Posts filed under 'memory'

“Precise Tactility”: Polly Barton Interviewed by Xiao Yue Shan

December 1, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Language is a source of great fear, but it's also a source of great joy and connection.

At page 124 of Polly Barton’s Fifty Sounds, I found myself smiling impossibly wide, reading out loud to the empty room: “Kyuki-kyuki . . . The sound of a pen writing on a whiteboard.” Part of the joy that pervades and grows in reading this “memoir-dictionary” is in its subtle invitation to speak: to feel, as the author says, the “sensory bombardment” of encountering each new word, and the world that arrives with it. Written in fifty essays that each orbits off—sometimes tangentially, sometimes straightforwardly—from one of Japanese language’s vast selection of onomatopoeic words, the book generates a curious, sensual portrait of Barton’s life in Japan as a young woman, informed by the Wittgensteinian notion of language being defined by its utility, and in similar spirit to Lyn Hejinian: “Language . . . nearly is our psychological condition.” Through explorations of how the myriad self comes to match and distinguish itself from the world in words, Fifty Sounds creates an ecstatic realm of what happens in, between, and across languages—and the people who speak them.

Barton is a prolific translator from the Japanese; her repertoire includes Akutagawa winners like Tomoka Shibasaki’s Spring Garden and bestsellers like Misumi Kubo’s So We Look to the Sky, as well as English PEN Awards for Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are and Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job. Though we’ve spoken to her in the past about her translation work, I wanted to hear more about the linguistic and textual discoveries that catalysed this desire to work with language, in the quiet and admiring affinity between all people who love words and their secret conspirations. I spoke with Polly on-screen in our opposing time zones; she answered my questions in thoughtful bursts of speech that carried with them a vivid, various nature, her hands occasionally gesturing at the immeasurable distance between us, that which only language can attempt to breach.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Did Fifty Sounds begin in its current structure?

Polly Barton (PB): Not at all. I started working on it when I’d just got back to the UK after years of living in Japan, and at first, it was just notes for essays about the Japanese language. The inclusion of the onomatopoeia happened quite naturally, but the “fifty sounds” structure came about when I started writing the proposal for the [2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions] Essay Prize; I wanted to do it as a way of consolidating my thoughts, because I felt like there was meat in there and I was really enjoying writing about it, but it was kind of all over the place.

But the more I was writing, the more this concept started coming to me, and it seemed so out there that even while I was writing, I was thinking, can I do this? Can I write a memoir in fifty essays about Japanese onomatopoeia? Still, the callout for the contest said, “rewards ambitious writing,” so I was like, they want ambitious, I’ll give them ambitious. It’s funny because I am so grateful for that structure. It was just a crazy idea I hit upon, but I think it was very good for me to have that as a constraint, to start over fifty times—so I could do some sections like prose-poems, and a couple bits that are more academic.

XYS: Freedom dressed up as a constraint. There are definitely pieces that feel as though they could be portioned into separate texts, but because all the sections are encompassed in the umbrella of one experience, it feels cohesive.

PB: I don’t know if I intended this, but the experience of being in Japan, and learning Japanese, was so chaotic to me. I think a lot of people who learn a different language when they grew up and live in another culture—particularly one where they’re visibly different from most people around them—do have this real panoply of conflicting experiences, and the book is about embracing chaos in a way.

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Writer and Translator E.J. Koh Explores the Bridged and Braided Histories of Language

August 23, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Ruwa Alhayek

If my mother’s letters could sleep, my translations would be their dreams.

E.J. Koh’s memoir, The Magical Language of Others, was published in January 2020, but I read it in lockdown a few months later. Since March, I have read or listened to this book at least four times, each time encountering something else that makes me come back to it. Koh’s memoir is a coming-of-age story framed by translations of the letters her mother sent her from Korea, where she and Koh’s dad relocated for work. It tells the heartfelt story of a young Korean-American woman who comes to poetry and translation, to Japanese, and to a deeper understanding of her own languages, English and Korean. And she weaves into this story, with palpable sincerity and magnanimity, the stories of generations of women before her who survived the Japanese occupation, the Jeju massacre, and one abandonment after another. In this interview, she talks about avoiding seamlessness and translating war, wounding, and the seemingly impossible.

Ruwa Alhayek (RA): Has translation allowed you to inhabit your mother’s letters in a different way? 

