Place: Turkey

Turkish Dude Lit Has a “Dad Rock” Moment: Barış Bıçakçı’s The Mosquito Bite Author

January 14, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Matthew Chovanec

[A] stream of academic writing still holds up these dudes and their self-pity as emblematic of national identity.

Turkish dude lit is much like dude lit elsewhere: it deals with the trials of privileged man-boys. Unlike some of the genre’s more vilified geographic variants, though, it has yet to be carefully examined. While grateful for the chance to indulge in it freely, former Asymptote contributor Matthew Chovanec has his qualms; in particular, he argues, pinning Turkey’s Volksgeist on its male antiheroes actually does them (and their readers) a disservice. Enter The Mosquito Bite Author, in Chovanec’s own recent translation: might acclaimed writer Barış Bıçakçı’s subtle parody of the vain male figure pave the way to its survival?

I really enjoy Turkish novels about men wasting away in their comfortable, petty-bourgeois lives. I can’t get enough of them. I love following along, a vicarious flaneur, as the protagonists stroll through my favorite Istanbul streets. I’m charmed by their ability to take just the right line of surrealist poetry from the Ikinci Yeni movement and make it fit as an oracular judgment on their own personal haplessness. I even like reading about them sitting at home, staring at their bookshelves and resenting their wives. Something about them has me consuming these titles with the faithfulness of a reader of policiers or harlequin novels, and Turkey keeps producing them with almost pulp-like regularity. Every decade, it seems, brings its own antihero, yawning at modernist art exhibits, slinking away from military coups, scorning the superficiality that comes with economic liberalization, or trying out the latest fashions in postmodern soliloquy.

While I myself am a voracious reader of highly literate accounts of sociopathy, I appreciate that they aren’t for everyone. As an American, I can also admit that I’ve basically taken a circuitous linguistic route to enjoying works that would face derision back home, reveling as I am in another country’s “Dude Lit.” Laura Fraser describes the genre as one whose “books generally propel a confused, often drug-addled or alcoholic, narcissistic, philandering male protagonist to, well, not self-discovery, but some semblance of adult behavior.” Her description could just as easily apply to the protagonists of Turkish novels like Yusuf Atılgan’s Aylak Adam, Oğuz Atay’s Tutunamayanlar, Vedat Türkali’s Bir Gün Tek Basına, or Ayhan Gecgin’s Gençlik Düşü; they, in turn, make frequent reference to the Slacker International, inhabiting the same fictional universe as Seymour Glass or John Shade. READ MORE…

Honoring the Art of Translation: Ümit Hussein

September 28, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Ümit Hussein

Our task is not restricted to giving readers access to literature . . . by doing so we also perform the role of cultural ambassadors.

Though Asymptote has made it a point to celebrate literary translation no matter the time of year, we’re still pretty thrilled that there’s a whole month dedicated to the cause. As we draw towards the end of National Translation Month, Asymptote is taking the opportunity to bring together essential components that complete the cycle of literature as it travels from one language to the next, with the intention of recognizing the meticulous, purposeful, and intimate labour invested into a text during this peregrination—from conception to publication. We have asked four valued members of the literary community, spanning the globe, to bring us their take on translation and its gifts. 

In this third feature, we are delighted to present an original essay by Ümit Hussein, an award-winning translator (and past Asymptote Book Club contributor!), who translates from the Turkish to the English. Her translation of Burhan Sönmez’s Istanbul Istanbul won the EBRD prize in 2018 and her translation of Nermin Yıldırım’s Secret Dreams in Istanbul is forthcoming from Anthem Press. Born and raised in North London in an extended Turkish Cypriot family, Hussein sees her role as translator reaching beyond the linguistic, in order to act as a cultural ambassador and elucidate a different cultural context for English readers. Here, she explains her own response to the question of why translation is essential to promoting literature and bringing about change.  

