Posts filed under 'Eastern European literature'

Writing From the Frontlines: An Interview with Ostap Kin and Kate Tsurkan

November 16, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

Writing is the most significant response to war and death; writing is, in this case, life.

Yaryna Chornohuz is a combat medic in the Ukrainian Marines, currently serving on the frontlines. She also happens to be a brilliant poet, capturing the reality of the Russian invasion with powerful lyricism. I was very moved by Chornohuz’s “A Cycle of Wartime Poems” translated by Kate Tsurkan and Ostap Kin, which were featured in our Summer 2022 issue. I had the opportunity to interview Tsurkan and Kin about the importance of literature in the time of war, and we conducted our conversation over email, from our respective homes in Ukraine, the United States, and Ireland. I am proud to share this dialogue, in which we discuss—among other things—how language can be an act of resistance and how it is crucial, now more than ever, to amplify the work of Ukrainian writers and artists. 

Rose Bialer (RB): I would like to begin by asking how each of you came to translating Ukrainian literature? How did you first encounter Chornohuz’s poetry?

Kate Tsurkan (KT): Well, I am first and foremost a trained scholar of French literature, but life is truly full of surprises. By a twist of fate, I moved to Ukraine, and a year later, I met my husband and ended up staying here. What was simply a field of interest in my work as a literary magazine editor became an obligation to understand and delve deeper into the culture that I’d married into. 

As for Chornohuz, I first learned of her poetry through the journalist Justina Dobush, who read aloud the poem “too red a spot” for Asymptote. She also did an interview with Chornohuz for Apofenie, and kept telling me that this is a writer to keep my eye on. I owe a lot to Justina because when I was just starting out and admittedly knew very little, she was one of those Ukrainians giving me much-needed insight on the contemporary literary scene and Ukrainian culture in general. Chornohuz is part of the growing genre of Ukrainian veteran literature; prior to her role in the military, she was an active member of the Ukrainian literary sphere and also worked as a translator. These days, Ukrainians know her best for her military service and activism. Her poetry and overall perspective on war had such a visceral impact on me that I felt it needed to be shared with the world. 

Ostap Kin (OK): I’m originally from Ukraine, born and raised there. When I switched continents, I started translating from Ukrainian into English. It all started as a combination of factors, including challenge, curiosity, and a need to experiment; I wanted to get firsthand experience about how work that appeals to me may sound in English, and what the whole process looks like. Lastly, I did hope to share Ukrainian literary works with others.

I heard about Yaryna Chornohuz from the news sometime in 2020. As an activist, she protested, I remember, in the governmental headquarters. Kate Tsurkan is the one who introduced me to her poems and invited me to work on their English language. 

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Refuting Domination: Margaree Little on Translating Osip Mandelstam

June 22, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Michal Zechariah

I found particularly disturbing the tendency to play up Mandelstam’s death in the translations, sometimes changing the poems radically to do so.

Featured in the current Spring 2022 issue, Osip Mandelstam’s “Lines on an Unknown Soldier” is a nightmarish yet poignant reflection on war. Margaree Little’s new translation aims to bring out previously overlooked aspects of Mandelstam’s poetry by practicing devoted attention to his original text and to its historical and personal contexts. In her discussion of Mandelstam, Little glides between erudition and intimacy with his works. Our correspondence led to surprising discoveries like the everyday object Mandelstam despised, serious consideration of the political significance of translating Mandelstam today, and renewed appreciation for how literary insight can shape translation.

Michal Zechariah (MZ): Before translating Osip Mandelstam’s poem this spring, you published another translation of his work in American Poetry Review. How did you first encounter Mandelstam’s poetry, and what drew you to translate it? What usually guides your choice when you decide to take on a translation project?

Margaree Little (ML): About ten years ago, around the time I was in graduate school, I first encountered Mandelstam’s work in the Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin translations. I was drawn to the poems, but remember feeling that I was missing something, as though there was a screen separating me from the poems.

In 2016, I began to translate [Marina] Tsvetaeva’s work, focusing increasingly on her political poems that have largely been neglected in English-language translation. This work drew me further into that world, that moment. Then, two years later, my partner and I were visiting our friend, the poet and translator Eleanor Wilner, in Philadelphia. Eleanor has talked about the influence of Mandelstam on her own work and gave me her copy of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s extraordinary first memoir, Hope Against Hope. The book describes the last four years before Mandelstam’s second arrest and death, but more than that, it offers a window into the worldview that grounded his poetry and his entire life.

