Place: Ukraine

Winter 2024: Highlights from the Team

Get excited to dip into our Winter 2024 issue with these highlights from our team!

Ilya Kaminsky’s “Reading Dante in Ukraine” makes an impassioned case for the crucial role of art amid the horrors of war. What we need, as Dante’s journey shows us, is to defend ourselves with it: a tune to walk to, even in the underworld, as long as one still walks. In Miklós Vámos’s “Electric Train,”  translated by Ági Bori‚ the question-answer format gives the piece levity and rhythm, and the counterpoint of the humor interplaying with the troubled relationships brings it powerful depth. I found wisdom in the wry humor of Jaime Barrios Carrillo’s poems in David Unger’s translation. I love the image of angels spending the evening in their hotel rooms, ironing their enormous white wings.

—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor

The masterful language in Ági Bori’s translation, as though hand-holding the reader through a children’s story, and the simple act of gifting a present in the story belie the depth and complexity of emotional turmoil that wash over Miklós Vámos’s characters in “Electric Train,” a turmoil that seemingly hits out of nowhere like a wave yet in fact stems from a deep brewing well of built up memories and tensions. The contrast highlights all the more the challenges, and perhaps even limits, of recognizing and understanding another’s intentions, experiences, and feelings.

Rage, sorrow, resilience, helplessness, hope, a hunger for life and love and connection, grief, a numbing screaming despair: it is difficult to put into words the sensations that ran through me as I read Samer Abu Hawwash’s “My People” in Huda J. Fakhreddine’s translation. It cannot possibly compare to the feelings and thoughts of Samer Abu Hawwash and the Palestinian people, to the reality of having each day and moment narrow down to dried bread and tear tracks.

I was intrigued by Laura Garmeson’s discussion, in her review of Brazilian author Itamar Vieira Junior’s Crooked Plow, of the tongue as “both creator and destroyer. It has the power to make and unmake worlds.” It is a through line in Crooked Plow that reminds us of the power and possibilities of language and story to shape our lives. Garmeson’s review, in a way, is also a fire that kindles awareness of Itamar Vieira Junior’s work and the legacies, realities, and possible futures for Afro-Brazilian communities. The tongue as symbol also feels like a through line between these pieces in their rumination on what is gained and lost and pushed aside in the choices we make of what, how, and when we say (or write) things, or not.

—Julie Shi, Senior Executive Assistant

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Our Milestone 50th Issue Has Landed!

Featuring Emily Wilson, Ilya Kaminsky, Michael Cronin, Nam Le, and Samer Abu Hawwash alongside new work from 35 countries!

Living today is a feat of coexistence. In Me | You | Us, our Winter 2024 editionAsymptote’s landmark fiftieth!—people seek ways to equably share a world of jostling values, languages, and stories. Embracing the rare spotlight in mainstream English media almost never afforded translators, Emily Wilson discusses her groundbreaking translation of Homer and its place in the constellation of existing English Odyssies. Public intellectual Michael Cronin makes the case for translation’s centrality in the construction of new narratives necessary for the continued survival of our species amid other species. Headlining our Special Feature themed on coexistence, Nam Le’s frenzied poems are just as preoccupied with Carl Linnaeus’s taxonomy in the original Latin as they are driven to distraction by the insufficiency of that same scanty alphabet against the tonal splendor of Vietnamese. In Ilya Kaminsky’s Brave New World Literature contribution, truckloads of Dante’s Inferno being delivered to a besieged Kharkiv speak to a different, tenuous, and moving, coexistence. As support for Ukraine wavers in the US, we at Asymptote have kept up our coverage of the region also through Elina Sventsytska’s devastating poetry, a review of Oksana Lutsyshyna’s latest award-winning novel in English translation, and a dispatch about the chilling aftermath of a Russian dissident’s self-immolation. Alongside these, I invite you to discover the Mexican pioneer of magical realism Elena Garro, Palestinian poet Samer Abu Hawwash, Cuban artist Gertrudis Rivalta Oliva, and Romanian playwright Edith Negulici amid never-before-published work from a whopping thirty-five countries. All of it is illustrated by the Netherlands-based guest artist Ehud Neuhaus.

Winter-2024-v9
If, as Taiwanese author Lin Yaode put it, “literature’s history is really a history of readers of literature,” the history of Asymptote might also be in part a tale of its readers. But why should it stop there? To all collaborators and supporters, past and present, I say gratefully: this one is for you! As hinted at by last year’s closures of The White Review and Freeman’s—both similarly prestigious journals with a focus on world literature—existence (by which I mean mere survival) has not been easy. We made it to our 1st, 2nd, 3rd . . . and to our 50th edition because of you.

