave mound
moral integrity of Ming & Qing dynasty

teenagers who sing praises to each other
chanting girls and boys
listen

I don’t want
you to make things difficult for others
West Mountain’s sentimentality

walk far, then start driving
—no worries about poetry
me and the People’s Congress

READ MORE…

Fact and Fantasy in the Black Forest: An Interview with Alexander Pechmann

September 20, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Anna Rumsby

The Austrian author’s latest spiritual adventure story asks readers to consider the nature of time.

Die Zehnte Muse (The Tenth Muse), published by Steidl in 2020, is a genre-bending novel set in the Black Forest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The story focuses on two main characters, Algernon Blackwood and Paul Severin. Blackwood is modelled on the twentieth-century supernatural author of the same name, well known for his short stories “The Willows” (1907) and “The Wendigo” (1910), while Severin is modelled on the German expressionist painter Karl Hofer. The novel centres on the mystery of Talitha, a timeless figure both men develop fixations on, twenty years apart, after glimpsing her in the forest.

Pechmann deftly weaves together strands of philosophy and layers of storytelling in under two hundred pages. On some levels, the book feels like a classic gothic ghost story. There are all the major elements: a forest; restless, disillusioned young men; a creepy, strict religious boarding school; a supernatural presence. But the book also covers the nature of time, dreams, spiritualism, and the occult, the psychological, Gnosticism, art history, translation, and Yenish culture. The Yenish are a nomadic people from central Europe, whose distinct culture emerged in the early nineteenth century, although the Yenish language predates this. Here, Pechmann discusses the many-layered novel and the enduring mystery of Talitha.

Anna Rumsby (AR): How would you classify this genre? I’m tempted to say neogothic, but it’s also a fairy tale, historical fiction, a semi-biography, and in some places almost a philosophical essay.

Alexander Pechmann (AP): In some reviews, the book was called a “Künstlerroman” (art novel) or a psychological ghost story. That’s OK, but I like to call it—as well as my other novels—a “spiritual adventure” or “adventure of the soul,” in contrast to “adventures of the mind,” such as detective stories or science fiction, or “adventures of the heart,” such as stories about love and relationships.

Adventures of the soul are rooted in dreams and make use of ancient traditions, fairy tales, superstitions, and religious ideas. Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen wrote this kind of fiction, and Blackwood also had a certain love for symbolistic paintings. Symbolism had a strong influence on me while I was working on the novel, but I feel also close to the Romantics with their deep love for nature, and classic Austrian writers like Leo Perutz who mixed historical facts with fantasy.

AR: How did your experience as a translator and linguist inform this novel? There’s a huge attention to language—I’m thinking specifically of the Bible translation chapter regarding Talitha, but there’s a great blend of English, German, French, and Yenish throughout.

AP: I have a special interest in writers who move freely between cultures and languages. I’m thinking of Lafcadio Hearn, who was born in Greece, grew up in England, went to the USA, and ended up in Japan, or Marmaduke Pickthall, who went to Syria as a young man and would be the first English translator of the Holy Quran. Algernon Blackwood spoke German and French fluently and was also a traveller between cultures. The attention to language in Die Zehnte Muse grew naturally out of the fact that the school of the Moravian Brothers in Königsfeld was and still is visited by students from all over the world. Also, the Black Forest, the background of the novel and place where I live, has always been a melting pot of different languages, dialects, and cultures. While working on the novel, I learned more about Yenish and was astonished that this language uses both Hebrew and Yiddish words. This fit in perfectly with my idea that Talitha was accepted by the Yenish, even though she obviously came from some other ancient culture.

AR: Who or what is Talitha?

AP: In my first draft, she was just a wild child, living in the forest. I knew she was somehow related to the Yenish, so I was searching for typical Yenish names. I liked Talisha or Talitha best, and then I read the story of a priest’s daughter named Talitha who was raised from the dead by Jesus. This opened up new possibilities for my story. Could someone who was resurrected by Jesus grow old and die like a normal person? What if this girl was damned to live on and on? I do not answer this question in the novel and leave it up to the reader to decide whether she was just a lost Yenish girl, the ghost of a murdered girl, or the resurrected biblical Talitha. She might also just be a fantasy of Paul Severin, she might have stepped right out of Maurice Denis’s painting, or she could be even an incarnation of time itself. READ MORE…

State of Emergency: Helene Bukowski’s Milk Teeth in Review

September 13, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Anna Rumsby

Milk Teeth is a novel with a lingering taste, one that weighs on the soul.

