A monthly peek at what our superstar Asymptote team members have been up to!
Poetry Editor Aditi Machado’s debut collection of poems, Some Beheadings, “exploring territories as disparate as India’s Western Ghats and the cinematic Mojave Desert,” has just been published by Nightboat Books.
Drama Editor Caridad Svich’s Red Bike has been selected for NNPN’s 2017 National Showcase of New Plays this December.
Contributing Editor Ellen Elias-Bursac was given an award by the Serbian PEN Center for her work translating Serbian writers into English.
Asymptote’s new Fall issue is replete with spectacular writing. See what our section editors have to say about the pieces closest to their hearts:
As writer-readers, we’ve all been there before. Who of us hasn’t been faced with that writer whose words have made us stay up late into the night; or start the book over as soon as we’re done; or after finally savoring that last word, weep—for all the words already written and that would never to be yours. The feeling is unmistakeable, physical. In her essay, “Animal in Outline,” Mireia Vidal-Conte describes this gut feeling after finishing El porxo de les mirades (The Porch of the Gazes) by Miquel de Palol: “What are we doing? I thought. What are we writing? What have we read, what have we failed to read, before sitting down in front of a blank sheet of paper? What does and doesn’t deserve readers?” There are the books that make you never want to stop writing, and the books that never make you want to write another word (in the best way possible, of course). Vidal-Conte reminds writers again that none of us is without context—for better or for worse. Her essay is smart, playful, honest, and a must-read from this issue.
—Ah-reum Han, Writers on Writers Editor
"Our society is unwilling and unable to fully and profoundly come to terms with the legacy of either totalitarian regime."
In December 2015, my new play, The Silent Whip, premiered on the small stage of the National Theatre in Bratislava. It was written as a warning about what might happen if my country, Slovakia, fails to come to terms with its wartime past, but in light of the recent general election there, which has swept a neo-Nazi party into parliament, it turned out to be a grim prediction.
My country’s history is marked by a recurrent loss of memory, mostly imposed from above. As someone who spent nearly half of my life under state socialism, with history lessons filled with blank pages and distortions, I have found history to be a never-ending fount of fascination and explored it through my writing, much of which is based on real figures from our more distant and recent history.
One such figure is the protagonist of The Silent Whip, the acclaimed 20th century Slovak writer Milo Urban. The best of his fiction, written before World War II, particularly the novel The Living Whip, still forms part of our literary canon. Yet he is also one of many Slovak writers who have sullied their reputation by getting entangled with one ideology or another. In the four decades from 1948 until 1989 many authors genuinely believed in the idea of communism, or at least pretended to believe in it in order to be allowed to publish. During the much shorter existence of the wartime Slovak Republic (1939-1945), a satellite of Nazi Germany, quite a few distinguished writers embraced the national socialist ideology. Many of them were condemned after the war and some, for instance Jozef Cíger Hronský, emigrated to South America.
Asymptote blog seeks new contributions on current cultural events and political issues.
“Look at the rose through world-colored glasses,” Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote. In this spirit, Asymptote is now seeking (translated) poetry and nonfiction directly responding to global issues and worldwide cultural events for publication on our blog.
Subjects can vary widely: the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis, the Paris attacks, the work of recent prize-winning writers, anniversaries of significant cultural events, even the release of the new Star Wars film. From politics to pop culture phenomena, we are looking for new writing on the most up-to-date global events.
Like our journal, we are looking for creative, original, and highly engaging work that is translated into English, or consider how translation plays a role in these events.
The goal of this new blog series is to share responses to the most current matters from all over the world, not just its English-speaking territories, and to encourage writers of all stripes to engage with these issues and events.
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Recent highlights from the blog include:
Alberto Chimal’s essay on Star Wars (aka La guerra de las galaxias [War of the Galaxies]) in Mexico, translated by George Henson
Allegra Rosebaum’s “Spectacle Shopping,” her analysis of Black Friday through the lens of Guy Debord’s La Société du spectacle
“Say Ayotzinapa,” a special feature in which David Huerta’s poem “Ayotzinapa,” written in response to mass kidnappings and killings in a small town in Guerrero, Mexico, was translated into 20 languages
Jennifer Croft’s “When an Author You Translate Gets Death Threats,” a comprehensive essay which detailed the intense online criticism of Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk and Nobel-winner Svetlana Alexievich’s defense of Tokarczuk
Ryan Mihaly’s “Translating Indigenous Mexican Writers: An Interview with Translator David Shook,” posted on Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which discussed the controversial holiday
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Non-fiction submissions should be no more than 1500 words. Translations into English are preferred over submissions originally in English. Send your submissions, pitches or queries to blog editors Ryan Mihaly and Patty Nash at blog@asymptotejournal.com. Send us your best, most critically engaged and creative writing on the important matters of the day. Rolling deadline.
Sue Burke and Maia Evrona on the ideal review for a translation—and the tendency to forget the translator entirely.
Sue Burke: The book review said that Angelica Gorodischer “writes poetic, vigorous prose.” Yes, she does. And she doesn’t – that is, I wrote the poetic, vigorous prose.
I’m the translator for Gorodischer’s novel Prodigies, published this year by Small Beer Press. The review was in Kirkus. At least it listed me as the translator and it was favorable, even if it wasn’t ideal.
What would be an ideal review for a translation? While any book review has to cover a lot of ground, at some point I think it ought to explicitly acknowledge that the work being reviewed is a translation and mention its apparent approach, since a translation in some way rewrites the original. If possible, it might compare a passage of the original to the translation and note whether the translation wrestles successfully (or not) with linguistic and cultural challenges, captures its literary quality like elegance or immediacy or wit, and accurately conveys both the meaning and subtext.