If you are an avid reader of the magazine and haven’t yet signed up, we hope you’ll consider becoming an official sustaining or masthead member today for as little as USD5 a month in addition to subscribing to our socials (FacebookXInstagramThreads) and our monthly Book Club. If you represent an institution advocating for a country’s literature, check out this (slightly outdated) slideshow and get in touch to sponsor a country-themed Special Feature, as FarLit has recently done. (The deadline to submit to our paid Faroese Special Feature is February 15th, 2024; the guidelines and a new call for reviewers to contribute to our monthly What’s New in Translation column can be found here). If you work for a translation program, prize, or residency, consider advertising through our myriad platforms, including our newly launched “Upcoming Opportunities in Translation” column. And, finally, if you’d like to join us behind the scenes in advocating for a more inclusive world literature, we just announced our very first recruitment drive of the year (deadline to apply: February 1st, 2024). Thank you for your readership and your support. We can’t wait to hear from you!

Summer 2023: Highlights from the Team

Still looking for entry points into our brand-new Summer issue? Members of our multi-continental team offer you several!

From the Indonesian Feature in the Summer edition, I was intrigued by the poems of Nirwan Dewanto, in vivid translations by John H. McGlynn, including “The Way to the Museum,” which begins with “All eyeballs dipped in the vinegar of the bourgeoisie will become pickled eyeballs” and continues, in long lines, to contemplate class, blindness, and revolution. It resonated against the pathos and absurdity in excerpts from Ulrike Draesner’s Schwitters, translated by Sharon Howe, and Tatiana Niculescu’s play Brancusi v. United States, fresh portraits of European Modernist artists Kurt Schwitters and Constantin Brâncuși, respectively. In each case, as the exile of the artist comes to the fore, the language of their place of origin is woven into the text, along with glimmers of humor. I particularly appreciated the note from Niculescu’s translator Amanda L. Andrei, which describes the process of working, as a heritage speaker, with her father Codin Andrei: “The emotional challenge [of translating this work] lies in my own hang-ups of being a non-native speaker due to political and historical forces beyond my control. When we co-translate, my father and I converse about Romanian culture from a perspective free of Western stereotypes of communism, vampires, and oppression, and we are delighted.” Finally, I was swept up in the atmospheric excerpt from Habib Tengour’s Women of the Odyssey (tr. Teresa Villa-Ignacio) while listening to Tengour’s mellifluous reading of the subtle text in French, describing those who console themselves by “sticking ear in seashell” or the “Unfinished / Wave bringing you to the threshold.”

—Heather Green, Visual Editor

I adore the rush of the speaker’s voice in Enrico Remmert’s The War of the Murazzi (tr. Antonella Lettieri), and its syntactical verbality, meandering but never losing control, digressing into tightness, into an accumulation of narrative stress. I love as well the narrator’s contextualisations of the backdrop of Turin and its historico-social problems with violence, particularly in a refugee context: Turin feels masterfully integrated into the plotline, like a combattant in the Murazzi war itself, and the vivacity of its violence continues running, naturalistic, organic, as the “river never stops running.”

The textuality of Mateo Díaz Choza’s Precipitations (tr. Lowry Pressly) is staggering: the dual columns that inform multiple methods of reading the poem, as well as the materiality of the poem, almost transforming it into an object itself. The way the words waterfall down the screen mimic the “drop,” a kind of fall from heaven, in a mode that lends itself to the digital form undoubtedly better than it would a magazine or a standard-format book, in the “depths of the page” that ultimately do not supercede the infinite scroll of the screen. When the poem’s substance and words meet and meld into each other, the poem’s two columns also merge into one, into the “weather,” “snow-mute” but “beautiful” in the void of its meaning. Choza creates an aesthetics of decay, of death, of abandonment, but of regeneration as well. The drop recurs again and again; the speaker will continue to recognise his lover, again and again.

I love the adventure of Amyr Klink’s One Hundred Days Between Sky and Sea (tr. Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren), the sense of movement through space and time that underpins the narrator’s paradoxical stillness, immobility. It is remininescent of Jules Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires, venturing beneath the sea or into the heart of volcanoes, on a journey pushing against the boundaries of human capacity. Klink melds the joy and exuberance of a child discovering the world with a practical, didactical style of writing that underpins the veracity of his voyage. I find this piece particularly apt for Asymptote as a vessel in the sea of understanding, a buoy of translation in the archipelago of languages.

