Posts filed under 'colonialism'

Will the Present Suffice? On Disappearance in Fiction

September 21, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by MK Harb

It seems that disappearance creates even more presence, focusing around the individual instead of erasing them.

What is absence—this deeply felt substance that is not made of matter, but lack? In texts across time, writers have given form to vanishing and its metaphorical power, studying its mystery and its abjection, its myth and its experience. In the following essay, MK Harb discusses three cases of disappearance in short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Munro, and Danial Haghighi, and how the three authors use the duality of presence and absence to explore the psychology of those who go and those who stay, as well as experiences of class, gender, sexuality, and colonialism.

In a curious poem by the name of “Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage,” the late Larry Levis created, in words blown with the precision of a glassmaker, a philosophical text on life and desire. Beginning with, “It’s a list of what I cannot touch,” Levis narrates the myth of the Cumaean Sibyl, an ancient Greek priestess who, in her quest to ask the Gods for eternal life, forgot to ask for eternal youth. What ensues is a lesson in cruelty, for as time expands and centuries go by, she shrinks and dwarfs until she becomes as tiny as a thumb, upon which she is placed in a jar to “suffocate without being able to die.” As the years churn on, Sibyl eventually finds herself in a birdcage, placed there by an Athenian shop owner for her protection. She emits small bird-like whispers to Athenian boys, who often rattle her cage to ask: What do you want, Sibyl? To this she responds: death. Her voice goes mute as she witnesses an ever-changing Athens through to the Second World War, all the while continuing to be alive, shriveling and aging, yet somehow disappearing from living. Using Sibyl, Levis creates a melancholic irony in which a desire for a prolonged life leads to disappearance.

When I think of disappearance, I think of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and the soul-crushing friendship between Lila and Elena, two intellectual women haunted by the other’s abilities, acting out their insecurities through never-ending disappearances and reappearances within each other’s lives. I think of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1960s film Woman in The Dunes, where a depressive Japanese scientist spends the night with a seductive village woman in a remote sand dune. After their affair, the staircase leading outwards—a symbol of return to urbanity—vanishes, and the most Sisyphean struggle ensues. In such works, disappearance is an allegory for life and time, lost and spent.

Disappearance has long been a hallmark of serious prose, a thematic thread throughout literature of all variances. In three short stories set in Canada, India, and Iran, this allegorical device operates at the narratives’ center. The first is Jorge Luis Borges’ “Man on the Threshold,” which follows the tradition of narration through memory, telling us of the writer’s childhood friend, Bioy Casares, who brings with him from London to Buenos Aires a strange dagger. This object triggers another story from a friend sitting with them, Christopher Dewey, who served in the British colonies of India. READ MORE…

Reckoning With the Idea of the Canon: An Interview with Robin Myers, Part II

July 7, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa

The tradition becomes this tidal flow that is always acting on us . . .

In the second part of a three-part series, Editor-at-Large Alan Mendoza Sosa continues his conversation with poet and translator Robin Myers. In this installment, they continue their discussion on multiplicity in translation, touching on canons in Spanish literature, conceptual writing, and collaboration. Read part one of the interview here.

Alan Mendoza Sosa (AM): Have you felt that commercial interests interfere with what gets published and translated?

Robin Myers (RM): Always, although I find it hard to express exactly how, beyond my own intuitions and observations, you know? Definitely. I sense that certain authors become “hot” authors, and so other writers will get grouped together or hyped in response to them or in comparison to them. And of course authors in translation are very susceptible to being treated as automatically “representing” the country or even the region they come from, which is hugely problematic. Among many publishers there is a real interest in contemporary Latin American fiction writ large, which is obviously never a balanced playing field. With literature translated from Spanish to English, there are lots and lots of books being translated from Argentina, Chile, quite a few books from Mexico, and far fewer from other places. You know, very unequal.

AM: Usually very little, next to nothing from Central America, I would imagine.

RM: Totally, next to nothing. Yeah, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, I’d say.

AM: Sometimes Peru, maybe? Or not even.

RM: Yeah, Peru a little more recently. I’m thinking of Katya Aduai, Gabriela Wiener. But anyway, my hope is that as interest in translation as a field continues to grow, and with increasing advocacy for translators as artists, the range and multiplicity of authors who get translated will also keep growing. I think all of that is on the rise, which is thrilling.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 1, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Cristina Pérez Díaz, MARGENTO, Peera Songkünnatham, and Suhasini Patni

Book fairs, Booker longlists, and magazine launches from Thailand, Puerto Rico, India, and Romania!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on the political undertones of a Bangkok book fair, new translations of Indian literature, new magazines out of Puerto Rico, and celebrations of Francophone literature in Romania. Read on to find out more!