After reading this book, I went back to his poems and started to translate them to get closer to the original work. I found the originals so rich in music, in layers of meaning and feeling, and so varied in tone, including sharp awareness and wit.

I also began to realize the degree to which Brown and Merwin, as well as other dominant English-language translators, have altered the poems. These changes range from what could be considered more benign (clunky wording or phrasing) to distortions that fundamentally alter the poems’ meaning. I found particularly disturbing the tendency to play up Mandelstam’s death in the translations, sometimes changing the poems radically to do so. This tendency creates a romantic myth of the poet, while erasing crucial parts of his actual work. The gap between the originals and existing versions made me want to continue to translate the poems and honor them on their own terms.

I suppose these are the dual threads that run through my translation work, whether of Tsvetaeva or Mandelstam; a connection to the poems and the deep urgency within them, and a frustration with how they have previously been translated—or ignored, or distorted—in English.

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A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

May 12, 2022  |  in News  |  by Eva Wissting and Julia Sherwood

A selection of our latest staff reads

From a newly translated work of Czech dystopian literature to a Swedish nonfiction chronicling the violence of European colonialism, here are our staff’s latest recommended reads. Sign up for our newsletter to get these recommendations delivered right to your inbox.

lak

Since its publication in 2016, The Lake, the multiple award-winning dystopian novel by the Czech writer and translator Bianca Bellová, has been translated into 20 languages and is now finally available in Alex Zucker’s English version. Comprising four chapters whose titles echo the stages of the evolution of an insect, it is a coming-of-age story of Nami, a boy who grows up in a small, Russian-occupied town dominated by the statue of “The Statesman”, situated on the shore of the ever-shrinking and heavily polluted lake. Its dwindling stock of fish provides the locals with their only source of income and is home to a baleful Lake Spirit whom they try to appease with sinister burying rituals. Brought up by his grandma, the teenage Nami sets out for the city in search of his long-lost mother and, after experiencing horrendous exploitation and violence, returns to his home town to find a redemption of sorts by diving into the lake. Clearly inspired by the author’s experience of growing up under Soviet occupation and possibly also by the Russian annexation of the Crimea, this bleakly powerful portrayal of a downtrodden society under Russian occupation has acquired a new resonance in early 2022.

—Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large for Slovakia

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“It is not knowledge that we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions.” In his best-known book, Exterminate All the Brutes (tr. Joan Tate), Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist travels from El Menia in Algeria to Zinder in Niger, constantly struggling with sand that reaches every corner of his eyes, his luggage, and his floppy disks—the original book is from 1992, with many re-prints since. His journey through the Sahara also becomes a journey into Europe’s colonial history, with parallels to the Polish-British writer and seaman Joseph Conrad. As a horrified witness to colonial brutality, Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness as a commentary to an ongoing debate, where European colonial violence almost invariably is excused, glossed over, and even justified. Lindqvist’s book shows how Nazism wasn’t an anomaly in an otherwise peaceful and democratic Europe—all ideas and methods applied by the Nazis had already been developed before them by Europeans of different nationalities. Still as relevant today as when Lindqvist’s book first was published, it inspired Raoul Peck’s HBO documentary of the same name from 2021.

—Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large for Sweden

*****

Read more on the Asymptote blog:

Listening to Syntax: Eugene Ostashevsky on Lucky Breaks

April 20, 2022  |  in Book Club  |  by Shawn Hoo

[Belorusets] writes in this beautiful, off-kilter, very non-state, non-Russian Russian

Reviewing Yevgenia Belorusets’s Lucky Breaks, Shawn Hoo writes, “The question of what photographs and literature can do in war, I suspect, will not be resolved anytime soon.” Still, as one reads Belorusets’s text of stories from the fringes of wartime, the role of writing within conflict—even if varied and not always discernible—emerges as vital, urgent. Our Book Club selection for the month of March, Lucky Breaks provides a doorway by which the voices and images of Ukrainian women, and their ordinary lives, emerge and connect in unexpected, miraculous ways. In the following interview with Eugene Ostashevsky, whose expert and precise translation of Lucky Breaks has given this title a formidable presence in English, Hoo and Ostashevky discuss the rejections of typical narratives, transitions of impossible grammars, and translating as a pursuit of poetics.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

Shawn Hoo (SH): You have translated mostly Russian avant-garde and absurdist poetry. Were the things that drew you to these poets the same things that drew you to Yevgenia Belorusets’s Lucky Breaks?