When I was asked to write this article, my brief was to make it about any aspect of translation I thought was important. Unaccustomed to so much freedom, I set about wracking my brain. One of the first thoughts that crossed my mind was, why do we translate at all? Given that it is widely believed that a translation can never be equal to the original; that a good translator is one that is completely invisible; that the translation must read as though written in the target language; that we are branded with the label traduttore traditore; that it is so poorly paid; and that, harshest of all, a certain award-winning writer, who translated fiction before she became a novelist, said in an interview, “For me it’s a waste of time . . . I want to write, not waste time with translations.” (Fortunately for this author, her translator, whose translation won her the prize, does not share her views.) What, then, motivates us to lavish so much love, care, time, and energy on what is frequently treated as the poor relative of “real” writing? READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2020

March 16, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal, Georgina Fooks, Josefina Massot, and Rachel Allen

We're feeling the need for great literature in these strange times.

These last few weeks of winter will be known as the time of stockpiling, and as countries around the world are shutting doors in response to COVID-19, stores are being cleared out and preserved goods and household necessities are piled up in cupboards. But just as it is vital to care for your body in these perplexing times, it is equally important to nurture your mind. So it is with that in mind that we present the newest and brightest in translated literature from around the world, in hopes that what is available to us remains our compassion, our desire to understand one another, and the privilege to travel amidst isolation. Below, our editors present a book of poetry written in a defiant border-language, a poignant Turkish critique of human cruelty, a Colombian novel depicting a young girl’s inner wildness, and the latest translated poems of Jacques Roubaud, written in the Oulipo tradition of valuing absence as equally as presence. 

night in the north

Night in the North by Fabián Severo, translated from the Portuñol by Laura Cesaro Eglin and Jesse Lee Kercheval, Eulalia Books, 2020

Review by Georgina Fooks, Communications Manager

How do we choose which language to write in?

For some of us, that choice can be fraught. Whether you’re a child of immigrants (as I am), or from a contested border region (as Fabián Severo is), there is a great deal at stake when making that choice. It impacts your identity, it shapes your politics. There’s no doubt that when reading this collection, Severo’s decision to write in Portuñol is a political act. READ MORE…

Our Year in World Literature

December 31, 2019  |  in News  |  by Alexander Dickow and Lee Yew Leong

The top 10 articles we published in 2019—according to you!

To send off 2019, we’re revisiting the ten most-read articles from our issues this year. Not surprisingly, most of them were concentrated in our Spring 2019 issue, voted by 290 readers as your favorite edition this year. Scroll down to see which article was the biggest hit in a year that saw never-before-published writing from 70 countries and 44 languages spread out over four quarterly issues.

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At No. 10 is Argentine author Sylvia Molloy’s thrilling but sensitive meditation on the bilingual condition from the Fall 2019 issue—read her essay “Living Between Languages.” READ MORE…

My 2019: Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

December 23, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

What follows is not a reckoning of everything I read this year, but rather a contemplation of the different ways that books assign themselves to me

Flaubert once said that one should read not for the purpose of instruction, but “in order to live.” Continuing our staff summations of 2019 in literature, Asymptote’s Educational Arm Assistant Katarzyna Bartoszyńska outlines an abundant year of reading, ranging from feminist favourites to autofiction to books about books, and in doing so, considers the sense of how books find their way to us, perhaps so that we may live.

Reflecting on my year in reading, I started to think about how various books came into my hands. I’m a literature professor, so a lot of what I read is determined by the classes I’m teaching, the syllabi I create. But making assigned book lists seems to have become a habit that spills over into the rest of my life as well—much of my reading seems to be part of various projects with lists of their own. It’s rare for me to randomly grab a book off my to-read shelf and just dive in, though I did just that with Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins, and it ended up being one of my favorite books of the year; a collection of formally dazzling short stories, whose pleasure was heightened for me, perhaps, because I entered it with almost no previous knowledge, and so was all the more delighted by every surprising twist and turn. I had a similar experience with Yiyun Li’s breathtaking A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. But as often as not, the result of such serendipity will be the creation of a new list—for instance, I’ve now resolved to read everything else Yiyun Li has written. What follows, then, is not a reckoning of everything I read this year, but rather a contemplation of the different ways that books assign themselves to me, and the highlights of these circumlocutious processes. READ MORE…

The Language of Non-Existence: Ümit Hussein on Translating Burhan Sönmez

December 12, 2019  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Sarah Moore

Ultimately, I believe the main challenge of [translating] literary fiction is that it’s a labour of love.