Peera Songkünnatham, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Thailand

Bookworms are back wheeling their suitcases around in the country’s biggest book fair. It is the place to get another year’s worth of kong dong (“pile of pickles”)—i.e., unread books. After a cancellation last year and a move online the year before, the twelve-day National Book Fair, organized by the Publishers and Booksellers Association of Thailand is being held at the new rail transport hub, Bangsue Grand Station, until April 6. Many publishers, both major and independent, release new books in anticipation of this event, where they can get a bigger cut from sales and buyers have come to expect extra-special discounts. With over 200 publishers participating, author meet-and-greets, and predictable logistical complaints at the temporary new venue, we can perhaps sense a return to normalcy.

If one looks at this normalcy more closely, however, one can see an increasing trend of explicit politicization in the largely commercial enterprise. The calendar of main-stage events includes book launches by pro-democracy politicians from the Move Forward Party and the Progressive Movement (of the disbanded Future Forward Party). The names of four such politicians, all men, grace the official calendar—without the titles of their books, oddly enough. The Progressive Movement is also publishing its first translation: an illustrated children’s book, นี่แหละเผด็จการ (Así es la dictadura) by Equipo Plantel, first published in 1977 in post-Franco Spain. These examples provide quite a contrast to ostensibly political but effectively depoliticizing events led by, for lack of a better word, the literary establishment, like the panel discussion “Stepping into the Third Decade of the Phan Waen Fa Award: Political Literature for Democratic Development,” featuring three award committee members and a literary scholar.

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Violence, Beauty, Structure, Freedom: An Interview with Translator Urayoán Noel

March 9, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Noa Mendoza

Urayoán is always conscious of, resisting, and emphasizing the neocolonial nature of the translated word.

In the early days of the pandemic I became obsessed with a little book called Materia Prima (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019) by Uruguayan poet Amanda Berenguer. Two years later, I’m still returning to it again and again. Berenguer’s poetry, ranging from a classically lyrical style to experimental concrete work, speaks to a certain gruesome dance that defines the intense moments of closure and euphoric freedom of the pandemic era. The poems—particularly her concrete works—contain wells of meaning; they dip into abstraction and yet are completely literal, hung in the spatial galaxy of the page, intimate and infinite, like vessels unto themselves. The English translations, pasted next to the original Spanish, felt like an impossible feat. How, I wondered, was it possible to translate these vessels in which every letter, fluidly molded in Spanish, was essential to their form?

 When I interned for UDP in the summer of 2021, I seized the opportunity to chat with one of the translators who had worked on the book, and specifically on these visual poems, Urayoán Noel. Noel is a poet, translator, and professor based in the Bronx, originally from Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico. His poem “ode to coffee/oda al cafe,” named after the iconic Juan Luis Guerra song, deconstructs the relationship between English and Spanish, empire and cash crop, moving in and out of the two languages like a defiant and fluid snake. This is emblematic of the warm and brutal intelligence that Urayoán brings to the act of translation: he is always conscious of, resisting, and emphasizing the neocolonial nature of the translated word, and he has a deep love for language and an understanding of all that it celebrates, erases, amplifies, and reveals.

Noa Mendoza (NM): I thought it might be nice to start out talking about a poem that I’m actually going to get a tattoo of soon.

Urayoán Noel (UN): No way, really?

NM: Yes! This graph one, it’s untitled, but it is a pictorial representation of a beach scene, with a jumble of letters underneath.

I’m wondering what your experience was translating this graph, and, more generally, the incomprehensible. The words in the middle that don’t necessarily hold semantic meaning. And also gibberish more generally, if you ever think about that when it comes to translation.

UN: I think I might make a distinction there. I certainly agree that Berenguer’s language isn’t linear. I’m not sure she’s a poet of gibberish. I think of gibberish as a kind of uncontained language. My sense is there’s always this rigor in her work and a constant struggle between freedom and constraint.

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2022

January 24, 2022  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Erica X Eisen, and Xiao Yue Shan

The reconstituting of memories that have been erased is a central concern for the playful yet meditative Winter 2022 issue.

Asymptote’s Winter 2022 issue is now out, marking the magazine’s eleventh year in publication! The newest edition features writing from a record forty-three countries and twenty languages. Here to introduce you to what this issue has to offer are our blog editors with some thoughts on the pieces that stood out to them the most.

In Maria Stepanova’s 2021 genre-defying work In Memory of Memory, she wrote that her excavation of family history was motivated by a desire to discover “the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.” Stepanova was absorbed with not only recovering the stories of her Jewish family but also probing her own obsessive relationship with memory itself. The memoir suggests the faultiness of memory in its rips and tears, while betraying an anxiety over its artifice in the way the memoirist manipulates the archive through inclusion, exclusion, and distortion for the purpose of her narrative. The reconstituting of memories that have been erased through the forces of time and displacement is a central concern for the playful yet meditative Winter 2022 issue. Like Stepanova, the authors of these varied works construct complex inquiries into the past through reappraisals of memory, dreams of alternate lives, and imaginative play with form. They seek the truth through memories while contesting their inevitable artificiality and malfunctioning.