I appreciate Asymptote‘s continued dedication to featuring Ukrainian writing in each issue, particularly Ukrainian writing about the Russian invasion. In my view, this is one of the most essential tasks of literature in translation: to continually draw attention to the diversity of global experiences; to remind us that our lives are not insular, that we are not islands. To that end, I found Anton Filatov’s Finding Myself at War (tr. Patricia Dubrava) both heart-wrenching and vital. As his “eyes bleed” before the cruelty of false news stories, so do readers’ eyes before the horrors of Ukrainian soldiers’ war experiences. They are given voice not in those news stories, but in literature. Sharing their stories—and I love the detail of the abandoned cat, ironically (or not?) named Death, as well as the final section on cinema—is an act of taken care.

I find Nicole Wong’s discussion of translation theory in The Terroir of a Single Work: Redefining Scope in Approaches to Translation incredibly pertinent and eloquent, and I particularly enjoy the ‘close reading’ section where she dissects her own translation of Proust. It’s a priviledge to experience the clarity and sharpness of such a mind through this piece. Her style is reminescent of Kundera’s narrator in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: playful, heavy on metaphor without falling into abstraction, clear, enlightening (and bearably so!). Since reading this piece, I’ve found myself returning to it as I internalise and integrate her analysis into my own understanding of translation.

 —Michelle Chan Schmidt, Assistant Editor (Fiction)

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2023

Taking a closer look at pieces on landscape’s multiplicity, unrequited love, and memory amidst grief.

Launched four days ago, our blockbuster Summer 2023 issue gathers never-before-published writing from a remarkable thirty countries—including a spotlight on Indonesia. Don’t know where to begin with this thrilling mélange of established and emerging voices? To help you dip your toe into this brand-new edition brimming with literary gems, our blog editors take you through their favorite pieces. Read on!

Within the tensions of unrequited love, the transformative faculties of ardor conduct their most astounding magic. Time is stretched to its utmost limits, unbound feelings hit a multiplicity of extremes, and the physical proof of reality collapse under the extraordinary pressures of belief. There’s not a lot of happiness that can be found amongst the shifting phantasms and polarities of this condition, but there is plenty of beauty, of poetry, of hope and awe, all of it stemming from nothing but the imagination in overdrive, sparked brilliantly alive by the beckoning figure of desire.

There are many examples of such love to be found in life and art, but one that seems particularly difficult to understand is the love of a fan. The indulgent culture of fandom gives free reign to displays of love-as-devotion, ranging from pedestrian claims of destiny to reckless acts of sacrifice—and because it often inflicts the young and the hyperbolic, its passions are seen as lacking any certifying element of truth. A one-sided, disingenuous, superficial love. But just try telling that to a fan.

In an excerpt from her novel, Phantom Limb Pain, Heejoo Lee does much to redeem this expressive, unrestrained love. Tracing the contours of a fan’s deep—even vicious—adulation for an idol, Lee’s forthright prose, translated with a sensitive colloquiality by Yoojung Chun, reaches a tender, natural honesty, describing an emotion that gives a rhythm to the days and months, a thrill to the pedestrian events of waiting and wanting, and a vividity to the fantasies making life more beautiful. Manok, the young woman who paves the way for our nameless protagonist into fandom, is “downright shameless,” keenly following her idol’s every move, openly displaying her possessive jealousy, and attributing her love to an act of God. Being a fan in South Korea’s multibillion-dollar idol industry is nothing less than laborious; fans religiously attend promotional events, spare no expense in purchasing goods and merchandise, and “pour their hearts out” at every opportunity. From the outside, one is made to wonder what any individual gets out of this all-consuming lifestyle, and here, Lee explains it to us through Manok, with the eloquence of absolute sincerity:

Their presence stayed mysterious over repeated encounters, and it refused to be locked into language. Their real presence rendered everything in high relief, so that everything—even their shadows or things that might be their shadows—became amazing to me.

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Bilingual Books: A Personal History

The process of doubling, of language regenerating itself, overlaps the process of translation and the weaving of two versions together. . .

Though not yet standard practice, bilingual editions of translated works are becoming increasingly welcomed by readers, both as a method of language engagement and an embodiment of a text’s various appearances and lives. In this following essay, Ian Ross Singleton discusses the power of reading and learning from a bilingual text, as well as the many dialogues that can transpire from this meeting of reader, writer, translator, and the worlds they each bring along.

I have bilingual books to thank for access to much of my knowledge of each and every language I utter—specifically Russian and, most recently, Ukrainian. I began to learn Russian about seventeen years ago. I was delighted to be able to access the originals, alongside helpful translations, in books such as Russian Stories / Русские рассказы, edited by Gleb Struve, which introduced me to the work of writers such as Evgeny Zamyatin and Fyodor Sologub, among others. Penguin also published a bilingual anthology of Russian poetry that became the basis of my education in this language, from which I memorized poems by Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Aleksandr Blok.

