Posts filed under 'childhood memories'

Translation Tuesday: “Return” by Cristalina Parra

my mother’s eyes in the morning and my father / ringing the doorbell, atop his bike, without shoes...

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you poetry from Chilean poeta Cristalina Parra’s debut collection Tambaleos. Translated from the Spanish by Julián David Bañuelos, “Return” is a tidal wave of nostalgia–overwhelming and sweet. 

Return

while swapping my papers, my mountains for the

desert gulf, i think about the reflections of clouds

cloaking the Santiago Mountain or the sun

rise measuring the length of your face, slowly

cracks the day, there, the winds cross

the valley, the leaves sing and the clouds dance, I

hear the music you sent and the music we listened

to while running from the pigs, i think of all

the shellfish in this cold ocean and how the squids,

before death, try for the shore, i see,

my mother’s eyes in the morning and my father ringing

the doorbell, atop his bike, without shoes, his olive

skin, i think about the pup attempting their first

steps and the whiskey i threw back with my cousin

while playing Charlie Garcia’s keyboard and

chatting about the void we both understood, I think of the sunrise

for the first time in three years.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Gogol” by Musa Effendi

Try to understand his situation by this single explanation—he couldn’t hug anyone.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, a disabled youth’s love of football is hindered by his supposed friends in Musa Efendi’s short story “Gogol.” Though our narrator attempts to convince us (or perhaps himself) of his empathy for his friend Gogol, it’s not long before the petty worries of children mirror the cruel pragmatism of the adult world, all at the expense of their friend’s wishes. Through deceptively simple prose, we’re taken through a string of childhood vignettes chronicling the titular character’s ostracization. The narrator’s excuses, deflected upon the reader (“You would do the same thing, too”) segues into a haunting and almost surreal final image, a scene tinged by the narrator’s remorse and subdued sense of awe.

“Turtles can fly.”
–Bahman Ghobadi

I do not like Balzac-style narratives; I do want to know a lot, yet I never dreamed of seeing everything. So I choose to talk about the near side of the Moon.

 

*

We talked about this with the guys during the nights before the actual play. Despite the name of the game, hands play an important role in football; it is the hands that help you speed up when you are running. It is the hands that help you to keep your rival away when you have the ball. It is the hands that help the goalkeeper to not let the ball pass through the door. In football, you get penalized because of a hand, but you can’t play without it either. Elchin was the one who told us all this. This was the reason we didn’t let Gogol play and assigned him as commentator of the game instead. We called him Gogol because while commentating the game, he used to get excited when a goal was scored and would make a noise like this: Go-go-go-gooooal!

He wasn’t stammering. It is just that he didn’t have hands. Try to understand his situation by this single explanation—he couldn’t hug anyone.

*

Our yard was surrounded by the neighborhood of strong football teams. There was Boka’s team on the opposite street (I don’t remember the name of it); they used to play very well. Nemeczek, Csónakos played in his team as well. Timur and his team were another bunch of strong players. So we didn’t have a chance to actually let Gogol join us in the game. You would do the same thing, too; for us, our games were more like training. But it would be waste of time to try him out by giving him a chance to play. True, his loss was greater than ours, but it is not worth sacrificing or compromising in such matters. Grown-ups do this, too—they prefer to save time and money rather than noticing other people’s losses. Necessity of life—my father would say.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2020

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

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

amang

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

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

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

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

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

Spring 2011: Out of the Void

The curse of forgetting is our blessing and from whence our greatness springs. Out of the void, we create.

