Posts filed under 'absurdity'

What’s New in Translation: October 2021

October 11, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel, Kent Kosack, and Thuy Dinh

New works in translation from Poland, Croatia, and the Netherlands!

This month, our selections of the best in world literature are unified by their writers’ undeniable strength of voice and masterful control of the narrative form. From the Netherlands, a collection of A.L. Snijder’s very short stories—a genre invented by their author—revels in the unreal natures of our reality. From Croatia, the dark humorist stylings of Robert Perišić masterfully delineate the unrealiable boundaries of nations and psychologies. And from Poland, reporter and writer Margo Rejmer brings us a rare and intimate glimpse at Communist Albania under the fractious rule of Enver Hoxha, from the people who lived through it. 

night train

Night Train by A.L. Snijders, translated from the Dutch by Lydia Davis, New Directions, 2021

Review by Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora

            “For more than fifty years I have cherished one wish: to travel. This wish is part of another wish: for reality without reality—stories that are indistinguishable from the truth.”

—A.L. Snijders, “Baalbek” from Night Train

The key to understanding A.L. Snijders’s very short stories (dubbed zkv—zeer korte verhalen) lies inside “Baalbek,” where the Dutch author connects his desire to visit Lebanon’s ancient Roman outpost with creating stories that depict “reality without reality.” The Stone of the Pregnant Woman, a megalith found in Baalbek and enshrouded with otherworldly presence, represents the perfectly magnified symbol for Snijders’s miniature approach. His Night Train—a collection of ninety-one zkv translated by Lydia Davis—is a shapeshifting amalgam of fable, zen koan, commentary, lyrical essay, and autobiography. As an immersive foray into the unknown, the instability of Snijders’s narrative form produces a trompe-l’oeil effect “indistinguishable from the truth,” giving the reader a sensation of being at once disoriented and illuminated.

Born Peter Cornelis Müller in 1937 in Amsterdam, Snijders came from a large, bourgeois Catholic family. The dual forces of freedom and order constitute the main themes of his life and work. Artistic and cosmopolitan, Snijders nevertheless chose a stable career teaching at a police academy and led a placid life as a gentleman farmer in rural Achterhoek, Holland’s eastern region. Even after being awarded the Constantijn Huygens Prize in 2010—one of the three most prestigious literary honors in Holland—Snijders did not, for years, deviate from the low-key routine of reading his work on an early morning radio show and circulating his steady flow of zkv among an email list of loyal readers. Ever industrious, he passed away this past June while working on new material.

The commonplace in Snijders’s oeuvre is imbued with mystery. In “Minor Characters,” Snijders’s alter-ego wonders if his compressed fiction may actually be “unpsychological novel[s] for people who understand nothing about psychology.” If reality resembles an unseen but anarchic mole emerging each night to turn Snijders’s garden into a surrealist landscape (“Mole”), then the author’s aesthetic philosophy suggests holistic means to affirm “what can never be understood.” This notion of reality as unknowable, or “unpsychological,” represents the trademark of Snijders’s fiction, allowing his narrative—as both burrowing animal and spy—to elude conventional expectations and assume an enigmatic depth, despite its compact form. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Funeral” by Gabi Csutak

April 23, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Anna Bentley

I tried to imagine what it would be like if I really was planted out on that bare hillside to gaze for years at the gravestones.

In today’s Translation Tuesday, Gabi Csutak captures the conflicting emotions that funerals often produce. Her young narrator, soaked in rain and mud at a relative’s burial, muses on the absurdity of death and the rituals surrounding it. 

The ground had been sodden for days when they took Grandad’s coffin out to the cemetery beyond the bridge. All the relatives marched behind it in single file between the graves where the ground had become a muddy stream. Uncle Árpi went in front, of course, and set the pace, like he did on every family hike. He had rolled up his trousers with care and pinned them in place with clothes pegs, like cyclists do, so that his yellow boots could lead the way. Dad set off eagerly after him, but the soles of his shoes were so smooth that he slipped all over the place. He kept trying different cross-country skiing manoeuvres to stop himself from falling or crashing into anything. But from time to time his own trouser legs tripped him up. The fabric reached the ground and had soaked up the mud in a manner of minutes, almost up to his knees. He clutched at Aunt Zsóka from time to time, then pushed himself off again. She was the most secure point, her stiletto heels drilling deep into the earth with every step, but every time she freed herself from the mud again it was touch and go whether she would need to proceed barefoot. You could see the sole of her foot straining, arching improbably under her laddered tights. She lifted her shoe out with her toes, then once again sank into the mud.

