Place: Germany

We’re Reached Our Milestone Tenth Anniversary! 🎉

January 28, 2021  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

And we’re celebrating with a new issue (and some very big names in world literature)!

Dear reader,

I’m thrilled to present “Brave New World Literature,” our special milestone edition marking ten full years of curating the very best in contemporary letters. Highlights include an exclusive last interview with James Salter conducted before he died in 2015, new translations of Alfred Döblin and Alain Mabanckou, as well as a trio of essays by intellectual heavyweight Eliot Weinberger, former Granta editor John Freeman, and frequent contributor Jeremy Tiang—all suggesting a “culturally multidirectional” way forward for the next decade.

In addition to featuring a “writer’s writer” (the aforementioned James Salter), we’re proud to debut in English a “true poet’s poet” (the Mexican Max Rojas) in a roster that also includes poet superstars Najwan Darwish and Carlos de Assumpção. Elsewhere, fellow Brazilian writer Adelice Souza and Hungarian author Anna Mécs give us a pair of stunning fictions in which women perform (or postpone) their deaths, while our first nonfiction lineup under new Nonfiction Editor Bassam Sidiki sees a fascinating pseudo-scientific colonial document answered with a modern memoir of Egyptian politics. In light of the recent protests by Navalny supporters all across Russia, Artur Solomonov’s drama—also about enacting death, while portraying the machinery of state propaganda—could not be more timely: The play was in fact considered so politically inflammatory that it has only ever been staged underground. All of this is illustrated by talented guest artist the Australia-based Naomi Segal. READ MORE…

Announcing Our January Book Club Selection: My Grandmother’s Braid by Alina Bronsky

January 27, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla

My Grandmother’s Braid . . . takes the idea of dysfunctional to a whole new level.

The intricate latticing of a family’s dysfunctions can provide ample material for any writer, but that is no indication that the material is easy to render in its full complexity. In our Book Club selection for January, however, we are proud to present a text that explores the peculiarities of familial relations to tremendous result. My Grandmother’s Braid, written by acclaimed author Alina Bronsky, tackles the subject(s) with equal parts biting wit and generous compassion, culminating in a subtly sensitive portrait of what happens behind the closed doors of households, and the closed minds of our loved ones. 

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! 

My Grandmother’s Braid by Alina Bronsky, translated from the German by Tim Mohr, Europa Editions, 2021

Over the years, I have grown weary of that infamous Tolstoy adage that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Mostly because it seems to me that the sources of our unhappiness tend to be often so ordinary (and thus far more common that we’d like to admit); evil can lack imagination, and even the worst of pains can soon turn into dull aches as we get used to almost everything. Dysfunctional families, however, are another story, and the family at the center of Alina Bronsky’s My Grandmother’s Braid, translated by Tim Mohr, takes the idea of dysfunctional to a whole new level. Despite its relative slimness, this book takes the reader on a journey with so many twists and turns that I kept staring at the pages in disbelief.

At the age of six, our narrator Max immigrates from the Soviet Union to Germany with his maternal grandparents, taking shelter in a refugee home. The verb “immigrate” is technically correct, although there is a sense that Max and his grandfather, Tschingis, didn’t immigrate as much as they were dragged to the unnamed German town where the story takes place by Max’s grandmother, Margarita Ivanova, or Margo.

Margo is the driving force behind this story and almost everything that happens in Max’s life (and not only Max’s). Worried that Max’s health is too precarious for Russia, she exploits the family’s threadbare Jewish heritage to gain refugee status. Once in Germany, she seems to suffer from what can potentially be described as Munchausen syndrome by proxy: she is certain that Max is too fragile to live as a normal child would—that he is afflicted by a number of inexplicable maladies. She hauls Max from doctor to doctor, all of whom continually refuse her diagnosis as she grows ever more certain of their incompetence. She feeds Max only steamed vegetables and unseasoned barley and oats and refuses to let him go play with other children. When Max starts first grade, she insists on being seated at the back of his classroom and interrupting his lessons with her often-wrong advice on how to solve his math assignments. The dullness of Max’s school life eventually becomes too much for her, and it is only when Margo grows bored that Max is able to gain a little bit of freedom and agency. And it is here that the narrative begins to speed up, and the years slide by to the point where reader loses track of how much time has passed. READ MORE…

Different Ships on the Same Ocean: Jennifer Croft in conversation with High as the Waters Rise author Anja Kampmann and translator Anne Posten

January 13, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Jennifer Croft

. . . one needs to be very sensitive towards this structure, which is both a structure of memory and time as well as emotion.