E.J. Koh (EJK): Translating my mother’s letters for me is inseparable from experiencing the vast distance between us in my youth—from the US to South Korea, between English and Korean—and the violence of when that distance suddenly collided to a close. I am living my way back toward the pain of being separated and reunited again. I am holding two strings at the same time. One is the mother who delivered her child. The other is the child who can deliver her mother. That is why I say if my mother’s letters could sleep, my translations would be their dreams.

RA: If you were to issue a new translation of these letters, how do you think they might change? 

EJK: I am in love with and feel deeply grateful for the work of translators. I’d be honored to see her letters translated again, by different translators. What occurs to me is how I leaned away from seamlessness, translation as if written in the historically dominant English, and hoped to let Korean remain—against erasure—choosing instead words with sound, syntax, and rhythm to keep pace with my mother’s voice running circles inside me. But I feel there is no one way, and the assumption of one is the failure to see what can be different and what can be changed.

RA: I was really inspired by the scene of your morning ritual in Japan where you sit in the coffee shop with the hanging vines from dawn until your classes start, memorizing ten pages from your pocket dictionary every day—is there something about that type of immersion that resembles the process of translation for you?

EJK: When I lived in Japan, I starved myself. I wouldn’t eat a proper meal until I could order in Japanese without error. My eating disorder entered my language, and discipline became a place where I could intellectualize my self-harm. I learned the language quickly but with shame and guilt—not opposites to but the very sources of pride. I used language to isolate myself. I say, Languages, as they open you up, can also allow you to close. Where before I depended on separation, now I move in the world by way of connection and humanity. READ MORE…

Memory in Present Tense: On Haruki Murakami’s First Person Singular

July 1, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Darren Huang

Murakami's latest collection returns to his perennial fixations with jazz music, baseball, and mysterious meetings with women and animals.

First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel, Knopf, 2021

In Haruki Murakami’s short story, “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning” (from his 1993 collection The Elephant Vanishes), the archetypal Murakami protagonist—an unreliable, doubtful man—fleetingly encounters an unfamiliar girl on the street and suddenly realizes she is the 100% perfect girl for him, though he has never spoken to her, nor finds her particularly beautiful. Instead, this melancholic, gently absurdist piece concerns itself with what the narrator would have said had he approached the girl. After dismissing a number of ridiculous ideas, the narrator decides on a long fabulist story, in which a young girl and young boy meet, discover they are one hundred percent perfect for each other, and separate to test their feelings. While apart, however, both lose their memories, and when they eventually encounter each other again, both only briefly acknowledge that they are perfect counterparts, but still go on to forever disappear from one another’s lives.

The story, which later served as inspiration for Murakami’s novel 1Q84, employs the author’s recurring narrative device of intermingling reality and unreality in the minds of his narrators, largely applied to the fleeting but transformative romantic encounters between men and women—most famously evident in his early bestselling novel, Norwegian Wood. It also reflects Murakami’s longstanding thematic concerns of loss, estrangement, doomed love, and loneliness. Notably, the young girl and boy not only become estranged from each other, but also from themselves in the loss of their memories; this theme of disconnection unites the stories in the author’s latest release, First Person Singular, fluidly translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel. The collection is his first since the English publication of Men Without Women in 2017, and returns to Murakami’s perennial fixations with jazz music, baseball, and mysterious meetings with women and animals. They are all narrated by an aged writer—resembling Murakami himself—who wistfully reflects on loosely chronological formative experiences. In this way, the stories blur not only dream and reality but also author and narrator, playfully employing the lens of memory to grapple with how we transcend—or fail to transcend— the disconnections that occur between others and ourselves.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2021

June 14, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by David Boyd, Eva Wissting, and Julia Sherwood

The best and latest from Mexico, Sweden, and Poland!

This month, our selections of excellent works from around the world are manifold with mystery: some historical, some psychological, and some linguistic. From Poland, philosopher Remigiusz Ryziński attempts to figure out the sexual politics behind Michel Foucault’s hasty departure from Warsaw. The newest autobiographical novel from Linda Boström Knausgård contends with the author’s own experiences with electroshock therapy, and its impact on her memories. Lastly, in an essay collection by Mariana Oliver explores the act of moving between the various territories of cities and languages, between familiarity and curiosity. Read on to find out more!

foucault

Foucault in Warsaw by Remigiusz Ryziński, translated from the Polish by Sean Gasper Bye, Open Letter, 2021

Review by Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large for Slovakia

“Michel Foucault came to Poland in October 1958. He took a position as the first director of the newly founded Center for French Culture at the University of Warsaw. It was in Warsaw that he finished his doctoral thesis, later published as History of Madness. Yet in mid-1959, he was forced to leave Poland. The reason was a certain boy, Jurek. No one ever figured out who this boy really was.” With the mystery laid out, Remigiusz Ryziński opens his exploration of this little-known episode in the life of the philosopher as a young man, and his attempt to find out what led to Foucault’s expulsion from Warsaw.

