Posts filed under 'feminism'

Acts Against Fate: A Review of Cautery by Lucia Lijtmaer

July 2, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Maddy Robinson

Refreshingly, in Cautery, the stifling confines of gender in both past and present are treated in a way that defies easy essentialism.

Cautery by Lucía Lijtmaer, translated from the Spanish by Maureen Shaughnessy, Charco Press, 2025

Last October was a particularly busy month for news providers in Spain. Deadly, climate change-induced floods ripped through Valencia; the desperate residents of Barcelona and the Canary Islands continued to protest against unsustainable levels of tourism and unregulated property speculation; and in Madrid, sleazy stories of coercion and coverups involving a prominent young politician rattled a progressive left-wing party to its core. Despite the depressing familiarity of such headlines, it almost seems portentous that all of these subjects appear in one form or another in Lucía Lijtmaer’s 2022 novel, Cautery. An accomplished writer and co-director of the acclaimed feminist pop-culture podcast Deforme Semanal Ideal Total, which tackles everything from critical theory to modern dating, Lijtmaer’s finger is firmly on the pulse of millennial Spanish society.

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Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from The Elements

June 17, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Michelle Clayton

I said I wished I had voted, and the three of them burst out laughing.

Pedro Mairal’s 2005 El año del desierto [The Elements] is a novel for our times: a beautifully-written, grippingly-narrated, and lucidly-plotted story of how easy it is for a civilization to fall back into barbarism. It begins in an Argentina in the grip of the financial, political, and social crisis of December 2001, and it goes on to narrate the collapse of civil society: a collapse that takes place over the span of a calendar year, but that involves the implacable unraveling of some five hundred years of history. As history and geography rewind beneath the feet of the nation’s horrified inhabitants, one woman lives through its regressive stages, just barely surviving to tell a tale that resonates with dystopian imaginings everywhere. It is told from a resolutely female perspective, that of the clear-eyed and plain-spoken heroine, Maria Valdés Neylan, the descendant of Irish immigrants to Argentina. (Not just any immigrants: her great-grandmother is the title character of James Joyce’s short story “Eveline” – left on the docks by Joyce, but imagined here by Mairal as having traveled on to Argentina). Maria’s narration alternates between the laconic and the lyrical, testifying in vivid and moving but never salacious ways to the violence she sees unfolding around her, and that is visited on her own body – as we see in this excerpt, in which she thinks back over the line of fierce female figures from whom she is descended, in ironic parallel with the unraveling of women’s rights in a society barreling backward.

—Michelle Clayton, translator

“The Comet”

I wasn’t able to bathe until the third day. There was a tub with cold water in a tiny room at the back of the house with a bolt on the door. It wasn’t the cleanest, and of course it was hard to see anything, but just to have some privacy felt like luxury to me; I could finally cry without being seen, not to mention take my clothes off and let down my hair. It had been months since I had done either: I always felt like I was being spied upon, with unseen men milling around me. Now I bathed standing up in the big metal tub; I washed my hair with soap, luxuriating in it despite the freezing water. Other residents sometimes left a garden hose filled with water coiled in the sun on the patio through the day, so as to have lukewarm water when they bathed in the evening. But I didn’t wait to heat up the water; as soon as I learned that the bath was free, I went straight in.

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Translation Tuesday: “A Proper Lady” by Arbër Selmani 

June 10, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Suzana Vuljevic

Come with us, let’s shapeshift, let’s resist the expectation to be beautiful in front of the cameras

“A proper lady” (Zonja, in Albanian) is many things, but more than any other, she is expected to be obedient. For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you an incendiary prose-poem against the patriarchy, written by the queer Kosovar poet Arbër Selmani and translated by Suzana Vuljevic. In this mordant poem, a chorus of unnamed women turn society’s expectations upside down, their harsh refrain of “if we were proper ladies” calling attention to the abuse and exploitation inherent in the class aspiration of being “a proper lady.” In the words of the translator: “Proper ladies in the context of the poem largely refers to the kind of women that are forced to follow the rules as it were, becoming inured to male dominion, fulfilling a submissive, obedient role, and falling prey to misogynistic men. At the same time, there is an overtly rebellious undercurrent that calls out the indecencies of societies that take advantage of, abuse and demean women.” Implicit in the poem’s collective point-of-view is an alternative aspiration, a solidarity that can resist the oppression of a misogynist society. Read on!