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Announcing our January Book Club Selection: Night School by Zsófia Bán

January 31, 2019  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Jacob Silkstone

Night School is a textbook like no other.

With our February selection, the Asymptote Book Club is taking subscribers back to school. Fortunately, Zsófia Bán’s Night School is a school unlike any other—populated by a cast of literary and cultural figures ranging from Frida Kahlo (and her double) to Laika the space dog. Each chapter of Bán’s textbook primer is filled with ‘defiant irreverence’ and the perfect combination of wit and profundity.

We’re delighted to be sending our subscribers one of the year’s most coruscatingly original short story collections, in Jim Tucker’s superb English translation. If you’d like to join us in time for next month’s Book Club pick, you’ll find all the information you need on our web page. Once you’ve joined, head to our Facebook group to meet other Book Club members and contribute to the discussion. We look forward to seeing you there!

Zsofia Ban Night School

Night School: A Reader for Grownups by Zsófia Bán, translated from the Hungarian by Jim Tucker, Open Letter, 2019

Reviewed by Jacob Silkstone, Assistant Managing Editor

Let’s begin with a simple biographical detail: Zsófia Bán has spent much of her life in academia, and her first novel (originally published in Hungarian in 2007) is a textbook. It seems barely necessary to add that Night School is a textbook like no other.

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Translation Tuesday: “The Attack of the Living Chairs” by Jonathan Minila

January 15, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Will Stockton

When I stood up, the chairs arranged themselves menacingly.

This week, we present a darkly funny short story in which an important dinner party is hijacked by a gang of malevolent chairs. Written by Jonathan Minila and translated from the Spanish by Will Stockton, “The Attack of the Living Chairs” is both an absurdist romp and a mocking portrait of Mexico’s ruling class. 

The chairs revealed themselves as soon as we crossed into the dining room. They drew back to the wall and surrounded us as we approached the table.

The women screamed. We did, too. The guest of honor—the President’s wife—swooned and fainted. I served as the home’s proprietor, and something had to be done.

I tried to pick her up, feeling ridiculous, disgusted to touch a woman with so much fat on her arms and such a formidable mustache. Still, everyone hoped I would find a solution.

My wife seemed to have been rendered speechless. The others, too. No one moved. Only me, who struggled to lift this influential fat woman.

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English without Pain

June 2, 2014  |  in Interviews  |  by Miriam Sherwood

An interview with Thomas Smetryns on his untraditional, comic opera made with English language-learning records

Belgian composer Thomas Smetryns wrote one third of Triptych, a new opera commissioned and created by Opera Erratica. His piece A Party uses the English language-learning records L’anglais sans peine from 1950s France as the basis for an absurdist comedy.

How did you come across the L’anglais sans peine records?

I DJ with 78rpm records with a friend, and I was always looking for new material, because we didn’t want to only play the regular Bing Crosby and Andrews Sisters songs. I found the German-language records first and then I started to look for them, especially, and collect them. They’re all from the 1950s because they stopped producing 78rpm at the end of the 1950s.

How did you choose which records to use in A Party, your section of Triptych?

I was quite fascinated by L’anglais sans peine because there is a lot of material, it had the book with it, and because it was just quite funny. The accents of the records… the way they pronounce the words, as a Belgian I find them very refined, but for Patrick and other native speakers they are funny just because it’s a very old-fashioned way of talking.

I had already transcribed the whole record, so when Patrick [Eakin-Young, director and co-librettist] and I were trying things out for Triptych, I said he should take a look at it. He was completely enthusiastic, so from then on it went really fast, I think two weeks later I got the first draft of the libretto from him.

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