In the fall of 2018, translator Anne Posten told me about a German book she had fallen in love with, about oil rig workers, male intimacy, the nature of memory, and the cost of freedom. I begged her to send me the pages she had translated that same night and was bowled over from the very first sentence. Two years later, I had the honor of publishing at Catapult Anja Kampmann’s debut novel, High as the Waters Rise, in Anne’s translation, which promptly became a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award in Translated Literature.

High as the Waters Rise is the story of Waclaw, a man who grew up in a German mining town and has been working on oil platforms across the world for twelve years. When Waclaw loses his closest companion in an accident on the rig, he must embark on a journey of grief and reckoning. 

Of course we all depend on the oil industry, even if the workers who run it are invisible to us. This novel makes that exploitation not only visible but intimate and personal. It is a politically urgent story, exploring the problems of a globalized capitalist society. But more than anything, it is the story of one man who stands at the margins of that society, asking what his life is worth.

Before we published it here, High as the Waters Rise had already been well received in Germany, where it won several awards and was nominated for the German Book Prize. But international literature in English translation, particularly by debut authors, must find passionate champions in order to succeed. We were thrilled when the novel found such a champion in author, critic, and translator Jennifer Croft, who alongside author Olga Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Flights. 

Below, Jennifer discusses with Anja and Anne the translation process, its challenges and intimate nature, and what it means to translate a person into another language. I hope that their conversation might inspire you to read High as the Waters Rise, which Jennifer Croft has said contains “prose with the brightness of poetry, in a splendidly lucid translation.”

—Kendall Storey, Editor & Foreign Rights Manager, Catapult

Jennifer Croft (JC): How did you two meet and come to this project? How did you decide to work together? Anne, maybe you could also speak a bit about how you generally choose your translation projects.

Anja Kampmann (AK): Anne and I met years ago when I was a fellow at the International Writing Program in Iowa. We’ve been in touch ever since, as she developed her professional career as a translator and I wrote a book of poetry and High as the Waters Rise. But I never expected her to do the translation for High as the Waters Rise, just because I respect her so much in her own work. I couldn’t believe it when Anne told me that she had fallen in love with the novel and wanted to translate it. Her translation sample was wonderful and she caught the spirit and rhythm of the book right away.

Anne Posten (AP): In a way, High as the Waters Rise has been a long time in the making. Anja and I met in 2010. I had just moved to New York to start grad school at Queens College and still felt a bit like a country mouse in the big city. A mutual friend knew Anja wanted to come to New York after her time at the International Writers’ Program in Iowa and asked me if I wouldn’t mind hosting her. I said yes. Luckily, Anja and I became fast friends, and we still cherish memories from that time when we were both discovering the city and getting to know each other. We’ve kept in touch ever since, and over the course of these ten years, I fell in love with and started translating Anja’s poetry and visited her several times in Germany. In that time she published her first poetry collection and I my first book-length translations, and then Anja’s debut novel Wie hoch die Wasser steigen came out, to great success in Germany. I was thrilled for her, and entranced by the text. It was amazing to be so familiar with Anja’s poetry and then see, like magic, that same voice and style turned into a novel. I did a sample translation and wrote a long report on the novel, which I sent out to almost all of the editors I know, plus some I didn’t. There was a lot of initial interest and then, much to my surprise and dismay, radio silence. I was feeling pretty frustrated when I ran into Kendall unexpectedly on a trip to New York in November 2018 and heard that she’d started working for Catapult. When we met for drinks, Kendall asked if there was anything I might want to pitch her. I told her about the book and she was immediately intrigued. I sent her my sample and report, and the rest is history. I can still hardly believe it all worked out so perfectly—getting to work on a book I care so much about, written by a friend, and edited by someone I respect, like, and trust so much as Kendall.

