Posts filed under 'art of translation'

Principle of Decision: Translation from Swahili

October 5, 2023  |  in Principle of Decision, Translations  |  by Albert Mwamburi, Hassan Kassim, Idza Luhumyo, Jay Boss Rubin, and Wambua Muindi

. . . the auditory and visual imagery that gather as you read the Swahili version . . . How [to] transfer the same to the English version?

This edition of Principle of Decision—our column that highlights the decision-making processes of translators by asking several contributors to offer their own versions of the same passage—provides a look at how translators render the subtleties of a poem with multiple layers of meaning in a new language. This round, Asymptote contributor Wambua Muindi leads our Swahili edition of the column.

Ken Walibora’s Kufa Kuzikana was originally published in 2003 and just clocked two decades since publication. For this edition of Principle of Decision, I chose the first two paragraphs of Walibora’s novel partly to celebrate it but also to appreciate the story it follows in the context of what occupied the first half of 2023 in Kenya—the cycle of anti-government and cost-of-living protests, the ensuing police brutality, and the ethnic targeting and profiling.

I also found these paragraphs appropriate here given that introductions are always novel and always set the tone for a story. In this case not only do the two paragraphs borrow the geography of Kiwachema, the fictional country the novel is set in, they also illustrate the constant movement and consequent contact that is the backdrop against which Walibora animates post-colonial Kenya. The friendship between Akida and Tim—the novel’s main characters—becomes a fable for the nation and demonstrates the exclusionary logic of national politics despite the promise of nation-building. 

I wanted to see what different translators’ English renditions of the novel’s opening lines would sound and feel like. Of particular interest was the auditory and visual imagery that gather as you read the Swahili version, and the way these sentences introduce the tone of the narration. How does a translator transfer the same to the English version?  This is also a question many of the translators asked themselves. Phrases like ‘dhahiri shahiri’ and ‘miinamo ya vilima’ which embody the particularity of Swahili sounds, posed an interesting challenge. The particularity with which the translators supply the tonality of Swahili is fascinating. Take for instance the last word: It is translated differently by each of the translators below, showing the different interpretations given and techniques employed in English translation.

—Wambua Muindi

READ MORE…

Principle of Decision: Translation from Urdu

June 28, 2023  |  in Principle of Decision, Translations  |  by Farah Ali, Haider Shahbaz, Hammad Rind, Naima Rashid, and Sabyn Javeri

Each of the four translators interacts with the same, short poem through the filter of their individual personalities.

This edition of Principle of Decision—our column that highlights the decision-making processes of translators by asking several contributors to offer their own versions of the same passage—provides a look at how translators render the subtleties of a poem with multiple layers of meaning in a new language.

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I chose a poem by Iftikhar Arif, a revered Urdu poet. It was written for his son, Ali, and was published in his first volume of poetry, Mehr-e-Doneem (The Divided Sun, Daniyal Publications, 1983). This poem is a father’s sendoff; as he says a farewell to his son, he feels a lump in his throat and slips some blessings and lessons for the future into his farewell, barely masking his fear. A companion piece, the short poem “Dua” (Prayer), was written for his daughter, and published in the same volume, containing a similar wish of goodwill.

The poem is not to be read at face value. Defeat is baked into its premise, and what the poet is saying out loud, he knows to be the opposite of the truth. It is a prayer for the impossible, asking a grown man not to lose his innocence. There is rupture in the title itself: Aik tha raja chota sa—(once upon a time) there was a little prince. It’s the tone in which you speak to a child, who is uninitiated into the realities of life. It’s the tone of lullabies. There is a clinging to a make-believe world in the language, an attempt to soften the edges, to make the truth less harsh, to almost wish it away.

The first word of the first line starts with the son’s full name, Ali Iftikhar. The once-little prince is a grown man, which the poet acknowledges, but then slips back to addressing the grown man through his mother, a line repeated thrice in the poem: “I have told Ali Iftikhar’s mother not to let him…”.

Throughout the short poem, there is a push and pull. On one hand, there’s an attempt to glaze over the truth and to control the circumstances; on the other hand, there’s truth leaking through the veneer of denial. The repetition is like a broken record to convince the speaker himself. There is also a contrast between the naïveté of the language and the knowledge of truth beneath it—and bridging both, a father’s love. He tells the son to stay away from the corruption of the world by asking his mother to keep him from transgressing the different circles of protection: the garden, the neighbour’s garden, the street and the world beyond. Which grown man hasn’t transgressed these limits?

The four translators, sensitive to the central challenge posed by the poem, have found different solutions to address the tug in the original. Farah Ali is alert to the rhythm and pace in the original. Hammad Rind pays attention to calibrating the register and forms of address, important tonal considerations for the poem. Haider Shahbaz brings an experimental take to his reading, leaning into its dark undertones. Sabyn Javeri sees the poem through a feminist lens, asking questions that trouble her as a woman.

I’ve always seen translation as a conversation—a conversation between the author and the translator, the translator and the work, a translator and other translators, a translator and a reader. This folio shows how rich that conversation can be. Each of the four translators interacts with the same, short poem through the filter of their individual personalities.

—Naima Rashid READ MORE…

How Tove Ditlevsen Opened the Way for My Life as a Translator

June 26, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Tiina Nunnally

I worked hard on the translation, typing the manuscript three times on my electric typewriter.