If we were dignified ladies, we’d have to wake up at the crack of dawn and wash the feet of the patriarchy. If we were proper ladies, we’d be off filling jugs with water, heating them up with the dark bits of our souls. If we were ladies, we’d have to be sure not to make a sound at night. We’d have to fake orgasms, swallow the pain, and then go on to tell ourselves we had it coming. If we were the kinds of ladies society wanted us to be, we’d be in the habit of rolling our eyes and accepting our husbands’ slaps like ordinary boxes of chocolate. If we were ladies, we’d have to cook around the clock to fill the hairy bellies of wretched husbands—husbands long ago turned masters.

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The It Girl in Her Own Words: Helen O’Horan on Translating Izumi Suzuki

December 19, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Bella Creel

I wanted the translation to feel more emotionally driven, and that’s what I prioritized.

In her first novel to be published in English, the counterculture icon Izumi Suzuki draws from her real-life experiences to craft a musical, vulnerable portrait of nonconformism during a tumultuous era in Japan. From passion to nihilism, dreaminess to self-destruction, Set My Heart on Fire is unafraid of contradiction in its approach to the self, inscribing mind and body in all of its varying desire and directions. As our final Book Club selection for November, Suzuki proves to be a particularly resonant writer for contemporary readers in her audacious pursuit of pleasure and mutability in identity, all told in a vivid voice conjured by translator Helen O’Horan. In this interview, O’Horan speaks to us about how Suzuki channels a sense of disconnection, her knack for performativity, and the centrism of human relationships in her literary work.

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 USD20 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.   

Bella Creel (BC): How did you initially discover Izumi Suzuki’s work, and what drew you to her writing?

Helen O’Horan (HOH): I first worked on a short story for Suzuki’s collection, Terminal Boredom, just before the pandemic. I joined the project relatively late; by then, the reports had been written and the research done, so I want to credit the other translators and the publisher. That’s how I first learned about her work.

After that story, I really got into her writing—the timing was significant too. During the pandemic, I found myself feeling increasingly disconnected from my mind and body. My work as a translator wasn’t disrupted much since most of my clients are outside the United Kingdom, and it’s all online, but I started feeling like my mind and body were splitting apart.

That sense of disconnect reminded me of Suzuki’s writing—she often describes her body as something separate from her mind. Her work resonated with me at that moment, though of course, that’s just my interpretation. READ MORE…

Announcing Our November Book Club Selection: Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki

November 28, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Bella Creel

Izumi feels emotions at their extremes, and she considers ideas to their ends.

When the cult writer Izumi Suzuki debuted in the English language with stunning, subversive short stories of counterculture and fantasy, critics and readers alike were astounded by her utterly individual voice, speaking candidly about emotional heights and lows, womanhood, and the chaotic world of drugs, music, and dreams in which her narrators found themselves. Now, we are given the chance to learn more from Suzuki’s own tumultuous life in the newly published autofiction, Set My Heart on Fire, written in the same mesmerizing, phantasmagoric tone of brusqueness and vulnerability that gave reality to her imagination. As our November Book Club selection, this novel enlivens the sharp mind, loves, and frivolities of a woman who sought and fought for her individuality, as well as the decades in which Japan was also undergoing changes of both revel and devastation.

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 USD20 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.   

Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, translated from the Japanese by Helen O’Horan, Verso, November 2024

Strung-out bass, clunky keys, psychedelic vocals. Abundant patterns, colors, and substances. Dancing, libating, popping, fucking. The groovy, knocked-out backdrop to 1960s Japan. In Honmoku, a district in Yokohama known for its American military base, Japanese youth had reveled in the abundance of American-influenced music, rock and roll, and rebellion, fueled by the financial prosperity of the “Golden Sixties” and its reigning youthful, nonconformist spirit. Izumi Suzuki, a prolific science fiction writer in the late 1970s, moved to Tokyo in 1969 with a year remaining to soak in that rhythm, as in the following decade, Japan would face the first hint of its coming economic breakdown as GDP growth slowed significantly during the global oil crisis. The former revelers, strung out and blissed out, were suddenly thrust into a decade of fading glory and no direction.

