Posts filed under 'new in translation'

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2024

Taking a closer look at Asymptote’s milestone issue!

Not sure where to start with our tremendous fiftieth issue? Our blog editors talk their favourites.

In its overarching theme of “Coexistence,” Asymptote’s monumental 50th issue draws together the quiet, the forgotten, and the unseen, allowing us to inhabit worlds that are not our own. From the bright unease of Elena Garro’s “The Week of Colors” (tr. Christine Legros), to the serene, dynamic stanzas of Eva Ribich’s Along the Border (tr. Julian Anderson), to the dedicated love in Almayrah A. Tiburon’s “Keyboard and Breastfeed” (tr. Bernard Capinpin), Asymptote’s Winter 2024 Issue examines the relationships we have with each other, with the world, and with ourselves.

Dark and unflinching, Maria Grazia Calandrone’s Your Little Matter delves into the ambiguous history of the author’s mother Lucia, her parents’ joint suicide in Rome, and all that was left behind. Central to the piece are physical mementos—two old photographs of Lucia, a list of items left in a suitcase, clippings from a newspaper—from which Calandrone pieces together the story of her parents’ lives, revealing aspects of a woman her daughter barely knew. Alongside the photos come memories passed down and memories created, as Calandrone pieces together the life of a young woman who was nearly forgotten. 

Translated by Antonella Lettieri, Your Little Matter is a work of empathy—of putting on a parent’s shoes, of imagining the pain and the love of the life that led to yours. The lives of our parents are distant, disconnected from our own. Even for those who knew their parents, the question of who they were before we existed can be haunting. What did you lose when you had me? What did you gain? It can be a self-centered venture, as relationships with parents often are, and Your Little Matter simultaneously veers away from and embraces this selfishness. Who were you? Why did you have to leave? I want to remember you; I want you to be remembered. Calandrone’s condemnation of the society that killed her parents; the somber moments spent amidst photographs, imagining; the love she holds for someone who can only be known retroactively—these elements draw you into Lucia’s life, her story, unforgettable. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest in literary news from Guatemala, Costa Rica, and the Vietnamese diaspora!

This week in world literature, we hear from our Editors-at-Large reporting on the latest in literary developments! In Guatemala, we’re covering the literary community’s response to threats to the electoral process, as well as the country’s most recent award-winning authors. From the Vietnamese diaspora, we take a dive into two authors’ recent publications. Read on to learn more!

Rubén López, Editor-at-Large, Reporting on Guatemala

On August 31, sixty-two Guatemalan writers, editors, and artists signed a statement calling for the resignation of María Consuelo Porras, Head of the Public Prosecutor’s Office. Ms. Porras, who was included in the Engels List of 2023 for obstructing investigations against corrupt political allies, has been the main actor in the attempt to sabotage the Guatemalan electoral process of this year. 

On June 25, the progressive presidential ticket composed of Bernardo Arévalo and Karin Herrera surprisingly made it to the second round of the election. This started a series of legalistic arbitrariness from Ms. Porras in an effort to prevent the duly elected candidates from taking office democratically on January 14. 

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: May 2023

New translations from the Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese!

This month, our editors feature three titles that showcase what’s possible when a writer fully showcases a firm and brilliant insight into their reality. From a collection of short stories that investigate the violence of Latin American society, to a multifaceted depiction of colonial Mozambique, to essays that focus on the intimate dailyness of human lives in twentieth-century China, these works educate, provoke, and enthrall. Read on to find out more!

ampuero

Human Sacrifices by María Fernanda Ampuero, translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle, The Feminist Press, 2023

Review by Rubén Lopez, Editor-at-Large for Central America

In Human Sacrifices, a collection of short stories, María Fernanda Ampuero traces the deterioration of individuals who have survived an overwhelmingly violent reality. With guts, blood, and a dense anger, she escorts us to a precipice with each story, strips us naked, and delivers us to a place where the wounds of Latin American are made real, and thus can be dissected. Published by Editorial Páginas de Espuma in 2021 and now appearing in English translation by Frances Riddle, the collection contains twelve stories that question our reality as one occasionally resembling more a traitorous deception.