In 2021, two publishing giants—Penguin and Farrar, Straus and Giroux—sent Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen’s collected memoirs, The Copenhagen Trilogy, out into the world. A huge hit upon release, readers praised Ditlevsen’s emotional power, her passionate dedication to the life of words, her wry humour, and her uncanny, incisive gift for description. Long celebrated in her home country, Ditlevsen had taken a long time to find the same audience in the English language—and it is largely thanks to the dedication and prowess of her translator, Tiina Nunnally, that we were finally able to meet this brilliant mind on the page. Now, in this essay, Nunnally tells the story of the discursive journey that the Trilogy took to its now-massive Anglophone audience, and how Ditlevsen opened up the way for her to change her life.

At the end of Youth, the second volume of her collected memoirs, The Copenhagen Trilogy, Danish author Tove Ditlevsen receives a copy of her first published book, a slim poetry collection titled Pigesind (Girl Soul). And for her, it’s a revelation:

My book! I take it in my hands and feel a solemn happiness, that isn’t like anything I’ve ever felt before. . . . It can’t be taken back anymore. It is irretrievable. . . . Maybe my book will be in the libraries. Maybe a child, who in all secrecy is fond of poetry, will someday find it there. And that odd child doesn’t know me at all. She won’t think that I’m a living young girl who works, eats, and sleeps like other people. . . .Tonight I want to be alone with it, because there’s no one who really understands what a miracle it is for me.

When I translated those words in 1984 and then, a year later, saw them in print for the first time, it was an equally momentous experience. My translations of Ditlevsen’s Childhood and Youth were issued by Seal Press in one volume under the title Early Spring. It was my first published book, and how it came to be published at all seemed to me a miracle. READ MORE…

The 2023 PEN/Heim Grantees Talk Translation: Part I

May 22, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Caroline G. Froh, Mark Tardi, and Richard Prins

Doesn’t the magic of writing happen in those rare bursts where you manage to coax an extra voice out of your mind?

The PEN/Heim Translation Grant is one of the most reliable indicators as to which texts will come to be considered vital in the English-language literary landscape, with past grantees including George Szirtes translating the Hungarian giant of postmodernism, László Krasznahorkai; Daniel Borzutsky translating the Chilean revolutionary poet, Raúl Zurita, Jennifer Croft translating Polish Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk, and Anton Hur translating the celebrated South Korean genre-bender, Bora Chung. The aim of the grant is to support translators during their vital and difficult work of working on a text, and as a result, the texts that come to English-language readers by way of this gift are often exemplary examples of not only the writers’ intelligence, imagination, and effort—but equally importantly, the translator’s.  

In this three-part series, Asymptote has asked the 2023 PEN/Heim grantees to talk about their work in progress; their responses, brimming with excitement, conviction, and connection, are a testament to how much translators put themselves into their labor. Through the varied approaches and languages, they share the important commonality of surety: that the work they’ve been entrusted with has an immense potential to illuminate our reality, enlarge our world, and enrich our experiences of literature.

Here, Mark Tardi ruminates on the importance of discipline; Richard Prins talks about following instinct; and Caroline Froh opens up about the physical effect that reading has on us.  

Mark Tardi on Olga Hund:

In The Poethical Wager, Joan Retallack argues intelligently for the creative embrace of life’s unexpected swerves, the “unsettling transfiguration of once-familiar terrain [which tends] to produce disorientation, even estrangement, by radically altering geometries of attention.” Olga Hund’s remarkable and award-winning debut novel, Psy ras drobnych (Dogs of Smaller Breeds) was such a swerve for me, thanks to James Guerin and Klaudia Cierluk, editors at Berlin Quarterly, who commissioned me to translate an excerpt. Hund’s writing pulled me in immediately, and I felt sure that English-speaking readers would connect with the book much like I had.

Dogs of Smaller Breeds takes place in an in-patient women’s psychiatric ward in southern Poland and via the narrator—who may or may not be the pseudonymous Hund herself—we’re offered short vignettes, unabashed and unapologetic glimpses into the lives of women who would be otherwise largely invisible and neglected. In one poignant and heartbreaking segment, Hund’s narrator observes that:

If it weren’t for papers: documents from orphanages, correctional institutions and prisons, hospital records, blue cards and prescriptions; and if it weren’t for their various small objects: a spoon from the canteen, a prayer book, a photo of two Yorkies torn out of a newspaper, a cassette with the inscription “Mother” and the chaplet of Our Lady recorded on it, a tote bag washed and folded evenly—no one would remember that these women, who are here today, were alive at all.

Hund doesn’t attempt to construct a comprehensive picture, which would reveal some neatly packaged truth. This is one of the most compelling aspects of the book—the devastating intimacy and scaled back narratives propel the story forward, à la Fleur Jaeggy or Jenny Offill. For instance, in one scene, the narrator recounts how the women are not so crazy as to have forgotten the abuses they’ve suffered, most often from family and partners. Hund uses a neologism, “męże-węże,” which literally would be something like “husband-snakes,” but the term rhymes perfectly while simultaneously magnifying menace. I rendered this as “spouse-louse,” which loses some of the historical connotations of snakes and viperous dangers, but the parasitical qualities of lice—surviving on the blood of another—echoes other aspects in the novel. READ MORE…

Principle of Decision: Translation from Chinese

March 29, 2023  |  in Principle of Decision  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

This column is an exercise in transparency, an effort to lift the curtain and show the undercurrents of the translator’s mind.

The second edition of Principle of Decision—our column that highlights the decision-making processes of translators by asking several contributors to offer their own versions of the same passage—demonstrates translation’s capacity to reveal shades of meaning in the source text—here a passage from Chinese writer 林棹 Lin Zhao.