For our penultimate Book Club selection of the year, we looked to the occupations of memory and philosophy to find Burhan Sönmez’s masterful novel, Labyrinth. Brought into English from Turkish with every bit of its poeticism intact by the author’s long-time partner in literature, Ümit Hussein, the work tellingly arrives at a time when we as readers are questioning the integrity of our collective memories more than ever. In the following interview, Asymptote’s Assistant Blog Editor Sarah Moore speaks to Hussein on her relationship with Sönmez, the necessity of knowing where a novel “comes from”, and the lonely profession of translation.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers in the US, the UK, and the EU. Today is the last day to sign up to give or receive our Book Club titles—starting from this month! Take advantage of our special Black Friday sale and get 10% off three-month subscriptions. Once you’re a member, be sure to join our online discussion group at our Facebook page!

Sarah Moore (SM): You’ve translated several other books by Burhan Sönmez. How has his work evolved over the years in terms of content or style? Can you point to some longstanding themes? What stood out to you about this particular novel?

Ümit Hussein (UH): Burhan and I first met when we were both starting out. I have translated all his novels to date, including his first, North—the only one yet to be published in English. I don’t want to misquote the number of books he told me he read in preparation for it, but I believe it was over a hundred. Because the novel was still in manuscript form when I translated it (it hadn’t yet found a Turkish publisher), he kept revising it. I must say, that’s something that hasn’t changed over time! He’s incredibly meticulous. Every word he writes has been carefully considered and rethought and rewritten. I know because I work very closely with my authors; I think it’s important to establish a rapport during the translation process, and consequently I’m one of those tiresome translators who is constantly in touch with questions and comments and requests for explanations. 

While each of Burhan’s novels bears his unmistakeable stamp, they are all very different and have evolved over time. Istanbul Istanbul may be his most mature in terms of craftsmanship and poeticism, but my personal favourite is Sins and Innocents. Both revolve largely around storytelling, as does Burhan’s work at large. In Istanbul Istanbul, four prisoners sharing a tiny underground cell distract each other with stories. Similarly, half of Sins and Innocents is set in Burhan’s native village in Central Anatolia, and each chapter in the Anatolian half is devoted to the often dramatic story of a real life village character. These chapters could, if developed, comprise novels in themselves: there are tales of young girls being buried alive, a student mistakenly shot dead by his brother who is embroiled in a blood feud, a beautiful woman scarred for life when she is attacked by a she-bear maddened with grief after the death of her cubs. Burhan is a born storyteller, because he comes from a culture where the oral tradition is very prominent. READ MORE…

Announcing Our November Book Club Selection: Labyrinth by Burhan Sönmez

November 28, 2019  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Sarah Moore

In this exploration of the passage of time, Sönmez is at his most philosophical and his most political.

To live, to remember, and to forget—these are the mainstays of nearly every narrative both real and imagined, and this month, we have selected Burhan Sönmez’s masterful novel, Labyrinth, which traverses these themes with a lucidly Borgesian, yet stirringly original hand. A highly anticipated publication in Sönmez’s award-winning body of work, this profound book navigates the psychogeography of Istanbul to interrogate that most mysterious creature: the self.

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!

Labyrinth by Burhan Sönmez, translated from the Turkish by Ümit Hussein, Other Press, 2019

Boratin Bey knows that his name is Boratin, that he lives in Istanbul, that he is a blues musician with a tattoo on his back, but he doesn’t know why. And, more urgently, he doesn’t know why he jumped from Bosphorus Bridge—a fall he survived but which has now caused total memory loss. At the beginning of Burhan Sönmez’s Labyrinth (deftly translated by Ümit Hussein), Boratin wakes, disorientated in his unfamiliar apartment with no knowledge of who he is. Luckily, he has a few anchors that can guide him through his now estranged surroundings. Firstly, his bandmate, Bek, who takes care of practical matters, informs him of his likes, dislikes, habits and tries to settle him back into his old rhythm. His sister helps as well, taking great joy in remembering the past and recounting tales of his childhood to Boratin over the phone.