AK: Yes, it felt like a perfect match. Also, it was great to have a friend by my side for the American translation, after almost five years I spent writing the book. READ MORE…

The Shrouded Force of Fate: Anja Kampmann’s High as the Waters Rise

December 10, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

High as the Waters Rise fills the great blank canvas of loss with a precision that nourishes the fine contours of emotion.

High as the Waters Rise by Anja Kampmann, translated from the German by Anne Posten, Catapult, 2020

In the rich silt into which Titusville, Pennsylvania sinks its foundations, there was only one spot where it was possible to strike oil at the extraordinarily shallow depth of sixty-nine feet. On August 27, 1859, a small group of men, at the last-ditch orders of one Edwin Laurentine Drake, sank their pipes into the ground—guided by that unknown intuition which, in retrospect, looks terribly similar to fate—and black gold flowed forth. It is how the world flows forth from a single life, from one man’s fortune to a new forever, a radically altered world.

The idea of fate, its shrouded force, is perhaps the only abiding salve for the more devastating consequences of self-awareness. We look back on our times to construct an architecture of experiences, arranging fragments by our available logic to see what structure rises from the flood—what materializes in the aftermath to become that one reference by which we can define, or justify, our lives. For some reason, we always urge towards a singular narrative, despite sharing in the overarching suspicion that the life one leads is not one, but always many. The salvaging of this steadfast, solitary lesson is a comfort—that it indeed has all been for something. Without it, there would be only darkness, that eternal torrent, that deafening collapse.

Because Anja Kampmann begins High as the Waters Rise with an ending, we arrive at the temporary space between the shock of happening and the proceedings of salvage. Waclaw and Mátyás are longtime companions working on an oil rig, sharing in a rare and profound intimacy that dissipates the customary subscriptions of male camaraderie. When Mátyás vanishes from the ship in an incident so abrupt and absurd that it seems almost mystical, Waclaw is stirred into a potent, hypnotic grief—a grief that necessitates the sea, the infinity it conjures, which Kampmann calls upon in the vignette that opens the text: “There would only be sea, piling up and up. There would be no north or south. The water would swallow even the cries of the storm, which no ear would hear.” In the midst of these tides—which overwhelm the daily rituals of work, care, and thought—is the solitary island of memories, visions in which Mátyás is frayed at the edges by recall. Only these mirages anchor Waclaw: these small footholds of before, in the vast midnight of after.

READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2020

October 26, 2020  |  in News  |  by Ah-reum Han, Garrett Phelps, Lee Yew Leong, Michele Hutchison, and Sam Carter

Our Section Editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2020 issue!

This year’s events have made us all a little rusty in the art of travel, so hopping across our fortieth issue’s thirty-two countries may feel equal parts thrilling and daunting. Luckily, our section editors (including our Dutch Literature Special Feature curator, International Booker Prize co-winner Michele Hutchison) are happy to lay out a road map. Read on for literary duos on life and love in the Netherlands, a Norwegian’s popular fury, a Mexican novelist’s elusive but lasting influence, and a German author’s and Iranian poet’s exquisite study of silence.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction and Nonfiction Editor:

Not quite as stunningly “out there” as The Haunting of Bly Manor’s episode five, Paweł Sołtys’s deeply moving “The Kiev Sea” (translated with great aplomb by Eliza Marciniak) nevertheless reminded me of it: we are in such close third-person mode that even the reading material that the protagonist uses to while away time seems to be directly absorbed as consciousness while operating as pivotal mise en abyme. Memories and regret flit through this consciousness, “maintain(ing) the other me within the present me,” even as everything is “already slipping towards an invisible edge.” In truth—as we follow the protagonist down the rabbit hole of nostalgia—the slippage began much earlier: “it seemed that since he’d turned forty, he could only discard things. Friends, women, memories even.” What is the sum of life then? How much can we hold on to? On this fateful October day of reckoning, this fictional protagonist is reminded, via fiction, as we all are perhaps, of how removed and frightfully impersonal existence finally is: “It really happened, all of it, but it’s as if it were a story, told not to me but to someone nearby, in the noise of a bar or during a fight, a proper one, when the sound of the blows drowns out the wailing.”