Foucault in Warsaw is the first non-academic book by Remigiusz Ryziński—a Polish philosopher and cultural critic who studied at the Sorbonne—and another addition to Sean Gasper Bye’s impressive portfolio of translations. Combining the techniques of literary reportage with the analytical tools of Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, Ryziński has unearthed secret police dossiers and trawled through hundreds of pages of reports filed by undercover cops and snitches: “Stories typed or handwritten, full of dates and places, names and connections, meetings, relationships, breakups, love, and suffering. Reading them felt like flipping through someone’s family photo album.” He immersed himself in the press and newsreels from the period, incorporating details, such as the price of everyday goods and statistical information, to conjure up the flavours, textures, and colours of Warsaw—the city that is as much a hero of this book as the philosopher himself, along with “the boys whose company Foucault enjoyed most.”

For those familiar with recent works of Polish literature, Ryziński’s reconstruction of the life of the gay community in Warsaw in the late 1950s will bring to mind Lubiewo, Michał Witkowski’s groundbreaking 2004 novel depicting gay life on Poland’s Baltic coast, before and after the end of communism. While Witkowski’s book presents fictionalised versions of real stories and characters, Ryziński has tracked down the actual people who knew Foucault during his time in Warsaw (including some who were romantically linked to him) or were active on the gay scene at the time. He retraced the places Foucault did—or was likely to—frequent, recreating a detailed topography of Warsaw’s cruising spots: an assortment of cafés and bars from the seedy to the sophisticated, steam baths both ornate and functional, public squares and monuments ideally suited for pulling soldiers, and public toilets such as the French-style urinals known as “mushrooms,” to the bathrooms at the Palace of Culture, considered “the height of luxury.” READ MORE…

The International Booker at the Border of Fiction: Who Will Win?

May 27, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

[T]his year’s shortlist . . . is explicitly focused with questions of archives, loss, and narration.

With the announcement of the Booker International 2021 winner around the corner and the shortlisted titles soon to top stacks of books to-be-read around the world, most of us are harboring an energetic curiosity as to the next work that will earn the notoriety and intrigue that such accolades bring. No matter one’s personal feelings around these awards, it’s difficult to deny that the dialogue around them often reveal something pertinent about our times, as well as the role of literature in them. In the following essay, Barbara Halla, our assistant editor and in-house Booker expert, reviews the texts on the shortlist and offers her prediction as to the next book to claim the title.

If there is such a thing as untranslatability, then the title of Adriana Cavarero’s Tu Che Mi Guardi, Tu Che Mi Racconti would be it. Paul A. Kottman has rendered it into Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, a title accurate to its content, typical of academic texts published in English, but lacking the magic of the original. Italian scholar Alessia Ricciardi, however, has provided a more faithful rendition of: “You who look at me, you who tell my story.” This title is not merely a nod, but a full-on embrace of Caverero’s theory of the “narratable self.”

Repudiating the idea of autobiography as the expression of a single, independent will, Caverero—who was active in the Italian feminist and leftist scene in the 1970s—was much more interested in the way external relationships overwhelmingly influence our conception of ourselves and our identities. Her theory of narration is about democratizing the action of creation and self-understanding, demonstrating the reliance we have on the mirroring effects of other people, as well as how collaboration can result in a much fuller conception of the self. But I also think that there is another layer to the interplay between seeing and narrating, insofar as the act of seeing another involves in itself a narrative creation of sorts; every person is but a amalgam of the available fragments we have of them, and we make sense of their place in our lives through storytelling, just as we make sense of our own.

I have started this International Booker prediction with Cavarero because I have found that this year’s shortlist—nay, the entire longlist—is explicitly focused with questions of archives, loss, and narration: what is behind the impulse to write, especially about others, and those we have loved, but lost? Who gets to tell our stories? It is a shame that Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette—as one of the most interesting interjections on the narrative impulse—was cut after being first longlisted in March. The second portion of Minor Detail sees its Palestinian narrator becoming obsessed to the point of endangerment to discover the story that Shibli narrates in the first portion of the book: the rape and murder of a Bedouin girl, whose tragic fate coincides with the narrator’s birthday. This latter section of the book is compulsively driven by this “minor detail,” but there is no “logical explication” for what drives this obsession beyond the existence of the coincidence in itself. READ MORE…

Distance Shapes Memory: An Interview with Karla Suárez

May 13, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Dorothy Potter Snyder

In my case, at least, I look first, get muddy and sweaty, and walk away. Only then do I write.