In Rose Bialer’s deeply affecting interview, the Hungarian poet, memoirist, and translator George Szirtes speaks of returning to certain memories and themes in his personal history throughout his career in poetry, sometimes writing new poems that function as continuations of collections published decades before. This idea of Szirtes’s “return” to the same moments for their comprehension reflects his mistrust of memories but also his belief that truths are embedded within them. One of the talk’s many astonishing moments is when Szirtes claims that the return over time to the same memories in his poems reveals parallel narratives that add up to a palimpsest of personal history and identity. For Szirtes, formal constraints such as the terza rima continuously open the same memories to new facets and understandings. This illuminating conversation demonstrates how the fluidity of memory allows the poet-translator to construct an unstable past and self while “registering the sense of truth in all its complexity.”

READ MORE…

Here France Drowns Algerians: Literary and Cultural Afterlives of October 17, 1961’s Occulted Pogrom

October 18, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Alex Tan

How will France reconfigure its fragile self-image to accommodate the historical excesses that it has consistently balked at confronting?

This essay is written in memory of all those—predominantly Algerian—killed, deported, or otherwise injured by the violences of French colonialism, and in solidarity with the continuing efforts to resist the forgetting of October 17, 1961 and demand accountability from the French state.

For most of the English-speaking world, October 17 will not register as a date of any consequence. Yet, several days ago in the boulevards of Paris, scores of demonstrators marched from the Rex Cinema to the Pont Saint-Michel; they were tracing, in a defiant act of memory, the cartography of a heinous massacre of Algerian protestors by the French police force that took place, sixty years prior on the very same cobblestones. Their ancestors—most of whom did not survive that deadly evening—had walked those roads in peaceful opposition to the racism and surveillance they had suffered at the hands of the French, as well as the discriminatory night-time curfew that had just been imposed exclusively on Algerian workers.

The publicity posters of this year’s commemorative efforts feature the title “Un Crime d’État” (a crime of the state), handwritten in a ghostly chalk-like texture above two shadowed hands reaching out of murky, watery depths. To the survivors, descendants, relatives, historians, activists, and those who otherwise refuse to forget the bloody police brutality of October 17, 1961, that tableau of desperation will be familiar. On that night, besides beating and injuring countless men, French police officers handcuffed and threw an undocumented number of Algerian demonstrators into the river Seine, leaving them to drown. Historians estimate that around two hundred deaths occurred that night. In an eyewitness account cited in House and MacMaster’s monumental Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory, officers throttled the arms of a man clinging to the parapet “until he dropped like a stone into the river.” Subsequently, nearly six thousand Algerians who did not perish were rounded up, tortured, and deported back to detention camps in Algeria.

Of the scant images that have circulated of 1961, the most iconic is arguably a shot of graffiti spray-painted along the riverbanks, reading “Ici on noie les Algériens” (here we drown Algerians). What’s remarkable is its persistent afterlife in the infinitely reproducible medium of photography, elevated to a sort of metonym for Algerians’ collective trauma—despite the actual graffiti having been literally whitewashed out of existence not long after its writing. Street art continues to spring up here and there: a telling instance is “Ici la France a noyé des Algérien(nes)” (here France drowned Algerians), shifting the temporal frame of reference and naming the locus of guilt. Or, more recently: “Nous sommes les descendants des algériens que vous n’avez pas noyé . . .” (we are the descendants of the Algerians that you did not drown).

oct 17 poster

The state’s erasure of the incriminating graffiti emblematises an essential hypocrisy upon which France’s modernity is built, and perhaps no colony has borne the brunt more painfully than Algeria. It was there, during its struggle for independence from 1954 to 1962, that the French government engaged in one of its most violent and cruel wars while native peoples agitated for decolonisation. Yet the metropolitan French press, largely indifferent to what was transpiring across the Mediterranean, referred to the widespread killings, bombardments, and torture euphemistically as “the events.” Only in 1999—a full thirty-seven years after Algeria gained independence—did France officially bring itself to acknowledge that a “war” had occurred. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2021

September 27, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel and Sarah Moore

New work this week from Mexico and Algeria!

This month, our editors dive into two powerful works that look into the dominating subjects of human life: sex and war. An erotically subversive collection of stories by award-winning author Mónica Lavín moves to the darkest and most questioning arenas of desire, and a memoir by Algerian Freedom fighter Mokhtar Mokhtefi stands as a cogent and compelling text of witness of his nation’s struggle against French colonialism.

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Meaty Pleasures by Mónica Lavín, translated from the Spanish by Dorothy Potter Snyder, Katakana Editores, 2021

Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

There is catharsis in transgression, and pleasure—especially the centering of one’s own pleasure—is all too often transgressive. The twelve short stories in Mónica Lavín’s collection, Meaty Pleasures, thoughtfully curated and translated by Dorothy Potter Snyder, capitalizes on this subversive desire, exploding the tranquil veneer of domestic life by compelling our complicity in the deeply uncomfortable and socially taboo.

