Posts filed under 'Epic'

‘Obliged to Serve a Memory’: A Review of Vera Mutafchieva’s The Case of Cem

Cem . . . is silent, an inanimate object in his own story, only moving when and where other powers will him.

The Case of Cem by Vera Mutafchieva, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel, Sandorf Passage, 2024

Cem—born in the burgeoning Ottoman Empire, the second son of the legendary Mehmed the Conqueror, and in the eyes of history, the exiled prince. In his time, Cem was lauded by storytellers the world over for who he might become and what he might accomplish, until finally he was pitied for all that he endured. But these portrayals of Cem, some true and others exaggerated, have all but faded from the public eye over time—a fact that renowned Bulgarian author and historian Vera Mutafchieva sought to remedy with her comprehensive account of his struggle in her novel, The Case of Cem.

Mutafchieva’s works have been published in nearly a dozen languages, the most recent being Angela Rodel’s English translation of The Case of Cem. Originally published in Bulgarian in 1967, the story follows Cem as he tries and fails to usurp his older brother at the behest of some of his countrymen. He is forced into years of exile that take him far from home, from Rhodes to France to Italy. His imprisonments—though those holding him would call it refuge—turn the almost-sultan into an unwilling pawn and bargaining tool for European powers, and eventually lead to his tragic downfall. 

The Case of Cem is a daring blend of court intrigue, tragedy, and historical fact that masterfully captures complex layers of history in its prose and reads like an epic. Just as prevalently, though, it is a reflection on memory, identity, homeland, and what it means to lose them.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Dispatches from the Philippines, Bulgaria, and the Vietnamese Diaspora!

This week, our editors report on (attempts) at elucidation in the humanities and the cruelties of historic expatriation; the instating of Living National Treasures in the form of indigenous practitioners and their singular crafts; and a word that is meant to sum up a year. 

Thuy DinhEditor-at-Large, reporting on the Vietnamese Diaspora

The National Museum of Immigration History in Paris, France is currently offering a sobering exhibition on the history of Indochinese workers-soldiers, called les lính thợ or les công binh. As colonized subjects, twenty thousand men from Indochina—i.e., Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia—were brought to France at the onset of World War II to help with the war effort. Aside from a small percentage of educated volunteers who wished to escape the colony’s lack of social advancement, the majority, ranging from ages 18 to 30, was forcibly recruited from the poor peasantry to work in France’s defense industry.

Besides the exhibit, recollections by surviving workers have been compiled in recent years by various sources, such as the photographic essay “The Forced Oblivion” by Alejandra Arévalo, the graphic memoir “Les Lính Thợ: Immigrés de force, les travailleurs indochinois en France 1939-1952” (2017) by Pierre Daum and Clément Baloup, the film Công Binh, la longue nuit indochinoise (2013) by Lê Lâm, and the Vietnamese-French monograph, Những người lính thợ – Les travailleurs indochinois requis by Liêm Khê Luguern (2010).

When Germany invaded France in June 1940, the Indochinese workers were evacuated to the free zone in Southern France, where they worked in forestry and pioneered the rice-growing industry in the Camargue region. Both state-run and private companies employed these workers, but salaries were either paid to the French government, or distributed to the workers at rates significantly below those paid to locals. When Germany invaded the free zone in 1942, the workers were conscripted by German occupation troops to work in weapon factories. Besides harrowing working conditions, the men suffered physical and mental trauma due to prolonged exile and mistreatment by their superiors. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2023

New translations from the Catalan and the French!

This month in newly released translations, we’re featuring two authors of inimitable voice and style. From the Catalan, a surrealist masterpiece by Ventura Ametller sharply blends history with mysticism in an epic retelling of the Spanish Civil War; and from the French, the latest text by Annie Ernaux returns to some of the author’s most central themes—sex and memory—in a poignant examination of corporeal and psychological navigations.

Summa Kaotica by Ventura Ametller (Bonaventura Clavaguera), translated from the Catalan by Douglas Suttle, Fum d’Estampa, 2023

Review by Samantha Siefert, Marketing Manager

A monstrosity of a fish gnashes at a tiger, the tiger leaps towards a gun, the gun is aimed perilously at the prone body of a nude woman. . . It’s all so unexpected and moving, but what do these objects have to do with one another—or with anything at all?

Such is surrealism: the challenge of reconciling the disparity of absurdity. “Everything leads us to believe that there exists a spot in the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the high and the low, the communicable and the incommunicable will cease to appear contradictory,” declared André Breton in his manifesto. Riding on the coattails of Dadaism, surrealism emerged as an impulsive reaction to the tragedy of the First World War: If reason had resulted in such great suffering, then what good was a movement rooted in realism?

The antithesis of reason, then, was the way forward, and the efforts of the avant-garde were so resonant that they continue to exist today as comfortable figures of popular culture, where the discordance of fish, tiger, and gun feel almost familiar in Salvador Dalí’s famous painting, “The Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening.” The surrealist world of letters, however, leave room for discovery.