轻而又轻的一天。时隔多年，那轻而又轻的一天生机犹在。如果你推却一切责任，对他人的痛苦视而不见，去拥抱巨大的明亮、明亮的寂静、寂静的自我，你就能短暂地占有那种轻而又轻。

qīng ér yòu qīng        de yī tiān            
轻而又轻                     的一天。
A light and light         day.

shí gé duō nián
时隔多年
After many years,

nà qīng ér yòu qīng de yī tiān     
那轻而又轻的一天
that light and light day

shēng jī yóu zài
生机犹在。
still exists.

rú guǒ nǐ tuī què                 
如果你推却
If you push aside

yī qiē zé rèn
一切责任，
all responsibilities,

duì tā rén de tòng kǔ         
对他人的痛苦
to the pain of others

shì ér bù jiàn
视而不见，
turn a blind eye,

qù yōng bào          
去拥抱
go to embrace

jù dà de míng liàng, míng liàng de jì jìng
巨大的明亮、明亮的寂静、
the enormous and bright, bright silence,

jì jìng de zì wǒ
寂静的自我，
the self of silence

nǐ jiù néng duǎn zàn dì zhān yǒu   
你就能短暂地占有
you can also briefly possess

nà zhǒng qīng ér yòu qīng
那种轻而又轻。
that kind of light and light.

This passage is taken from the Chinese writer 林棹 Lin Zhao’s debut novel, 流溪 Liu xi, published in 2020. Its narrative takes place throughout Lingnan, a region on China’s southeast coast, weaving through dense urbanities and viridescent ruralities, the subtropical heat and myriad languages, to tell the story of a young woman whose daily life, from its very earliest days, is inextricable from violence, metamorphosis, and fantasy. A tribute to high Nabokovian style, Liu xi is a stunning, inimitable example of what is possible in the Chinese language—the music it pronounces, the visions it conjures, the delicacy and intricacy that can be excavated from its logograms.

READ MORE…

Principle of Decision: Translation from Armenian

January 2, 2023  |  in Principle of Decision  |  by Kristina Tatarian and Meghan Racklin

[This] will, we hope, allow for a more direct look at the choices translators make—at the principle of decision they employ in their practice.

Each translation speaks with two voices; that of the author and that of the translator. Yet, it is often when they have done their work well that the voices of translators go unrecognized. Their names are left off of covers, and their efforts mentioned only as brief asides in reviews. 

This neglect fails to give translation its due. Walter Benjamin wrote: “Reading a translation as if it were an original work in the translation’s own language is not the highest form of praise;” it is, rather, a failure to fully considering a work in translation, with its two voices and two languages. In an essay for Astra, translator and writer Lily Meyer references Susan Sontag’s definition of style when discussing translation as an art, stating that “to make art without having or consulting your own stylistic preferences strikes me as impossible . . . [Sontag] defines style, more or less, as ‘the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of an artist’s will.’ Surely a translator’s will can also be found inside anything they translate, animating the text and powering it to full-fledged life.” 

This new column, Principle of Decision, is an effort to make the styles of translators more visible. In each installment, one translator will select a famous sentence or brief passage from the literature of a certain language, and several translators will then offer their own translations of it. The differences and similarities between the translations will, we hope, allow for a more direct look at the choices translators make—at the principle of decision they employ in their practice.

For our first edition, we are proud to feature a selection from the Armenian, chosen by Editor-at-Large Kristina Tatarian. Kristina’s word-for-word translation is accompanied by translations from three translators, whose work can also be found in the Fall 2022 issue’s Special Feature on Armenian literature. Kristina has also provided explanatory commentary on her selection, as well as on the translators’ choices.

—Meghan Racklin

 

One peaceful morning  was   one     sad      morning

Մի խաղաղ  առավոտ  էր  .  մի  տխուր  առավոտ :

Mi  haghah    aravot         er      mi   tehur  aravot
˘       ˘     ¯      ˘  ˘   ¯          ˘        ˘    ˘   ¯    ˘  ˘  ¯

This sentence is from the beginning of “Gikor” by Hovhaness Tumanian, one of the central figures in Armenian literature. Based on a real story that Tumanian had heard as a child, “Gikor” is a tale about the dreams and hardship of a twelve-year-old boy, the eponymous Gikor, as his father sends him away from his home in the village to “become a man” and earn a living in the big city. Unfortunately, the boy’s precocious aim to alleviate his family’s hardship eventually ends his life. This sentence marks the moment in the story when Gikor’s mother and siblings watch him leave; accompanied by his father, he moves further and further away from home. The story comes full circle as the father returns to the village—only this time, Gikor is not there anymore. The different translations of this sentence, which presages the early death of the young protagonist, highlight the theme of the Armenian Special Feature (half-lives) by presenting us the “half-life” of the protagonist, a life that prematurely ended. This poignant story may be seen as an emblem of cultural memory about the Armenian Genocide, as Tumanian himself was at the forefront of humanitarian efforts to save children. The contributing translators have each found their own way of translating this memorable sentence, which marks the day when this young and sensitive boy leaves his home, and never returns. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2022

August 1, 2022  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Erica X Eisen, and Xiao Yue Shan

This issue deeply reckons with fixing selves that have been lost, falsely performed, and fractured.