It all begins and ends with the flesh. “Postprandial,” the decadent opening story, foregoes grounding details about setting and character in order to focalize an aphrodisiac tasting menu, offered from a hotel restaurant manager to a passerby, and the explicit sex that follows. It readies the reader for Lavín’s challenging approach to realism, intimacy, and power imbalance which pervades the rest of the collection. The final story, “Meaty Pleasures,” also emphasizes the sensual relationship between food and sex—but in a completely different way. Told from the perspective of an adult daughter who has watched her parents’ Saturday afternoon artisanal butchering hobby grow into an obsession that echoes over the course of their lives, the sex is left entirely to the implicit, straining in constant tension with the parental web of familial obligations. The daughter and her sister reflect: “Sometimes we’d ask each other, have you tried calling Papá and Mamá on Saturday afternoons? Because on that day of week, they never answered the phone to either one of us.”

In between, we meet many a troubled family. As is common in stories of nonconformity, various characters rebel against the numbing effect of matrimony, but their resistance does not lead them to any predictable conclusion—or perhaps any predictability is heightened to a manic extreme. In “What’s there to come back to,” a husband leaves his repentant wife on their doorstep for a whole winter’s night before he, begrudgingly, allows her back into their home. Snyder’s translation captures a certain languor and resentment in his stream of consciousness that induces anxiety when set against the excruciating awareness of her waiting, building a rawness that painfully and coldly leads to his reflection upon waking up in the morning: “Fried eggs again for breakfast, the TV news. I think she’s gone. Maybe she froze to death. Maybe we both froze to death.” In “You Never Know,” a son tires of the demons left to him by his mother’s abandonment. “Then, you kiss and hug them in the shadows of a movie theater, and you masturbate thinking about them, and when you start to want something more than their bodies, like their companionship and tenderness, you leave without saying goodbye.” Innocent—righteous, even—though his anger seems, his journey darkens with an incestual turn. “Roberto’s Mouth” finds a disgruntled housewife disappointed yet again when her own plans to leave her family are thwarted by her naughty-mouthed chat-room lover’s lazy approach to cuckholding. In such narratives that continually unpack and distort the concepts of familial intimacy, images of transgressively penetrated flesh dominate the collection, inviting the reader to reflect on the discomfort they inspire. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 16, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Charlie Ng, and Eva Wissting

Find out what’s been happing in the literary scenes of Bulgaria, Sweden, and Hong Kong!

“Lazy to shake the white fan, nude in green woods . . .” The languorous summer words of Li Bai are perhaps demonstrative of these mild months, but even a writer too lethargic to fan himself is still scrawling poems. The pen never rests, as proved by a bounty of literary news from Bulgaria, Sweden, and Hong Kong this week, as our editors report on book fairs, awards, and festivals. Read on to find out more!

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria

It is a truth universally acknowledged that books—with their magical power to still the world and inspire us in previously unimaginable ways—can transform the course of human lives for good, and this seems especially obvious when it comes down to interpersonal relationships, especially the queen of them all—love. The recently organized Bulgarian literary festival Пловдив чете (Plovdiv reads) demonstrated that by uniting fiction and the deep appreciation of others, resulting in a happy collaboration.

On the last day of the tightly packed program, which included an afternoon poetry reading under the blooming linden trees by the up-and-coming authors Aleksandar Gabrovski, Dimitar Ganev, Gabriela Manova, and Liliya Yovnova, a rather nervous young man from the public stood up and, under everyone’s curious gaze, asked his speechless girlfriend for her hand in marriage. Once it was established that a “happily ever after” was soon to follow, the audience was assured that the world would continue to spin—possibly in patterns that, more often than not, rhyme.

Hosts of this particular occasion were one of the country’s best-renowned writers Georgi Gospodinov (whose verse is available in Asymptote’s pages!) and the talented poet, essayist, and screenwriter Ivan Landzhev. Both shared their fascinating insights into the qualities required of a helpful editor, the art of mentoring gifted adolescents without erasing their unique personalities, as well as the importance of authors reading each other. Another point that was touched upon was the ability to trace foreign influences in one’s works.

Alas, for even more thrilling discussions of this sort, we’ll have to wait until the 2022 edition. Until then, however, let us enjoy the rest of what global literature has to offer!

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

This month, Swedish writers Elin Anna Labba and Alma Thörn have been awarded the Norrlands litteraturpris—a literary prize of northern Sweden. The prize has been given annually since 1973 by a literary association of the region, Norrländska litteratursällskapet, along with the region’s writers’ organization, Författarcentrum Norr. Since 2014, there have been two categories: adult literature and children’s literature. For this year’s edition of the adult category, Swedish Sámi journalist and writer Elin Anna Labba was awarded for her nonfiction book Herrarna satte oss hit: Om tvångsförflyttningarna i Sverige (Sirdolaččat: The Deportation of the Northern Sámi). The jury’s statement pointed to how Labba has woven a literary fabric—oral testimonies, archived documents, yoiks, maps, and photographs that highlight the state abuse and colonial exercise of authority previously made invisible in Nordic history, and calls her book a hybrid that reveals the possibilities of literature. In the children’s book category, Alma Thörn is awarded for the graphic novel Alltid hejdå (Always Goodbye). Thörn’s book is about divorce from a child’s perspective, which the jury deemed “a visually and emotionally strong story.”