Izumi Suzuki’s latest work in English, translated by British linguist Helen O’Horan, is a novel titled Set My Heart on Fire—a notable deviation from the original title’s reference to The Doors’ “Light My Fire.” Song-inspired titles are a near-constant in Suzuki’s oeuvre, and her first novel in translation is no exception, with each chapter taking its name from a track from the sixties. While the references are upheld throughout much of the translation, O’Horan’s choice to alter the title better reflects the broader, underlying sense of desperation—for a dying age, a lost youth—and self-destruction that runs through the novel. READ MORE…

Daily, Unforgiving, Incessant: On Cho Nam-Joo’s Stories of Ordinary Repressions

November 18, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Ruwa Alhayek

Throughout the collection, we realize that there is nothing easy in the effort towards collective liberation…

Miss Kim Knows and Other Stories by Cho Nam-Joo, translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang, House of Anansi, 2024

Cho Nam-Joo, author of the bestselling novel Kim Ji-Young, Born 1982, has returned with Miss Kim Knows, a collection of eight short stories featuring an intergenerational array of characters and their struggles in a contemporary South Korea. The first story follows an elderly woman named Dongju as she visits her older sister, Geumju, who is housed in a care home for Alzheimer patients. Geumju’s health has devolved to the extent that Dongju is reminded of her son, whose life she had begged the doctor to save: “it didn’t matter if he had to lie in bed unable to talk or open his eyes.”  As she compares the two, she wonders about the meaning of her life, and eventually, as the story goes on, we are made to learn that Dongju has also lost both her husband and her younger sister. The truth, that “death is so close and so common,” is brought to close regard. This opening tale then sets the tone for the rest of this collection, wherein we must reckon with what it means to live, what kind of life is worth living, and what it means to sacrifice one’s life—or to give up on it.

In “Dear Hyunnam Oppa,” a young woman moves to Seoul and dates a man for ten years before he makes a casual proposal of marriage, upon which she is forced to contemplate being bound even more inextricably to him. She asks for time to think and writes a long letter in response, taking us from their first interaction to the announcement that she is breaking up with him and moving to a place he shouldn’t try to find. She expresses gratitude for all the help he has offered since her arrival in Seoul many years ago, but her letter unveils the suffocation she felt—that despite her appreciation for his clear and insistent instructions when she first moved to Seoul, she does not want to continue to relinquish control to him. “There’s so much I want to do,” she says, “I can’t give up on my own life.” The longer the letter goes on, the more insufferable this male character becomes—a caricature of the archetype he is supposed to represent; he even expresses to the narrator’s friend how much he appreciates that she “isn’t like other girls,” and when the friend doesn’t take it well, he turns on her, calling her a bitch (classic). The most compelling element in this story came from its disturbing ordinariness—that a reader is able to understand the exact trajectory of the relationship, as well as all the little seemingly benign phrases (“be careful”; “let me”) that culminate in an unbearable cage and a watchful eye she cannot be rid of. In light of her apology in the beginning, the partner’s “care” is revealed as a desire to be obeyed, in control, and never doubted—especially as that is the only form of love he offers. He does not want the narrator to be “corrupted” or to make significant decisions on her own, but also wants her to be socially “capable” and successful. In clear, compelling prose, Cho demonstrates how “daily” this relationship is, how casually it chips away at her narrator’s sense of self, how she is unable to name or pinpoint her discomfort as her boyfriend gaslights her. Her friends (sometimes unknowingly) re-ignite her initial feelings of dissatisfaction, but ultimately agree that her gnawing unease should not be brushed under the rug, and it is these friendships that allow her to “see [herself] for who [she is].” READ MORE…

An Allegory of the World’s Starving: ana c. buena by Valeria Román Marroquín

October 17, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa

These untranslatables are signs of the fissures of hegemony, of cracks in its dominance through which other worlds can blossom.

ana c. buena by Valeria Román Marroquín, translated from the Spanish by Noah Mazer, Cardboard House Press, 2024