Eugene Ostashevsky (EO): I translate as a poet, if that makes sense, which means that translation is vital to my poetic work (which foregrounds translation, which problematises translation) but, more importantly, that my poetics help me make translation choices. I started translating the OBERIU, the so-called absurdists, an avant-garde group in the ’20s and an underground group in the 1930s. The way their work formed me as a reader and a poet, even before I started translating, was their absurdisation of language: the way they took classical poetics and projected avant-garde poetics on them, breaking up classical poetics to build these very beautiful linguistic structures which questioned rather than affirmed language. They questioned rather than affirmed reference or the veracity of statements, and greatly relativised linguistic truth. So here’s the important point: I think maybe what drew me to them was the fact that I’m an immigrant. It was the fact that—I don’t want to say I don’t write in my native language, but—I don’t write in my native language, technically speaking.

With Belorusets, you read Lucky Breaks and there is a lot of Daniil Kharms, member of OBERIU, for the reason that Kharms really reflects on and deconstructs narrative. When Belorusets takes her stories about war and cuts out authorial omniscience, writing about the fog of war, and about interacting with people whom you don’t know much about, she describes these people in this kind of glancing way, often slipping into these Kharmsian rejections of classical narrative.

The second thing is that, like virtually all Ukrainians, she is bilingual. But she writes in Russian because that’s what they speak in her family. Now the Russian language is associated with the Russian state, but there basically used to be, in the twentieth century, two forms of Russian: an émigré Russian and a Soviet Russian. After the Soviet Union collapsed and the émigrés started publishing in Russia—because that’s where the readers were—it turned out that the compromise, the attaching of the language to the political unit of the Russian Federation (even though nobody did it consciously) turned out to be very harmful for the language. [Belorusets] writes in this beautiful, off-kilter, very non-state, non-Russian Russian which has (it sounds like I’m talking about wine) tinges of Austro-Hungarian syntax. Also, she is trained as a translator from German, so that’s also there; beyond that Central Europeanness of her Russian, there is Gogol. You feel that in the ironies, in the way the words and the clauses are not lined up one after another but rub up against each other, the way they are defamiliarised. I just love that.

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We Stand With Ukraine: “Charred Snow” by Deborah Kelly

April 16, 2022  |  in We Stand With Ukraine  |  by Deborah Kelly

and all words swallowed hard / on themselves.

In this edition of our column that spotlights literature expressing support for the citizens of Ukraine, we present Deborah Kelly’s poem, “Charred Snow.” Through tightly coiled lines, the poem evokes both the ongoing devastation and the inarticulable grief of victims of war. 

Charred Snow

Who sings a folksong on the steps of ruin
knows, there are words one swallows
under bombardment,
but I, in another town, could cry devastation,
as many times as it fell.
In the charred snow, burnt bread.
The least of it. To say devastation,
I cried sons, daughters.
But then, Bucha,
and all words swallowed hard
on themselves.

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We Stand With Ukraine: “Life’s More Enduring Than War” by Irina Ivanchenko

April 2, 2022  |  in Translations, We Stand With Ukraine  |  by Ian Singleton, Irina Ivanchenko, and Marina Eskina

As the war in Ukraine continues, our new column shows that the world stands with Ukraine.

In our fourth installment of this new weekly column, we collect the works of writers around the world in response to the ongoing war in Ukraine—texts of compassion, of endurance, of commemoration, and of reaching outward. This poem expresses the resilience of both the art of poetry and the Ukrainian people in the face of violence.

Life’s More Enduring Than War

When the water runs out,
light fades, frost falls, and the
firmament freezes over,
we won’t stoop to prose.

Тhe grasses, dry and stiff,
have not yet grown above us.
Until the words run out,
we’ll speak in verses

of those who are far and near,
and say that we’re one and loved,
above the Bug, the Vorskla, the Dnieper,
in Warsaw, Rome, and Prague.

When all the words run out,
in bird language, we’ll proclaim,
in one universal roll call—
our homeland is alive.

Life’s more enduring than war,
long-lasting, sacrosanct.
We’re all her children, and while
she lives, we won’t be orphaned. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

February 18, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Julia Sherwood, and Kristina Tatarian

Literary festivals, translation contests, and more from Mexico, Armenia, and the Czech Republic!