As I coordinated this interview with Karla Suárez, I had the impression that she was in constant motion. She is an inveterate bike rider and, even while working, takes “virtual trips by pacing around [her] writing table.” Her abundant energy is evident both in her productive career (nine books and participation in no less than forty-two anthologies during the last decade and a half) and in her female characters, canny women who are the architects of their destinies.

For Suárez, the mind’s attempt to understand is best complemented by a strong dose of the physical, because the body offers its own truths: “The best thing to do is to make love,” declares brainy Julia, the protagonist of Havana Year Zero. “. . . not think, offer up the body, the body, the body, the body, to the point of exhaustion . . . and the next day another body, and not thinking, not thinking, not thinking.”

Suárez’s background as an electrical engineer and a classical guitarist is evident in her novels which have the timing, complexity, and structural elegance of the proverbial Swiss watch. She likes her chapters to be about the same length to offer the reader rhythmic consistency, and intertextual gems await the attentive reader. But she is also something of an imp. She likes to have fun—and so do her characters.

I started our interview with word association, just as friends Lucía and Circe do in Suárez’s second novel Viajera, and she played right along. Then we talked about writing about home through the twin lenses of time and distance.

— Dorothy Potter Snyder

Dorothy Potter Snyder (DPS): Let’s play word association.

Karla Suárez (KS): Okay.

DPS: City?

KS: Should have an ocean.

DPS: Ocean?

KS: Motion.

DPS: Body?

KS: Sweat.

DPS: Stranger?

KS: What I am sometimes.

DPS: People call you a Cuban writer, but above all you’re an urban writer, whether the setting is Havana, Mexico City, Sao Paolo, Rome, Paris, or Lisbon where you live now. Can you imagine writing a novel that doesn’t have anything to do with a city? Or are they—and Havana in particular—indispensable to you?

KS: Four novels (Silencios, La viajera, Habana año cero, El hijo del héroe) compose what I call “my Havana Symphony,” because the characters in them are either from Havana or live there. In those novels, I wanted to deal with themes that concern the country and the city where I was born and raised, a Havana that goes from the 1970s to the ’90s. They are independent stories, of course, but there are subtle links between them. For example, some secondary characters appear in more than one novel; there are scenes in which the protagonists of several novels meet without knowing each other; and there is an object (a backpack) that passes from one character to another and thus travels from novel to novel. I wanted to create a micro-world where my characters cross paths—and even I with them, because I also appear in a very subtle way (though not as a protagonist) in some of these stories. This symphony is now complete, and I’ve started another cycle. The story I’m writing now, for example, does not take place in Havana nor does it have anything special to do with the city. It’s part of a different symphony. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: May 2021

May 10, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Jacqueline Leung, Lindsay Semel, and Sarah Moore

New work from Iceland, Chile, France, and Argentina!

We take our jobs of bringing you the best new releases from the realm of world literature very seriously, and this week, we have four astounding texts from authors notorious for their intelligence, their variousness, and their ability to captivate. From Iceland, Sjón explores the banality of evil in a charged, probing character study. In Argentina, the legendary Norah Lange comes to new light as she evolves beyond her reputation as a literary muse, and tells her story in her own, singular language. The latest from French writer and playwright Yasmina Reza is a poignant meditation, guided by oratory, on selfhood, aging, and human frailties. And lastly, Chile’s award-winning Lina Meruane comes out with an exploration of illness and intergenerational trauma that is at once dreamy and deeply grounded in physicality. Read on to find out more!

red milk

Red Milk by Sjón, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb, Sceptre, 2021

 Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

Sjón, one of Iceland’s most internationally recognizable literary figures, is a lifelong cultural miscegenationist. Since his earliest days as a neo-surrealist poet and musician, he has drawn proudly and liberally from global artistic lineages. In Red Milk, his latest collaboration with long-time translator Victoria Cribb, he employs an intentional, methodical restraint to examine the survival of Nazism post-World War II through the life and early death of Gunnar Kampen, a fictionalized version of a real, small-time Icelandic neo-Nazi. Sjón’s policy of omission—of drama, psychology, violence, grandeur of any kind—results in a delicious tension. He tempts us to expect so much of the novel, and though he never provides the relief of clean culminations, he manages to keep the reader wanting.