It’s that time of year again, dear readers—we at Asymptote blog are on the hunt for the freshest, funniest, most clever and on-the-pulse writing you’ve got, related to literature, translation, and the way words shape our world.
Like our journal, we are committed to publishing creative, original, and knife-sharp pieces in conversation with world literature, translation, and global culture—which means we love to read and publish original pieces and translations by writers, thinkers, and artists like you. So if you have something to say, read on—and get in touch!
Asymptote blog looks for voice, depth, and topicality in its postings. We welcome regular and one-time contributors, and publish essays, dispatches from literary events, interviews, book reviews, in-depth examinations of the world-at-literature and the world-at-large, as well as weekly new translations of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama!
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Highlights from the blog’s recent past include:
Nina Sparling takes an up-close look at food, translation, and literature—how do we read “terroir,” Emile Zola’s Les Halles, and Colette’s kicked fish?
Florian Duijsens’s “Pop Around the World” column examines “House of the Rising Sun,” well, around the world.
In The Tiff, a new recurring column, leading translators debate some of the field’s most pressing current issues.
Matthew Spencer’s on-the-edge column The Orbital Library teases out the intersections of the sci-fi genre and translation.
A conversation between two legends of Russian-to-English literary translation is uncovered—picking bones over a Russian restaurant menu, of all things.
Josh Billings discusses the often-fascinating histories behind the wheeling-and-dealing ghosts of world literature—its translators!
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If you’d like to contribute, but don’t quite know where to start, here are a few simple ways you can join the list of blog contributors:
1. We’re looking for reviewers to write about new translated or translation-related books. In your e-mail, talk about a few works you would like to review and why.
2. We’re also looking for translations, published every Tuesday in an ongoing series (predictably dubbed Translation Tuesday). In your e-mail, let us know your translation ideas, as well as your connections with authors or specific works. Permission and rights are necessary prior to publishing.
3. We’re looking for general musings related to translation, poetics, writing, the industry, current events, politics, visual arts, film—whatever fits your fancy! We’re amenable to all sorts of different writing
Variety is our bread-and-butter, so if you have something new you’re itching to say, we might just be the platform for you! Please send us a proposal with some information about you, how you’d like to contribute, and a writing or translation sample at blog@asymptotejournal.com. Rolling deadline.
A sound-off between two translation heavyweights Susan Bernofsky and Suzanne Jill Levine
Susan Bernofsky, Translationista + director of literary translation at Columbia University
Translating well is pretty difficult, so it stands to reason that a certain number of the translations you find out in the world are going to stink. And lousy translations can be of as many different types as Tolstoy’s unhappy families—or at least it might seem so at first blush. But when it really comes down to it, most translations that fail to live up to their potential sin in one of two fundamental ways. In the first case, the translator just doesn’t know what he’s doing. This can mean that he fails to master the original language he’s translating from to the point of being able to understand everything the author is up to, whether it’s stylistically, tonally or even on the basic level of plot (of stories, of sentences). Let’s face it: if you don’t know a language well enough to unpack a syntactically knotty sentence or recognize slang expressions and figures of speech, it’s pretty hopeless. If you read in a translation from the English about someone refusing to donate the posterior of a rodent when it’s really just a rat’s ass he’s not giving, well, that’s a nifty example of lost in translation. Or maybe the translator knows the language pretty well, but the writer has set the work in a milieu where the translator doesn’t know his way around enough to decipher the signposts that show whether a bit of dialogue is to be read as sarcastic or heartfelt, aggressive or shy. Or he’s never eaten that particular sort of food and doesn’t know how to find the words for it. Or he’s lazy and hasn’t bothered to study the work he’s translating carefully enough to really see how it ticks. Or or or. That’s the first set of things that can go wrong. These are all eminently fixable. The translator can do research, or ask for help, or get a work ethic, or plot to spend time in a place that will provide him with the cultural literacy he lacks. This mediocre translator might still be on his way to becoming a good one. The second category of ills is more dire. These are problems that arise when the translator just isn’t a good writer in English. And that’s a hard one to remedy. Why should translators be any less prone to Tin Ear than writers of other sorts? We’ve all encountered sentences that sound like something large and heavy being dragged downstairs. Occasionally a writer does this on purpose, for effect, but usually not. And the dirty secret of translation is that the very activity of translating tends to turn elegant writers into awkward ones. It’s because when you’re translating (especially if you’re fairly new to the activity), you’re likely to spend too much time hanging out in the part of your brain that learns foreign languages, makes rational decisions and does math. Look, I’m not a neuroscientist. But remember all those exercises your creative writing teachers used to throw at you? (Here’s six words, make a sestina right now, go!) They were mostly designed to trick you into switching off the rational part of your brain long enough for you to be able to write something. Good writing is most likely to come into being not by force of will but by relaxing into a sort of loose focus that lets the wiser part of your brain (the part where flashes of insight strike) take control. And it’s really hard to make simultaneous use of the writerly and rational parts of your brain, as brilliant translation requires. This is my private explanation for why so many translations fall short of delightfulness. Ideally, a translation of a literary work should be a work of literature in its own right, displaying a sense of style, tone, rhythm, voice and language succulent enough to make you want to read it all over again. And if the translator can’t really write well, that’s not going to happen. Still, there’s a bit of hope left. Like other sorts of writers, translators can get better at what they do by reading a lot of well-written books and thinking and talking about what they read. I’m not convinced that taste and a sense of style can be taught, but I’m pretty sure they can be learned. READ MORE…
