Posts filed under 'feminism'

Salone del Libro 2023: Diversity through the Looking Glass

June 1, 2023  |  in Dispatches  |  by Catherine Xin Xin Yu

The theme for this year’s Salone was “Through the Looking Glass”, featuring over 1,500 kaleidoscopic encounters between storytelling and reality.

The Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino, or the Turin International Book Fair, was established in 1988 to connect every single participant in the wide-ranging world of literature—from publishers to librarians and, of course, readers. Throughout a large catalogue of readings, performances, conferences, and workshops, the Salone brings in guests from all over the country and abroad to share in the joy of the written world, discuss the current prospects and themes of the industry, and showcase both Italian-language literature and promoting international writing within Italy. This year, Catherine Xin Xin Yu attended the fair on behalf of Asymptote to find out what it has on offer, from migrant literature to eco-writing.

From May 18 to 22, the 35th Salone Internazionale del Libro—the largest annual book fair in Italy—attracted over 200,000 visitors to the Lingotto Fiere exhibition centre in Turin. Over five days of panels, lectures, publisher exhibitions, and literary initatives, perhaps the biggest news story to emerge from the event is an ecofeminist protest led by Non una di meno (Not One Woman Less) and four other Turin-based activist groups against Eugenia Maria Roccella, the anti-abortionist and queerphobic Minister for Family, Natality and Equal Opportunities. Protestors, along with members of the audience who spontaneously joined them, prevented the politician from presenting her newly released memoir in order to demonstrate what it is like to be silenced by the state institutions she represented—which tampers with women’s rights to abortion and surrogate maternity while muddying the water with media misrepresentation and cracking down on protests using police forces. While this peaceful protest was labelled as “anti-democratic” and “unacceptable” by the Meloni government, the Director of the Salone, Nicola Lagioia, defended the contestation as a legitimate democratic act. This is one way in which the Salone provided an urgently needed platform for repressed voices, while opening up a pathway to diversity.

Indeed, the theme for this year’s Salone was “Through the Looking Glass,” featuring over 1,500 kaleidoscopic encounters between storytelling and reality, with notable attempts to bring forward new, alternative perspectives. One such novelty was the focus on colonial legacies and decoloniality. A panel featuring the Somali-Italian author Igiaba Scego, Turin-based Albanian visual artist Driant Zeneli, and Italian crime fiction author Carlo Lucarelli looked at the removal of Italian colonial history from collective memory—drawing attention to the lack of guilt and the myth of “Italiani brava gente” (“Italians, good people”). Many place names in Italy still bear witness its colonial past: visitors in Turin might notice that the final stop of Metro Line 1 is called Bengasi (like the city in Libya); I myself have rented a flat on Via Tripoli and regularly run errands on Via Addis Abeba (like the capital of Ethiopia) and Via Macallè. But these quotidian reminders often go unnoticed, and colonial history is not systematically taught in schools.

salone del turino 1

At the heart of the discussions on how this silence can be broken are words that “tear apart, resist, and restore,” to quote Jhumpa Lahiri’s preface to Scego’s latest novel, Cassandra a Mogadiscio (Cassandra in Mogadishu). Another panel on decolonisation, featuring the Italo-Somali author Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, the Iraqi author and intellectual Sinan Antoon, and the Filipino trauma journalist Patricia Evangelista, insisted on the importance of reconstructing the lived experiences of victims from a non-Western point of view, and restoring names and humanity to these individuals. Italian, the language of formal education in ex-colonies like Somalia and Ethiopia, is both a line of coloured division and the language of cultural exchange. Recognising the plurality of Italian and using it to foreground individual experiences are both ways to decolonise while writing in the language of the colonisers. READ MORE…

A Place for Malice in Literature: On Izumi Suzuki’s Hit Parade of Tears

April 3, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Bella Creel

Women lead the stories in Hit Parade of Tears—with their desires, their passions, and their fears. . .

Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, and Helen O’Horan, Verso, 2023

In the moody, deliriously humorous worlds of Hit Parade of Tears, Izumi Suzuki’s protagonists embody searing emotions, from anguish to apathy, all felt at an apex that seems like a breaking point. Sharp and achingly present, these eleven short stories are transposed by writers Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, and Helen O’Horan, and present emotional and often unsettling glimpses into worlds both familiar and fantastical. Though each story stands on its own, there are elements that draw them together: the stream of Japanese rock from the 1960s and 70s playing in the background, a woman searching for her younger brother, a blurry line between mental illness and otherworldly abilities, and perhaps most consistently, a spotlight on some of the ugliest aspects of human nature—pettiness, cynicism, self-obsession, vitriol. We find these traits in her characters across the board, and those who veer from this standard are noted for their irregularity. Whether it’s a spunky teenage girl or an ungrateful husband, the dialogue in translation is natural and engaging, and each character reads with a distinct voice; descriptions are elevated by clever word choice, from a “galumphing figure” to “laparotomized remains,” and each paragraph is a newly vivid scene.