In his manifesto of New Brazilian Cinema, “An Esthetic of Hunger,” filmmaker Glauber Rocha called for art that communicates the poverty and misery of Latin America, and that could contribute to liberating the region from the “debilitating delirium of hunger.” He wrote this in 1964, at a time of global upheaval when Latin American cultural circles began to grapple with the torment of those left behind by globalization. Sadly, today, sixty years later, Latin America remains one of the most economically unequal regions on Earth. Decades-long neoliberal developmentalism keeps failing at what it—allegedly—has set out to do: eradicating the entrenched social disparities of the region. Instead, inequality only intensifies. The World Inequality Database reports that in 2020, the top 10% of Latin America owned 77.6% of the region’s wealth, a 2% increase from the 75.6% reported in 2000. The trend of increasing inequality is not unique to Latin America, but it is particularly extreme there. In Europe, the top 1% share of wealth rose from 24.9% in 2000 to 25% in 2020, while in the United States it increased from 32.0% to 34.9% in 2020. Capitalism confirms—time and time again—the falsehood of its mythical self-conception as a system that bolsters the progressive enrichment of everyone. Responding to this context, different Latin American groups have, of course, questioned the region’s unequal social conditions, calling for justice and change. In 2011, thousands of Chilean students dressed up as zombies in massive protests against educational debt and the privatization of public universities. More recently, Latin American women have taken to the streets in yearly Women’s Strikes to demand the recognition of care work as unpaid labor and to protest rising femicide numbers. Their demands for justice and their achievements are sources of light in an otherwise darkening global political landscape, and literary communities have taken up the same fight. The book ana c. buena, a 2021 poetry collection by the Peruvian poet Valeria Román Marroquín, presents a critique of capitalism that highlights its disastrous impact on the daily lives of working women. Indeed, the book’s main figure—Ana C. Buena, a woman under precarious and insecure work conditions—also functions as an allegory of the countries wounded by historical colonialism, current neocolonialism, and insatiable global capital. READ MORE…

For the Reader Who Cannot Be Bought: On Dubravka Ugrešić’s A Muzzle for Witches

October 10, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Eamon McGrath

. . . her writing worked to unsettle, challenge, and dismantle—a process she called “a perestroika of literary values.”

A Muzzle for Witches by Dubravka Ugrešić, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać, Open Letter, 2024

For thirty years, Dubravka Ugrešić lived in self-imposed exile as a cultural dissident and an enduring critic, challenging the prevailing orthodoxies that fueled anti-intellectualism, oppression, inequality, and nationalism. Her prolific writing—including both fiction and essays—took on topics ranging from the rise of virtual fandoms and the wars of Yugoslav dissolution, to cultural nostalgia and the state of the publishing industry.

A Muzzle for Witches, released this year by her longtime American publisher Open Letter, was Ugrešić’s final book before her death in March 2023. Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać (the preeminent translator into English of Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian authors, including David Albahari, Ivana Bodrožić, Slavenka Drakulić, Daša Drndić, and Robert Perišić), the book is a highly polished transcript of an interview between Ugrešić and literary critic Merima Omeragić.

The book is divided into seven sections, throughout which Ugrešić expounds upon many of the key themes and ideas she addressed in her life’s work. Loosely guided by Omeragić’s brief questions, she focuses on three subjects that are her greatest concerns: the resurgence of Croatian nationalism after the breakup of Yugoslavia; the marginalization of women’s voices, particularly in literature; and the dubious future of contemporary literature itself. Cumulatively, these three areas—in no small part responsible for her extended exile—suggest a grim outlook for the future.

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Announcing Our September Book Club Selection: A Long Walk From Gaza by Asmaa Alatawna

September 30, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

Alatawan’s novel is both personal and political; at its heart, it’s a story about freedom.

In Asmaa Alatawna’s mesmerizing and clear-sighted debut novel, A Long Walk from Gaza, the long journey of migration is revealed as a dense mosaic of innumerable moments—a gathering of the many steps one takes in growing up, in fighting back, and in learning the truths about one’s own life. From the Israeli occupation to the daily violences of womanhood, Alatawna’s story links our contemporary conflicts to the perpetual challenges of human society, tracking a mind as it steels itself against judgment and oppression, walking itself towards selfhood’s independent definitions. We are proud to present this title as our Book Club selection for the month of September; as Palestine remains under assault, A Long Walk from Gaza stands as a powerful narrative that resists the dehumanizing rhetoric of war.

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 USD20 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. 

A Long Walk From Gaza by Asmaa Alatawna, translated from the Arabic by Caline Nasrallah and Michelle Hartman, Interlink Publishing, 2024

There are some books that grab you from the very first line and hold your attention tight, right through every single word to the end; even once you’ve finished reading them, they keep delivering with their exquisite phrasings and stunning imagery, their deft, original storytelling. Asmaa Alatawna’s A Long Walk from Gaza, co-translated by Caline Nasrallah and Michelle Hartman, is one such novel. Through her enthralling and thoughtful prose, Alatawna unfolds idea after idea, fact after fact, emotion after emotion, recounting a tumultuous upbringing and journey that moves with both personal and universal resonance.