The Summer 2022 Issue is our forty-fifth edition, featuring work from thirty-one countries! From newly translated fiction by luminaries such as Elfriede Jelinek and Thomas Bernhard, to our special feature highlighting Swiss literature, and to probing essays that interrogate the adoption of new languages, these intricately linked writings feature characters who are thrown into abysses both personal and political but discover moments of solace, communion, and revelation. To introduce you to another rich, wide-ranging issue, our blog editors discuss their favorite pieces.

In Elisa Shua Dusapin’s 2021 National Book Award-winning novel, Winter in Sokcho, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins from the French, the unnamed narrator, a young French Korean woman living on the border between North and South Korea, experiences an ongoing crisis of identity due her inability to be seen, displacement, and strained relationships with her domineering mother and absent boyfriend. In the novel, the narrator seeks to recover a self that has been rendered invisible. One of Dusapin’s most fitting metaphors for this reassembling of the self is the narrator’s constant search for her reflection in the mirror of the guesthouse where she works. Similarly, the search for a true reflection emerges as a central theme in the introspective Summer 2022 issue. It is apt in these precarious times when the stability of the self is being shaken by forces of displacement and politics that this issue deeply reckons with fixing selves that have been lost, falsely performed, and fractured. The building of the self is literalized by Lu Liu’s playful yet melancholy cover art, in which two boys nervously construct a sand tower out of words, alluding to the Tower of Babel made personal in Jimin Kang’s moving essay, “My Mother and Me.”

The mirror is the object of Andrea Chapela’s kaleidoscopic, multidisciplinary self-inquiry, “The Visible Unseen,” elegantly rendered by Kelsi Vanada. It adopts the fragmentary form of a series of failed beginnings, in the manner of Janet Malcolm’s famous essay on David Salle, Forty-One False Starts. Chapela’s variation of the form represents the difficulty of locating the self in one’s reflection. By extension, Chapela argues that at a given time, the self can never be completely isolated; rather, it can only ever be seen through a particular type of mirror, at a certain angle, beneath a certain light, yielding a fragment of the whole. Just as Chapela scrutinizes the mirror through a variety of perspectives—scientific, literary, philosophical, memoiristic—so must we be as comprehensive yet fragmentary when we search for ourselves. As Chapela writes, “Little by little, I start to accept that each new beginning of the essay is just one piece of the full picture.”

READ MORE…

Death, Hope, and Humor: David Unger on Translating Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Mr. President

July 14, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

Translation is often an act of revelation—of revealing what is hidden.

In 1946, Nobel Prize laureate and Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias published his magnum opus, El señor presidente, which would become one of the boldest and most inventive works of Latin American literature, an important predecessor for literary giants including Gabriel García Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende, and Roberto Bolaño. However, the text remains relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. In this intimate and revelatory interview, Editor-at-Large José Garcia Escobar speaks with Guatemalan American author and translator David Unger on the complexities of translating Asturias’s great work into English, balancing authenticity and readability, and its political and artistic legacy.

In 2015, I was living in New York and often got together with the Guatemalan-American writer David Unger. A year prior, he had won the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize (Guatemala’s highest literary honor), and his novel The Mastermind (Akashic Books) had just come out.

We met every other month, more or less.

We would go to Home Sweet Harlem, on the corner of Amsterdam and 136th, or Chinelos, a Mexican restaurant just around the corner, and talk about books, translation, and life.

He told me he was flattered that Cristina García had agreed to blurb The Mastermind. He told me of the time he met and had a strong disagreement with Nicanor Parra. When Parra died in 2018, David wrote a piece for The Paris Review. He told me to go see Andrés Neuman at McNally Jackson and read more of his work. Then one day, as we walked back to his office at City College, he said, “I’m translating El señor presidente.”

READ MORE…

The Art of Anguish

September 1, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Will Firth

The poignant novel is imbued with anguish rather than heated rage—both emotionally charged and deeply analytical.

Tatjana Gromača’s contemporary novel Divine Child centers on the narrator’s relationship with her mother, whose bipolar disorder diagnosis coincides with a startling descent into Croatian nationalism. The book earned the Croatian Ministry of Culture’s 2012 Vladimir Nazor Prize of the for t­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­he best work of prose and Jutarnji list’s Novel of the Year prize in 2013. Yugoslav émigré writer Bora Ćosić called Divine Child “a small masterpiece” and stated that the author stands out for her “precious crudity”—a reference to its often stark, earthy descriptions despite the prevailing poetic and philosophical vein. Divine Child will be released in North America by Sandorf Passage in October 2021. Here, translator Will Firth describes challenges he encountered along the way.

In 2020, I was commissioned by Zagreb publisher Sandorf to translate three books of contemporary fiction by Croatian writers with funding from the EU’s Creative Europe program. One of them was the short novel Divine Child (Božanska dječica) by Tatjana Gromača. I had not read anything substantial of hers before.

I immediately related to Divine Child. It’s a diarylike biography of the author’s mother, which focuses on her slide into bipolar disorder, when she is cold-shouldered and denigrated by society. It makes an important link between socioeconomic crises—the collapse of former Yugoslavia, accompanied by virulent nationalisms—and the individual. The mother’s Croatian-ethnic neighbors label her an undesirable minority, in this case an ethnic Serb, although she has spent all her life in Croatia and shows few, if any, signs of otherness. But this was a time when having the “wrong” name could cause you problems throughout the region, and arguably still can. The exclusion triggers the mother’s illness.