While the women of Hit Parade of Tears occupy the traditional feminine roles of wives, mothers, and sexual objects, they are not held to stereotypical ideals of femininity when it comes to their emotions and motivations, which makes this a thought-provoking and relevant read for feminists interested in non-Western perspectives. Women lead the stories in Hit Parade of Tears—with their desires, their passions, and their fears—and the men often read like props to the women’s narratives, whether that’s a self-obsessed husband, an ex-lover, a wannabe sugar daddy, a sacrifice, or a younger brother. Men’s bodies are constantly on display and under scrutiny—balding, thin, hot, or literally cut open from the stomach and hung like an ornament in a medical facility—and they rarely have any part in moving the plot forward.

The men in the protagonists’ lives belittle them and take them for granted, but the stories paint them in all their egoistic ways. In the eponymous “Hit Parade of Tears,” we spend the majority of the story listening to the thoughts of a man born over 150 years prior, who hit his prime in the 1960s and 70s. He talks down on his wife and her job archiving that era: “She’s jealous of me, he thought. She’s seething because she couldn’t take part in my youth like someone from the same generation could.” Come to find out, she’s been alive just as long as he has—they even dated briefly a hundred years ago, but he, solipsistic and self-absorbed, forgot, and he can’t imagine her experiences living up to his. Suzuki’s fiction is explicit in its critique of men’s treatment of women—hypocritical, predatory, and strikingly uncool, Suzuki’s men believe they have the upper hand in their relationships. Behind this belief, Suzuki’s women pull the strings, using the hands they’ve been dealt (as housewives, as sexy schoolgirls, as the repressed desires of a depressed woman) to their benefit. READ MORE…

A Perpetual Coming-of-Age: On Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü

March 22, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Irmak Ertuna Howison

Tezer Özlü will never be imprisoned in the traps of bourgeois norms and conventions.

Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely, Serpent’s Tail/Transit Books, 2023

Known as the melancholy princess of Turkish literature, Tezer Özlü is one of the most influential figures of women’s writing in Turkey. Inspiring generations of writers with both her life and distinct writing voice, Özlü has been a permanent fixture in country’s intellectual history; it’s surprising that such a beloved figure of Turkish literature is debuting in English only now. Fortunately for us, her glaring absence from international publishing has finally been remedied by Serpent’s Tail (UK) and Transit (USA), and English language readers can now discover the genius of a unique writer.

Despite being remembered as a leftist and feminist, Özlü was never a part of the revolutionary struggle like other famous Turkish authors recently translated into English. In Cold Nights of Childhood, she writes: “I was never a part of a revolutionary struggle. Not during the 12 March era, and not after it, either. All I ever wanted was to be free to think and act beyond the tedious limits set by the petit bourgeoisie”. She wasn’t imprisoned or tortured like Sevgi Soysal or involved in organized politics as her close friend Leyla Erbil. Even though she retained leftist sensibilities and occasionally wrote about class struggle, her revolt was more individual and existential. Accordingly, she wrote autobiographical novels which situate readers in the midst of her confrontation with different kinds of authority.

Cold Nights of Childhood is a compact example of her autofiction, and a perfect choice to introduce Özlü to new readers, encapsulating the themes and style that launched her as a tremendous force in the Turkish literary. In the afterward to the novel, translator Maureen Freely writes: “she was one of the very few who broke rules at sentence level, refusing continuity, and slashing narrative logic to evoke in words the things she truly felt and saw, that we all might see them”. Rejecting the linear narrative, she weaves together fragments of time; this experimentation with chronology enables her to reflect on her past while also imagine a way for a gratifying future. READ MORE…

Celebrate International Women’s Day with Women’s Writing!

March 8, 2023  |  in News  |  by The Blog Team

Join us as we highlight the vital contributions of women to literature and translation.

March 8th is International Women’s Day, and we wanted to take the opportunity to lift up the work of women in world literature. Below, find a selection of pieces published on the blog in the past year, across essays, reviews, translations, and interviews, curated to represent the breadth and brilliance of women working in writing.

Interviews

A Conversation on Kurdish Translation with Farangis Ghaderi
by Holly Mason Badra

But when you look deeper, when you look at archives, and look at early Kurdish periodicals, you find women. You discover these forgotten voices. An interesting example of that is Zeyneb Xan, who published under the pseudonym of Kiche Kurd (“Kurdish girl”). In 2018, when a publisher was reprinting Galawej (the first Kurdish literary journal published in 1939–1949), they decided to have sections on contributing writers. They came across this name, and one of the researchers working on the project uncovered that the identity of the writer was Zeyneb Xan (1900–1963), the eldest sister of Dildar—a very well-known figure of Kurdish literature who wrote the Kurdish anthem. Although her family was a literary family and at the center of literary attention, her manuscript remained unpublished until 2018. Her truly fascinating poetry collection covers a wide range of themes from patriotism to women’s education and liberation.