Milk Teeth by Helene Bukowski, translated from the German by Jen Calleja, Unnamed Press, 2021

You can’t expect the world to be exactly the same as it is in books.

Milk Teeth is claustrophobic. The silent world of Skalde and her mother Edith is cut off from everything else by fog and a collapsed bridge; civilization has also crumbled, and they reside in its remnants on the edge of a small, loosely-knit group in a so-called ‘territory.’ Edith has arrived in this place as an outsider, so though they are treated with tolerance, still disdain and suspicion dominate their relationships with most of the few people they have any contact with. In this fearful landscape, Skalde loses herself in books—until the day she starts losing her milk teeth, and finds a girl in the forest called Meisis. Thereafter, she slowly finds the strength to rebel against her mother’s neglect, and to question the rules of the society she finds herself in.

As a child, Skalde rarely leaves her house and garden, bringing it to close relevance with our era, and the all-too-familiar confinement common to all of us. The world beyond the river is depicted as a scary, dangerous place that presses at the edges of their small existence, serving as a further reminder that we are living in an increasingly atomised age—an era of isolationism between nations sparked by telltale international shifts to the political right, along with increasingly popular feelings amongst world leaders that their ‘country is an island’—catalysed by COVID.

In the ‘territory,’ the suspicion of outsiders is overarching, echoing the eagerness of some to designate certain groups as responsible for their hardships. Half-truths and disinformation are rife; neighbours judge neighbours, and people are cast out for reasons as trivial as having red hair or failing to lose their milk teeth. The setting—dense fog followed by blazing heat in an indiscernible survivalist purgatory—only adds to the novel’s cloying nature. Reading this during quarantine felt akin to falling through the looking glass into a world only slightly more absurd than our own. READ MORE…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

September 2, 2021  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Kent Kosack, and Suhasini Patni

A selection of staff reads from Asymptote’s Fortnightly Airmail

We hope you’re staying dry. If you’re looking for a book to curl up with, check out these staff reads—hailing from Colombia, Germany, and India. Sign up for our newsletter to get these recommendations delivered right to your inbox.

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Like an archaeology museum, Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses (New Directions, 2020), translated from the German by Jackie Smith and longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, catalogues objects, places, artwork, people, and animals lost to history across centuries of time and continents through twelve genre-bending and essayistic pieces, one of which was previously featured in Asymptote. Schalansky is a German writer and editor, whose previous novels grappled with the transience of things, isolation, and the disappearance of islands and species. Schalansky adopts a wide range of styles to enter the world of her material and reanimate the objects under consideration, while Jackie Smith captures the idiosyncratic form of each piece. Schalansky’s pieces are indeterminate, meandering collages of history, biography, memoir, and criticism. They are linked through their concerns with the ravages of time, the processes of decay, and memorialization. In the style of W.G. Sebald and Sir Thomas Browne, these pieces represent memento mori, in that they meditate on the disintegration of things, while also asking us to consider how the past is interpreted from writings, artifacts, and a discontinuous archive. These retellings of history are acts of preservation—they give voice to the silenced, reorient the reader toward an era, a place, or a person, while also probing the political and philosophical dimensions of memory and forgetting.

—Darren Huang, Editor-at-Large for Taiwan

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David, an aging painter losing his vision to macular degeneration, reflects on the most difficult night of his life: his son’s euthanasia twenty years ago. Such is the plot of Tomás González’s elegiac novel Difficult Light, translated from the Spanish by Andrea Rosenberg, and released by Archipelago Books. As David writes, he keeps returning to the night in New York City when his family waited to hear if his son, paralyzed and suffering, had followed through with his decision to die. Will the doctor show for the illegal assisted suicide in Portland? Will his son change his mind? Death permeates the novel. His son’s. His wife’s. His own, impending. But so does beauty, love, humor, and though it’s difficult, light.