A Long Walk from Gaza is Alatawna’s debut in both Arabic and English—a semi-fictionalized, coming-of-age novel. Originally published in 2019 as Sura Mafquda, it explores the struggles of a teenage Gazan girl as she rebels against her surroundings, both at home and at school, and her heartbreak as she leaves Gaza for a new life in Europe. Her escape doesn’t resolve her problems but instead introduces new challenges, revealing the persistent, ongoing internal conflict of exile. While portraying life and a childhood under Israeli occupation and oppression, Alatawna also takes an incisive, knowing look at the patriarchal system of her own people. READ MORE…

Rudderless in the samidare-rain: On Naoko Fujimoto’s Reinterpretation of Heian Period Japanese Woman Poets

September 25, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

. . . Fujimoto has rendered her translations to “restore some of the freedom of form in which these original works were made.”

09/09 Nine Japanese Female Poets / Nine Heian Waka Poems, translated from the Japanese by Naoko Fujimoto, Toad Press/Veliz Books, 2024 

My parents were criticized for allowing a girl to study advanced language skills and piano lessons–for what–“Why don’t you keep your daughter in Nagoya?” Some teachers looked at me saying, “You are not even the smartest, nor a boy.”

Have you ever wished to be a boy? And have you ever interrogated the root of that wish? Perhaps you have been told by your family members that a woman’s role is not to utter garbage-talk like a hen pooping. Or perhaps your family’s insistence that you get married off has grown more insistent over the years. Maybe it’s shameful to admit that you’ve never been seated at the center of the table, that you’ve internalized a certain misogyny, or that you live in a society that has instated men as the heads of households, as breadwinners and intellectual superiors—not because they are smarter, but because they were given the opportunity to pursue their education.

This was the case for the men and women in my grandparents’ generation, who grew up under the Japanese occupation of Taiwan and the Confucian teachings that compare the “tiny man” (the scoundrel) with the “women.” I grew up learning about the Nineteenth Amendment and the Declaration of the Rights of Women in a neighborhood that largely continues to unlawfully segregate jobs by gender. The number of times I have been told that my writing is “frivolous” and that I was “not serious” about my literary career is innumerable.

How remarkable it is then to behold 09/09 by Naoko Fujimoto as a testament to the resilience and remarkable artistry of Japanese women writers during the Heian period (794 to 1185), a time of both gender segregation and cultural flourishing. I find myself seeing my obstacles mirrored in the Heian court custom of referring to women by their relationship with their male relative, or in Fujimoto’s lament in being called out as “not even the smartest”—with smart being measured by her ability to repeat what she has memorized verbatim on these make-you-or-break-you high stakes examinations that are characteristic of East Asian countries like Japan, Korean, or Taiwan. The idea that only the “best women” are afforded the same education as the most ordinary man is pernicious and deeply ingrained in East Asian society, even with the ongoing women’s rights movements in those countries. That identity is further complicated in East Asian-American communities overseas, where western values of independence clash with Asian values of Confucian filial piety and female subservience to men, and where leadership positions continue to be wielded by men in all types of professions. READ MORE…

Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: Mammoth by Eva Baltasar

August 29, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Hilary Ilkay

The spirit of the zoo has entered her bedroom: sex without pleasure, purely for the sake of regeneration, a blind but demanding impulse.

In the latest from lauded Catalan author Eva Baltasar, an animal desire is on the rise. Tired of the city, her studies, and the vacuity of contemporary life, the young protagonist of Mammoth seeks out a supposedly simpler provincial existence, and is willing to do anything to get there. Through both physical and psychological extremes, Baltasar’s heightened portrait is both shocking and absorbing, reflecting the chaos of an ego that vibrates with desire and spirals against expectation. The prose shivers with sensuality as this journey inward and outward carves its remarkable procession—the rampage of an unencumbered self, raging against the presumptions of civilised life.

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 USD20 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. 

Mammoth by Eva Baltasar, translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches, And Other Stories, 2024

Following on the heels of the 2023 Booker-shortlisted Boulder, Eva Baltasar’s latest novel, Mammoth, seizes the reader in a vice grip from the opening page and doesn’t relent even after its final words; the ending, in fact, delivers the sharpest blow of all. The narrative is a raw and visceral exploration of a young woman who shatters the routine of her daily life, learning to dwell among the shards of a new form of existence. Using a rich vocabulary of metaphors and similes, Baltasar creates a fictional space that is confrontational, explosive, and evocative, demonstrating her masterful ability to delve into the psyches of queer women who find themselves on the fringes, and Julia Sanches’s translation from the Catalan deftly captures the novel’s unique tone and voice.