Wild Women: An Interview with Aoko Matsuda and Polly Barton
by Sophia Stewart

For me, films and television programs, as well as books and comics, have always been the places where I can meet outsider women, weirdo women, rebel women, sometimes scary women. When I was a child, I didn’t care if these women were human beings or ghosts or monsters, and I didn’t care if they were from Japan or other countries. I was just drawn to them, encouraged by their existence.

To Protect Oneself From Violence: An Interview with Mónica Ojeda
by Rose Bialer

Maybe if I was born in some other place, I would be writing about something else, but I do believe that Latin America is a very violent continent, especially for women, and in all of our traditions of women’s literature, there have always been women writing horror stories in Latin America. . .  I do believe that it’s because you can’t write about anything else. That’s how you live life. You are afraid for your life. You are scared of the violence in your family, the violence between your friends, the violence in the street. You can’t think about anything else except how to protect yourself from violence.

READ MORE…

A Conversation on Kurdish Translation with Farangis Ghaderi

November 28, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Holly Mason Badra

Translation is a commitment—a way of illustrating my commitment to making Kurdish literature known.

We speak here about the practice and politics of Kurdish translation, female representation in Kurdish literature, and the future of Kurdish literary works, culture, and understandings through digital archival projects. 

Holly Mason Badra: Can you talk about the project and translation process for Women’s Voices from Kurdistan: A Selection of Kurdish Poetry? 

Farangis Ghaderi: Women’s Voices from Kurdistan was the result of a collective initiative with my colleagues Clémence Scalbert Yucel and Yaser Hassan Ali. The idea behind it was that, as scholars and researchers of Kurdish literature, we were very aware of the invisibility of Kurdish literature in the world literary arena. The translation of Kurdish literature is emerging but still not comparable with other Middle Eastern languages. At Exeter, there were a number of Ph.D. students and researchers working specifically on Kurdish literature and we had been engaged in translation as part of our research, but these translations often remained unpublished (in theses or dissertations). Occasionally, some translations were published in scholarly publications, but they were only excerpts of the literary pieces and not the entire work. At the time, none of us considered ourselves literary translators. 

We also thought about how works published in academic outlets don’t reach a larger public audience. Reflecting on these issues and realizing our potentials, we hosted a translation workshop in 2017 that was led by Dr. Yucel and made possible by an outreach grant (by the British Institute for the Study of Iraq; BISI), where Ph.D. students working on Kurdish literature came together with researchers at the Center for Kurdish Studies at Exeter and colleagues in translation studies. Each participant had their own selections, but the overall theme was gender, with preference for female poets. Together, we practiced translation and held discussions for two days. After this workshop, Clémence, Yaser, and I continued to meet, discuss, and work on the translations and polish them. We presented our translations in a number of festivals in the UK and began thinking about publishing them. We then approached Transnational Press London about publishing the collection, and they were very enthusiastic about it. 

It was important for us to publish in an outlet that allows the publication of the original Kurdish language as well as the English translation. The collection includes poems from the nineteenth century to contemporary female poetry, written in various Kurdish dialects (Gorani, Kurmanji, Badini, Sorani) and in Arabic. 

HMB: When did you first start working in translation and what has that journey been like for you? 

FG: I started translating into English while pursuing my Ph.D. My research was on the emergence of modern Kurdish poetry. I had to translate classical and modern poetry in three dialects (Kurmanji, Sorani, Gorani) as part of literary analysis. The workshop I described above was foundational for me as a translator—following the workshop, Dr. Yucel and I conducted a research project on English translations of Kurdish literature which is now published. Both the workshop and the research project helped me to become aware of trends in English translations of Kurdish literature—the biases that translation can produce or reproduce and the politics of translation itself. I became more aware of the question of access and the politics of access. How a certain group of translators—in our case, a group of mostly Kurdish researchers at Exeter—were not thinking of ourselves as translators even though we were translating. Translation was part of our job. I began thinking about questions of confidence, exclusions, access (which is limited for Kurdish scholars). The journey has been one of gaining confidence and understanding what translation involves. It has been an educational process, too. 

READ MORE…

Turkish Tragedy Writ Small: Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn

November 10, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Irmak Ertuna Howison

A single night becomes the microcosm of the Turkish experience of militarism, gender inequality, and sexuality.