The poignant novel is imbued with anguish rather than heated rage—both emotionally charged and deeply analytical. As a review in Publishers Weekly noted, it “takes on the hatred that was manufactured, mythologized, and manipulated to feed, justify, and rationalize violence.”

The title—Divine Child—is a dual reference: to the mother’s turn to religion in later life, and to the formative influence of her disciplinarian father, a military man, whose expectations she always strove to fulfill, even after his death, thus making her something of an “eternal child.” Typical of literature from the region, character development is sparse, even with the central character of the mother, and we have to piece together her appearance, occupation, and family history from a range of allusions and asides. Setting her in a historical and social context is more important for the author and omniscient narrator, and the reader is free to decide whether this sparseness is an exquisite literary pleasure or unnecessarily tantalizing suspense.

The editor of the English edition, Buzz Poole, was not convinced by the looseness of the narration in combination with its poetic style and philosophical ambit, so he made a major structural intervention: the novel in translation begins with an event central to the story—a visit to Mother at the hospital. This directs the flow and helps transport the author’s delicate voice. As translator, I was a go-between in negotiating this significant change.

Inconsistencies in the original also put me in the role of editor, and I collaborated with Gromača to tighten the language in translation. I like to correspond with authors to check my understanding of the text, even when I’m pretty sure how I’m going to render a particular term or phrase. With Divine Child, Gromača and I exchanged quite a few emails. We got on well and were on the verge of meeting up in the fall of 2020, when I was at a residency in Zagreb, but the worsening pandemic foiled our plans. In any case, our good working relationship was important for facing the challenge of translating this novel.

The main difficulties in translating Divine Child were to do with its startling imagery and metaphors. Here are several examples:

Frigid Sphinxes

Gromača describes packs of stray dogs in her hometown that “roamed the streets (…) and floated in abandoned fishing boats like frigid sphinxes with piercing, hypnotic eyes.” The original conveys this image as “poput pomodrjelih sfingi,” i.e., like sphinxes that have turned blue. I wasn’t sure in what sense the author meant “blue”—I thought it could refer to the bluish light by the river and the silhouettes of dogs in the twilight. In fact, she meant that the dogs have literally turned blue from the damp cold on the riverbanks and also from their lowly thoughts and those of the surrounding human society. “Frigid” conveys that physical and spiritual cold. READ MORE…

Adam Sorkin and Romanian Poetry in 2020

December 16, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Andreea Scridon

Sorkin’s corpus demonstrate[s] exceptional verve and dedication—two especially valuable traits in a sometimes thankless publishing industry. . .

“All Romanians are born poets,” goes a local saying, but far too few are published in English. Among their faithful champions, award-winning translator Adam Sorkin stands out: while some of us forwent productivity in favor of survival this year, he managed to put out a whopping three Romanian poetry translations. In times of collective confinement, they fittingly tackle the self’s relationship to space: the city, the countryside, the foreign land. They hone in on different forms of love and fear, too, from the romantic to the maternal to the religious—the love and fear of God. Beyond these and other commonalities, however, they differ in structure and style: the first is an emotional bildungsroman, the second an epic, the third a hymn of sorts. This formal range attests to Sorkin’s chops, which Assistant Editor Andreea Scridon is only too happy to extol.

It’s always contentious to name someone the best translator of a language, a claim that is perhaps more trouble than it’s worth. I, for one, tend to shy away from such absolutisms, but Adam Sorkin gives me second thoughts. Undeniably, he’s at the top of his game, having published over sixty books of Romanian poetry in English translation (even in the year of the plague, he’s managed to publish several).

Of the three most recent ones—Mircea Cărtărescu’s A Spider’s History of Love, Ioana Ieronim’s Lavinia and Her Daughters, and Aura Christi’s The God’s Orbit—I must admit I’ve only read the first in the original (among contemporary authors, Cărtărescu is a firm favorite of mine, so the stakes were especially high). All three, however, merit attention.

I have no interest in writing a sycophantic or fawning piece; in fact, I would be embarrassed to be so generous with praise if I didn’t feel that Sorkin’s corpus demonstrated exceptional verve and dedication—two especially valuable traits in a sometimes thankless publishing industry that doesn’t necessarily have an interest in promoting a minor language. To put it simply, having worked with Sorkin myself, I knew he wouldn’t disappoint.

A Spider’s History of Love was published by New Meridian Arts in July, making it the first of three Cărtărescu books to come out in English around this time (Solenoid, translated by Sean Cotter, will be published by Deep Vellum in 2022, and Nostalgia, translated by Julian Semilian, is forthcoming from Penguin in 2021). The book’s title is Sorkin’s doing, a phrase he took from a poem included in the volume, which encompasses selections from multiple collections; these are curated into three sections, entitled “Once I Had . . . ,” “Bebop Baby,” and “Prisoner of Myself.”

Considered cumulatively, these poems do not seem to represent an overarching epic odyssey in the same obvious way that Ioana Ieronim’s Lavinia and Cărtărescu’s own Levantul do; rather, they resemble an emotional bildungsroman with porous boundaries, entirely dictated by the inner life of the poetic narrator as he bends, with force and delicacy, the world to his perception, and not vice versa.

In “Once I Had . . .” and “Bebop Baby,” the microcosm of the poet’s Bucharest serves as the stage for various amorous pursuits. With obvious erudition, indicated by winks to his forerunners in Romanian literary history, Cărtărescu combines Romantic and Levantine elements with communist shabbiness. Thus, contemporary banality, even poverty, are seen through an euphoric eye and become savoury for those who understand how to look the right way, thanks to the poet’s almost rabid attention to detail:

. . . and deep down in the digestive tract I could spy
death herself.