Not only is translation front and center of what we publish as a journal, it also takes place behind the scenes. In February 2011, after the excitement of putting out an issue (and hearing from readers like Eliot Weinberger) subsided, we got to work on the Spring edition. Among our first tasks: launch a search for our next guest artist. The Japanese illustrator Kazunari Negishi submitted a cover on 10 Mar 2011. One day later, tsunami struck Mr. Negishi’s homeland. We had to make the decision as to whether Mr. Negishi would be the one to provide 14 illustrations in three weeks. There was another front-runner, with a good cover submission, ready and willing, who had English to boot. Mr. Negishi didn’t read English; Sayuri, our contributing editor, would have to translate the texts. “Work is good though, in times like these,” she offered. I hesitated one day before saying yes. In the end, under what must have been very difficult conditions for both Ms. Okamoto and Mr. Negishi, 14 stunning illustrations were produced that would make any magazine proud. Many well wishes poured in when our Spring 2011 issue went live, and not a few of them mentioned how much they love the artwork. Here to introduce the Spring 2011 edition (as well as the dispatch from post-3.11 Japan that Sayuri especially undertook to write) is Assistant Editor P.T. Smith.

The editor’s notes for Asymptote issues always point the reader in a direction, and for the Spring 2011 issue it was one of current events and counterpoints. Without research, the current events of that period can be hard to place. The connection between Sayuri Okamoto’s letters and the 2011 tsunami is called out directly, so that’s easy. After that it gets harder, but that’s only appropriate because, as is often the case, other links and other ways to read the issue as a whole develop. With this one, it’s memory, both its recovery and its absences. In Anthony Luebbert’s essay on A. R. Luria, he writes, “The curse of forgetting is our blessing and from whence our greatness springs. Out of the void, we create.” That creative act lives throughout the pieces in this issue, which play off each other and allow me come to my own thoughts on memory.

Asymptote came to life in the early days of my own entry into the world of translated literature. My first job after college was in an office where there was a rather light workload or maybe just lenient supervision. I have fond memories of printing off pieces from Words Without Borders, folding them up, putting them in my pocket, and heading off to the bathroom to get in some reading. In my memory, I did the same with Asymptote. But that can’t be the case: I’d already left the job by the time the journal launched. I enjoy this vaguery, this impossible overlap. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: ‘Moss’ by Julia Fiedorczuk

I shall have to overcome the vanity, the applause, my own self, and measure up to life—measure up to death.

Much of the prose in Asymptote‘s Spring 2018 fiction section (especially Jon Fosse’s Scenes from a Childhood) includes keenly observed sketches from childhood. This Tuesday, we bring you a piece from Poland that continues that theme. In Julia Fiedorczuk’s ‘Moss’, the narrator’s recollections of her grandmother are a powerful evocation of a child’s experience through the grown-up’s consciousness. And fair warning: you’re probably gonna shed a tear or two when you get to the last line.

But I’m still a child, then, who doesn’t know how to read yet.

I’m five, maybe six years old, in a purple flannel dress with little green roses. That child’s thin legs are sticking out from under the dress. Scratched and bruised like seventy sorrows. I’m sitting on a high stool in front of a mirror, legs dangling in mid-air. She’s standing behind me. Brushing my hair. I have long hair, the colour of ripe corn. Fine hair; it won’t survive adolescence: it’ll have to be cut when I hit fifteen.

READ MORE…

Asymptote Book Club: An Interview with Chris Andrews, Translator of The Lime Tree

Style seems to give Aira direct access to a past that hasn’t passed.

We begin a new series of monthly interviews for the Asymptote Book Club with a conversation between Asymptote Assistant Editor Lizzie Buehler and Chris Andrews, translator of César Aira’s The Lime Tree. For more about this sparkling novel, check out Emma Holland’s December review.

Josh Honn, reviewing an earlier Aira novel, suggested that Aira moves forward in straight lines only in “an attempt to make the line come back upon itself.” In the interview that follows, Chris Andrews discusses Aira’s “sinuous” writing technique, The Lime Tree’s links with Proust, and the way the novel depicts everyday racism in Perón-era Argentina.

Lizzie Buehler (LB): Tell us a little bit about how you came to translate The Lime Tree. How did the novel’s intensely self-reflective nature affect your process of translation?

Chris Andrews (CA): I read The Lime Tree (or The Linden Tree as it will be in the US edition) when it first came out in Spanish in 2003, and it has been one of my favourite Aira books since then. So I was very pleased to get the chance to translate it.

READ MORE…