The stories in Human Sacrifices are profoundly Latin American, but more specifically, they describe the experience of vulnerable Latin American women: a unique kind of hell. Gendered violence is present in almost all the narratives—a bone that vertebrates the monster: “Desperate women,” states one of the protagonists, “serve as meat for the grinder. Immigrant women are bones to be pulverized into animal fodder.” The opening story, “Biography,” is perhaps the most intimate, narrating in first person the terror of being a migrant woman in a foreign country. The narrative implants the dehumanizing panic of crossing invisible borders in pursuit of a less harsh horizon, as well as the fear of becoming an anonymous number, a disappeared woman, a name written on a wall. As the narrator states: “I remember someone once told me that the stars we see have been dead for a long time, and I think that maybe the disappeared women might also shine on like that, with that same blinding light, making it easier to find them.”

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: April 2023

New translations from the French, Swahili, and Polish!

This month, we are taking a look at works from world literature that unveil the universal intersections at the centre of society: an empathetic interrogation into the cross-section of contemporary life in a superstore by the inimitable Annie Ernaux; a brilliantly curated selection of humanist stories from the Swahili; and a subtle, delicate look into the nature of happiness as written into dialogue by lauded Polish author, Marek Bieńczyk. Read on to find out more!

look at lights

Look at the Lights, My Love by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer, Yale University Press, 2023

Review by Laurel Taylor, Assistant Editor

Even at its best, ethnography is an ethically tricky subject; at its worst, it can dehumanize, tokenize, and Other the people who fall under its burning eye—an eye so often situated in wealth, power, whiteness, and patriarchy. Annie Ernaux is all too aware of the treacherous ethnographic ground she walks in Regarde les lumières mon amour, originally published in 2014 and translated now into an incisive and unadorned English by Alison L. Strayer as Look at the Lights, My Love. In this brief but gripping nonfiction entry, Ernaux records her various visits to the French big-box store Auchan from November 2012 to October 2013, a period which happens to coincide with the 2013 Rana Plaza building collapse in the Savar sub-district of Dhaka, Bangladesh. 

For all its drab ubiquity and late-capitalist imbrication, Ernaux treats the site of the superstore not only as a place perpetuating a unilateral and devastating economics (in the broadest sense of the word), but also one which engages humanity in complex ways—affectively, socially, temporally.

. . . when you think of it, there is no other space, public or private, where so many individuals so different in terms of age, income, education, geographic and ethnic background, and personal style, move about and rub shoulders with each other. No enclosed space where people are brought into greater contact with their fellow humans, dozens of times a year, and where each has a chance to catch a glimpse of others’ ways of living and being. Politicians, journalists, “experts,” all those who have never set foot in a superstore, do not know the social reality of France today.

Indeed, it feels almost taboo in the often inward-facing world of Parisian literature to engage with something so blasé as a big-box store. At one point, Ernaux even says in an aside, “I don’t see Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, or Françoise Sagan doing their shopping in a superstore; Georges Perec yes, but I may be wrong about that.” For me, this is what makes Ernaux’s earnest attempt at engagement all the more relevant (and close-to-home, as I grew up in a squarely middle-class family that did most of its shopping at a big-box store). In addition to the unconventional topic, this particular book also feels difficult to classify. Neither journalism nor something so structured as a dialectic, Look at the Lights, My Love is something more akin to mindfulness. It is an attempt to deliberately undo the asynchronous pace of the superstore—a place where flash sales, labyrinthine design, ever-changing displays, and the press of daily chores all collude to entrap and entangle us in the past, present, and future all at once. Ernaux’s thick descriptions, in trying to circumvent these snares, work to better provide us with “[a] free statement of observations and sensations, aimed at capturing something of the life of the place.”

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: February 2022

New work this week from Tunisia and Russia!