I saw her leaning against the iron fence of the TB hospital next to the police headquarters
stopping a kid on the sidewalk to send him to fetch a newspaper or a fresh bun
and I saw her shopping for bread and newspapers in the pinkest, most incomparable
xxxxxxxxxsunset.

(“Love Poem”)

Everything becomes effervescent and iridescent for this narrator, a master of the art of sublimation, who seems to be eternally in love. His are confessional narrative poems—a form which suits the sentimental experience, with its varied shades and seasons. Long as they may be, they read quickly, engaging with reality and avoiding excessive abstraction. The rhyme is ingenious thanks to both the author and the translator (“. . . the evening / deposited thin sheets of lapis lazuli / the parked cars seemed folded from tinfoil and smelled of patchouli”; “. . . and your figure reminds me so little of aesop / that I wrote you a bebop”). READ MORE…

From Epic Hero to Modern Bro: On Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf

December 9, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Kwan Ann Tan

Modern translations of medieval writings are not only a link to the past, but also a reflection of what our current culture finds important.

Throughout the year and across the world, people have reluctantly adopted and updated a medieval custom: quarantine in times of plague. Other remnants of the era, however, have been much more readily embraced. The Middle Ages continue to capture our fancy (sometimes even frenzy), and the latest version of a classic tale is a perfect case in point. By keenly zooming in on some of the boldest, most innovative aspects of American author Maria Dahvana Headley’s recent translation of Beowulf, our very own Kwan Ann Tan (editor-at-large for Malaysia and medievalist-in-training) reflects on the value of bringing the past into the present.

The modern fascination with medieval language and culture is not particularly new—from the pre-Raphaelites to Hollywood blockbuster depictions of the medieval era, it’s clear that something about the Middle Ages still captivates us. In January 2020, for instance, the Facebook group ‘We Pretend It’s 1453 Internet’ was created, and it has since amassed close to 200,000 members; it’s filled with humorous posts imitating medieval speech and pretending to ask for advice on ‘medieval’ subjects (they’re not always period-accurate, but it’s the spirit that counts). Likewise, a subgenre of ‘medieval TikTok’ is gaining speed, with some genuinely funny skits reimagining what it would be like if knights were Twitch streamers—again, reformulating medieval staples to suit the modern imagination. On a more academic note, the Global Medieval Sourcebook project at Stanford University collects rare, previously untranslated medieval texts in modern English for the adventurous reader. In fact, new translations of medieval writings are being released every day, be they for academic or creative purposes.

As a child, I had vaguely heard of the story of Beowulf, but I always assumed that Beowulf himself was the monster, the antagonist—not the hero. After I memorised huge swathes of the text in the original Old English, the line between monster and hero only became more blurred; in fact, the poem’s elusive complexity has fuelled debate on this dichotomy for decades, if not centuries. There is something about Beowulf that keeps us coming back, and this lasting interest is reflected in the number of translations of the epic published over the past few decades.

When news of American author Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) first broke on Twitter earlier this year, my timeline was quickly filled with messages from disgruntled medievalists complaining that yet another Beowulf translation had been unleashed upon the world. I myself approached it skeptically, but was quite literally hooked from the first word. For those who haven’t had the agonising pleasure of trying to decipher Old English for a year, it’ll teach you one word for sure: ‘Hwæt,’ the famous opening of Beowulf. It has been historically translated to varying degrees of formality, but Headley knocks conservatism aside to give us the earth-shattering ‘Bro.’ This brilliantly sets the tone for the rest of the text, and one thing is clear: it definitely isn’t your grandma’s Beowulf. READ MORE…

The Prolific Bricoleur: An Interview with Susannah Rodríguez Drissi

December 7, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sophia Stewart

Imagination works best under certain confines. I like to look around me and see what I can work with. Bricolage is . . . using whatever is at hand.

The past few times that I’ve found myself procrastinating, distracted, and generally blocked creatively, I’ve thought about Susannah Rodríguez Drissi. As of this writing, Cuban-born Rodríguez Drissi has penned a novel, a poetry collection, short fiction, creative nonfiction, literary translations, scholarly articles, book reviews, multiple plays, and a jukebox musical. (By the time I finish writing this introduction, that list is likely to have grown.) Looking at my own untouched to-do list, I think of her prolificacy, of the sheer volume and breadth of her work. Rodríguez Drissi’s curiosity is one that can’t be constrained by genre. She’s multidisciplinary, to put it mildly—an artist and an academic, working across forms with a fluidity that is rare.   

As of late, like most people, my attention span has shriveled, and my energy reserves feel regularly depleted. With much of the city shuttered, my evenings and weekends are mostly vacant. In these moments, disappointed with my own inertia and daunted by the unstructured time before me, I wonder what Rodríguez Drissi might do. Currently, she’s promoting her debut novel, planning the unconventional productions of two original works of theater, and translating a Cuban story collection. In the midst of chaos, she creates. If she felt as I do now, would she snap herself out of inaction through the sheer desire to make something? Would she look at an empty weekend like mine and see its generative possibility?

I had the recent pleasure of speaking with Rodríguez Drissi about her work and upcoming projects. Naturally our conversation spanned celestial bodies, bricolage, and some of our favorite Spanish-language writers. I regret to report that I am still unable to explain how she and I have the same number of hours in a day.