There are bilingual books by individual poets as well; Pushkin Threefold, translated by Walter Arndt (Dutton Books), gives the original Russian texts of Pushkin alongside literal English translations and verse translations. The book shows how translators must scrutinize, interpret, and create texts that are nonetheless complemented by ready comparisons with the original. Nativity Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a collection of the exile Joseph Brodsky, includes work written during the end-of-the-year holidays or discussing the story of Christ’s birth, and provides both a way of reading Brodsky’s original Russian poetry as well as elegies by poets who admired his writing, such as Derek Walcott, Anthony Hecht, and Seamus Heaney. Even the American poet Carol V. Davis wrote It’s Time to Talk About… / Пора говорить о…, a bilingual book of poems written in Russian and English, published in Russia by Simposium in 1997.

A bilingual book lends itself to a dialogue between two languages, the kind of negotiation that take place in a bi- or multilingual mind. It also creates a space for the kind of lingering that a bi- or multilingual person does with their words—the space a translator navigates in their relationship with both the original and their own renderings. It signifies companionship: of the author and the reader, of the author and the translator, and, if the reader is a language learner, of a teacher and a student. A bilingual book also does much to demonstrate the intimacy between the translator and their source texts—a relationship that involves a close scrutiny of language and meaning—and thus it also fosters the relationship between the two texts. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Here’s the Sun for You” by Vasyl Stus

learn to play this exciting game about war: imagine the enemy all around you, they have come to rob you of your blissful existence.

This Translation Tuesday, the unnerving poetry of Ukraine’s greatest post-war poet Vasyl Stus furnishes a haunting glimpse into the suffocating atmosphere of Ukraine in the Soviet era–all too resonant as Ukrainians once again struggle to survive in wartime. Hear from translators Bohdan Tokarsky and Nina Murray on Joyful Cemetery, the collection of poetry from which “Here’s the Sun for You” is taken, written two years before Stus’s arrest for dissidence and subsequent death in a Soviet forced labor camp in 1985: “Stus’s most politically radical volume, it [Joyful Cemetery] exposes, with a Kafkaesque subversion of logic, the grotesque nature of the Soviet totalitarian state. The running theme in the entire collection is the struggle, both as a human and as a Ukrainian dissident, to stay alive – free and authentic – in the kingdom of the living dead, which is rife with lies, artificiality, violence, and conformism.”

Here’s the sun for you, said the man with the cockade on his cap
and pulled out a nickel that looked like a tiny sun.
And here’s the road for you: he made a few steps to the right
and drew the edge of it with the toe of his boot.
To help you feel cheerful—turn on these tape-players and radios,
pick up these rattles
and bang them, bang them against your heads.
To avoid getting thirsty or hungry—
listen to the lectures and watch these popular films
about how happily you will all live
once you make it to the hereafter.
To avoid the rain dripping
down your necks—
remember:
every downpour
eventually ends
even the flood
from the windows
of heaven.
When you are cold—start singing these songs.
He handed out a sheaf of stamped lyrics
(approved by the censors for singing
in groups of two, three,
and even more voices).
When you feel that you need to rest,
learn to play this exciting game about war:
imagine the enemy all around you,
they have come to rob you of your blissful existence.
In a word, shoot at them, throw yourselves
onto machine gun nests
and fall under tanks.
Just don’t start running, he added.
Our kind benefactor!
Who would want to run from this paradise?
we cried in unison
as we struggled to see into the eyes
under the beak of the cap:
they looked like two drops of quicksilver.

Translated from the Ukrainian by Bohdan Tokarsky and Nina Murray.

Vasyl Stus (1938-1985) was a Ukrainian poet, prose writer, essayist and prolific translator. Widely recognized to be Ukraine’s greatest post-war poet, he has been celebrated for his intellectual, philosophical and psychological works engaged in radical self-exploration. Stus was also an uncompromising Soviet dissident. He grew up in Donetsk where he struggled against rampant Russification and later moved to Kyiv where his doctoral (and official poetic) work was cut short because of his public protest against the mass arrests of Soviet Ukrainian intellectuals. For his aesthetically insurgent poetry, as well as his indefatigable fight for human and national rights, he was arrested in 1972 and spent the rest of his life in Soviet prison and the Gulag. He died in 1985 in the Perm-36 labor camp. Despite constant oppression, Stus produced several poetry collections, including Зимові дерева (Winter Trees, 1970), Веселий цвинтар (Joyful Cemetery, 1970) and his magnum opus volume Палімпсести (Palimpsests, 1980), which he wrote, against all odds, in the Gulag.