Another recent book that calls attention to serious issues is Dansa med corona (Dance with Corona) by the staff of the care home Östergård 2 in Kristianstad. Last year, media frequently wrote about the place, which was one of the first care homes in southern Sweden to be struck by COVID-19. Now, the staff are sharing their own experiences through the recent publication: “Your children beg you to stay home from work because they believe you will die if you go there. Media depict you as the executioner and your friends flee when they see you. At the same time, the elderly need you at work to survive.” The book gives precious insight into the life of the caretakers during extreme times, with guilt and fear as only a couple of the challenges they have had to manage.

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

Having been suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the Hong Kong Book Fair returns this year with the theme “Inspirational and Motivational Reading,” running from June 14 to 20 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai. Besides collaborating with numerous publishers to showcase new books in Chinese and English, the organizer also invited famous local and international writers to participate in talks and workshops, including Neil Gaiman and Julia Lovell. However, with the introduction of the national security law, Hong Kong’s publishing sector is overcast by the anxiety over tightened freedom of speech and expression. As reported by the Hong Kong Free Press, the Hong Kong Trade Development Council announced that police would be notified should they receive complaints on exhibits that breach the national security law. This warning is among a series of censoring actions taken against oppositional voices, including the forced closure of the Apple Daily newspaper and the removal of some political books from public libraries.

Despite the tense political situation in Hong Kong, Hong Kong literature is varied enough to represent Hong Kong in different ways. In a recent interview published by Words without Borders, Louise Law, the director of Spicy Fish Cultural Production Limited and publisher of the local literary magazine Fleurs des Lettres, speaks to translator Jennifer Feeley on Hong Kong’s literary scene and the translation of Hong Kong literature. Feeley is a major translator of the works of Xi Xi, and her translation, Not Written Words: Selected Poetry of Xi Xi, was a prizewinning collection. Zolima CityMag’s recent Hong Kong’s Great Writers series also highlights Xi Xi as their second feature. The article introduces Xi Xi’s literary life and explores the playfulness in her characters as well as her literary style.

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Read more on the Asymptote blog:

The Strange—and Strangely Familiar—World of 1800s Science Fiction Novella Les Xipéhuz

April 28, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Andrea Blatz

Rosny suggests that colonialism will eventually end because of a lack of communication.

In J.-H. Rosny’s 1888 novella Les Xipéhuz, strange beings invade humans’ territory and immediately begin to kill them. Communication becomes impossible; translation is useless because the Xipéhuz threaten humanity’s existence. In today’s essay, Andrea Blatz argues that, whilst science fiction purports to tell stories foreign to our own experience, this French book represents an all-too-familiar colonial situation—and crystalizes the relationship between language and imperialism.

J.-H. Rosny—the nom de plume of brothers Joseph Henri Honoré Boex and Séraphin Justin François Boex—wrote during the Third Republic, when France was expanding its empire in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. But the country had also recently lost the Alsace-Lorraine region to Germany after the Franco-Prussian War, and a loss so close to home was a brutal blow to national pride. Borders also shift in Les Xipéhuz, in which mysterious creatures invade the humans’ territory. The French empire claimed that its raison d’être was to bring its civilization to the rest of the world, and one way to do this was to spread its language. Consequently, the Alliance Française was established in 1883 to teach the French language and spread its culture and civilization, as well as to help create a new French identity.

In this context of imperial expansion, science fiction emerged. Belgian author J.-H. Rosny Aîné—the later pen name of elder brother Joseph—was one of the first authors to write science fiction in the French language, along with Jules Verne. In his works, Rosny pushes readers to imagine humans evolving to create a better world, free of colonialism, through science. The protagonist in Les Xipéhuz, Bakhoûn, represents the use of scientific knowledge for human advancement. Although seen as an outsider for his strange habits—for example, he farms instead of hunting and gathering—he is respected, and the nomadic Pjehou tribe turns to him when their methods against the invading Xipéhuz—who may or may not be from another planet—prove useless. Bakhoûn, who is thousands of years ahead of his time, represents modern rationality in comparison to the primitive beliefs of the other members of his tribe. His beliefs are based on logic rather than superstition:

Premièrement, il croyait que la vie sédentaire, la vie à place fixe, était préférable à la vie nomade, ménageait les forces de l’homme au profit de l’esprit. Secondement, il pensait que le Soleil, la Lune et les étoiles n’étaient pas des dieux, mais des masses lumineuses; Troisièmement, il disait que l’homme ne doit réellement croire qu’aux choses prouvées par l’expérience.

First, he espoused the idea that sedentary existence was preferable to nomadic life, allowing man to channel vital forces toward the development of the mind. Second, he thought that the Sun, the Moon and the Stars were not gods but luminous bodies. Third, he taught that man should only believe in things that can be proven by Measurement.