Dawn by Sevgi Soysal, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freeley, Archipelago Books, 2022

Writing in the 1990s, the Turkish literary critic Berna Moran praised Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn for its historical urgency, but noted that it would not be a novel that survived the test of time—that its themes would lose their relevance. Perhaps Moran was optimistic in thinking that women’s struggles and militarism would be issues of a distant past in the years to come, or perhaps he undermined the strength of Soysal’s formal innovations. Whatever his reasons might be for painting the novel as a historical relic, his prediction did not come true; Dawn is now more relevant than ever, with Maureen Freely’s flawless English translation.

Soysal isn’t a stranger to English-speaking audiences. Her novels Tante Rosa and Noontime in Yenişehir have been translated into English, and she is a legendary figure in the history of feminism in Turkey. Along with writers like Leyla Erbil and Adalet Ağaoğlu, she defined the écriture feminine of Turkish literature long before it was coined and theorized by Western feminists. The eccentric, self-reflective, and often ironic tone of their protagonists reflected on what it means to be a woman—not only in a modernizing Turkey, but also in a leftist milieu dominated by men. While women’s struggle and sexual autonomy took the back seat in the leftist quest to liberate “masses,” these authors problematized the very notion of “masses.” Did the dream of a liberated people also include liberated women? The tension between how the outside world views liberated, intellectual women and how they view themselves is often the driving force of such novels, and hence their writing is often turned inwards, with sharp observations of situations and characters.

Dawn is a visceral and cinematic example of this kind of writing: where the embodied social experience of women takes central stage. It is also, as Moran notes, a novel about militarism and incarceration. Written in 1975, after Soysal’s own imprisonment following the 1971 coup, the novel situates the woman’s body in its confrontations with authority. The brilliance of the novel might be traced to the formal structure through which the author reflects on this confrontation; ever the innovator, Soysal sets her novel within the course of a single night, interspersing the narrative with flashbacks of different characters. The stories beget other stories of individuals becoming situated in their own relation to authority, only to return to the “present” moment where they are confined within the four walls of the town jail. A single night becomes the microcosm of the Turkish experience of militarism, gender inequality, and sexuality. READ MORE…

How a Polish Writer Created His Own Apocrypha: An Interview with Maciej Hen

October 26, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Wioletta Greg

Either we shall fight until we wipe each other out, or we shall talk and build mutual understanding.

Maciej Hen is a well-known writer in Poland, awarded the Gombrowicz Literary Prize and shortlisted for the prestigious Angelus Central European Literature Award. Perhaps because the twentieth century was cruel to his Jewish family—himself being persecuted as a child in 1968 when the Polish government launched a campaign against the Jews—the writer writes primarily historical novels, describing the world at the precipice of immense change. In his debut work, According to Her, readers observe the birth of Christianity; in the following Solfatara, he describes ten days of revolution in mid-seventeenth-century Naples; in the third, a lonely, older hero from Warsaw goes on an unplanned journey amidst a change in regime, and discovers that his ancestor was at the head of a bloody people’s rebellion. Hen told me that in a new work—one which is not yet published—Doctor Faustus will be written as a woman. It seems to me that if the books of Maciej Hen were to be widely translated into other languages, he would become a contender for the Nobel Prize; his writing is visionary. With According to Her to be published soon in English translation by Holland House Books, readers in the Anglophone will now be introduced to this beautifully written book about the alternative life of Jesus Christ, told from the perspective of his old Jewish mother. I was moved and delighted by it; someone finally gave the voice to the Virgin Mary. 

Wioletta Greg (WG): In According to Her, the story of a son is told by nearly a woman named Mariamne, who is almost a hundred years old, and uncannily resembles Mary of Galilea. A bold idea for an author who lives in a Catholic country.

Maciej Hen (MH): Not only do I live in a Catholic country, but worse still, I’m a Jew living in a Catholic country. And, to top it all, I’m a Jewish atheist. Actually, I grew up separated from the basics of Judaism, because my parents belonged to the first generation of Jews who felt that religion was not so important for their children.

WG: I’m curious why you published your book under the pen name Maciej Nawariak. Were you afraid of being attacked for re-describing the life of Jesus from a Jewish perspective? 

MH: I took the pen name from pure vanity. My father is a writer who had earned himself a reputation long before I came up with my debut book, and I was so sure my publication would be a success, that, in order to fully enjoy it, I would have to disqualify in advance any suggestions people might put forward about my father’s name helping me enter the literary world.

WG: Your parents survived the Holocaust as refugees in Central Asia, and they met in Uzbekistan.

MH: Yes, they met in Samarkand in 1943. My mother was twenty-one at the time, and my father just under twenty. He was from Warsaw, and she was from a village outside Lwów. After the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union, they both evacuated eastwards and finally settled for a while in Samarkand, the former capital of Tamerlane. After the war, they returned to Warsaw. Out of their families—both once very large, as per custom—only five people survived, including themselves. My father changed his surname from Cukier to Hen, in time becoming a highly regarded writer in Poland, and my mother took care of the household, raising my sister and me—for a few years she was also a Russian language teacher. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2022

October 10, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ah-reum Han, Alex Tan, and Eva Wissting

New work from the Arabic, the Korean, and the Ojibwe language!