From Michele Hutchison, Guest Editor of Dutch Literature Special Feature:

Good fortune would have it that I was working on the selection of Asymptote’s Dutch special when my translation of The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld was awarded the International Booker Prize. Perfect timing for sharing these stunning new Dutch voices with you, coinciding with the spike in interest in our national literature. (I wrote ‘our’ without thinking: I’m a defected Brit, resident in Amsterdam.)

To be honest, Dutch literature has long had plenty to offer, and there have been other recent successes. Think of Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin (translated by David Colmer) winning the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award ten years ago, and think of the great reception Gerard Reve’s classic The Evenings (translated by Sam Garrett) and Tonke Dragt’s The Letter for the King (translated by Laura Watkinson, recently a Netflix series) have had in English. We haven’t exactly been hiding our light under a bushel. Nevertheless, it was wonderful to put together this selection of Dutch talent to entice you to read further. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2020

September 14, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal and Filip Noubel

New work from Taiwan's Amang and Germany's Jenny Erpenbeck!

This month’s selected new translations from around the world cross more than geographic boundaries: the first combines deliciously feral Taiwanese poetry with exclusive, first-hand conversations on the process of writing and translating it; the second features a series of stylistically varied but equally poignant essays on an acclaimed German author’s personal and political journey. Both titles prompt us to peek into their subjects’ fascinating lives and work, and we’re all too happy to indulge.

amang

Raised by Wolves: Poems and Conversations by Amang, translated from the Chinese by Steve Bradbury, Deep Vellum, 2020

Review by Filip Noubel, Editor-at-Large for Uzbekistan

When I agreed to review Raised by Wolves, I thought I had signed up to read a translation of contemporary Taiwanese poetry. I very quickly realized my mistake: Raised by Wolves is much more than that; it is an invitation to partake in a feast of words that agree to disagree, that clash and dissolve to reemerge in another language. It is also an act of transgressive eavesdropping, as the poet and her translator let readers in on their intimate discussions about their craft (the book’s subtitle is “poems and conversations”).

Amang has published several collections, including On/Off: Selected Poems of Amang, 1995-2002 (2003), No Daddy (2008), Chariots of Women (2016), and As We Embrace Thousands Are Dying (2016). In addition, she is a filmmaker and blogger, and her eclectic interests are clearly reflected in this new translation of her work. A couple of themes, however, seem to be especially prevalent throughout.

First, as the poet discloses (incidentally explaining her collection’s English title), she was raised mostly by her grandmother, who “was quite a character. She was very powerful and courageous. A she-wolf. She would do or say whatever she wanted. None of th[at] Confucian nonsense for her.” In line with this almost feral sentiment, many poems include raw images celebrating nature or the vibrance of the human body. In one, for instance, Amang writes: “Thrusting your hand down a tiger’s throat / to tear out his heart  / so, too, I / cut from a book a sheet of / ice.” And elsewhere: “I can give you anything / . . . / except that puny little stick / they call a prick / and is that worth making a fuss about?” READ MORE…

Who Will Win the International Booker Prize?

August 19, 2020  |  in Essays, News  |  by Barbara Halla

One of my least favorite strands of Booker discourse [is that] . . . a particular book wins . . . because it ticks . . . marketing-friendly boxes.

The long-awaited announcement of the International Booker winner is finally around the corner, and with a shortlist explosive with singular talent, the gamblers amongst us are finding it difficult to place their bets. To lend a hand, Asymptote’s very own assistant editor Barbara Halla returns with her regularly scheduled take, lending her scrupulous gaze to not only the titles but the Prize itself—and the principles of literary criticism and merit.

In my previous coverage of the International Booker Prize, I mentioned that there is always an element of repetition to the discussions surrounding it; quite honestly, there are only so many ways one can frame the conversation beyond mere summarizations of the books themselves. I find myself hoping that each year’s selections will reveal some sort of larger theme looming in the background, giving me at least the pretense of a cohesive thesis statement. I think that was definitely the case with last year’s shortlist and its explicit concern with memory, but considering how English translation tends to lag behind each book’s original publication by at least a couple of years, it was probably a coincidence. I’ve had no such luck with the 2020 shortlist; most of my attempts at finding a common theme have felt like a stretch.