This month has seen the publication of new essays in Mexico highlighting the importance of editors, literary festivals in the Armenian capital, and the screening of restored screen adaptations of Czech literary classics. Read on to find out more!

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

The literary community has not been discouraged by the global pandemic. February is already blooming with a host of literary events and new publications, some of which—announced early to build excitement—will reach readers later in the year.

On February 4 and 5, the fourth edition of the Kerouac International Festival took place. The event featured poetry readings and performances, showcasing work that disturbs traditional boundaries between visual art, music, and literary creation. The festival takes place every year in Vigo, New York, and Mexico City. This year, the lineup included several nationally and internationally recognized poets. Among them was Hubert Matiúwàa, who has been translated by Paul M. Worley for Asymptote. Poet Rocío Cerón also participated in the festival, presenting performances that blurred the lines between digital art and poetry. Shortly after the Kerouac Festival, she also kicked off a solo video art and poetry exhibition called Potenciales Evocados (Evoked Potentials), hosted in the convent where Early Modern poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz lived.

Four hours north of Mexico City, in the state of Querétaro, another event of international importance took place: the publication of Editar Guerra y paz (Editing War and Peace) by the independent publishing house Gris Tormenta. Written by Argentine editor Mario Muchnik, the book is part of Gris Tormenta’s Editors Collection, a series that highlights the work behind designing, planning, and putting out a book.

Finally, February also brought thrilling news to writers. Translated by seasoned Asymptote contributor Christina MacSweeney, Daniel Saldaña Paris‘s novel Ramifications was featured in the longlist of the Dublin Literary Award. Similarly, poet, translator, Asymptote contributor, and champion of contemporary literature in Spanish Robin Myers had her poem “Diego de Montomayor” selected for the compilation The Best American Poetry 2022.

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Describing the Entire World: On Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob

February 16, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

Tokarczuk does not glorify the past, but neither does she offer us the comforting illusion that we have left its barbarism behind.

Olga Tokarczuk has long been recognized in Poland as one of the most important authors working today, but it is only in the last few years that she has received her due recognition in the English-speaking world. The course of her rise to fame in English has been in some ways unexpected, beginning as it did with one of her more experimental fictions, Flights, which is also among her longer works. Although this seems to bode well for her continued success, it is in some ways unfortunate that Flights was the first of her novels to receive such attention, because it may give readers the wrong impression: Tokarczuk’s work, though ambitious and wonderfully complex, is in fact best characterized by an extraordinary vivacity and approachability.

That this grace and elegance can also be appreciated by Anglophone readers is due, in part, to the brilliance of Tokarczuk’s translators, and the particular genius of Jennifer Croft is once again on display in The Books of Jacob. Croft beautifully captures the distinct quality of Tokarczuk’s prose: the lightness, the playful curiosity, the lyricism. This is harder than one might think: I translated a few lines of The Books of Jacob myself for an academic essay I wrote on the novel, and it is humbling to compare my version to hers. As Croft recently explained in an essay on the process of translating the novel, part of the trick is managing word order, a complex phenomenon in Polish that, if rendered too faithfully in English, makes for an awkwardness that is utterly alien to Tokarczuk’s style. To get her right, it is necessary to take some liberties, and it requires a truly gifted translator to find the right balance.

A big part of what distinguishes Tokarczuk’s work is its spell-binding immersiveness. Many of her novels, like the much earlier Primeval and Other Times and House of Day, House of Night, have a fairy-tale quality (one that has much in common with the works of magical realism so popular in the 1990s), produced in part by her fondness for interweaving notes of magic or mysticism but also more generally by her narrators’ sense of wide-eyed wonder at the world. The Books of Jacob is very characteristic in this regard, particularly in its interest in the occult and otherworldly. At the opening of the novel, we meet Yente as she awakens on her deathbed and suddenly floats above the scene, viewing everything from on high. “And this is how it is now, how it will be: Yente sees all.” And so the story begins, establishing a perspective that hovers between life and death, outside of time and space, a striking combination of detachment and sensuous detail. At one moment, it ponders the conventions of geographical borders; at another, it notes the particular scent of a sweaty body.