More than anything, we want Gunnar to either damn or to redeem himself, but he refuses to be anything more than a tempest in a teacup—a chess piece carved in ivory rather than ebony. He passes his brief life engaged in the mundane building of a movement that never comes to fruition. He stumbles into nationalist socialism the same way any young person stumbles into their solidified adult identity. This is not a psychoanalytic assessment of what draws him to Nazism so as much as a collection of images, inputs, choices, and feedback that nudge him there. One such curious image comes from a party he attended with his parents as a child. Bored with the adults, he wanders through the house until he encounters “a human figure, sitting in the shadow thrown by the curved back of the armchair,” in the library. He marvels at her brown skin and colorful clothing.

Without releasing her grip on his left hand, she raises his right hand and pulls it under the lampshade, holding it up to the strong bulb until the light shines red through the child’s flesh, revealing the silhouettes of the bones inside.

            ‘Only possible with such a hand.’

The woman nods at him. The filigree brooch on her shoulder gleams, exposing the pattern from which it is made: a myriad tiny swastikas that differ from the hated one only in that they stand upright rather than tilted on their side.

            ‘Only white people let the light into themselves.’

The imagery is not attributed any meaning besides its own aesthetic potency. The woman’s exoticism is a neutral source of intrigue for Gunnar, unrelated to his blossoming racial beliefs. The woman—as an ideologically educated Gunnar discovers later—might well have been Savitri Devi, the all too real mother figure of contemporary neo-Nazism, but Gunnar’s brush with history is told with the same tone as if she had simply been Reykjavik’s witchy spinster. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: February 2021

February 22, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Darren Huang, and Thuy Dinh

Please join us in celebrating three new translations this month from Russia, Mozambique, and Spain!

Amongst the great gifts that translation brings us is an awareness to the alternation and variegations of perspective, informed by ever-shifting factors of fact, selfhood, relationships, and hearsay alike. In this month’s roundup of excellence in world literature, our selection of texts brings expansive voices to light in exquisite explorations in what it means to remember, comprehend, and believe: a luminous text on family history from Maria Stepanova, the reimaginings of folktales by Mia Couto, and a deft fiction on self-deceptions by Sònia Hernández. 

in memory of memory

In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale, New Directions, 2021

 Review by Darren Huang, Editor-at-Large for Taiwan

In W.G. Sebald’s final novel Austerlitz, the protagonist Jacques Austerlitz—an art historian who arrived in Britain as an infant refugee from Czechoslovakia in the Kindertransport—searches for the fate of his parents, who were displaced and lost amidst the Holocaust and the Second World War. The novel is a poetic and digressive excavation of family history through the innovative hybrid of photography, travelogue, history, art criticism, and fiction, as well as a meditation on the horrors of the twentieth century, the unreliability of memory and memorialization, and the weight of the past on the present. This unique, peripatetic narrative method of ruminating over the past, which Sebald described as “documentary fiction,” is adapted by the highly acclaimed Russian novelist, poet, and essayist Maria Stepanova in her autofictional, essayistic memoir, In Memory of Memory, elegantly translated by Sasha Dugdale for New Directions. Like Sebald, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in her multi-genre novel Dictee, Stepanova adopts an oblique, multifaceted approach towards her central project of assembling a family history dating from the late nineteenth century. She lodges memoir like a puzzle box within cultural commentary, historical documents from her ancestors, philosophical discourse, and literary criticism; the result is a densely textured memoir-in-fragments that is alive to the limitations of its project—the lack of historical evidence, the inaccuracies in memory, the fraught relationship between the storyteller and her subjects, and the inevitable incompleteness of the family narrative.