In an attempt to avoid making this simply a collection of bite-sized reviews, I want to talk about one of my least favorite strands of Booker discourse: the tedious—sometimes almost malicious—assertion that if a particular book wins, it does so not because of its “literary merit,” but rather because it ticks a number of marketing-friendly boxes. Maybe it has been translated from a language that rarely gets published in English, or perhaps it seems particularly relevant to our present, directly tackling racism, homophobia, or misogyny. Regardless of the source of such a statement, it has this irritating “political correctness is ruining literature” thrust to it.

Now, in the past I have relied on “non-literary” clues to try and guess the Booker winner, and to some extent, I still do. However, in my mind, whenever I try to glean the winner using such external factors, I do so based on a few assumptions. First of all, while not all shortlisted books will necessarily be my favorite or even to my liking, the judges at least believe them to be great books, and the winner might indeed be different under different (personal) circumstances. In fact, despite what some detractors of contemporary fiction might say, there is plenty to love about the books being published today, and in the presence of so much good literature, taking into account “external” factors is only natural. After all, as translator Anton Hur recently tweeted, in response to an article arguing against a translated fiction category for the Hugos, “Literary awards ARE marketing tools, they should be used to solve MARKETING PROBLEMS.” READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translation Tuesday: “Heimat Who Lives in a Box” by A.E. Sadeghipour

March 10, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by A.E. Sadeghipour

The service was horrible or maybe we were never supposed to be there.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, inexplicable shapeshifting, bad table service, tangible numerals, and a loving friendship that defies spatial logic are on the menu in “Heimat who Lives in a Box,” written and translated from the German by A.E. Sadeghipour. In this surreal microfiction, a dinner date is marred by embarrassment and a rude (and seemingly inhuman) waitstaff. Sadeghipour’s ability to flout realism while preserving the conventions of the short narrative leads us to a conclusion that is both ironic and “happily ever after”-esque.

My friend Heimat lives in a box which she wears everywhere we go. It constantly causes conflicts when making dinner reservations. The last time we made a dinner reservation and crossed the threshold of the restaurant, she grew larger than the door and continuously banged into the door frame. She grew embarrassed and shriveled down into a matchbox. I picked her up, kissed her, walked in, and was escorted to our table.

The service was horrible or maybe we were never supposed to be there. The other guests closed their eyes as they ate, and the waitstaff’s heads were always transfixed on our position regardless of where their bodies were moving. When the food arrived, it was cold and had a hair in it.

READ MORE…

The 2020 Booker International Longlist

March 2, 2020  |  in Essays, News  |  by Barbara Halla

This year the specter of violence, visceral brutality, and even hauntings loom large.

Every year, the prestigious Booker International Prize is always announced to a crowd of critics, writers, and readers around the world with much aplomb, resulting in great celebration, some dissatisfaction, and occasional puzzlement. Here at Asymptote, we’re presenting a take by our in-house Booker-specialist Barbara Halla, who tackles the longlist with the expert curiosity and knowledge of a reader with voracious taste, in place of the usual blurbs and bylines, and additionally questioning what the Booker International means. If you too are perusing the longlist in hunt for your next read, let this be your (atypical) guide.

I tend to dread reading the Booker wrap-ups that sprout immediately after the longlist has been announced. The thing is, most critics and bloggers have not read the majority of the list, which means that the articles are at best summaries of pre-existing blurbs or reviews. Plus, this is my third year covering the Booker International, and I was equally apprehensive about finding a new way to spin the following main acts that now compose the usual post-Booker script: 1) the list is very Eurocentric (which says more about the state of the publishing world than the judges’ tastes); 2) someone, usually The Guardian, will mention that the longlist is dominated by female writers, although the split is around seven to six, which reminds me of that untraceable paper arguing that when a particular setting achieves nominal equality, that is often seen as supremacy; and 3) indie presses are killing it, which they absolutely are because since 2016, they have deservedly taken over the Booker, from longlist to winner.