In this month’s round-up of the latest in world literature, our editors bring vital texts addressing faith, (false) mythologies, desire, migration, and Indigenous culture to the forefront: a collection of penetrating, prismatic poems from the lauded Egyptian poet Iman Mersal; from South Korea’s Lee Geum-yi, a fiction that tells the long-silenced stories of women crossing the seas to be wed to strangers; and a new collection of poetry, documenting Ojibwe lives, by eminent writer Linda LeGarde Grover. Read on to find out more!

threshold

The Threshold by Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022

Review by Alex Tan, Senior Assistant Editor

Perhaps it begins with a search. The Egyptian poet Iman Mersal returns to her homeland in hopes of procuring a book by Saniya Saleh, an elusive writer no one seems to have heard of. Instead she finds a table, piled with the canonized words of men; nowhere in sight is the person she seeks: a wife, sister, and mother, who can only secondarily be a writer in her own right. “I don’t know how she likes to see herself,” she laments in a wandering essay. Left with the “wasted potential” of what survives, she can imagine only a voice of muted cadence, “a whispered song of mourning which slips through to me amid the din of revolutionaries’ rabble-rousing slogans, of warriors intent on victory, of those broken by defeat angrily denouncing state, dictator and society.”

A similar quality of whispering, of slipping through, inhabits Iman Mersal’s angular The Threshold, a collection of poetry translated delicately by Robyn Creswell in conversation with the poet herself. In the titular piece, a collective biography of sorts charts a path through the streets and labyrinthine hypocrisies of Cairo in the nineties: “one long-serving intellectual screamed at his friend / When I’m talking about democracy / you shut the hell up.” Elsewhere a speaker ventures, “Let’s assume the people isn’t a dirty word and that we know the meaning of en masse.” Yet this momentary compact reveals its own fragility; language with all its alibis and forms of subterfuge seems a poor vessel, too riddled with holes to hold “all the wasted days” and the “nights / of walking with hands stretched out / and the visions that crept over the walls.”

Mersal’s work is unafraid of its own promontories and edges. Often, the writing advances a crepuscular view of the self, ever-partial and shrouded in semi-obscurity, divided from its figurations. The opening poem dryly declares, “I’m pretty sure / my self-exposures / are for me to hide behind.” Her name, which contains the Arabic for “faith” and “messenger,” is too “musical” for “a body like my body / and lungs like these—growing raspier / by the day.” On what map might we locate the trembling contours of that occluded life, “whose existence I’ve never been sure of,” and which appears to “have neither past nor future” in an encounter with a stranger, on whose shoulder she accidentally falls asleep? How unwieldy it feels in its bulk, how relentlessly it has been anatomized, in spite of its wispy resistance to measurement:

This is the life into which more than one father stuffed his ambitions, more than one mother her scissors, more than one doctor his pills, more than one activist his sword, more than one institution its stupidity, and more than one school of poetry its poetics.

READ MORE…

The Essential Integrity of Language: In Conversation with Anukrti Upadhyay

September 14, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Suhasini Patni

The two languages are two paths to approach our complex soul. . .

Anukrti Upadhyay, a Sushila-Devi-Award-winning author, is one of India’s few bilingual writers; working in both Hindi and English, she has always looked at writing as a form of translation. In Hindi, she has published a collection of short stories called Japani Sarai and a novel called Neena Aunty, both hailed as pathbreaking in Hindi literature. She is, however, best known for her books Bhaunri and Daura—perhaps the only English-language novels set in rural Rajasthan, telling stories of the desert and its folks.

I first met Anukrti in Udaipur at a writing workshop organized by the Rama Mehta Trust. Over a three-day workshop, we spoke about translation, writing, and she discussed the works of her favorite Hindi authors. I caught up with her later and we conducted this interview over email; in our conversation, she talks about being a bilingual writer, whether language affects form, and what transcreation means to her.  

Suhasini Patni (SP): What does being a bilingual writer in India mean to you?

Anukrti Upadhyay (AU): I have written poetry in Hindi for as long as I can remember—and if my mother is to be believed, even before that! Fiction, on the other hand, I began writing only a few years ago, and in English. The how and why of this occurrence, which had seemed organic to me at the time, I can now parse with hindsight; Hindi, the language of spontaneous expression, is the natural choice for poetry and English, the acquired medium, provides room for distance and synthesis which are essential for building stories. Of course, like everything else in life, this is not a complete explanation, nor one that is accurate on all points. After writing prose in English for a couple of years, I began writing fiction in Hindi as well, deriving a deep and unique satisfaction in the freedom and maneuverability I have in the language.