Bohdan Tokarsky is a literary scholar and translator specializing in Ukraine’s twentieth-century and contemporary literature, currently based at the University of Potsdam (Germany). He completed his PhD on the works of Vasyl Stus at the University of Cambridge, where he taught as Affiliated Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies between 2018-2020. His essays and translations have appeared in literary magazines such as Los Angeles Review of Books and Apofenie. He is the author of The Un/Executed Renaissance: Ukrainian Soviet Modernism and Its Legacies (Berlin: FTS, 2021) and co-author of the verbatim play The Summer Before Everything (2016) on revolution and war in Ukraine. He is currently working on the first English-language monograph on Stus’s poetry.

Nina Murray is a Ukrainian-American poet and translator. She is the author of the poetry collection Alcestis in the Underworld (Circling Rivers Press, 2019) and several chapbooks. Her award-winning translations include Oksana Zabuzhko’s Museum of Abandoned Secrets, and Oksana Lutsyshyna’s Ivan and Phoebe (forthcoming from Deep Vellum). Her translation of Lesia Ukrainka’s Cassandra was performed at the Omnibus Theatre in London in 2022.

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Read more from Translation Tuesdays on the Asymptote blog:

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2023

Diving deep into the issue with spotlights on Bolivia, Ukraine, Romania, and more!

Our Spring 2023 issue is alive. Animated with the wide plethora of voices, lifeforms, and phenomenon from thirty different countries, this selection of world literature is moving, feeling, singing, and changing—wonderfully emblematic of writing’s capacities to transcend the page or the screen. To aid you in your explorations of this multivalent “Vivarium,” our blog editors present their favourites from the issue, including our first ever feature of Bolivian literature, and work from Portugal’s famed modernist, Fernando Pessoa. 

“Love does not fulfill itself,” the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy once wrote, “it always arrives in the promise and as the promise.” Though it seems almost flippant, in this line is the (not so well-kept) secret that has always led me to look for love in poems, that moves me to believe there is still no better medium than poetry to offer us love’s canyons and shadows, and that it is the poem’s purposeful language which allows us to seek love out—not in the validating or reciprocating constructs of daily life, but in truer forms: those sublime visions, conquerings of time, and suspensions of reality. Nancy knew that love is unfulfillable because its absolution is impossible, but it still comes to us as inextricable from eternity: the promise of love is love’s own perpetuity, the promise that love’s law is the one that overcomes all others. And though there are great, sweeping narratives of love in novels, there are wondrous portrayals of love in theatre and in cinema, there are photographs and paintings that capture love’s possibilities and devastations, but the reason I return to the poem is that it, too, is a form that recognises its own innate impossibility (because how can a word capture any of this), and then goes on to form its own laws, which enact the impossible.

Mariana Berenice Bredow Vargas’s alluring, propulsive work, “Let it Go,” is one of the most magical love poems I have come across in some time. Translated with the expert, time-keeping ear of Forrest Gander (whose prowess is especially evident in his rendering of the last lines), the piece begins with an invitation and does not wait a beat before seemingly taking us by the hand to sweep over the landscape, magic carpet-ing over the exhaustive obligations of everyday patterns and collected burdens, up and towards the vast and imagined horizon that separates the awake and the dreamed, into the kaleidoscoped marvels and cacophonic frequencies of everything the world has to offer. The poem is an exalted plea for the lover to recognise the availability of immense beauty and profound joy, but also a tender admittance that one can only get there travelling alongside another: “. . . there’s life // dreaming you past the pain, let’s go, I want / to dream it too . . .” Balancing the imploring voice of a hopeful romantic with the resonant fact that fantasy is essential to anyone wanting to live, within Vargas’s impatient call is the promise of love—a promise so beautiful, it almost doesn’t need to be kept. READ MORE…

Our Spring 2023 Edition Is Here!

Featuring Fernando Pessoa, Franca Mancinelli, Wu Ming-Yi, and Yolanda González in our animal-themed special feature

Experience the world anew through non-human eyes in “Vivarium,” our Spring 2023 issue! From macaques to marmots, muntjacs to mosshoppers and microscopic prokaryotes, a superabundance of literary life overflows from 30 different countries. In this thriving biosphere, you’ll find work from Estonia and Oman flowering in the same soil as Alaa Abu Asad’s Wild Plants and our first entry from Bolivia via Pulitzer Prizewinner Forrest Gander. The same Pangaean ecosystem sustains our animal-themed special feature headlined by Yolanda González, recipient of the 2001 Premio Café Gijón Prize, and 2018 Booker International longlistee Wu Ming-Yi. Alongside these, there are the always thought-provoking words of Italian poet Franca Mancinelli, which bloom in both the Interview and Poetry section—the latter also shelters Fernando Pessoa, whose brilliant co-translators Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari have rendered him in one of his most mordant heteronyms, Álvaro de Campos.

