Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

October 7, 2022 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Eva Wissting, and Thuy Dinh

Literary news from New York, Vietnam, and Sweden!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on Spanish poetry readings in New York, new Vietnamese translations of classic Japanese novels, and the Gothenberg Book Fair in Sweden. Read on to find out more!

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from New York

Though I usually report from Mexico City, I recently moved to New Haven to begin a PhD program at Yale. However, relocating has not prevented me from engaging with Hispanophone literary communities, particularly in New York City, a creative hub that connects people from all over the world, and where literary readings in Spanish are common.

The first event I attended was a multilingual poetry open mic at the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan. Hosted by Spanish poet Marcos de la Fuente, the soirée “Se Buscan Poetas / Poets Wanted” takes place every last Wednesday of the month. It brings together poets from New York and beyond, who sign up to share their work to the Bowery’s attentive audience. I went on Wednesday, August 31, and participated both as spectator and reader among other emerging Spanish- and English-speaking poets. The event opened with a performance by De la Fuente and actress Clara Francesca. They set the mood for the night with a dramatic interpretation of the bilingual poem “Solstice,” published in the anthology Poetryfighters (Ultramarina Editorial, 2022), assembled by De la Fuente himself. The reading was both exhilarating and engaging. Beyond simply voicing words from the book, De la Fuente and Francesca modulated their expressions and walked around the stage in synchrony with the content and rhythm of the text, creating moments of emotional and aural tension that excited the audience, more like a concert or play than a traditional poetry reading. In addition to hosting the monthly open mic, De la Fuente also directs the New York City part of the Kerouac Festival, an international poetry, music, and performance celebration that takes place in Vigo, New York, and Mexico City. Earlier this year, the festival featured the Chilean writer and Asymptote contributor Arelis Uribe.

Shifting Temporalities: An Interview with Bryan Flavin

October 3, 2022 | in Interviews | by Rose Bialer

We should consider an absence not as something that inhibits access but rather as an opportunity to actively discover. . .

Featured in the Summer 2022 issue, “The Ayah of the Throne,” by Habib Tengour, is a lyrical story that explores the French colonial power in Algeria toward the beginning of the Algerian War of Independence. The story centers around how colonial forces shaped the narrator’s experience of education, language, religion, and even how and when one can tell stories. With this vibrant and original account of his childhood, Tengour reclaims the power of storytelling and relays a life-altering moment with humor and compassion.

In his English translation, Bryan Flavin deftly captures Tengour’s voice and introduces Anglophone speakers to an important piece of writing from one of the foremost voices in contemporary Francophone Maghrebi literature. I had the opportunity to speak with Flavin over email about his experience translating “The Ayah of the Throne.” In the following interview, we discuss the intricacies of working with multilingualism, the importance of not explicating in translation, and the complex and interwoven histories of French and Arabic.

Rose Bialer (RB): I always like asking translators how they first began translating. I am even more curious in your case since you work in both French and Arabic.

Bryan Flavin (BF): I’ve always loved the precision and structure in linguistics and language studies, as well as the exploration and plurality of language in literature and creating writing. During my undergraduate education, I studied linguistics and French literature with a specialization in Arabic language and culture and ended up discovering literary translation as a sort of intersection for all my interests. I was lucky enough to take classes on French translation and global literacy toward the end of my studies and started with translating student writing with an undergraduate translation magazine I helped co-found. It was something I continued practicing on my own until deciding to pursue it in my graduate studies.

RB: You mention in your Translator’s Note that you had the chance to work with Habib Tengour during his Fall 2021 residency with the International Writing Program. This program sounds fascinating, and I would love to hear more about your experience, especially collaborating with Tengour in person.

BF: My translation program had the opportunity to pair with one of the residents to produce a translation of their work during workshop sessions devoted to each piece. Both the original writer and translator were present and active contributors during each workshop, and the balance (and sometimes friction, but in a generative way) between the author’s original intention and the translator’s means to produce something independent in the English was uniquely pronounced due to the workshop’s collaborative nature, which made for a great learning experience.

Lover as Intimate Other: Chinatown by Thuận

July 13, 2022 | in Reviews | by Thuy Dinh

Thuận’s protagonist roams ceaselessly yet neurotically in her imagination even as the main action is confined in both time and space.

Chinatown by Thuận, translated from the Vietnamese by Nguyễn An Lý, New Directions, 2022

In an interview with Italian journalist Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre in 1989, Marguerite Duras revealed she had chosen the rather nondescript title of The Lover (L’Amant), her celebrated novel about a love affair between a fifteen-year-old French girl and a Chinese man in French Indochina, as “a reaction against all the books with that same title, [for] it isn’t a story about love, but about everything in passion that remains suspended and incapable of being named.”