—Kent Kosack, Director, Educational Arm READ MORE…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

August 11, 2021  |  in News  |  by Carol Khoury, Eva Wissting, Kent Kosack, and Mary Hillis

Here to help you diversify your bookshelf, a selection of staff reads from Asymptote’s Fortnightly Airmail

If, as the adage goes, readers experience a thousand lives before they die, then readers of translated literature experience a thousand cultures without ever leaving their armchair. Set in Canada, India, Finland, Italy, and Jordan, here is a selection of international reads recommended by our staff for the newsletter. Get ready to be transported!

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The year is 1506. The great artist Michelangelo is furious at his stingy patron the Pope, “the bellicose pontiff who had thrown him out like a beggar.” But as one door closes, another opens in the form of an invitation from the Sultan of Constantinople to come to his city and design a bridge to cross the Golden Horn. Tell Them of Battles, Kings & Elephants, written by Mathias Énard and translated by Charlotte Mandell, is a feat of richly-imagined historical fiction that tells the tale of this sculptor’s journey. Michelangelo is abstemious and driven, consumed by his art and ego. But he soon succumbs to the charms of cosmopolitan Constantinople, its sounds and smells, its poets and performers. Yet dark forces conspire to thwart the artist from completing his designs. Intrigue. Assassins. Daggers in the night. Will Michelangelo complete his bridge and join cultures and continents? What will be the legacy of his journey? You’ll have to read it to find out.

—Kent Kosack, Director of Educational Arm

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Kjell Westö’s novel The Wednesday Club, translated from the Swedish by Neil Smith, takes us to Helsinki in 1938–ten years after the Finnish Civil War. The Second World War has not yet started, but Hitler and his policies are already a recurring discussion topic far beyond Nazi Germany. Lawyer and recent divorcee Claes Thune wants to keep the gentleman’s club with his three friends amicable but not only the world around them but also the past keeps intruding. As some of the friends start drifting apart, Thune finds a friend in his new secretary Matilda Wiik. But why is she so secretive about her background? Westö is one of the most highly praised Swedish-language writers in Finland. Although he writes poetry and short stories as well, it’s with his novels set in twentieth century Helsinki that he has truly established himself as a writer. Readers of the engaging and intriguing The Wednesday Club understand why.

—Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large for Sweden

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Smita sends her daughter to the village school in Badlapur for the first time, an action that sets a daring journey in motion. Guila works in her family’s wig workshop, the House of Lanfredi in Palermo, but soon receives news that changes the course of their business forever. In Montreal, a successful lawyer, mother of two, and woman who has it all, Sarah’s priorities are about to shift dramatically. Laetitia Colombani’s The Braid, published by Picador in 2019, interlaces the stories of Smita, Guila, and Sarah—each on the precipice of change. Cinematic in scope and expertly translated from French by Louise Rogers Lalaurie, it is ideal for binge reading. Set in the present day, the alternating perspectives flow seamlessly and are further linked through a poem. Colombani creates a deeply personal tale of women building new paths upon generations of faith, culture, and tradition, while revealing unexpected ways in which our modern lives intersect.

—Mary Hillis, Educational Arm Assistant READ MORE…

To Learn the Wider World: The Summer 2021 Educator’s Guide

August 2, 2021  |  in Asymptote for Educators  |  by Anna Rumsby, Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, Kent Kosack, and Mary Hillis

Stories set in other places and cultures, written in different languages, widen the world; I try to bring that feeling into the classroom.

Since its inception in 2016, the Educational Arm has developed instructional materials to accompany select pieces from the nonfiction, fiction, poetry, drama, and visual sections of each issue of Asymptote. Now with twenty Educator’s Guides in our archive, and over one hundred lesson plans based on translations from over fifty different languages, teachers can truly experience the world with their students. We encourage educators to explore the myriad of ways Asymptote content can be adapted and used in their curriculums; most lessons can be readily applied in literature courses at the high school or university level, but are also flexible enough to be adapted for a variety of humanities classes such as English, creative writing, cultural studies, and modern languages. They can also be easily applied to engage lifelong learners at community centers or arts organizations.