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What’s New in Translation: March 2023

New translations from the Yiddish, Japanese, and Esperanto!

In this month’s round up of the latest releases, we’re thrilled to introduce three singular works from rulebreakers, free thinkers, and true originals. From Japan, an early novella from the nation’s renowned enfant terrible, Osamu Dazai, gives a telling look at the writer’s internal monologue. From the Nobel laureate Issac Bashevis Singer, a bilingual edition of the Yiddish author’s story—in multiple translations—opens up an inquest into the translator’s pivotal role. And from the Ukrainian émigré Vasili Eroshenko, a collection of the author’s fairy tales, translated from the Japanese and Esperanto, presents a well-rounded selection of the transnational author’s politically charged work. Read on to find out more!

gimpl

Simple Gimpl by Isaac Bashevis Singer, a definitive bilingual edition with translations from the Yiddish by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, and David Stromberg, and Illustrations by Liana Finck, Restless Books, 2023

Review by Rachel Landau, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

Whether you choose to know him as “Simple Gimpl” or “Gimpel the Fool,” the main character of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novella is a likable, rambling man who finds himself in an unfortunate situation. His wife, Elka, is frequently using their shared home for affairs with other men, and all of Gimpl’s attempts to come to terms with the situation are complicated by his deep love for her. Even when the pair are forbidden by the town rabbi from seeing each other, Gimpl works tirelessly to provide for the children and for Elka. He feels betrayed to learn, at the end of Elka’s life, that the children were not really his—and his reaction to this deception is a surprising one.

The narrative in Simple Gimpl is slow-moving, reflective, and witty. It is an undeniable pleasure to read—and certainly not difficult to read multiple times in a row, as this edition of the book incites the reader to do. This “definitive bilingual edition,” released by Restless Books, includes back-to-back translations of the Yiddish work; first is Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Simple Gimpl,” which is followed immediately by Saul Bellow’s “Gimpel the Fool,” and this compendium of translations is decidedly about translation itself. Over the course of more than one hundred pages, one must realize that this is not a book about Gimpl, and not even about the differences between Saul Bellow’s Gimpel and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Gimpl. It is about the role of the translator; it is about the strange impossibility of rendering a story. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Snowman’s Son” by Aleksandr Kabanov

I also am a snowman’s son, despoiled of hearing and sight

This Translation Tuesday, we deliver unflinching poetry from Ukraine that sheds cold light on the child victims of the Russian invasion. On translating Aleksandr Kabanov’s pioneering, at-times enigmatic style, translator Marina Eskina writes: “I chose ‘The Snowman’s Son’ for its expressiveness, force, and, last but not least, because it is more translatable. It includes Biblical references with some overtones from the Russian classical poet Aleksandr Pushkin’s famous poem The Prophet which in turn is an allusion to the scene from the Book of Isaiah. My goal as a translator was to preserve these references and allusions without ruining author’s stylistics. Such close reading and search for meanings brought me closer to deciphering Kabanov’s metaphorical universe.” 

The Snowman’s Son

The snow of war that flies askew
ignoring all the rules,
it fiercely pierces us through and through
but partly stays the course.

Snow rested the seventh useless wing
on earth’s frozen spine,
the other luckier six it brought
underground to his son.

There, underground, the rink of ice
glitters and melts with the laughs
of kids killed casually by war:
let’s mold them a dad of snow.

But death is eerily cunning,
it swaps the crown for a pail—
amidst the hasty castling—
a carrot for the cross and nails.

READ MORE…

Winter 2023: Highlights from the Team

Dip your toe into our milestone Winter 2023 issue with these recommendations from our global team!

I found, as I sat down to read this issue, that what I was hungry for was urgency, vitality, wit and I found pieces that gave me what I was looking for. “There’s No Cure for the Dead” by Nazli Karabiyikoglu (tr. Ralph Hubbell) weaves a breathtakingly complex tapestry, rife with competing rhythms and energies. Selim Özdoğan’s “Seven Difficulties and One Ever-Narrowing Path” (tr. Katy Derbyshire) brought exactly the acerbic, incisive voice I needed. The Alfred Döblin story “The Woman Who Walked In Her Sleep” (tr. Joachim Redner) was filled with great verbs, gestures, colors, sounds, taking the reader on a dizzying trajectory, a plummet, really, from the character swanning about Berlin, showing off his colorful fashion ensemble, to a murderous rag doll come to life. Menke Katz’s poems with their structural challenges around diminishing or growing numbers of syllables and the love of Yiddish had me re-reading them and admiring the translation. And Aco Šopov’s deep, painful poems (tr. Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer) after the devastation of the 1963 Skopje earthquake show how despair communicates across decades and has much to say to us about loss and survival now, sixty years later.