It is very important to me that I practice writing in both Hindi and English. I use “practice” here advisedly, for writing is a practice, just like law or medicine or running a triathlon. Writing fiction in two languages offers me the opportunity to observe and explore in different ways, each offering its own unique range and challenges, its muteness and volubility. These two languages, both mine in different ways, nurture and, I’d like to believe, enrich my writing.

SP: Does a story tell you what language it should be written in? Does language affect genre or form? Do you dream bilingually? 

AU: Aha, what an interesting bouquet of questions! Yes, a story tells me which language it wishes to emerge in. The first rumblings of a story, the first words—a sentence or a phrase—come to me like birds coming home. Whichever language those words are in, that’s the one I work with. I have noticed that the language does not seem to have any overt or discernible connection with the plot or setting or characters. Perhaps there are certain times when I think in one language and other times in another?

No, my language has not, till now, impacted genre or form. To me, the first and foremost condition for a story is that it should hold my interest, and language has never acted as a barrier in that; it has always been only a receptacle for the story.

And do I dream in two languages? Shouldn’t the question first be—do I dream?! Yes, and yes, and I wake up to jot down the vague or sharp images that remain with me in either language. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2022

August 15, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Laurel Taylor, and Samantha Siefert

Introducing new translations from French, Persian, and more!

As the world reverberates with the powers and consequence of language, this month’s round-up of translations are especially resonant with their assertion of how texts can subvert, heal, and ascribe meaning to life. Below, find reviews of a text that gathers poetry and its translators in boundary-defying dialogues of methods and ideas; a novel that powerfully uses silence to address the transgenerational trauma of the Rwandan genocide; and a sensitive story of an Iran on the precipices of change by celebrated modern novelist Simin Daneshvar.

Screen Shot 2022-08-15 at 1.39.43 PM

Poetry’s Geographies: A Transatlantic Anthology of Translations, edited by Katherine M. Hedeen and Zoë Skoulding, Eulalia Books, 2022

Review by Laurel Taylor, Assistant Managing Editor

How does one review a translation (or rather a set of translations) which center the translator? This is the question I’ve been asking myself as I make my way through Poetry’s Geographies: A Transatlantic Anthology of Translations, edited by Katherine M. Hedeen and Zoë Skoulding. This ambitious collection is unique in bringing together translation practitioners from the heart of the Anglosphere and giving them a space to speak about their practices—what Hedeen might describe as “countermapping,” what Don Mee Choi might describe as “lilymethod” mapping, and what Erin Moure might call “in”mapping.

As you may have gathered from this description, Poetry’s Geographies begins not with the text-in-translation but with the translator, with their essays and methods which speak in sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary dialogues. Through these, we, the readers, are asked to sit with the very contradiction of translation itself—the notion that one language can be “deformed” or “twinned” or “exploded” into another. Indeed, the acknowledgement of this impossibility, the greatest and most repeated cliché concerning poetry and translation, drives the collection. As Skoulding writes in the introduction, “Rather than making the world more transparent and ‘accessible’ for quick consumption, poetry and its translation can sustain opacité…as an opaqueness that allows the Other to exist in full, not to be reduced or subordinated.” Put differently in the essay from Sasha Dugdale:

I stand against this idea of translation as a vitrine in which we see the original. I stand against it here, me, many kilos of proteins, lipids, water, with a slow local history of my own composition and concurrent decomposition (I see also that it is a grave act to scribble in these lines)

no person is a pane of glass no person is of pure intent no person is devoid of history

In this approach, the notion of language as a window is cast aside. Language is smoke and mirrors (me). Language is air (Ziba Karbassi). Language is sound (Skoulding). Language is an infestation (Moure). Language is a sufism (Stephen Watts). Poetry’s Geographies asks us to stare into the mist and watch the swirling shapes, the fleeting shadows, the forms familiar, menacing, and absent. The thing we perceive, in Hedeen translating Victor Rodríguez Nuñez, may in fact be absence:

your existing is not shaped
from the knot that resembles the foliage weave
your being is not shaped
from the board sanded down by countless downpours
barely the keyhole owl eye
to look inside so nothing was left outside
an image in heat

fertilized by the void

READ MORE…

The Body as Dispute: On Carnality

July 18, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Talking—or writing—seems to be the only method by which the excruciating loneliness of being a single, physical body can be ameliorated.