His experience of the world may only just be commencing, but it doesn’t take long before the big philosophical questions start to appear. “Did I choose and buy the furniture in this house?” and “Have I always lived alone?” are suddenly supplanted by “What does beautiful mean?” and “What brings on the desire to die?” A change that is, of course, understandable as Boratin is suddenly forced to step into his own life through the eyes of a complete stranger to it. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

May 24, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Janani Ganesan, and Rachael Pennington

We come to you this week armed with manifestos from Hong Kong, recipes from India, and voices giving shapes to poetry in Barcelona.

We look both backward and forward: a revolution in China, an election in India, poets uniting in Barcelona to cohere past and future with performance and verse. This week our editors are here with literary news items that display a history starkly immediate, a present gathering visions, and tomorrows which hope that remembrance may also be an act of resistance. 

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong:

The May Fourth Movement was one of the most influential events for China in the twentieth century as it powerfully revolutionised Chinese culture and society. The cultural movement complemented the political Xinhai Revolution led by Sun Yat-sen in heralding China’s modern era. Its centenary is celebrated across the Straits, and Hong Kong is no exception. Hong Kong’s Dr. Sun Yat-sen Museum is in collaboration with the Beijing Lu Xun Museum to organise “The Awakening of a Generation: The May Fourth and New Culture Movement” Exhibition, displaying relevant collections from both Beijing and the Hong Kong Museum of History to the public, including the handwritten manuscripts of Chen Duxiu and Hu Shih. The exhibition will also showcase visual and multimedia artworks that are inspired by the event.

The Hong Kong Literary Criticism Society has inaugurated the “Hong Kong Chinese Literary Criticism Competition 2019” to promote literary criticism in Hong Kong, and the launch ceremony of the competition was held in the Hong Kong Arts Development Council on May 18. Hong Kong writer Yip Fai and Chinese scholar Choy Yuen-fung from Hong Kong Baptist University were invited to give a talk on the necessity of literature and literary criticism, moderated by the chairman of Hong Kong Literary Criticism Society, Ng Mei-kwan.

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Thirteen Keys to a Doorless House in Toledo: On Tela de sevoya by Myriam Moscona

May 16, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Sarug Sarano

The Ladino language has etched on her tongue the addresses of countless houses in the Jewish Quarters of Toledo and Burgos.

Myriam Moscona’s Tela de sevoya (Onioncloth) was published in English in 2017, translated from the Ladino by Antena (Jen Hofer with John Pluecker). In today’s essay, Asymptote’s Sergio Sarano, himself a Ladino speaker, uses Moscona’s book as a starting point to explore the language and its history, shaped by the complex migrations of the Jewish diaspora. Sergio also discusses Ladino’s current status as an endangered language and highlights the important role that Moscona, as one of just a few writers who continue to publish in Ladino, has to play in keeping the language alive.

“I come upon a city
I remember
that there lived
my two mothers
and I wet my feet
in the rivers
that from these and other waters
arrive to this place”

—Myriam Moscona

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Philosophical Thriller: Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s Chaos: A Fable in Review

May 15, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Alice Horne

Chaos might have the pace of a thriller, but it has the timely relevance and pointed insight of many a great novel.

Chaos: A Fable by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, translated from the Spanish by Jeffrey Gray, AmazonCrossing, 2019.

Imagine finding yourself in an unknown country, with no understanding of how you got there and the taste of dread in your mouth, and you’ll have a good sense of how it feels to read acclaimed Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s novella Chaos: A Fable. According to the publisher’s synopsis, Chaos sets out to be both a “provocative morality tale” and a “high-tech thriller,” and, indeed, it seems to land somewhere between the two: think John le Carré “espionoir” meets Franz Kafka’s The Trial.