The text is deliberately structured into three distinct portions: the first two sections alternate between cultural criticism, personal anecdotes, and historical documents. Certain “chapters,” wryly entitled “Not a Chapter,” are entirely composed of letters from her forbears, including her maternal great-grandparents, Sarra Ginzburg and Mikhail Fridman, her maternal grandparents, Lyolya and Lyonya, and her paternal grandparents, Nikolai Stepanov and Dora Stepanova, among others. The letters, chronologically arranged from 1942 to 1985, offer intimate glimpses into the personal lives of Stepanova’s family, and serve additionally as pieces of cultural history. They are redolent of a particular place and time, evoking what Stepanova calls “a feeling for the age.” Each epistolary “chapter” is accompanied by minimal context or commentary and separated from each other by essayistic inquiries into memory—ranging from such subjects as the photograph, Charlotte Salomon and her epic novel Life? Or Theatre?, Sebald and his writings on history, and the memory boxes of Joseph Cornell. In the first two sections of the text, this digressive arrangement interrupts the family narrative so that it only appears in decontextualized fragments. The effect of this bifurcated structure is that the family narrative remains mostly unexplored until the end of the second section and the third section, which consist of more conventional biographical accounts of family members. Stepanova’s delay in directly grappling with both her personal and family history reflects her anxieties about writing on the past. For example, she cites Marianne Hirsch’s concern that inserting archival photographic images might de- or re-contextualize them and distort their original realities. Therefore, the sections of cultural criticism represent the author’s hesitant, fitful attempts at approaching the past, which she finally accesses in the final third of the novel. In these critical chapters, Stepanova admits to “picking through different approaches to the past, as one might pick through dried peas, in search of one that might work.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Oyster Pond” by Xosé Anxelu Gutiérrez Morán

February 2, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Xosé Anxelu Gutiérrez Morán

When I swallow saliva I can feel / how it rained the afternoon I first knew about you.

Memories of a family outing are preserved for posterity in Xosé Anxelu Gutiérrez Morán’s “Oyster Pond,” this week’s Translation Tuesday selection. Our speaker’s second-person address captures the intimacy and awe of a parent-child relationship, here a one-sided epistolary written for a hypothetical being (the future adult) recording the experiences of an actual being (the present child). The recurring images of wetness—foam, rain, saliva, the sea—evoke images of nascent life and mimic the ebb and flow of a child’s mind (e.g., the “life or death” urgency of collecting beads). At the metapoetic level, the gift our speaker offers the child is placed into the interim care of the reader—we are witnesses and keepers of a private and cherished memory.

Oyster Pond

To Nora, barely two years old

You are not going to remember this moment,
that is why I am writing it down for you.
You do not know either that you have
all your memory to celebrate
while you bring us
more beads for a necklace
as if your life depended on them. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Five Poems by Radmila Petrović

January 26, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Jovanka Kalaba

some words are so tender / that we keep them in greenhouses

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, memories of a pastoral youth emerge as an urban woman’s coming-of-age in these selections from Serbian poet Radmila Petrović. Our speaker alternates between moments of bittersweet nostalgia for her erstwhile village life (“The Curse of the Woods”), and a reckoning with the violent patriarchal norms of her home (“Forest, Plow, Primrose”). This sequence of poems demonstrates a liberated wisdom beyond the stifling lessons of past generations, a voice which confronts the brutality of patriarchy—and even the alleged inefficacy of poetry itself—with an acerbic wit (“Above Your Collarbones,” “Just Checking”). Petrović’s verse masterfully bridges a bitter, world-weary narrative voice with moments of childlike vulnerability (see especially the power of maternal silence in “The Language of Plants”), and deploys bucolic images alongside moments of bodily destruction. Of particular note is the poet’s use of line breaks (here captured by the superb translation from Jovanka Kalaba and edited by Ellen Elias-Bursać) to almost mimic the process of gradual, episodic recollection—and the hesitation warranted by traumatic memory.

The Curse of the Woods

does never came near the households
we would see them when we headed uphill
to pick rosehips for jam

one summer while mowing a meadow
Father accidentally mowed a fawn
the mountain wailed at sunset

ever since that day I have always
walked in front of the mower
moved rabbit kits out of the way
catapulted snakes with a pitchfork

ever since that day I have carried the curse of the woods

your doelike heart sees yellow hunting dogs
in my eyes
my fingers feel like blades of a mower

You can’t do this anymore, you said

Mother put my legs out with the hay
this morning
for the cows READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “What I see” by Beatrice Cristalli

July 21, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Julia Pelosi-Thorpe

You see, even if I don’t see you / I know you’re breathing inside of us.