In Catalonia with Dalí at the beginning of the twentieth century, the writer Ventura Ametller—the pen name of Bonaventura Clavaguera—was hard at work, producing a prolific collection of poetry, essays, and novels that turn the world upside down in raucous prose, described by essayist Lluís Racionero as “Dalí in words.” His work has remained only quietly appreciated, but perhaps the time has come for that to change with the new publication of Ametller’s groundbreaking magnum opus, Summa Kaotica, in a masterful translation from the Catalan by Douglas Suttle. READ MORE…

The Seyavash Cycle and Ritual as Translation

If the rituals as such are the bridge from one story to the other, we can view this transformation as an act of translation . . .

In our new column, Retellings, Asymptote presents essays on the translations of myths, those enduring stories that continue to transform and reincarnate. In this essay, Claire Jacobson covers the path of the Seyavash cycle through time and cultures, its adoptions and adaptations. 

In Khurasani poet Abu al-Qasim Ferdowsi’s epic the Shahnameh, symbol of innocence and hero-prince Seyavash undergoes a false rape accusation, a martyr’s death, and a symbolic resurrection. This tale—the pure hero is falsely accused of rape and suffers either a literal or symbolic death and resurrection as a result—is found across cultures and time, often beginning with the hero’s virtuous rejection of a lustful woman: the incorrupt Seyavash recoils from his stepmother Sudabeh’s declarations of love, as does the Khotanese version of the Mauryan prince Kunala from Queen Tishyaraksha; the righteous Joseph (Yusuf) flees Potiphar’s wife, Zulaikha; the chaste Hippolytus rejects Phaedra’s advances; the honorable Bata refuses to betray his brother Anpu by sleeping with his sister-in-law. Much like Seyavash, each of these men are then written into the cycle of accusation, death, and resurrection. 

Many of these myths coexisted in a shared discursive space, but not all of them continued to develop and change as living stories. After the Islamic conquest of the Iranian plateau, several began to converge. By the early Islamic period, the tale of Yusuf and Zulaikha was considered by literary critics to be the same story as Seyavash and Sudabeh but in a more appropriately Islamic format, and many of the rituals that had long been practiced to celebrate Seyavash were repurposed to commemorate the death of Husayn at Karbala. In this case, ritual (by which I mean the popular practice of religion) seems to act as a medium of translation, carrying the shape of the re-enacted story forward even though the language, notions of gender, and cultural landscape were all slowly changing as the millennia passed.

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Balancing Familiarity and Strangeness: Rebekah Curry on Translating Euripides

Making a poem or remaking a poem into new language—it’s all part of the same whole.

Euripides’ Alkestis, written in the fifth century BCE, tells the story of a queen who volunteers to die instead of her king and husband. Our Spring 2022 issue features an excerpt from the play in Rebekah Curry’s new translation—a delightfully contemporary rendition of this Ancient Greek work based on a collaboration between Curry and classics scholar Stanley Lombardo. In our conversation, Curry—an award-winning translator of old and current languages—reflects on humor in Euripides’ disturbing play, the appeal of ancient stories, and the different shapes collaborative translation can take.

Michal Zechariah (MZ): A new translation of an ancient text is always an exciting event—it seems to go beyond the text at hand and suggest a new relationship with the past, as in Emily Wilson’s recent translation of Homer’s Odyssey. How did you first encounter Alkestis, and what drew you to translate it? 

Rebekah Curry (RC): If memory serves, I first read Alkestis (in translation) as a sophomore classics major at the University of Kansas, while taking a “Greek Lit and Civ” class. Admittedly, I don’t believe I gave any more thought to it at that time than I did to the other texts I read for the class. Then, a few years ago, I was in a conversation with Stanley Lombardo, whose student I’d been at KU, and he proposed a collaboration. He’d spent some time on a translation of Alkestis that he wanted to take in a different direction, and his idea was for us to work on (and, we hoped, publish) it together.

MZ: I noticed you chose to title your translation Alkestis rather than the better-known anglicized Alcestis, a choice that reminds me of Willis Barnstone’s return to original name forms in his Restored New Testament. What made you choose to use the Greek forms of Alkestis’ and other characters’ names? Is this choice part of a wider approach you took to your translation?

RC: My idea in using Greek forms of the names rather than the Latinized/anglicized forms (“Apollon” rather than “Apollo,” “Herakles” rather than “Hercules”) was to create a sort of productive estrangement. The Greek names defamiliarize the story somewhat, distancing it from the accumulated versions and adaptations of classical mythology in English. At the same time as the translation aims at bringing Alkestis into the twenty-first century, the names are a reminder that this narrative is happening in a remote time and place. I should say, however, that this isn’t an approach that I would push everyone translating from Ancient Greek to take—it just depends on what kind of effect you’re trying to create.