In other words, Bakhoûn bases his conclusions on evidence he has gathered, employing a quantitative methodology to learn about the Xipéhuz. During the weeks he spends observing them, he formulates and tests hypotheses regarding the invaders’ social, educational, and communication systems.

His findings mirror an anthropological study and the importance of science for the spread of the French empire. As the French did with their subjects, Bakhoûn used his newly acquired knowledge to gain a position of power over the Xipéhuz. Scientific advancement was said to measure how advanced a group of people were and thus was used as a tool in imperial expansion. Scientism, which promoted an objective view of the world, became the dominant ideology. To spread science, language also had to be spread. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2021

March 15, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alice Banks, Carol Khoury, Maddy Robinson, and Rachel Farmer

The best in world literature from Iceland, Palestine, Algeria, and Japan!

This month, our selection of excellent new publications are representative of literature’s capacity for translating worldly phenomenon into language, converting the lived into the understood. From Iceland, a passionate and intimate call to response on the tragedies of environmental destruction; from Palestine, a monumental work of love and resistance from “the Virginia Woolf of Palestine,” Sahar Kalifeh; from Algeria, a sensual novel that treads the tenuous territory of colonialism’s aftereffects; and from Japan, the English-language debut of Akutagawa-winner Kikuko Tsumura, who with graceful humour and intrigue tackles the toxic concept of labour in the thrive of capitalism.  

on time and water

On Time and Water by Andri Snær Magnason, translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith, Open Letter, 2021

Review by Rachel Farmer, Chief Executive Assistant

When Greta Thunberg addressed the UN Climate Summit in September 2019, she choked back tears as she uttered the now infamous words: “How dare you?” Reactions to this display of emotion were mixed to say the least. Some showed discomfort, others concern for her wellbeing; some dismissed her outburst as manipulative, others ridiculed her. Her face and words were even immortalised in meme format. In displaying her anguish and rage so plainly, Thunberg violated the unspoken rule that seems to underpin much of the communication and discussion around climate change, wherein impassivity, stoicism, and detachment reign supreme.

In On Time and Water—part memoir, part interview, part impassioned treatise on the future of our planet—Andri Snær Magnason follows the young Swedish activist’s example, casting aside convention and delving into the emotional side of the climate crisis. In doing so, he embarks on a deeply humane and vulnerable exploration of what manmade climate change truly means for the planet—and for us. In this compelling hybrid of a book, translated sensitively by Lytton Smith, he explains how, a few years ago, he was called upon to defend a region in his country’s highlands from being destroyed in the name of energy production. Despite his deep admiration for the spiritual fervour with which Helgi Valtýsson, another Icelandic writer, wrote about the region in 1945, Magnason found himself unable to infuse the same passion into his defence. Bringing emotions into the discussion would have risked his arguments being dismissed as hysterical, doommongering, or hopelessly idealistic.

I’d found myself overwhelmed by melancholy at the unruly devastation that washed out this peerless region, yet I chose words that seemed moderate and inviting to readers. I used the prevailing language of liberalism, innovation, utilitarianism, and marketing. I discussed the area’s importance for Iceland’s image, its potential tourist income, the area’s research value, how the highlands were a magnet for foreign currency as a filming location for movies or commercials. [. . .] We live in times when money is the measure of reality. I couldn’t argue nature’s right to exist, its essential value, by saying that we might find God’s all-encompassing expanse there. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: February 2021

February 22, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Darren Huang, and Thuy Dinh

Please join us in celebrating three new translations this month from Russia, Mozambique, and Spain!

Amongst the great gifts that translation brings us is an awareness to the alternation and variegations of perspective, informed by ever-shifting factors of fact, selfhood, relationships, and hearsay alike. In this month’s roundup of excellence in world literature, our selection of texts brings expansive voices to light in exquisite explorations in what it means to remember, comprehend, and believe: a luminous text on family history from Maria Stepanova, the reimaginings of folktales by Mia Couto, and a deft fiction on self-deceptions by Sònia Hernández. 

in memory of memory

In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale, New Directions, 2021

 Review by Darren Huang, Editor-at-Large for Taiwan

In W.G. Sebald’s final novel Austerlitz, the protagonist Jacques Austerlitz—an art historian who arrived in Britain as an infant refugee from Czechoslovakia in the Kindertransport—searches for the fate of his parents, who were displaced and lost amidst the Holocaust and the Second World War. The novel is a poetic and digressive excavation of family history through the innovative hybrid of photography, travelogue, history, art criticism, and fiction, as well as a meditation on the horrors of the twentieth century, the unreliability of memory and memorialization, and the weight of the past on the present. This unique, peripatetic narrative method of ruminating over the past, which Sebald described as “documentary fiction,” is adapted by the highly acclaimed Russian novelist, poet, and essayist Maria Stepanova in her autofictional, essayistic memoir, In Memory of Memory, elegantly translated by Sasha Dugdale for New Directions. Like Sebald, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in her multi-genre novel Dictee, Stepanova adopts an oblique, multifaceted approach towards her central project of assembling a family history dating from the late nineteenth century. She lodges memoir like a puzzle box within cultural commentary, historical documents from her ancestors, philosophical discourse, and literary criticism; the result is a densely textured memoir-in-fragments that is alive to the limitations of its project—the lack of historical evidence, the inaccuracies in memory, the fraught relationship between the storyteller and her subjects, and the inevitable incompleteness of the family narrative.