The Summer 2021 Educator’s Guide features lesson plans based on a diverse array of texts from the latest issue of Asymptote, including nonfiction translated from Czech and Spanish, poetry from Brazil and Iceland, and visual art inspired by China and the U.S. In these lessons, students are invited to observe urban life through the lens of psychogeography; explore the multifaceted relationship between art, memory, and cultural identity; research poets and critically examine the concept of literary canon; and delve into the translation process while reflecting on their own experiences reading works in translation. We hope that the Educator’s Guide will serve as a springboard for the use of world literature in your own classroom.

In this following roundtable, four members of the Educational Arm—representing a variety of teaching contexts—sit down for a discussion about the Educator’s Guide. Anna Rumsby (English language teaching, U.K./Germany), Mary Hillis (English language teaching, Japan), Kent Kosack (creative writing, U.S.), and Kasia Bartoszynska (literature, U.S.) discuss their favorite lessons from previous Educator’s Guides—why they chose the pieces in question, how they adapted them, with additional discourse on teaching through the pandemic and the importance of reading world literature.

Mary Hillis (MH): How does translated literature fit into your teaching practice? Have you taught any lessons from the Educator’s Guide, or do you have any favorite lessons from previous guides?

Anna Rumsby (AR): I teach English to German speakers; most of my lessons revolve around the German school system, and therefore involve rather more pedestrian areas such as grammar and traditional style essays. As a relatively new addition to the Education Arm, I was deeply impressed and invigorated by the creative freedoms we enjoy in producing the incredibly unique material at hand, working from some incredibly talented authors and translators. It definitely highlighted what had sometimes been lacking for me in my other work. I suppose that, in a way, working on the Educator’s Guide means I can design lessons which I would love to teach, rather than those I teach day to day.

In the Fall 2020 Educator’s Guide, I was particularly struck by the lesson plan called “Writing About What is Lost,” on “Living Trees and Dying Trees” by Itō Hiromi, translated by Jon L. Pitt. I am a great lover of both folklore and the botanical world; my MA dissertation involves a lot of Black Forest folklore, and my partner is a gardener, so the exercise on the importance and meaning of trees in Japanese culture really struck me. It reminded me of strolling through botanical gardens in the pre-COVID age, being told the Latin names and significance of all the trees I pointed at. I love how the lesson plan uses Itō Hiromi’s work as a springboard for further research, which in turn explores specific topics in more depth.

Kent Kosack (KK): I’m glad you mentioned “Writing about What is Lost.” It’s a great example of what teaching world literature and literary translation can do—letting the students explore a different place, a culture or sensibility, and using it to learn more about the wider world. By the end of the lesson, they’re making connections to their own lives and—in this case—reflecting on what’s been lost. It’s difficult work, but especially during this pandemic, necessary and potentially cathartic.  READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2021

July 26, 2021  |  in News  |  by Bassam Sidiki, Caridad Svich, and Lee Yew Leong

Our Section Editors pick their favorite pieces from the Summer 2021 issue!

The brand-new Summer 2021 edition of Asymptote is barely ten days old and we are still enjoying the diverse offerings from thirty-five countries gathered therein. Last week, blog editors Xiao Yue Shan, Allison Braden, and Shawn Hoo shared their favorites. Today, section editors Lee Yew Leong, Bassam Sidiki, and Caridad Svich distill their highlights for us:

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction, Poetry, Special Features, and Interview Editor:

Why do so few men read fiction by women? lamented MA Sieghart as recently as seventeen days ago in The Guardian. With female authors taking five out of six slots, the Summer fiction lineup, published just in time for #WomeninTranslation month, offers parochial-minded readers a taste of what they are missing out on. These stories are also deeply centered on the female experience: Gabriel Payares and Maša Kolanović deliver unsettling takes on pregnancy and new motherhood, while the aging protagonists of Kathrin Schmidt’s and Can Xue’s stories go on mushroom-fueled head trips that seem to set the universe right again. A third set explores the corrosive effects of work on identity (in particular, Joanna Chen’s superb translation of mechanical engineer Tehila Hakimi’s Company recalled for me Amelie Nothomb’s masterpiece Fear and Trembling).