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In Conversation: Daniel Mendelsohn on his new memoir, An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and An Epic

What I’m interested in creating is something that combines all the things that I do in my life as a reader and writer and teacher

Memoirist, critic, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn is perhaps best known for the application of mythic paradigms from the Western classics to the analysis of popular and literary culture. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2006 for The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, and finalist again in 2012 for his essay collection Waiting for the Barbarians, his criticism frequently graces the pages of The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. The forthcoming release (Knopf, September 12) of his new memoir, An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and An Epic—about his octogenarian father’s experience auditing his Odyssey freshman seminar at Bard College and their subsequent voyage aboard an Odyssey-themed cruise—occasioned this conversation with Asymptote Interviews Editor Henry Ace Knight.

Can you tell me about the genesis of the book? Was it taking shape in your mind as early as your dad’s request to sit in on the Odyssey course?

No, not at all. The sequence was that early in 2011, before the semester began, he approached me about taking my course; I knew that he was interested in rereading the classics in his old age, and I said, “Well, I’m doing this Odyssey course in the spring…” And he said, “Oh, can I take it?” It didn’t occur to me at the time that it might be something that I would write about. Then, about halfway through the course, at which point so many interesting and funny things were happening, I started taking notes—his interactions with the kids, the things he said about the text. Much of the book is based on the notes I took right after class, memorable exchanges I recorded. Around the midterm, I thought, “OK, somehow I’ve got to write about this,” although I hardly envisioned a book at that point. In fact, at the end of the semester, when Froma [Zeitlin, a Classics professor at Princeton and Mendelsohn’s mentor] told me about the “Retracing the Odyssey” cruise, I called a friend of mine who was the editor of a travel magazine, and I said, “My dad and I are going on this Odyssey cruise and I think I want to write about it.” But I only thought I was going to write a magazine article! Then, when my dad fell ill, I started thinking all of this was…suddenly it took on a shape, you know: the class and the cruise and his illness. And so I started thinking, in a sort of inchoate way, of how all of this could add up to something: him taking the class, us going on the cruise, and him suddenly having a stroke and thereby raising the question of whether he could be his old ‘self’—a very Odyssean question indeed. I started to see it all as one event moving along an arc and that that arc was the arc of the Odyssey.

Did you start to draw more and more parallels between the Odyssey and your relationship to your father as the semester progressed?

I’ve done this with several books now, this entwining ancient texts and personal narratives. I did it in my first memoir, The Elusive Embrace, in which I wrapped exegeses of various classical texts around a story about me and my family and being a gay man who decided to become a father—my story was interwoven with musings on classical texts about desire and parenting and so on. And then I did it in The Lost, in which the intertext is not a classical text but a biblical text: I used Genesis, with its memorable narratives about fratricide and global destruction and wandering and miraculous survivals, as a kind of foil for this family story about the Holocaust. Once you start thinking about a text, these parallels to your life start to present themselves. So in this case, because my mind was on the Odyssey, everything about what happened to Dad and me, the course, the cruise, started presenting itself as “odyssean,” as potential material, and the parallels between the personal narrative and the text started to make themselves felt. So, for instance, the first major section of my book, which recreates the first weeks of the Odyssey course and our discussions of the first four books of the Odyssey, which are about Odysseus’s son Telemachus going on a sort of fact-finding mission to learn what happened to his absent father, twines around flashbacks to my childhood in which I too am a boy searching for his father, trying to understand who he is. And so on.

What happens when I start thinking about a memoir is that I’ll have an intuition about how a certain text is going to structure the memoir, and then once I’m thinking that way it just takes off. But of course it’s only in the writing that you can really carefully work out the parallels and draw attention to them in a rather purposeful, literary way; so in this sense I’m also creating the parallels, I’m establishing them in my text for the reader. I know the Odyssey intimately, so as things were happening in real life I would think, “Oh my God, this is so Odyssean!”—like the guy on the boat with the scar. [A major revelation in An Odyssey turns on an encounter between Mendelsohn and an elderly fellow passenger who had a scar on his thigh dating to an incident in World War II. In Homer’s Odyssey, a climactic moment is linked to the history of a scar on Odysseus’s thigh.] When I met that old gentleman with the scar I thought, “You cannot make this stuff up!”—as it was happening, I was thinking that no one was going to believe this, it was just too good to be true. But it really happened!

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Trishanku―Language as Purgatory

“My adulthood is covered with the bubble-wrap of English.”

So here’s a story―Trishanku was a mythological king, the ancestor of the Hindu god Ram. When Trishanku grew old, the gods invited his soul to heaven, but he wanted to rise to paradise in his earthly body. “Impossible,” the gods shuddered. Trishanku went to the sage Vishwamitra for help. Vishwamitra conducted a great yagya for Trishanku, and with the power of his ritual, started levitating Trishanku―body and all―towards heaven. But when the gods barred the gates, Vishwamitra built an entirely new universe between heaven and earth where Trishanku dangles, upside down, for eternity.

As a bilingual writer, I often feel like Trishanku. Having grown up in a postcolonial country with the shadow of a foreign language colouring every aspect of my existence, a duplicity cleaves my life. I inhabit two languages―English and Hindi―but I’m never fully comfortable in either. It’s telling perhaps that Trishanku is also the name of a constellation that in English is known as Crux. This confusion of languages I reside in, this no woman’s land of living between tongues defines me.

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