Love in the time of lockdown is given voice in Beatrice Cristalli’s “What I see,” this week’s Translation Tuesday selection. Written in response to the COVID-19 crisis in Italy, the poem’s speaker prefaces the piece with a philosophical declaration about fate—through subtle and clever enjambment (the power of the poem’s one punctuated line: “Right?”), this musing becomes the speaker’s guiding question. The poem flows through possibilities and memories, to and from that one pivotal inquiry. Seemingly mundane objects—a toothbrush, a comb, a jumper—are charged with new emotive meaning as they evoke the processes brought about by the lockdown: leaving. Absence. And remembering. The speaker, trapped in the moment when these objects were fixed in place by circumstance, longs for the safety of a missing love.

What I see 

They say all’s subjective
But things play parts in fate
Right?
READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2020

June 15, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Eva Wissting, and Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

New publications from Brazil, Japan, and Poland!

This month, our selections of newly published literature from around the globe seem to cohere under the umbrella of trauma and memory, and the way they inevitably turn into narratives in the process of retrospection. From a Polish work of non-fiction that traces the sufferings of Poles during WWII, to the journals that document a Jewish immigrant in Brazil, to the strange and unspoken secrets of a small village in Japan—these works are of both documentation and imagination.

Logo-World-Editions-2018-black-white

A Little Annihilation by Anna Janko, translated from the Polish by Philip Boehm, World Editions, 2020

Review by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, Educational Arm Assistant

It is a grim fact, one that acquires increasing urgency in recent years, that those who were alive to experience the horrors of the Second World War are getting older: before long, we will no longer be able to talk to people who have direct experience of those times. Thus, we are increasingly grappling with the problem of second-generation memory: with the matter of how the descendants of survivors preserve and pass on the stories of the past for future generations, and with questions as to whether, or how, those descendants inherit the trauma of their ancestors. Anna Janko’s A Little Annihilation is a powerful meditation on these issues.

In this reckoning with the past, Janko describes the destruction of the Polish village of Sochy by the German military on Tuesday, June 1, 1943: the inhabitants massacred and buildings burned to the ground over the course of a mere few hours. Nine-year-old Teresa Ferenc, Janko’s mother, was among the survivors. In recounts of conversations, her mother describes her memories of that day—most especially, witnessing the death of both of her parents. Janko also chronicles interviews with other survivors from the village, interweaving their stories and noting the discrepancies between them, while describing efforts to tabulate the exact number of lives lost. The impossibility of establishing precise details is a crucial reminder of the intertwined nature of history and memory, a refutation of the common notion of their opposition, as well as a reflection on the challenges of documenting a massacre.

For some English-language readers, Janko’s text may be the first work they have encountered that discusses the sufferings of non-Jewish Poles during the Second World War. For Americans especially, to learn about Nazi atrocities is generally to learn about their efforts to exterminate European Jews, without a detailed understanding of how their eugenicist ideology shaped their policies and strategies in a broader variety of ways. Confusion over the fact that Poland was occupied territory has led to mistaken statements about “Polish death camps” (most notably, perhaps, when President Barack Obama used the term during a ceremony awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski in 2012; he later apologized for the error)—as Janko angrily reminds readers. “In my opinion it would be best if Germany gathered up all the camps they left behind in Poland. So that no one would be mistaken any longer.” READ MORE…

In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

May 16, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Sarah Moore

I remember that when everything starts to crumble, there are always people you can rely on, people who heal...who make everyday life more bearable.

For this week’s edition of In This Together, we present a text from the French writer, journalist, and musician Tania de Montaigne. Sarah Moore, translator and Assistant Blog Editor at Asymptote, introduces the piece:

This week, France ended its national lockdown that had been in place for almost two months. Yet, of course, life has not returned to normal and people have been adapting to the déconfinement, along with the many changes it has brought. During the lockdown, French daily newspaper Libération (popularly known as Libé) continued to publish its weekly column “Écritures” in its weekend edition, written alternately by four French writers including Tania de Montaigne. This particular article, “Pour mémoire” (“For the record”) looks back on everyday life before the COVID-19 pandemic, recalling past normality. Saying something ‘for the record’ is to let a voice ring out, to publicly declare that these words have value and should be remembered. The text’s power lies in its simplicity and honesty—evoking nostalgia for a pleasurable but naïve innocence that has been lost. 

De Montaigne alludes to the many small cultural references that can stir and unite a collective memory—song lyrics, TV shows, books, exhibitions—as well as our old habits and the importance of touch, which we perhaps took for granted. She also draws a link with the AIDS crisis and our various responses to something that is frightening, new, and unknown—that will inevitably be used politically. Most importantly, referencing other times of hardship, including the terrorist attacks in Paris and Nelson Mandela’s apartheid resistance, de Montaigne upholds the continual value of powerful words, voice, and support during times of crisis. 