Through its title, Baltasar thematically links Mammoth to her other two novels translated into English, Permafrost and Boulder: all three suggest weight, immovability. The unnamed protagonist in Mammoth is twenty-four years old and dissatisfied with her life, especially her research job at a university, which involves interviewing residents in nursing homes. “I hated my tool,” she reflects, “the specialist axe I used to cut up emotions and memories, the experience and suffering of those people.” This threat of dehumanization threads its way through the prose, hovering beneath the surface of every encounter. It’s telling that on the first page, the narrator reveals that her bedroom window faces a zoo, establishing a proximity to an animalistic wildness that has been broken and contained, on display for public consumption and enjoyment—a metaphor for her perception of her own existence. Returning to the zoo later, she thinks, “The animals didn’t live there, they rotted there—just like the visitors and no more nor less than the zookeepers.” READ MORE…

Domestic Escapisms: The Many Lives of Pauloma Chattopadhyay by Devangi Bhatt

August 19, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

Domestic bliss is clearly not as it seems, as there is still room for dissatisfaction and silent rebellions against complacency. . .

The Many Lives of Pauloma Chattopadhyay by Devangi Bhatt, translated from the Gujarati by Mudra Joshi, Niyogi Books, 2024

In The Many Lives of Pauloma Chattopadhyay, Devangi Bhatt’s novel of fantastic realism, the extraordinary is prefaced by a scenario of extreme normalcy. In Kolkata, Pauloma Chattopadhyay lives out her days as an ordinary middle-aged housewife. Her husband, Nikhil babu, is a civil servant and a man of a few words, set in his routine. Sharing their house are two sons and their families; there is a daughter too, but she is married and hence resides elsewhere. Theirs is a standard joint family and Pauloma is unquestionably the matriarch of the household, but it would be hard to say that she has any power to go along with that position—and even if she did, she is not one to exercise it. All things go about in harmony in house no. 11 with the well-practised dailiness of domesticity, and from the beginning, Bhatt makes it clear that her movements are not curtailed, and nor does she live in a state of unhappiness:

Pauloma is a vivacious woman with an abundant love for life. She likes gossiping with the neighbours, bargaining with the saree seller, watching Bengali plays with her daughters-in-law, and feeding her grandkids sondesh. Though Nikhil babu and Pauloma are very different, it can be safely said that their world provides a sense of stability. Everything has been well for a long time, and there have been no problems.

Stability, however, tends to get stale after a point in time, and even more so for a housewife whose life mostly takes place within four walls. While Pauloma is not exactly crushed by the mundanity, she nevertheless recognises it: “But… but sometimes a strange thought crosses Pauloma’s mind as she sits by the window, rubbing oil on her scalp. . . . As she turns the shell bangle on her wrist, she thinks that life shouldn’t be like a straight line without any exciting deviations.” These short moments are akin to revelation, brief ripples on a still body of water, and it is this feeling of the past slipping through her fingers, of the transience of her life, that sends her to the storeroom in search for her late mother-in-law’s large storage vessels—which have been gathering dust and are set to be sold. On a whim, she climbs into one of them, only to be immediately pulled inwards and magically transported. READ MORE…

Principle of Decision: Translation from Italian

July 11, 2024  |  in Principle of Decision, Translations  |  by Antonella Lettieri, Candice Whitney, Catherine Xinxin Yu, Elena Pala, and Julia Conrad

How does one evaluate the works of a writer who paradoxically championed women’s rights and supported an ultra-patriarchal regime?

Principle of Decision takes a close look at the manifold, careful decisions made by translators in their interpretations. Each participating translator is given the same excerpt of a text to render into English, revealing the various incarnations that can stem from even a single word. In this edition, Catherine Xinxin Yu presents a piece from the Italian writer Ada Negri.

When I was casually browsing at a book fair in 2023, my eyes were caught by two descriptors on the back of a tiny claret booklet featuring Ada Negri’s works: ‘feminist literature ante litteram’ and ‘twice nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature’. I had to find out who this Ada Negri was.