I don’t mean to trivialize the concerns listed above, especially in regards to the list’s Eurocentrism. Truth is, we talk a lot about the unbearable whiteness of the publishing world, but in writings that discuss the Booker, at least, we rarely dig deeper than issues of linguistic homogeneity and the dominance of literatures from certain regions. For instance: yes, three of the four winners of the International have been women, including all four translators, but how many of them have been translators of color? To my understanding, that number is exactly zero. How many translators of color have even been longlisted? The Booker does not publish the list of titles submitted for consideration, but if it did, I am sure we would notice the same predominance of white voices and white translators. I know it is easier said than done, considering how hard it is to sell translated fiction to the public in the first place, but if we actually want to tilt the axis away from the western literary canon, the most important thing we can do is support and highlight the work of translators of color who most likely have a deeper understanding of the literatures that so far continue to elude not just prizes, but the market in its entirety. READ MORE…

Life in Print: Michael Hofmann on Translating Peter Stamm

February 20, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

Translation in my experience effaces itself as you do it. There’s no such thing as translation-memory or any abiding feeling of translation-pain.

In a tumultuous January, Asymptote Book Club sent to subscribers a remarkable novel that is as compelling as it is disorienting: The Sweet Indifference of the World, written by esteemed Swiss author Peter Stamm and translated by Michael Hofmann, an accomplished poet with the penchant for “avoiding the obvious.” Instilled, as the best fictions are, with the tantalizingly elusive and the startlingly clear, the prose takes unorthodox turns to investigate a love lost and a life lived. Though we now have tools to navigate nearly every physical terrain, literature is still our main method for traversing the topography of psychological human experience. To grant us an insight on this unique work, Michael Hofmann talks with assistant editor Lindsay Semel about failures, freedoms, and the the survival of simplicity through translation.

The Asymptote Book Club is our gift to readers in the US, the UK, and the EU. Bringing the most notable titles in translated literature for as little as USD15 per book, you can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page.

Lindsay Semel (LS): So far, you are Peter Stamm’s only voice in English, and you’ve ironically referred to him as your “living author.” How does his writing converse with some of the other work you’ve translated? Do you find any interesting points of contact, clash, or cohesion?

Michael Hofmann (MH): Peter’s writing is so pure and clean. There’s nowhere to hide in it. Most of the things I’m associated with (or that I write myself) are much murkier and endlessly more elaborate. In some ways, we’re not a natural pairing at all. For someone like me who spends much of his time shuffling subordinate clauses or thinking of the ideal way to modify adverbs (with another adverb), it’s a purge and a cure. The contact, I suppose, is that to some extent he comes out of the Anglo-Saxon tradition (Hemingway, Carver, etc. etc.—though he has many more writers behind him), and I’m trying to return him to it in the most graceful and fitting way I can. In a way, it doesn’t feel like translating at all—it’s more like making a forgery. Trying to pass off something English-inspired as English!

READ MORE…

Announcing Our January Book Club Selection: The Sweet Indifference of the World by Peter Stamm

January 30, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

How often do we look back on our lives only to be confounded by our own choices?

Do writers aspire to live forever? Is literature a cultivated method of extending our capacities, prolonging the temporary, and rectifying our past mistakes? In this month’s Book Club selection, Asymptote has selected lauded German author Peter Stamm’s latest novel, The Sweet Indifference of the World, which probes such questions with a graceful awareness of how human relationships materialize and dissipate. Cohered by a love story told and retold, Stamm deftly enwraps complex psychological themes of identity and memory in his polished prose, translated into English skillfully by poet Michael Hofmann. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers in the US, the UK, and the EU. 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!

The Sweet Indifference of the World by Peter Stamm, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann, Other Press (US/Can) & Granta (UK), 2020

What casualty of a failed love affair doesn’t leave some phantom of themselves wandering eternally through their memories, in search of what could have gone differently? Peter Stamm’s The Sweet Indifference of the World, translated from the German into understated, efficient English by Michael Hofmann, invites the thrilling possibility of the alternate ending. Christoph, middle-aged and still coasting on the success of his first and only novel, recalls his relationship with actress Magdalena, grasping at a slippery opportunity to finally salve his unsatisfied soul. 