—Sophia Stewart, Assistant Interviews Editor

Sophia Stewart (SS): You are a true multi-hyphenate: a writer, poet, playwright, translator, and scholar. How do you balance your creative endeavors and your scholarly work? Do they ever intermingle, or do you try to keep them siloed from each other? 

Susannah Rodríguez Drissi (SRD): It used to be nearly impossible to practice one while pursuing the other, particularly during graduate school. I had a lot of things working against me, things that might have been understood as incompatible with an academic career: I was a married woman with children. Had I been a married man with children, then things would have been understood differently. You see, I didn’t have a wife’s assistance at home to shield me from domesticity and scattered toys. So, for a time, at least, I was overwhelmed with nursing babies and research.

In academia, intellectual and artistic pursuit tends to tilt more toward one side than the other. But working across genres provides me with a broader understanding of the reasons why we write. For me, genres are always intermingled. The same basic questions that guide my research are the same questions that I attempt to answer from one project to the next. They are just different ways of getting at a problem. A poem or an academic article—they are not much different to me, except for their packaging. Different packaging for different audiences. I write so that I can explain what I don’t understand, so that I figure out the why of something—or, if I already know the why, so that I can snap a picture of it for posterity, for those who might not understand it.

SS: As a scholar, your research focuses on Latin American literatures and cultures, with a special focus on the Caribbean and particularly Cuba. In the many Spanish literature classes I’ve taken, I found Caribbean authors to be consistently underrepresented. Over the course of six years and dozens of syllabi, I recall being assigned only three Caribbean writers: the Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos, and the Cuban poets Jose Martí and Nicolás Guillén. Are there any other writers you feel are overlooked in the Spanish-language canon, and who are some of your all-time favorite Spanish-language writers?

SRD: You can’t go wrong with Burgos, Martí, and Guillén. All three are poets and advocates of their nations’ independence, be it from Spain, as in Martí’s case, or from the United States, as in the case of Burgos and Guillén. With the three of them, you’re in good company. However, we need to make room for other voices. We don’t read enough Lydia Cabrera (if we read her at all), and there are plenty of contemporary writers who don’t get their time in the sun because we insist on the same voices time and time again. Right now, I’m obsessed with Mexican writer Fernanda Melchor and Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez—theirs are heartbreaking, astonishing voices that should be included front and center in every syllabus. We should start first with more women writers, then go from there. READ MORE…

Wild Women: An Interview with Aoko Matsuda and Polly Barton

November 23, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sophia Stewart

Metamorphosis is about possibility. I wanted to show the possibility of change in ourselves and society through . . . stories of transformation.

One of my favorite pieces of writing by Aoko Matsuda, translated by Polly Barton, is a story called “The Woman Dies,” which appeared in a 2018 issue of Granta. “The woman dies,” it begins. “She dies to provide a plot twist. She dies to develop the narrative. She dies for cathartic effect. She dies because no one could think of what else to do with her.” The first half of the story is divided up into corresponding sections: “The woman gets married”; “The woman gets pregnant”; “The woman miscarries”; “The woman is raped.” Matsuda’s argument echoes that of many American feminist critics, like Laura Mulvey and Alice Bolin, but the story’s formal inventiveness and fierce narration distinguishes “The Woman Dies.” With piercing precision, she takes to task that most insidious and ubiquitous narrative crutch, where women are nothing more than receptacles for pain and trauma.

Matsuda’s short story collection, Where the Wild Ladies Are, recently published by Soft Skull Press and translated again by Barton, offers a sort of corrective for the female suffering that has always pervaded storytelling. Through a series of interlinked stories, Matsuda blends existing legends with new stories to give women the agency and power that they often lack in our traditional narratives. In revisiting and reimagining centuries-old tales, she draws connections between the past and present, emphasizing the ways in which history is never really over.

The stories of Where the Wild Ladies Are have an explicitly feminist bent; against the backdrop of Japanese ghost stories, Matsuda tackles issues like glass ceilings and workplace discrimination, as well as patriarchal expectations for women: that they be hairless, that they don’t outshine their male counterparts, that they contain their rage (even when it’s merited). She is just as outspoken a feminist in conversation as she is on the page. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Matsuda, who is both a writer and literary translator (she’s translated work by Carmen Maria Machado and Karen Russell). Polly Barton also joined us and shed light on her work as Matsuda’s frequent collaborator. The three of us talked about Starbucks lattes, translating “Britishisms,” and the wonderful friendship that has blossomed between Matsuda and Barton.

 —Sophia Stewart, Assistant Interviews Editor

Sophia Stewart (SS): The stories in Where the Wild Ladies Are draw inspiration from traditional Japanese ghost and yōkai tales, and the book includes a complete list of references and outlines of these original works in a section called “inspiration for the stories.” Aoko, how did you choose these specific tales as inspiration, and why did you want to bring these traditional narratives and contemporary stories into conversation with each other? 

Aoko Matsuda (AM): Most of them are stories I’ve known since childhood. My favorite at that time was the ghost story of Okiku, because I also am from Himeji, where Okiku’s Well actually exists on the grounds of Himeji Castle. Summer is the season for kaidan—Japanese horror stories—and I used to watch the story of Okiku, along with other kaidan stories, on TV over and over. While watching her story, I found myself shouting to Okiku inside of my head: “Die Okiku, die quick, so that you can become a ghost with superpowers and have your revenge!” In my eyes, female ghosts in the kaidan stories looked so much livelier than living people, and were so much more fun to watch.