—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor

This issue I was particularly blown away by the quality of the interviews published. The César Aira interview conducted by Michal Zechariah is truthfully hilarious, and the line of questioning really allows his trademark wit and absurdism to shine through. I found Geetanjali Shree’s interview with Rose Bialer to be incredibly generous and thoughtful, fascinating and sharp. In both cases, I thought a really strong sense of their writing came through thanks to the interviewers. The visual section brought together two incredible artists—I’m researching the interplay of poetic text and space at the moment, so Lynn Xu’s thinking (teased out by Laura Copelin) really spoke to me, and I appreciated the climate focus of Bahia Shehab’s work, and her interview with Heather Green. Last but certainly not least, I loved Jared Joseph’s review of Johannes Göransson’s Summer. As a researcher, Göransson’s thinking on poetry translation has been incredibly insightful, and I enjoyed the same insights applied to his work, really engaging in depth with poetry as a genre and mode of being. As a bonus, I thought the criticism section was pleasantly varied in terms of geographies and genres!

—Georgina Fooks, Director of Outreach

All the fiction pieces in this issue are truly marvelous, as if they’re in conversation with one another! For example, Kim Cho Yeop’s “Laura” (tr. Sukyoung Sukie Kim) and Dalih Sembiring’s “Floccinaucinihilipilificatius” (tr. Avram Maurits) can be seen as companion pieces, as both stories deal with corporeal limitations and spiritual transcendence. Laura’s sci-fi context, on various conditions related to body dysmorphia, eloquently evokes the plight of non-binary and transgender groups, while Floccinaucinihilipilificatius represents a metaphorical lotus—its trajectory from pain and putrefaction toward the light of maternal love. There’s a sense of metaphysical wonder to both stories—even though one is inspired by science and the other by magical realism. READ MORE…

Texts in Context: José Vergara on the Russian Afterlife of James Joyce

[I]t made me slow down to appreciate how that convoluted language makes us understand life and experience anew.

This is the third edition of Texts in Context, a column in which Katarzyna Bartoszyńska seeks out academics who contribute to and elucidate the world of literary translation, revealing their deeper studies into texts both well-known and overlooked.  

Today, we trace the legacy of James Joyce to its significant resonance in Russian literature, which José Vergara examines in his cogent and deeply-researched text, All Future Plunges to the Past. By taking the work of five major Russian writers as example, Vergara illuminates the throughline of Joycean ideas and themes, both in their universality and their recontextualization and transformation amidst Soviet and Russian history. In this following interview, Vergara discusses how these writers used Joyce to make sense of their own realities, Russian-language literature in this present moment, and texts from within the prison.

Katarzyna Bartoszynska (KB): Tell me about All Future Plunges to the Past!  

José Vergara (JV): My book examines James Joyce’s impact on Russian literature from the mid-1920s, when the first Soviet translations started appearing, through 2020. Of course, that basically means I’m looking at his “influence”—but it goes beyond that. I’m more interested in how, on one hand, Joyce became emblematic of larger trends in Russian attitudes toward Modernism, intertextuality, generational conflicts, artistic identity, and other big issues; and, on the other hand, he took on various forms or manifestations based on how certain Russian writers read him—literally and figuratively. Previous scholars had examined the critical response to Joyce in the Soviet Union and émigré communities, but they paid much less attention to his place in Russian literature itself. So, in All Future Plunges to the Past, I present five case studies of major writers who addressed Joyce directly in their fiction: Yury Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin. The book explores how and why they were drawn to Joyce’s novels and ideas, interpreting them as an alternative path in world literature based on their respective biographical, historical, and cultural contexts. In this reading, Joyce becomes a prism through which to interrogate the question of cultural heritage in Russia, and a means for these writers to better understand themselves and their work. That’s at the core of the book: the question of literary lineages and how artists fashion their own histories through their writing.

KB: How artists fashion their own histories in their writing: could you say a little more about that?

JV: The central through line of my book is fathers and children, primarily sons. It struck me that the aforementioned writers were all, in one way or another, engaging with Joyce’s Shakespeare theory, which Stephen Dedalus explains in episode nine of Ulysses. Basically, he argues that creative artists, such as Shakespeare, become fathers to themselves by leaving behind their works, their lineage, a version of themselves for posterity to—hopefully—admire. At the same time, Stephen suggests that you have to select a literary forefather to supplant the biological. Each of the writers I feature consider this theory and respond to it in their idiosyncratic ways. For instance, Nabokov’s protagonist in The Gift pursues this path, but not to replace his biological father, who disappeared on a scientific expedition. Instead, like Nabokov, he wants to unite the cultural heritage that he lost as a result of the 1917 Revolution, and to bridge those gaps in emigration. All their readings of Joyce are operating on this metatextual level, as they come to terms with who they are in the history of Russian literature. READ MORE…

Help us toward our big 5-0 this #GivingTuesday

A special message from our editor-in-chief

Dear reader,

Time flies. It’s almost the year-end. How was 2022 for you?