The masterful craftsmanship of both author and translator animates a universe that trembles on the limit of realism. An elevation from the typical love story, the novel invites meditation on topics like the nature of narrative, the unreliability of perception, the standards by which we judge the value of a human life, and even the act of translation. READ MORE…

My 2019: Barbara Halla

December 20, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

Much is made of relatability in fiction, but it’s not something that I really think about.

As December winds to a close, we at Asymptote are once again reflecting and reminiscing on a year spent with books, those that have spoken to us, accompanied us, and in their own discreet way, carved their paths in the tracks of time alongside us. So today, in lieu of our weekly roundup, we return to our annual series with the following recap of Assistant Editor Barbara Halla’s literary year, filled with character-driven titles that range from the intimate to the epic. 

I had this strange impulse, as I sat down to write my “Year in Reading”, to scrap my outline and do something different: write not about the books that have stayed with me because of how good they were, but focus instead on the books I did not like. A “year in books that made me wish I didn’t know how to read” meditation, so to speak. And that would certainly be fun. Unsurprisingly, I seem to have a lot more to say about the books that made me miserable than the ones I loved, but I fought the impulse. What good would that do, just more misery (and free publicity) to spread in the world. So, back to my outline, and the more traditional rundown of some of the books that meant a lot to me this year.

I am going to start in reverse-chronological order. Much is made of relatability in fiction, but it’s not something that I really think about, unless someone tells me that a specific book is supposed to be particularly relatable to someone of my age/gender/nationality, in which case my brain takes this as a challenge to actively dislike it. While reviewers certainly mentioned its style (Joycean!) and its girth (a brick!), I don’t remember anyone specifically telling me that I should read Ducks, Newburyport because I would find myself in its pages. Lucy Ellmann’s opus, where an American housewife from Ohio spends her day making pies and thinking about everything from the challenges of motherhood to the climate crisis, is certainly a book of our time. But I didn’t expect that my overwhelming reaction to it would be a sense of “if someone could scan my brain this is exactly what I’d imagine it to look like!” As for relatable, this is the only book I have read in my life that shows some pity for tortoise-owners like me, and the fact that our care and attention are treated with complete indifference by the subject of our affection. There is a lesson in there somewhere about love and letting go. READ MORE…

What We Owe to Our Ancestors: On Nino Haratischwili’s The Eighth Life

December 4, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla

I kept wondering if part of the reason we are so invested in the stories of our female ancestors is not to save them, but to save ourselves?

The Eighth Life, by Nino Haratischwili, translated from the German by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin, Scribe, 2019

Sometimes I wonder how many people harbor a secret desire to write a book about their family’s entire history. I have certainly met enough women in my life who have expressed this explicitly, especially the stories shared by their mothers and grandmothers—the implication being that we don’t get enough of these stories in literature or biographies. It is perhaps for this reason that reading Nino Haratischwili’s The Eighth Life, translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin, feels so familiar, almost like a wish fulfilled. Because with all its exciting intricacies and the moving depth, The Eighth Life is not just the story of the trials and tribulations of one Georgian family over the red century; it is first and foremost a tribute that Niza, the book’s narrator, pays to her matriarchal line and to her family’s youngest member, her niece Brilka.

The Eighth Life has deservedly been compared to Tolstoy’s War & Peace, most recently translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Just like its epic predecessor, The Eighth Life features a dizzying amount of main and secondary characters whose lives are explored in depth and trailed over several decades, from the early 1900s to our present. The story starts with Niza’s great-grandmother, Stasia, the daughter of a famed Georgian chocolate-maker, who almost impetuously betroths Simon Jashi, a military man. Throughout the book, we follow Stasia, her sister Christina, and their granddaughters as they shape and are shaped by one hundred years of Georgian and USSR history. Like Tolstoy, Haratischwili is not afraid to go into the details of the major historical events that signpost the twentieth century, providing a guideline even for those that are not well versed in Soviet history. And just like Tolstoy, through the voice of her perceptive narrator, she is ready to remind us of the hypocrisy and absurd repetitions that history often entails. READ MORE…