Translated from the Spanish by Jeffrey Gray, Chaos is Rey Rosa’s nineteenth novel (the seventh to be translated into English). It follows Mexican writer Rubirosa as he reconnects with an old friend in Morocco and, by agreeing to a seemingly simple favor, finds himself drawn into an international plot to end human suffering by bringing about a technological apocalypse. Chaos indeed.

For a novel titled Chaos, it is perhaps unsurprising that I found the reading experience itself disorientating; so much so, in fact, that as soon as I read the last line, I had to flick back to page one and read it all again to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. (Fortunately, at only 197 pages, you can pretty much do so in one sitting.) Starting—mundanely enough—at a book fair in Tangier, the novella takes the reader on a breath-taking ride via the United States and Greece to Turkey. And I’m sure that, even on a second read, there were allusions and references that went far over my head.

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Translating the Ottoman Quartet: An Interview with Brendan Freely and Yelda Türedi

November 22, 2018  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Garrett Phelps

In practical terms, communication with the author is difficult: we can only communicate through his lawyers.

Ahmet Altan’s writing is sprawling, ambitious, radical—so radical that the author is currently serving a life sentence on charges of inciting the plotters behind Turkey’s 2016 failed coup. In the latest instalment of the Asymptote Book Club interview series, Altan’s co-translators, Brendan Freely and Yelda Türedi, reveal that their only contact with the author is through his lawyers. No written materials can be carried into or out of the prison where Altan is serving his sentence, but work continues on the final volume of the monumental Ottoman Quartet.

In conversation with Asymptote’s Garrett Phelps, Freely and Türedi give us an insight into how they came to translate Altan’s work, and why a novel sequence of novels dealing with the events of the early twentieth century has never felt fresher or more contemporary.

Garrett Phelps (GP): Like a Sword Wound is set during a momentous period in Turkish history and details the cycle of chaos which ultimately results in the Ottoman Empire’s collapse. As translators, did you feel the setting added to your burden of responsibilities?

Brendan Freely and Yelda Türedi (BF/YT): Both of us are quite familiar with this period, so the setting as such did not present any particular problem. However, we were aware of the echoes of the current political situation in Turkey, and of how little the main political currents seem to have changed in over a hundred years. In practical terms, although Like a Sword Wound was written in modern Turkish rather than Ottoman Turkish, Ahmet Altan made an effort to reflect the language of the period, often choosing outdated words and phrases. In our initial meeting to discuss the translation, he was concerned about how we would approach this. We agreed to take the same approach he did—that is, to prefer older words and phrasing to evoke the mindset of the period while still keeping the language current enough to avoid alienating contemporary readers.

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In Conversation: Canan Marasligil

November 14, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by Lou Sarabadzic

What I find important is to talk from a personal place: sharing what you know, writing from what you know, expressing yourself with sincerity.

Canan Maraşlıgil’s world has always been a multilingual one. Currently based in Amsterdam, she was born in Turkey, spent her childhood in Belgium, and, as a student, lived for a short time in Canada. Today, as a freelance writer and literary translator, she often travels internationally to deliver workshops and presentations, and works in no less than five languages: English, French, Turkish, Dutch, and Spanish. Always involved in several inspiring projects at once, Canan explores literature through writing and translation, but also photography, video, podcast, and digital media. You can therefore easily imagine our joy when, in addition to all of her brilliant projects, she kindly agreed to schedule an interview with Asymptote’s team member Lou Sarabadzic.

Lou Sarabadzic (LS): You work mostly in French, English, and Turkish, and are regularly involved in projects dealing with multilingualism. What does multilingualism mean for you, and why is it so central to your work?

Canan Maraşlıgil (CM): Multilingualism is my reality. I grew up in a family who came from Turkey to Belgium. We spoke Turkish at home, I went to school in French, then I learned Dutch at school (Belgium is a trilingual country if you count German, but the second language we learned at school was Dutch). I was also hearing a lot of German in our living-room through TV and our cousins living in Zurich and Hamburg—I also have family who migrated to Germany. I started to learn English through friends of my dad who was working in a hotel as a night receptionist, and through popular culture—films and music. However, English only became part of my formal education much later. Now, I start my sentences in one language and end them in another. In my mind, everything is multilingual. Certain feelings come to me in one language, and others in another language. I also work in Dutch a lot, but I don’t really feel in Dutch, nor in Spanish, which is also a language I know, but use much less.