In this week’s selection of translated literature, we present Hassouna Mosbahi’s expansive, dreaming portrait of Tunisia through the recollections of one man’s life, as well as Nataliya Meshchaninova’s precise, cinematic cult classic of a young girl carving her own way through abuse and neglect in post-Soviet Russia. Read on for our editors’ takes on these extraordinary titles.

mobsani

Solitaire by Hassouna Mosbahi, translated from the Arabic by William Maynard Hutchins, Syracuse University Press, 2022

Review by Alex Tan, Assistant Editor

The essential core. The innermost heart. The pupil of the eye. The central pearl of the necklace.

These are epithets lifted from a tenth-century anthology of poetry and artistic prose by the literary connoisseur Abu Mansur al-Tha’alibi—a privileged arbiter of what counted as the era’s innermost heart. Determined to immortalise the remarkable cultural efflorescence of his contemporary Arab-Islamic world, al-Tha’alibi took upon himself the task of gleaning the anecdotes, biographies, epigrams, and panegyrics he deemed exemplary of his epoch: “sift[ing] our enormous rubbish heaps for our tiny pearls”, as Virginia Woolf once wrote.

Not for nothing did al-Tha’alibi name his compilation Yatimat al-Dahr fi Mahasin Ahl al’-Asr: “The Unique Pearl Concerning the Elegant Achievements of Contemporary People.” From the inheritance of this opulent work, the Tunisian writer Hassouna Mosbahi drew inspiration for his own dazzling, shape-shifting novel Yatim al-Dahr—cleverly rendered in English by William Maynard Hutchins as Solitaire. Hutchins contextualises the title in his helpful preface, explaining that “yatimat” refers to both a “unique, precious pearl” and “fate’s orphan.” “Solitaire” reflects these prismatic valences.

Solitaire, also, is a game one plays with oneself; Mosbahi’s book, in many ways, is a puzzle with no straightforward answers. It is encyclopaedic and uneven and oblique. Stories proliferate, nestled within other stories, structurally echoing the classic Thousand and One Nights.

On a first reading, it is easy to sink into the sediment of the novel’s non-linear chronology, before being pulled abruptly out of the seductive illusion and back onto the newly destabilised present. Mosbahi’s work dissolves temporal barriers, saturating the present with echoes of the past. It feels vertiginous to remember that all the action spans a single day, kaleidoscoped through the mind of the eponymous orphan-protagonist Yunus and taking place mostly along the coast, at the threshold of sea and sand. Language arrives on the page like slips of paper curled up in glass bottles: Sufi prayers, journal entries, newspaper articles, quotations of verse, orally transmitted tales, autobiographical monologues—shored up in their rawness. Digressions expand, often without warning, to constitute entire chapters. Hutchins’ translation captures these tonal shifts impeccably. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2021

New titles this month from the Philippines, Indonesia, Syria, and Slovakia!

This month, our selection of translated titles traverse the battlefield and the surfaces of paintings, lonely post-Communist apartment blocs and conservative spaces housing queer, radical instances of love. In language described by our editors and reviewers as potent, provocative, capacious, and full of longing, these four titles present an excellent pathway into the writers who are bringing the immediacies of experience into powerful socio-cultural commentary on our reality: Martin Hacla, Norman Erikson Pasaribu, Ramy Al-Asheq, and Monika Kompaníková. 

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There Are Angels Walking the Fields by Marlon Hacla, translated from the Filipino by Kristine Ong Muslim, Broken Sleep Books, 2021

Review by Shawn Hoo, Assistant Editor

Words happened. Cow became
Cow. The word milk gushed in every throat.

From this seemingly deflationary announcement that opens one of Marlon Hacla’s poems—“Words happened.”—an entire landscape is animated and given breath at the very juncture of utterance. Not only do ears of corn and a crown of birds begin to stir, so too does the speaker, finding himself transported by the magical properties of language: “I uttered the word joy / And I was once again playing a game / As a child with my friends.” Read as the collection’s ars poetica, we might say that in Hacla’s debut poetry collection, words do not simply refer to things. They move things, and each marks an occasion in the world; they sing the world into movement.