But against expectation, Yente is not the novel’s narrator, nor even the book’s focal point, though she reappears occasionally to survey the scene and meditate on the vagaries of human designs and plans. Instead, the novel moves among a sprawling cast of characters, each with their own wonderfully idiosyncratic set of concerns and interests. There are the various members of the Shorr family (it is they who inadvertently make Yente immortal, having attempted only to keep her alive long enough that her death wouldn’t ruin ruin the wedding they are hosting.) There is the priest and encyclopedia author Benedict Chmielowski, who dreams of describing the entire world, and his pen-pal and aspiring poet, the noblewoman Elżbieta Drużbacka. There is the doctor Asher Rubin, whose cosmopolitan interests in European culture and philosophy draw him gradually away from the Jewish community. And one of my personal favorites, Moliwda, a lonely, wandering Polish nobleman who moves to Turkey, giving himself over to various utopian experiments in search of a place where he will belong. From these bits and pieces of the various characters’ lives, gradually, a larger story emerges.

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Pleasantly Odd Prose: An Interview with Translator from the Albanian, John Hodgson

March 29, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Sophia Stewart

When Albania was isolated under communism, Kadare tried to help his readers travel in their imagination.

Throughout Ismail Kadare’s autobiographical novel The Doll, recently published in English by Counterpoint Press, the narrator voices a dilemma that most writers know well: the insufficiency of language. “It was hard to explain because there were no words for it,” he says at one point. “Either I didn’t know them, or they weren’t yet invented.” And later: “No language could describe what I felt in my heart. I needed a different one. The one I had would not obey me.”

So much of the literary translator’s work lies in courting the obedience of language. Translation makes intelligible the previously unintelligible, imagines new words to convey preexistent meaning. John Hodgson knows this well: The Doll is the sixth book of Kadare’s that Hodgson has translated. Considering his outsized role in bringing Kadare’s work to English-language readers, he cuts a modest, unassuming figure. One of the few Albanian-English literary translators working today, Hodgson has translated Kadare’s novels The Three-Arched Bridge, The Traitor’s Niche, and A Girl in Exile, among others. In comparison to the Albanian writer’s previous novels, Hodgson describes The Doll as “a gentle, reflexive, and humorous book” and found “the experience of translating it was correspondingly relaxed.”

Hodgson and I recently discussed his work as an Albanian-English interpreter and literary translator, as well as the inimitable pleasures of “a Kadare sentence.”

—Sophia Stewart, Assistant Interviews Editor

Sophia Stewart (SS): You were born in England and studied English at Cambridge and Newcastle. What initially drew you to the Albanian language, and what led you to pursue Albanian translation professionally?

John Hodgson (JH): In the 1980s, I taught English in several now vanished Eastern European countries: the German Democratic Republic, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. The British Council sent me to the University of Prishtina in Kosovo. I knew nothing about Kosovo when I arrived, but I was enthralled by the life there. Now, during lockdown, I’ve written a short book in Albanian about this time, which I recall with great affection. Soon afterwards I was head-hunted by the United States Government to translate Marxist-Leninist propaganda.

SS: Seeing as you were born in England, and therefore speak British English, do you actively avoid Briticisms in your translations? While there is no such thing as “standard English,” do you attempt to make your English translations as universally intelligible—that is, “unmarked” by dialectical indicators—as possible?

JH: When I worked for the United States government, my computer would bleep whenever I used a Briticism, and this taught me, for instance, not to write the word “whilst.” English is very rich and capacious, so it is possible to write in an “unmarked” style without lapsing into bland UN-speak. Albanian also has a lot of variation, particularly between the north and south, and Kadare writes in a non-regional literary Albanian that is quite a recent flowering, and which he himself has done a lot to shape and infuse with expressive power. Recently he has been consciously reviving old words and creating neologisms. A Kadare sentence in Albanian is quite unlike any other writer’s. I was pleased when a reviewer described the prose of one of my translations as “pleasantly odd.” I thought I had perhaps captured something of this. Dialectical indicators in the original language pose more intractable problems than a translator’s own idiom. So does slang. Kadare hardly ever uses slang, and presents none of the difficulties of, for example, the soldiers’ Bosnian in Faruk Šehić’s Under Pressure.

SS: The author-translator relationship can vary so much depending on the particular project or pairing. Having translated so much of Kadare’s work over the course of more than two decades, what does your working relationship with Kadare look like?

JH: Kadare has had dozens of translators and he can’t spend all his time dealing with us. I have been grateful for the confidence he has shown in me. Generally, after I have completed the first draft of each book in English, the editor and I put together questions for Kadare, which he has always answered conscientiously. He doesn’t use the internet, and I like to respect his privacy. READ MORE…