The text is deliberately structured into three distinct portions: the first two sections alternate between cultural criticism, personal anecdotes, and historical documents. Certain “chapters,” wryly entitled “Not a Chapter,” are entirely composed of letters from her forbears, including her maternal great-grandparents, Sarra Ginzburg and Mikhail Fridman, her maternal grandparents, Lyolya and Lyonya, and her paternal grandparents, Nikolai Stepanov and Dora Stepanova, among others. The letters, chronologically arranged from 1942 to 1985, offer intimate glimpses into the personal lives of Stepanova’s family, and serve additionally as pieces of cultural history. They are redolent of a particular place and time, evoking what Stepanova calls “a feeling for the age.” Each epistolary “chapter” is accompanied by minimal context or commentary and separated from each other by essayistic inquiries into memory—ranging from such subjects as the photograph, Charlotte Salomon and her epic novel Life? Or Theatre?, Sebald and his writings on history, and the memory boxes of Joseph Cornell. In the first two sections of the text, this digressive arrangement interrupts the family narrative so that it only appears in decontextualized fragments. The effect of this bifurcated structure is that the family narrative remains mostly unexplored until the end of the second section and the third section, which consist of more conventional biographical accounts of family members. Stepanova’s delay in directly grappling with both her personal and family history reflects her anxieties about writing on the past. For example, she cites Marianne Hirsch’s concern that inserting archival photographic images might de- or re-contextualize them and distort their original realities. Therefore, the sections of cultural criticism represent the author’s hesitant, fitful attempts at approaching the past, which she finally accesses in the final third of the novel. In these critical chapters, Stepanova admits to “picking through different approaches to the past, as one might pick through dried peas, in search of one that might work.” READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2021

February 8, 2021  |  in News  |  by Bassam Sidiki, Caridad Svich, Eva Heisler, Garrett Phelps, Lee Yew Leong, and Sam Carter

Our section editors present their favorite works from our Winter 2021 issue!

Our Winter 2021 issue marks a decade of diving into the languages of the world (our archive now boasts 113 of them!) in all their incredible singularity and variegation. Spanning thirty-one countries, this milestone edition feels like a fitting way to honor a decade of hard work behind the scenes. After hearing from our blog editors last week, let’s pass the mic to the very editors who had a hand in putting together the issue itself.

“Is it a Comedy? Is it a Tragedy?” Thomas Bernhard asks in our debut issue from January 2011. Ten years later, Brazilian author Adelice Souza’s fever-dream of a story (in Padma Viswanathan’s pitch-perfect translation) provides a direct enjoinder: “The play wasn’t a comedy, nor was it a tragedy . . . It was a drama very specifically for those two women.” Just as in Bernhard’s story, the point is not the play at all—we hardly know what the play is about, other than the fact that its two actresses play a lonely woman and her dog, and that tragedy ensues when one demands to switch roles with the other. In contrast to Bernhard, who focuses squarely on the theatre-goer, Souza makes it all about the two actresses whose eight years of traveling with the play to multiple cities have “put them through every type of relationship.” It’s not a story one imagines being plotted out; rather, the work feels like it has been ejected, like toothpaste from a tube, sentence by exhilarating sentence. In the “Brave New World Literature” Special Feature, we also come full circle but in a different way via the return of frequent contributor Jeremy Tiang, who debuted as a translator in our first issue. Combining pop-cultural references with theory, “The World Is Not Enough” is full of quotable gems, but nowhere is Tiang more on-point than when he muses, “Perhaps if the dominant anglophone culture actually acknowledged itself to be part of the world, rather than treating ‘world literature’ as a spice rack to save itself from total blandness, more than three percent of books published in the United States would be in translation?” Finally, anyone who is curious about the workings of a magazine of world literature other than our own will find plenty of food for thought in John Freeman’s riveting piece on how he remade Granta into a global publication.

—Lee Yew Leong, Fiction Editor and ”Brave New World Literature“ Special Feature Editor

Max Rojas is a constant enthusiasm of mine and so I was thrilled to showcase a pretty sizable excerpt from Zane Koss and Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz’s translation—the very first in English—in all its shining, breathless glory. Even though it’s a mere sliver of a doorstop-sized poem, it’s an excellent sample of Rojas’ talent and an overdue introduction for the Anglosphere. The language of Bodies is both baroque and ephemeral, rugged and philosophical, and its tone swings between that of a theologico-political treatise and a declaration of war. It’s some of this last century’s densest and most sophisticated Spanish-language verse, and some of the most woefully unknown.

—Garrett Phelps, Poetry Editor READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2020

November 16, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel, Marina Dora Martino, and Samuel Miller

Our favorite selections for the month, featuring David Diop, Yi Lei, and Pergentino José!