There Are Angels Walking the Fields—first published in 2010 under the Ubod New Authors Series by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts in the Philippines—opens with a lilting “Invocation,” its unbroken anaphora incanting the world of inanimate things (“In the name of the rock. In the name of the lily blossom”), of unarticulated desires (“In the name of burned / Letters from a concubine”) and of those who have been cast into the margins (“In the name of wives / Abandoned by their husbands. In the name of gay fathers”). Who could believe more in language’s ability to intervene in the world than the one who uses them in supplication? In opening the collection with this list, Hacla immediately throws his lot with the downtrodden and the forgotten—those who may not have the ability to speak—and soothes them with the divine balm of words. In her translator’s note, past contributor Kristine Ong Muslim justifies her sharpening of the poem’s decisiveness in order to heighten the quality of invocation. Thus, a line more literally translated as “In the name of hands / Not touched” becomes “In the name of hands / Never held.” Might we also consider the translator as one who practices the art of invocation—except rather than calling out in prayer, the translator calls inward, to be possessed by both languages? Where, in order for words to perform the magic of the original—for cow to become cow—something first has to happen to them? In Muslim’s translation, Hacla’s lines are screwed tight; each enjambment turns brutally, and every line sweats with a potent lyricism, as how this opening poem rollicks to an epiphany by the end:

[. . .] In the name of faces hidden.
By a black veil. In the names of ears
That had not known the sound of a violin. In the name of a flower
That bloomed in the morning and wilted by nightfall.
In your name, you who would someday die and fade away.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2021

New works in translation from Poland, Croatia, and the Netherlands!

This month, our selections of the best in world literature are unified by their writers’ undeniable strength of voice and masterful control of the narrative form. From the Netherlands, a collection of A.L. Snijder’s very short stories—a genre invented by their author—revels in the unreal natures of our reality. From Croatia, the dark humorist stylings of Robert Perišić masterfully delineate the unrealiable boundaries of nations and psychologies. And from Poland, reporter and writer Margo Rejmer brings us a rare and intimate glimpse at Communist Albania under the fractious rule of Enver Hoxha, from the people who lived through it. 

night train

Night Train by A.L. Snijders, translated from the Dutch by Lydia Davis, New Directions, 2021

Review by Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora

            “For more than fifty years I have cherished one wish: to travel. This wish is part of another wish: for reality without reality—stories that are indistinguishable from the truth.”

—A.L. Snijders, “Baalbek” from Night Train

The key to understanding A.L. Snijders’s very short stories (dubbed zkvzeer korte verhalen) lies inside “Baalbek,” where the Dutch author connects his desire to visit Lebanon’s ancient Roman outpost with creating stories that depict “reality without reality.” The Stone of the Pregnant Woman, a megalith found in Baalbek and enshrouded with otherworldly presence, represents the perfectly magnified symbol for Snijders’s miniature approach. His Night Train—a collection of ninety-one zkv translated by Lydia Davis—is a shapeshifting amalgam of fable, zen koan, commentary, lyrical essay, and autobiography. As an immersive foray into the unknown, the instability of Snijders’s narrative form produces a trompe-l’oeil effect “indistinguishable from the truth,” giving the reader a sensation of being at once disoriented and illuminated.

Born Peter Cornelis Müller in 1937 in Amsterdam, Snijders came from a large, bourgeois Catholic family. The dual forces of freedom and order constitute the main themes of his life and work. Artistic and cosmopolitan, Snijders nevertheless chose a stable career teaching at a police academy and led a placid life as a gentleman farmer in rural Achterhoek, Holland’s eastern region. Even after being awarded the Constantijn Huygens Prize in 2010—one of the three most prestigious literary honors in Holland—Snijders did not, for years, deviate from the low-key routine of reading his work on an early morning radio show and circulating his steady flow of zkv among an email list of loyal readers. Ever industrious, he passed away this past June while working on new material.