Carnality by Lina Wolff, translated from the Swedish by Frank Perry, Other Press, 2022

God was not really dead when Nietzsche proclaimed it through his speaking-box of Zarathustra. The sage of the German philosopher’s negations was, in fact, cementing the divine being in the noumenal; Nietzsche treated the death of God not as a state of things, but as a verb. It is not a death in the fact of non-existence, but an assassination. God is trapped in that liminal state of dying, and we are its killers, perpetuating the ongoing lineage of a refusal to believe. This is the way it was a hundred years ago, when atheism was radical and conscious, when a lack of faith had to make its way forward by obliteration, when such words had teeth.

In contrast, despite a nun being the prime orchestrator of events in Lina Wolff’s Carnality, God really does seem to be dead, a fact that no one fixates on because it would be like penning a manifesto of the Earth being round. Amidst the vast moral quandaries that swirl through the text, the ancient lessons and axioms that had once served as answers are nowhere to be seen, making room for that “ancient nobility” of chance to storm in between all those narrow spaces between us and the world, us and each other, us and ourselves. Adultery, caretaking, organ donation, euthanasia, murder—it’s all just happening. No choreography in the theatre of choice.

When a yet unnamed writer takes on a three-month travel grant in Madrid, she settles in the city the way one does in an airplane seat: procedural, passive, and with just a little bit of unarticulated dread. Having studied there in her youth, she is familiar with the city’s thorns and sieges, and from the first paragraph, we know—no one sane would choose to spend their summers in Spain’s capital. Still, small pockets of reprieve are there to be excavated: the ceaseless gurgles of wine pouring from dark bottles, the evening’s ink blotting some of the heat, the bright imagination of a city that holds newness in its oldness (“It’s down there. Life,” she thinks to herself). This transition of scenery outside the windows is settled quickly and efficiently in the space of a few pages, then Wolff draws the curtains, puts a drink in the narrator’s hand, and tunnels down into the strange, mutable basement-structure of story—a world which, its walls being made of words, shifts constantly with the mere logic of telling.

READ MORE…

The Work of Feminism: On Elena Medel’s The Wonders

June 2, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

Alicia and María constantly think about the other women missing from their lives.

What makes us who we are, what shapes and defines us? Is it the country that we come from or the language we speak? Is it our sex or sexual orientation? The generation or political system into which we were born? Is it our job, the class we belong to, or the education that we are privileged with or denied? Is it our family, and, if so, as one character from Elena Medel’s The Wonders puts it, “What if genes determine your character, not just your eye colour or the shape of your mouth?” And in all this, how much is pre-ordained, what role is there for choice and free will?

Medel’s debut novel,  translated from the Spanish by Lizzie Davis and Thomas Bunstead, does not presume to offer a single, clear-cut answer to these questions, but one thing is obvious right from the start through the Philip Larkin quotation she has chosen as an epigraph: “Clearly money has something to do with life.” Weaving together the stories of three generations of women from a single family over the course of half a century, from the ’50s to the death of Franco in 1975 to the 2018 Spanish Women’s Strike, the novel seems to suggest that gender clearly has something to do with it, too.

As the novel opens, Alicia (the third generation in the family), finding herself without “so much as a used tissue,” feels uncomfortable from the sense of material limbo. Even at the age of thirteen, she understands that “money tempers [mediocrity], helps to conceal it.” Although she defines her life through money, or the lack thereof, her experience has also been shaped by another great absence that is inextricably linked to financial ruin: that of her father, who feigned the life of a successful businessman while getting increasingly into debt and committed suicide after a bungled attempt at life insurance fraud. From thereon out, Alicia is denied the expensive school and new apartment she’d expected and must move back to the suburbs of Córdoba, eventually moving to Madrid and a mundane life of insecure work and an unsatisfying relationship of convenience punctuated by anonymous casual sex with men who she can approach cynically as “safe bets.”

READ MORE…

On Women Who Refuse to Die: Who Will Win the 2022 Booker International?

May 25, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

What worlds have we been missing in prohibiting or dismissing women’s writing?

As we countdown to the 2022 Booker International Prize announcement on May 26, the contenders for the award offer new indications and perspectives by which to think about the world of literature and translation. In the following essay, our resident Booker expert Barbara Halla considers the digressive and variegated realm of “women’s writing”—that five out of the six titles on the shortlist were works by women authors is both evidence of the work’s scope and diversity, and also an overwhelming rejection of that old and tired idea: that women’s writing is simply of any gender-specific experience.

Since 2019, I have been relentlessly punished by the memory of this essay by an Albanian critic who argued in favor of the inherent superiority of men’s writing. His reasoning went like this: men write to triumph over life, whereas women write to survive. And for that very reason, the author claimed, men’s literature has universal appeal, as men are able to overcome the limitations of their own lived experiences and perspectives, while women’s writing focuses only on their painfully limited (i.e., domestic) existence.