There’s plenty to get excited about in the latest offerings from around the world, bound to satisfy the desires of any reader—from the emotionally visceral, to the patiently curious, to the surreal and the hallucinatory. In scoping for the finest translations, we bring you reviews of anti-colonialist fiction by a Prix Goncourt des Lycéens winner, a new collection from a leading figure of contemporary Chinese poetics, and the first ever literary translation from the Sierra Zapotec into English by a thrilling new voice. 

at night

At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop, translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020

Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

David Diop’s brutal sophomore novel, At Night All Blood Is Black, translated elegantly by Anna Moschovakis, is a relentless indictment of the colonial power structure. Through the utter dissolution of the protagonist, Alfa Ndiaye, the novel demonstrates its ripples and rhizomes throughout society—from the individual to the geopolitical to the environmental—rotting away what does not serve it. Though heavy and dark from beginning to end, this is a highly specific, deftly illustrated, poetically rendered critique that justifies the emotional slog.

Alfa is a chocolat soldier, a Senegalese man who has voluntarily travelled to fight on the side of France in the first World War. During the ensuing battles, Mademba, his childhood friend and “more-than-brother” is disemboweled before his eyes by an enemy soldier. We meet Alfa shortly after he has watched Mademba die slowly, refusing his pleas for mercy. In these scenes of articulate gore and moral anguish, Moschovakis reveals her poetic side in the restraint and somber vivacity with which she renders Diop’s descriptions. Alfa then finds himself in the throes of both deep regret and liberation from the moral conventions which had prevented him from acting in Mademba’s best interest. “No voice rises in my head to forbid me: my ancestors’ voices and my parents’ voices all extinguished themselves the minute I conceived of doing what, finally, I did.” The horror of both bearing witness to and being complicit in the suffering of a loved one silences the voices of morality in his head and marks his entrance into a world of alternate, competing guiding forces: his own tortured impulses and the abstract interests of the narcissistic state. He begins performing solo operations late at night in no-man’s land, disemboweling enemy soldiers and keeping one hand and a weapon from each kill.

A progression that functions on multiple planes expands the novel upwards and outwards from where it remains firmly rooted—in viscera spilled. As time advances and settings shift, Alfa’s psychological state, the narrative mode, the realms of reality, the overarching value system, and the gender coding of these spaces evolve in conjunction. Generally speaking, the trajectory is from the concrete to the abstract, the sober to the unhinged, the current to the eternal, the “real” to the mythological, the individual to the collective, and the masculine to the feminine. Alfa remains our guide, however unreliable, through this uncertain terrain, until his psychological coherence evaporates entirely, leaving the reader stewed in his reflections and testimonies. READ MORE…

Of Loneliness and Disillusion: Abdellah Taïa’s A Country for Dying

September 10, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada

While each narrative voice is unique, they all share a sense of loss. [The novel] draws its strength from its haunting air of solitude.

A Country for Dying by Abdellah Taïa, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan, Seven Stories, 2020

A Country for Dying is more about atmosphere than plot. It is a brief, taut work that digs deep into the margins of society to demonstrate the many ways in which colonialism pollutes our notions of love and self. Over the course of three parts and six chapters, Abdellah Taïa introduces us to the inner lives of four immigrants in Paris, as they contend with their present realities, the pasts they are trying to flee, and the dreams they still hope to indulge.

Their stories read like monologues, and talk toward each other more than they ever intersect. In this they mimic the characters, who are largely confined to their individual apartments; even the city that holds them all is, in a way, isolating—a refuge that can never quite be home (as a Moroccan living in Paris, Taïa himself writes from a place of exile). Thus, while each narrative voice is unique, they all share a sense of loss. A Country for Dying draws its strength from its haunting air of solitude.

If there’s anything like a connective tissue between the stories, it is Zahira: a forty-year-old Moroccan sex worker who has moved to Paris to escape the trauma of her father’s suicide when she was a girl. She struggles with the guilt of having “abandoned” him when he fell ill and was confined to the second floor of their house. “I didn’t think my father was going to die,” she reflects, “[b]ut I accepted, just like everyone else, that I wouldn’t see him again . . . The weight of his heavy footsteps echoes in my ear.” Grief-stricken, Zahira struggles to rewrite his story and heal her pain. Much of the chapter devoted to it is written in the second person as she addresses her father directly, updating him on his family’s lives after his death; in practice, however, it feels like she is addressing the reader, telling us her story on her own terms, to great emotional effect.

There is a direct through line between Zahira’s trauma and her instinct to take care of Mojtaba, a gay Iranian exile, when she finds him collapsed on the street. Looking after him over Ramadan helps her cope with her father’s death: “He was also tender, sweet, melancholic. That was obvious immediately. Something in him was similar to me, familiar.” For a moment, the quiet intimacy that forms between them brings them the peace they so badly deserve. Their bond never ceases to feel fragile, though, and it is clear that it will not last. READ MORE…