For the record

by Tania de Montaigne

I remember the day when the word ‘AIDS’ entered our lives.
I remember Barbara’s song, “Maladie d’amour / Où l’on meurt d’aimer / Seul et sans amour, / Sid’abandonné”. (“Love sickness / Where you die from loving / Alone and loveless, / Aidsabandoned”.)
I remember fear.
I remember people who had first-hand info through “my mother’s aunt’s cousin who works at the hospital” or “my brother-in-law’s cousin’s best friend who works for the government”.
I remember the National Front saying: “People with AIDS are like lepers, they should be locked up in an Aidsatorium.” And how they also said: “It’s a lie, condoms don’t protect you from the disease.”
I remember how some people claimed that there were miracle cures.
I remember Hervé Guibert’s book, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life.
I remember a philosophy exam and this quote from Aristotle: “The ignorant man affirms, the learned man doubts, the wise man reflects.”
I remember when Corona was a Mexican beer that you drank with a slice of lemon.
I remember the quiz you always found at the end of summer magazine editions: “What about you, what would you take with you to a desert island?” I went crazy trying to decide.
I remember how we used to go to the theatre, to concerts, how everyone was packed tight, focused, emotional, vibrating in unison and how that’s what was beautiful. READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Solaris

March 30, 2020  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Sarah Moore and Xiao Yue Shan

[Tarkovsky's] films are not designed to entertain—their pleasure comes from the possibility of being forever changed by seeing them.

Our second feature for Asymptote at the Movies is Andrei Tarkvosky’s Solaris, a 1972 Soviet masterpiece based on Polish writer Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel of the same name. Arguably one of the greatest science fiction films ever made, the plot focuses on psychologist Kris Kelvin and his arrival at the space station orbiting Solaris, a planet whose ocean had been the focus of intense scientific study for decades. As the two other scientists aboard behave increasingly strangely, Kelvin discovers that they are being “visited” by figures of their past, resurrected in the space station. A complex exploration of man’s place in the universe, his quest for knowledge, and the meaning of love and life, Solaris is a triumph.

Sarah Moore (SM): Sometimes it appears that a novel exists, destined for a certain filmmaker, as if it had in fact been written for such a connection. So it is with Lem’s novel and Tarkvosky; Solaris lends itself perfectly to Tarkovsky’s slow, profound meditations on human nature, the purpose of existence, memory, and the function of art. Lem’s novel is classified as science fiction but (as with many works of science fiction) incorporates a wealth of philosophy and spirituality. Tarkovsky unabashedly confronted the big questions. His films are not designed to entertain—their pleasure comes from the possibility of being forever changed by seeing them. Both the novel and the film are immensely detailed; whenever I watch Tarkovsky’s film, I am always struck by how much there is to comprehend, how much more there is to be contemplated each time. Perhaps a good place to begin this discussion, therefore, is with Tarkovsky’s own impression of Lem:

When I read Lem’s novel, what struck me above all were the moral problems evident in the relationship between Kelvin and his conscience, as manifested in the form of Hari. In fact if I understood, and greatly admired, the second half of the novel—the technology, the atmosphere of the space station, the scientific questions—it was entirely because of that situation, which seems to me to be fundamental to the work. Inner, hidden, human problems, moral problems, always engage me far more than any questions of technology; and in any case technology, and how it develops, invariably relates to moral issues, in the end that is what it rests upon. My prime sources are always the real state of the human soul, and the conflicts that are expressed in spiritual problems.

Tarkovsky’s preference for the human problems over the technological is clear in his huge re-structuring of the plot—or rather, his ability to lengthen the chronology. Whilst the action of Lem’s novel is restricted solely to the space station, such action contributes only three-quarters of Tarkovsky’s film. In a forty-minute prelude, the day before Kelvin’s departure to Solaris, we see him at his parents’ home, surrounded by lush nature. Long sequences of forests, flowing streams, underwater reeds, and large ponds contrast with the sparse, sterile settings of the space station that will appear later. Here, his complicated relationship with his father is introduced and he burns documents over an outside fire, preparing for a total rupture from his life on earth. For a text that so explicitly posits the choice between remaining on Solaris in the pursuit of scientific study and returning to earth, beginning the film in such a naturalistic setting is a huge gesture that places the human at its centre. How do you feel about the tension between “the scientific questions” and the “hidden, human problems” in the film? READ MORE…