My frustration with this article was compounded by finding its logic replicated elsewhere, in other books about the history of women in literature, and even during a conversation with another Albanian male writer a few months after reading that article. In the ensuing Q&A, the writer in question issued a complacent mea culpa about his lack of interest in women writers—he simply found their writing too limited and introspective. Of course, this is understandable. After all, it is easier to relate to Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei or Goethe’s Faust when one spends their days in the battlefield before making a deal with the devil and are whisked away for a night of debauchery with witches. After all, this is what “real” life is actually about, and it’s not like men ever write about minor concerns like marriage or childcare.

I’m being facetious, but this understanding of literature is pernicious—this desire to determine artistic value along essentialist gender lines. It also seeks to explain the existence of global and local literary canons as meritocratic, rather than the result of conscious policy decisions that have contributed to the erasure and devaluing of women’s writing. I was wondering about this argument as I made my way through the six books shortlisted for the Booker International 2022—five of which were written by women and published in the past fifteen years in South Korea, India, Poland, and Argentina. To be straightforward to the point of being trite: these five books undermine the notion that there is anything akin to a universal “women’s writing.” READ MORE…

Announcing Our April Book Club Selection: Gentlemen Callers by Corinne Hoex

April 28, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

Hoex’s playful romp through the transformative powers of female sensuality . . . toes the line of taste and teases the reader.

In the world of letters, sex is too often strangled with extremes. Whether entrenched in symbolism, proliferate with diverse politics, or avoided altogether, this pervasive element of human experience is too often deprived of its more irreverent, mirthful, and pleasurable evocations. In our Book Club selection for April, award-winning Belgian writer Corinne Hoex presents a series of sexual dreams and fantasies in Gentlemen Callers, a collection that astounds, subverts, and engages with physical pleasure in joy, levity, and dreaminess. Unabashedly funny and fiercely sensual, Hoex’s journey through the erotic is a breathless delight.  

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.

Gentlemen Callers by Corinne Hoex, translated from the French by Caitlin O’Neil, Dalkey Archive Press, 2022

Literature has—particularly in the last century or so—become a Serious Business. I’m not speaking here of economics or occupations, but rather the affect of seriousness. Very often, the more tragical, gritty, and dark a tale is, the more lauded its reception becomes. For whatever reason, we have decided that comedy is not as worthy of critical attention or canonization, in spite of the fact that, in my estimation at least, comedy is infinitely harder to pull off. Humor is culturally specific, temporally tied, and situationally contextual, and all of these facets are amplified in the context of translation, where puns and plays become tangled in tongues. This is what makes Gentlemen Callers, by Corinne Hoex, translated from the French by Caitlin O’Neil, a truly astonishing outlier. While French literature enjoys a fairly prolific publication rate in English, the kinds of literature chosen for publication are often cerebral, philosophical, and introspective. Hoex’s series of vignettes, too, are interiorized, in that they are dreamworlds, but they are also fleshy, sensuous, and gilded with a teasing tone firmly rooted (pun intended) in sexual exploration and fulfillment.

Gentlemen Callers is somewhere between a novel and a short story collection; a first-person narrator delivers each brief tale, and her power to call men (and other more fantastical lovers) into her dreams perennially returns, but nearly every chapter is self-contained, and the narrator shapeshifts as she sees fit, all the better to become the tool with which her lovers might exercise their expertise. Each vignette is titled after an occupation, some of which happily gesture to the realm of tried and true pornographic tropes (like The Mailman or The Schoolteacher) while others are more oblique: The Butcher, The Furrier, The Beekeeper. Following each chapter title comes an epigraph, all taken from some of Europe’s most famous canonical authors: Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Émile Zola. As one might expect, all the referenced authors are men, and all the epigraphs gesture to the occupation under examination, albeit some more obliquely than others. The narratorial play here is not only to reference the heights of physical joy one can achieve with a skilled workman, but also to reference the heights of intellectual joy one can achieve when toying with the phantom canon, with the master’s ghost.

Take, for example, the epigraph from “The Young Priest 2,” one of only three vignette continuations in the book. It’s from Thomas à Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ, perhaps one of the most widely read Christian works after the Bible itself. The quote: “How pleasant and sweet to behold brethren fervent and devout, well-mannered and disciplined!” This earnest, chaste sentiment takes on a new and sensually playful valence when paired with the priest’s vignettes, in which a handsome man of the cloth visits the narrator in her dreams and delivers an intercession upon which, “the Holy Spirit enters me. God clasps me in His arms, possesses me with His mouth, radiates His light by waking the wild urges of his servant’s potent sap.” No doubt Kemis himself, who in his teachings stressed silence, solitude, resisting temptation, and purging fleshly pleasures, would be outraged at the implication that actions “fervent and devout” might be found in the narrator’s oblique allusion to fellatio, “kneel[ing] on [her] white cloud, back arched, face upturned, lips parted, surrendering [her] flesh to the Redeemer.” READ MORE…