When you don’t go by a Judeo-Christian name, the constant bracing against mispronunciation can result in estrangement from your own identity, as Xiao Yue Shan explored in her recent essay on linguistic exile. I can relate. That’s why I found the ending of Abdushukur Muhammet’s “My Name” deeply moving. Translator Munawwar Abdulla not only does an excellent job nailing Muhammet’s melancholic voice, but also provides much needed contextualization in her translator’s note that imbues the poem with a sharp political layer. READ MORE…

Our Word Against Kafka’s

July 14, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Samuel Kahler

Kafka floats, shapeshifts, appears in many places at once; he is not a fixed subject.

Franz Kafka’s gigantic presence in the world of letters is undeniable, yet looking back along the labyrinthine volutes of history, one perceives distinctly the figure of a man who would likely be horrified at the depth and breadth by which we known his work. Having famously insisted that his texts be burned after his death, a betrayal by a close friend led to the remarkable corpus we freely access today. Since then, Kafka’s writings have undergone a dramatic escalade of ownerships, resulting most recently in its comprehensive release by the National Library of Israel. In the following essay, Samuel Kahler traces the events that led to Kafka’s legacy, delineating a writer’s intentions as they come up against the voracious appetites of the world.

 “I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”

—Franz Kafka

Part of the appeal of reading Kafka (or the madness, depending on who you ask) stems from the durability of the stories, parables, and novellas—their infinite resistance to decisive analysis enduring even after multiple readings. The texts evoke the quotidian anxieties of the modern age, achieving their incomparable effect by leaning into varied traditions of folklore, parable, horror, and the absurd, paradoxically balancing the polarities of universal relatability and a resistance against fixed interpretations. Can a body of work so ripe—so bursting with potential meanings—possibly be pigeonholed with a singular definition? To attempt a conclusive, complete answer—something like a grand unified theory of Kafka—would be the errand of a well-meaning but misguided fool.

Inseparable from the question, and equally difficult to answer, is another problem: namely, that of deciding which works belong in his official catalog and which do not. Mostly, we owe this state of affairs to a complex series of events that began with the discovery of Kafka’s will and continued onward through the next nine decades, through the many publications of his works and, later, the battles over his archival materials and the significance of the contents contained therein.

When the National Library of Israel released its newly digitized Franz Kafka collection this spring, it signified the end of a prolonged conflict over its acquisition. Yet, the collection’s publication does not portend a satisfying resolution for any facet of Kafka’s legacy; rather, it throws the spotlight on academia and the public at large, exposing our continued desire to make something concrete out of Kafka, despite his enigmatic condition.

Kafka’s posthumous drama—call it a tragedy, a passion play, a farce, or what you will—remains an unresolved mess, even after the curtain has supposedly come down. READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (May 2021)

May 6, 2021  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

From getting shortlisted for (or winning!) prestigious prizes to publications and performances, we were busy making waves this quarter!

Contributing editor Adrian Nathan West’s translation of Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World was shortlisted for the Booker International Prize.

Senior Copy Editor Anna Aresi’s Italian translation of a poem by Anna Akhmatova won the 2020 All-Russia State Library for Foreign Literature & The Institute for Literary Translation’s “Writers of the Silver Age about War” translation contest.

Nonfiction Editor Bassam Sidiki was awarded a Graduate Nonfiction Hopwood Award from the University of Michigan for two essays, one of which is forthcoming in Wordgathering. The Hopwood Awards are a major scholarship program at the University of Michigan, founded by Avery Hopwood.

Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, will be giving on June 11 for the third year in a row a computational performance titled #GraphPoem at the world’s most important digital humanities event, DHSI 2021.

Editor-at-Large for Japan David Boyd’s new co-translation with Sam Bett of Mieko Kawakami’s novel Heaven will be published later this month on May 25.

Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has a new short story in Arts & Letters and a short craft essay on Tobias Wolff in Fiction Writers Review.

Chief Executive Assistant Rachel Farmer‘s translation from the German of an extract of We Have Lived Here Since We Were Born by Andreas Moster appeared in the anthology Elemental, published in March by Two Lines Press.

Interested in joining the team? Watch this page next week for a very important announcement!