In employing Chinatown as an equally unassuming yet versatile title for her 2005 novel, Thuận responds incisively to the Duras’s work from which she took inspiration by showcasing her pair of star-crossed lovers—an unnamed Vietnamese protagonist and Thụy, her ex-husband who is born in Vietnam but has Chinese ancestry. A Hanoi-born writer and literary translator living in France but choosing to write her novels—ten at last count—in Vietnamese, Thuận (full name Đoàn Ánh Thuận) deftly balances her complex content with a wryly confiding style. Making its English debut via Nguyễn An Lý’s incantatory translation, Chinatown’s generic title is deceptive, its compact length trapping layers of tensions to illustrate how political struggles in the public realm mirror emotional struggles in personal relationships. Subversive yet casually framed like a run-on conversation between friends, Thuận’s novel explores various iterations of Chinatown to convey exile, alienation, oppression, and artistic freedom.

Consisting of one vertiginous 184-page paragraph, the novel is compressed within a two-hour timeline during which the protagonist and her young son are trapped in a Paris metro tunnel while local authorities investigate a bomb threat. With nowhere to go, the protagonist soon launches into reminiscences spanning two eventful decades—from the last years of the Cold War to the period following Vietnam’s implementation of free-market reforms. As such, the novel is simultaneously expansive and claustrophobic, its experimental form disrupted only by two fragments from I’m Yellow, a novel-in-progress by Chinatown’s protagonist. This novel-within-a-novel structure embodies the ambiguous push-pull between oppression and freedom: Thuận’s protagonist roams ceaselessly yet neurotically in her imagination even as the main action is confined in both time and space.

Here France Drowns Algerians: Literary and Cultural Afterlives of October 17, 1961’s Occulted Pogrom

October 18, 2021 | in Essays | by Alex Tan

How will France reconfigure its fragile self-image to accommodate the historical excesses that it has consistently balked at confronting?

This essay is written in memory of all those—predominantly Algerian—killed, deported, or otherwise injured by the violences of French colonialism, and in solidarity with the continuing efforts to resist the forgetting of October 17, 1961 and demand accountability from the French state.

For most of the English-speaking world, October 17 will not register as a date of any consequence. Yet, several days ago in the boulevards of Paris, scores of demonstrators marched from the Rex Cinema to the Pont Saint-Michel; they were tracing, in a defiant act of memory, the cartography of a heinous massacre of Algerian protestors by the French police force that took place, sixty years prior on the very same cobblestones. Their ancestors—most of whom did not survive that deadly evening—had walked those roads in peaceful opposition to the racism and surveillance they had suffered at the hands of the French, as well as the discriminatory night-time curfew that had just been imposed exclusively on Algerian workers.

The publicity posters of this year’s commemorative efforts feature the title “Un Crime d’État” (a crime of the state), handwritten in a ghostly chalk-like texture above two shadowed hands reaching out of murky, watery depths. To the survivors, descendants, relatives, historians, activists, and those who otherwise refuse to forget the bloody police brutality of October 17, 1961, that tableau of desperation will be familiar. On that night, besides beating and injuring countless men, French police officers handcuffed and threw an undocumented number of Algerian demonstrators into the river Seine, leaving them to drown. Historians estimate that around two hundred deaths occurred that night. In an eyewitness account cited in House and MacMaster’s monumental Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory, officers throttled the arms of a man clinging to the parapet “until he dropped like a stone into the river.” Subsequently, nearly six thousand Algerians who did not perish were rounded up, tortured, and deported back to detention camps in Algeria.

Of the scant images that have circulated of 1961, the most iconic is arguably a shot of graffiti spray-painted along the riverbanks, reading “Ici on noie les Algériens” (here we drown Algerians). What’s remarkable is its persistent afterlife in the infinitely reproducible medium of photography, elevated to a sort of metonym for Algerians’ collective trauma—despite the actual graffiti having been literally whitewashed out of existence not long after its writing. Street art continues to spring up here and there: a telling instance is “Ici la France a noyé des Algérien(nes)” (here France drowned Algerians), shifting the temporal frame of reference and naming the locus of guilt. Or, more recently: “Nous sommes les descendants des algériens que vous n’avez pas noyé . . .” (we are the descendants of the Algerians that you did not drown).

oct 17 poster

The state’s erasure of the incriminating graffiti emblematises an essential hypocrisy upon which France’s modernity is built, and perhaps no colony has borne the brunt more painfully than Algeria. It was there, during its struggle for independence from 1954 to 1962, that the French government engaged in one of its most violent and cruel wars while native peoples agitated for decolonisation. Yet the metropolitan French press, largely indifferent to what was transpiring across the Mediterranean, referred to the widespread killings, bombardments, and torture euphemistically as “the events.” Only in 1999—a full thirty-seven years after Algeria gained independence—did France officially bring itself to acknowledge that a “war” had occurred. READ MORE…

Contributor:

Alex Tan

Languages:

Arabic
French

Places:

Algeria
France

Writers:

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