Multilingualism means seeing the world through many different lenses. You can try and understand issues and current affairs through different media in different languages. I think that’s a huge advantage in today’s world.

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Announcing our October Book Club selection: Like A Sword Wound by Ahmet Altan

October 31, 2018  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Garrett Phelps

The novel is a breathless portrait of late-19th century Istanbul — the corrupt, violent and authoritarian core of a failing empire...

Our October Asymptote Book Club selection is the first novel in a quartet that aims to reveal “the dark and bloody face of history.” Earlier this month, a Turkish court upheld a life sentence for the quartet’s author, Ahmet Altan, on charges of aiding the plotters behind the failed military coup in 2016. He continues to work on the final volume of the quartet from inside his cell. Like a Sword Wound can be read as an autopsy on “the sick man of Europe”, the ailing Ottoman Empire at the turn of the last century, but also as a powerful indictment of despotic regimes across history.

We’re proud to be bringing our subscribers a novel of incredible courage, inspired by a belief that literature is close as we can come to finding “an antidote to the poison of power.”

If you’re already an Asymptote Book Club subscriber, head to our official Facebook group to continue the discussion; if you haven’t joined us yet, Garrett Phelps’ review should give you a brief taste of the novel, and all the information you need in order to subscribe is available on our Book Club site.

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Fall 2012: A Whirlwind Blend of Poetry, Fiction, Loud-mouthed Drama, and Phantasmagorical Art

September 8, 2018  |  in 30issues30days  |  by Marina Sofia

The pieces from the issue play off of each other’s fears and discoveries so well that it is almost uncanny.

Michael Henry Heim, the translator who introduced to English readers Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being—and my personal favorite, The Joke—dies on 29 September 2012. Not only do we mourn his passing, we regret not being able to publish the interview Heim agreed to months before. Michael Stein of Literalab, who has been researching interview questions for Asymptote when news breaks of Heim’s death, writes a tribute instead, which we publish on Tumblr (this being before the arrival of our blog). On the other hand, Yiyun Li—whom I have been courting since the beginning of Asymptote—finally agrees to grace the pages of our eighth issue (listen to a snippet of her conversation with Clare Wigfall here). Haven’t read Li? Start with “Love in the Marketplace” from A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Sometimes, in my more indulgent moments as editor, I think of that story and channel the question that the narrator asks of her mother, who prides herself on the care she takes to make the very best hard boiled eggs that she has been selling for forty years: Who even notices?

The Fall 2012 issue was the first issue of Asymptote that I encountered when I decided to reconnect with literature after a long hiatus. And I’ll be perfectly candid: as a skeptic who has never been afraid of ghosts, I was somewhat bemused by the Halloween-tinged theme of fear and the supernatural. But when I delved a little deeper I found no Disneyfication of the old pagan ritual but rather an exploration of fear that encompassed both the everyday and the extraordinary. In a whirlwind blend of poetry, fiction, loud-mouthed drama, and even phantasmagorical art, readers encounter the ghosts of of memory, AIDS, old age, Alzheimer’s, lost cultural identity, and so much more.

The pieces from this issue play off of each other’s fears and discoveries so well that it is almost uncanny. Afzal Syed Ahmed’s poem, which begins “In your language every line begins from an opposite end,” responds to Aamer Hussein’s fear of returning to a ‘home’ that no longer feels like home—and not simply because both are translated from Urdu. As Hussein explains, “I’m losing my mother tongue. I’m a vagabond, I carry my home on my back. Now I shall turn this foreign tongue into a whip and lash them with their words.” When discussing in her interview why she doesn’t feel ready to be translated into Chinese, Yiyun Li demonstrates a similar fear of losing one’s language, of being misinterpreted, of being pushed out or forgotten. READ MORE…