As I became an adult, I also realized how these old stories reflected and encouraged people to internalize misogynic views towards women, since most of the time those stories were written and told by men. So although I loved them very much, I’ve always had mixed feelings about them, and in writing Where the Wild Ladies Are, I wanted to create a space where all the female ghosts can enjoy themselves and find new lives. After I started to write the book, I did some research to find new stories I didn’t know of. One of the stories I was fascinated by was “Neko no Tadanobu,” which I rewrote as “The Jealous Type,” in which a jealous woman appears. The woman doesn’t have a big part to play in the story, and nobody feels sorry for her even though her husband is cheating on her. So in my story, I made her a main character and let her be as jealous as she wants.  READ MORE…

From Two Solitudes to Quattro Books: An Interview with Bilal Hashmi

November 18, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Moses

Quattro will . . . shift the discussion so it’s no longer . . . English and French, but the multilingual nature of Canadian writing.

Quattro Books was founded in 2006 by Allan Briesmaster, John Calabro, Beatriz Hausner, and Luciano Iacobelli, with the aim of publishing established and emerging authors who represent the linguistic and cultural diversity of literature in Toronto and across Canada. As such, from the start, Quattro Books has sought to bring out works originally written in English alongside those translated from the multilingual voices of Canadians who have arrived in the country as immigrants or refugees. The press’s recent acquisition by Bilal Hashmi, president of the Association des traducteurs et traductrices littéraires du Canada / Literary Translators’ Association of Canada (ATTLC-LTAC), and a translator himself—from French, Urdu, Persian, and Hindi—has led to a shift in focus that favours the latter. This is evidenced by Quattro Books’s first catalogue since Hashmi took over as Executive Director and Publisher. Due out in the fall of 2020, it will feature English translations of Canadian works spanning six languages. Asymptote’s co-Editor-at-Large for Argentina, Sarah Moses, met with Hashmi in Toronto to discuss Canadian literature as international literature, works in translation as partnerships, and how he’s shaping Quattro Books into a translation-focused press.

Sarah Moses (SM): I’d like to begin by asking you about your involvement with the ATTLC-LTAC. How has it led to Quattro becoming what you’ve described as a translation-focused press?

Bilal Hashmi (BH): Beatriz Hausner is central both to the ATTLC-LTAC and Quattro. She’s one of the founding members of Quattro and was the president of the ATTLC-LTAC in 2017, when I joined. I had the privilege of being mentored by her in translation and advocacy work, and the one thing we all sort of agreed on is that there should be more international works in translation available in Canada. So the movement from the ATTLC-LTAC to Quattro was, in a way, organic—the work at the former led to the idea: now we have an opportunity, let’s see what happens. That’s the way I thought of it. I started off as membership secretary in 2017 and I’ve been the president since June. We continue to work through some of the same issues that we’ve dealt with in the past: translator visibility, proper recognition, and so on—these remain our goals. But I think what Quattro will possibly do in the future is shift the discussion so it’s no longer necessarily the “two solitudes” of English and French, but the multilingual nature of Canadian writing that comes through.

SM: Is this primarily how you see Quattro Books fitting in among publishers of translation in Canada and internationally—as a press that moves beyond translations between English and French?

BH: In our first catalogue we have translations from French, Serbian, German, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, and then two titles that were written in English. We’re not going to do exclusively translation, but that’s the focus, which I think is unique in Canadian publishing. Whether or not that continues is something we’ll have to determine. We’re really hoping to find out if publishing majority translations is a viable activity.

Working with translation has involved a very international cast of characters, which is really what I find most exciting about Canadian literature as international literature. I think those who are very skeptical about translation’s profitability or potential for success kind of forget that you do have access potentially to other markets. Typically, Canadian books are marketed internally for Canadian consumption and the expectation is that Canadians will buy fellow Canadians. It doesn’t always work that way. My hope is that these books will be seen as Canadian literature, plus whatever other literature they’re referencing—let’s say the Portuguese-Angolan return novel, of which there’s now a sizable and critically acclaimed subgenre in Portuguese fiction. So the hope is that they’ll cross over into other markets, beginning in the US.

The catalogue started as kind of an exercise in fantasy, which I think I shared with you a couple of summers ago. It was an exercise in what works within the funding paradigm. Readers of Asymptote should know that in Canada the main translation activity is English-to-French, French-to-English, but the official requirement for funding from the Canada Council for the Arts is that the author be Canadian. There’s no limitation on the source language so long as the work is translated into French, English, or an indigenous language. I did a little bit of a research and I found a list of about twenty or so Canadian writers who brought in different literary histories with them. All of these works are technically eligible for Canada Council for the Arts grants, and we’re very lucky and grateful to the Canada Council for funding all six, which may be a first in Canadian publishing for one season, and probably unique in this part of the world. So that’s how it started. I think we have another half dozen languages already in the pipeline if not already under contract, also all Canadian authors. My hope is really to explore this lesser-known part of Canadian literary history, which tends not to see that much exposure in the current framework.

In the first couple of years, the focus will be on Canadian content, but we’re also starting to acquire from outside, including translations. That’s a challenge since I will insist that everyone gets paid at the Canadian rate, which is the determining factor. Because if it’s a five-hundred page novel and there’s no funding for it, then we’re probably not going to be able to pay the eighteen-cents-per-word rate—that’s the rate for prose. I believe the per-word rate remains at twenty cents for theatre and twenty-five cents for poetry. READ MORE…