Ada Negri (1870-1945), born in the northern Italian city of Lodi, grew up in a working-class milieu and began earning a living as a schoolteacher from the age of seventeen. She published her first poem La nenia materna (Mother’s Lullaby) in 1888, her first poetry collection Fatalità (Fatality) in 1892, and continued to garner literary acclaim through the 1910s. Her gaze was directed outwards, encompassing the struggles of the Italian working class of which she was a part, but also turned inwards, voicing her intense emotional turmoil as a woman, a lover, and a mother. At the same time, she actively participated in socialist projects like the Lega Femminile di Milano and co-founded the Asilo Mariuccia in 1902 for at-risk women and minors.

In 1917, Negri published her immensely successful short story collection, Le solitarie (Solitary Women), from which the excerpt below is drawn. Eighteen grayscale character studies provide ‘humble glimpses into the lives of women who fight alone: alone despite family, alone despite love, alone due to faults of their own, of men, or of destiny’, as the author wrote in the book’s preface (translated from the Italian). This collection was groundbreaking in its focus on the tribulations of lower-class women and unflinchingly tackles taboo subjects from female sexuality and abortion, to marital unhappiness and the lack of care for the elderly.

So far, so good, right? But Negri was also a controversial figure who achieved her status partly due to her staunch support of Mussolini’s fascist regime. In the 1890s, she befriended socialists active in Milan, such as Filippo Turati, the Russian-born feminist Anna Kuliscioff, Nobel peace prize winner Teodoro Moneta—and Benito Mussolini, who identified as a socialist at the time. But by the outbreak of WWI, as Mussolini’s break with socialism gave way to his avowed fascism, Negri definitively sided with Mussolini’s bellicose patriotism and distanced herself from the antimilitarist democratic socialism of Turati and Kuliscioff. She would go on to win the Premio Mussolini in 1930, become the first and only woman to be admitted into the Accademia d’Italia in 1940 (a short-lived hall of fame for intellectuals in fascist Italy, if you will), and follow government directives in her long-standing collaborations with major newspapers until her death in 1945. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: April 2024

April 15, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Georgina Fooks, Nestor Gomez, and Willem Marx

New titles from Kazakhstan, South Korea, and The Netherlands!

This month, our editors introduce three incredible new works that delve into family, solitude, and fractured legacy. From the lyrical explorations of family by Surinamese author Astrid Roemer, the delightful oddities of Yun Ko-Eun’s sincere and humorous short stories, and the vivid, compassionate vignettes of Kazkah author Baqytgul Sarmekova, these newly published translations invite reflection, tenderness, and joy.

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Off-White by Astrid Roemer, translated from the Dutch by Lucy Scott and David McKay, Two Lines Press, 2024

Review by Nestor Gomez, Editor-at-Large

In Off-White, Astrid Roemer weaves a grand, multigenerational narrative around the matriarchical figure of Grandma Bee and her family in Suriname, a South American country on the Caribbean coast. The year is 1966, and each member of the Vanta family is going about their lives in different directions, threatening the bond that is necessary to continue Grandma Bee’s vision of the family’s legacy.

While one part of this narrative is deeply embedded in identity, exploring how structures of race, class, and gender have been encoded within the family, another part is inextricably tied to loss and getting lost, as various characters all reckon with their history (cultural, personal, and traumatic) in different ways. Translators Lucy Scott and David McKay demonstrate remarkable skill and artistry in conveying the story with ease and clarity, relaying the subtle tensions in both the spoken and the unspoken. Through their work, Roemer’s prose enlivens with emotive and physical details (especially that of meals), deeply coloring the multiplicity that threatens the family’s unity while highlighting their diversity of experiences.

Even before beginning the novel, we are immediately confronted with the issue of color in the title: Off-White. The Dutch term, “Gebroken Wit,” is also included in the book’s very first page, and Roemer describes it as having multiple translated meanings, such as “broken white” or “refracted white.” In a conversation with Two Lines Press, Roemer states: “essentially, [gebroken wit] refers to refracted sunlight—a rainbow, for instance—showing a wide range of colors. . . [It] also means that sunlight always finds a way through time and always keeps gathering together.” This imagery of sunlight resonates strongly throughout the novel in the many harrowed struggles of the Vanta family: Heli’s burgeoning relationship with an older married man who teaches at her school, Louise’s ongoing incestuous relationship with her brother, and Laura’s diminishing mental health from the sexual harassment she experienced as a child at the hands of Grandma Bee’s brother, Lèon.  READ MORE…