Amid new work from a staggering 75 countries across four quarterly issues, we were very proud to have shone a spotlight on Ukrainian voices this year, voices like Zenia TompkinsAndrii KrasnyashchikhYaryna ChornohuzGalina Itskovich and Sergey Katran (outraged by what we saw on the news, we also announced a #WeStandwithUkraine column on February 25, one day after the Russian invasion began). When Roe was overturned in June, we worked hard behind the scenes to center women’s experiences in the recent Fall issue.

But this year was also marked by great uncertainty. For one, inflation everywhere meant that some team members were no longer able to continue in their roles—this meant that many of us took on extra work to maintain our quality and output; we didn’t want to let our readers down.

We also had to brace ourselves for cancellations in Book Club membership when we announced our first increase in subscription fee after five years, no longer able to absorb the increases in costs (of postage, and of the titles) ourselves. And, on a more personal front—as contributors to the postponed Summer edition knew—I came down with COVID this July, with symptoms that have lingered till now. Though my health is in a better place today than, say, one month ago, nothing is assured about our future: We still don’t qualify for the generous funding that many like organizations from the US or the UK receive.

So, on #GivingTuesday, I have to ask on behalf of my entire team: If our work this past year has meant anything to you, will you take just three minutes and pledge five dollars a month to our mission?

Because we can do even more for world literature with your help. Even better, sign up as a patron or masthead member. To show our gratitude, I’ll even personally put together a care package for you.

Around the corner, our big 5-0 (in issues, not years!) looms. Help us stick around until then. Our 50th edition will be all the more magnificent for it.

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Gratefully,

Lee Yew Leong, editor-in-chief

Hate Makes Us Weak

We should never forget that this war is about defending freedom, democracy and truth against dictatorship, chauvinism and lies.

As Europeans try to make sense of the war on their doorstep, boycotts targeting Russia have reached past the country’s oil exports to its poets, painters and tennis players. The invasion of Ukraine earlier this year set off the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II; it also, according to past contributor Vladimir Vertlib (tr. Julie Winter), inspired a wave of “outright hostility” against Russian literature. This thoughtful essay by the Vienna-based Jewish Russian writer is an argument about the baby and the bathwater—Pushkin and Putin—and a strident call for nuance in wartime.

When I was a child, other people always knew who I was better than I did. One day my parents told me that I was Jewish. But I wanted to be a Leningradian because I was born in Leningrad, known today as St. Petersburg. My parents laughed. They said that you could be a Jew and someone from Leningrad, that was no problem, even if you lived in Vienna. I didn’t feel Austrian or Viennese at that time, although I was undoubtedly at home in our neighborhood Brigittenau. To this day, parts of this Viennese district, as well as the adjoining Leopoldstadt, have remained the only place in the world where I feel I belong.

This ambivalent identity confusion was soon as much a part of my being as was my accent-free German and everyone’s mispronunciation of my first name, which I accepted and eventually even adopted myself. For my Austrian classmates and teachers, however, the matter was perfectly clear: I was a typical Russian. Why I was “typical” was a mystery to me because whenever my classmates or teachers described something as “typically Russian,” they immediately said that they “of course” didn’t mean me.

Brigittenau, where I went to elementary school and later to high school, had belonged to the Soviet occupied zone in Vienna after the war; the memory of that time was still fresh almost fifty years ago when I started school. The “Russians” were said to be brutal and uncultured. They drank water from toilet bowls, screwed light bulbs into sockets that were disconnected from any source of power and then wondered why they didn’t light up, raped women en masse, stole, robbed, murdered and destroyed senselessly, simply out of anger and revenge. Russians are emotional, it was said. Sometimes they’re like children—warm, naive and helpful—but they could suddenly become brutal and unpredictable like wild animals. They were, after all, a soulful people, in both negative and positive respects. The latter was attributed to me. If my essays or speeches were emotional, it was said to be due to my “Russian soul,” and people thought they were paying me a compliment. I, on the other hand, was always unpleasantly affected by these attributions, because I knew, even in elementary school, that Jews and Russians were not the same thing. No Russian, my parents explained to me, would ever accept me as his equal. In the former Soviet Union, ethnic groups, which included Jews, were clearly distinct. So my supposed “Russian soul” was not only embarrassing, it was also presumptuous. I was assigned something that I was not at all entitled to, based on my ethnicity. READ MORE…