The commonplace in Snijders’s oeuvre is imbued with mystery. In “Minor Characters,” Snijders’s alter-ego wonders if his compressed fiction may actually be “unpsychological novel[s] for people who understand nothing about psychology.” If reality resembles an unseen but anarchic mole emerging each night to turn Snijders’s garden into a surrealist landscape (“Mole”), then the author’s aesthetic philosophy suggests holistic means to affirm “what can never be understood.” This notion of reality as unknowable, or “unpsychological,” represents the trademark of Snijders’s fiction, allowing his narrative—as both burrowing animal and spy—to elude conventional expectations and assume an enigmatic depth, despite its compact form. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2020

The latest in literature from Spain, Romania, and France!

Our final selections in excellent translations for the year of 2020 are fittingly full of thought. Throughout these texts, one finds the endless potential roadmaps that chart out from the individual mind’s interrogation and contemplation of their surroundings, and one’s own place within them. From a wandering mind, everything is a pool for endless reflection; a Catalan collection draws from the sea, a Romanian notebook is filled with musings and defiances of authorship, and a French diary novel tells the lives of many through the life of one. 

salt water

Salt Water by Josep Pla, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush, Archipelago Books, 2020

Review by Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large for Argentina

On a recent virtual happy hour, my friend described a weekend camping trip on a secluded barrier island off the coast of Georgia, in the southern US. My envy verged on rage as I listened from my living room, which doesn’t get enough natural light. He said that after he and his wife kayaked over and set up their tent (annoying a resident heron in the process), they had done absolutely nothing—not even read. They sat on the shore and watched the sea. It’s easy to believe how that could have been enough.

Josep Pla would understand. In Salt Water, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush and released by Archipelago Books this month, Pla writes that “the mere presence of the sea is enough to sink into the deliquescent bliss of the contemplative life.” His curiosity courses through the book, a series of ten sketches that revolves around the coast of Pla’s native Catalonia: he describes shipwrecks, submarines, and harebrained sailing schemes. He relates stories from a salty, one-handed raconteur and imbues the rambling tales with strikingly lifelike texture. Though his plots unfold on or near the sea, human culture is ever present. Pla revels in detail, describing at length the joy of nearly black coffee on a marginally small boat: “That beverage makes an almost immediate impact: your mind projects itself onto the outside world, you are fascinated by everything around and a gleam comes to your eyes.” This book is a product of that fascinated, caffeinated gaze.

In the preface, Pla describes the stories as writings from his adolescence. In the translator’s note at the end of the book, however, Bush clarifies that they were written in the 1940s and hypothesizes that the preface was a canny attempt to evade censorship. He points out that Pla’s “articles containing veiled critiques of the dictatorship made him the most censored journalist in Spain.” Indeed, his biography offers helpful context for the conflicting claims that bookend the collection.

As a university student a century ago, Pla developed a clear, intelligible writing style and deployed it throughout his career as a journalist. He traveled widely across Europe as a foreign correspondent and served briefly as a member of Parliament for the Commonwealth of Catalonia, a short-lived assembly notable for its symbolic value. Over its eleven years in existence, the Commonwealth promoted Catalonia’s unity and identity, and evinced strong support for the Catalan language—Pla’s language. He became a chronicler of Spain’s tumultuous early twentieth-century history and spent multiple stints in exile. In the 1940s, he took to exploring his native coast and writing dispatches for Destino, a Burgos-based magazine at the forefront of the reemergence of Catalan-language culture. Throughout his peripatetic career, Pla never stopped writing: his complete works, compiled shortly before his death in 1981, stretch over thirty-eight volumes. READ MORE…

Announcing our September Book Club Selection: Straight from the Horse’s Mouth by Meryem Alaoui

By immersing us in Jmiaa’s world, Alaoui successfully avoids stereotype.

Humour and courage infuse debut author Meryem Alaoui’s Straight from the Horse’s Mouth, a brazen and lucid portrait of a sex worker who moves through her city of Casablanca with a scrupulous gaze and an aptitude for colourful description. As our Book Club selection for September 2020, the novel enchants with its surprising and exacting prose as equally as with its deft navigation of human experience and emotional spectrums, building a fully populated world that seems to have always been there, waiting for one to visit.  

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Straight from the Horses Mouth by Meryem Alaoui, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan, Other Press, 2020

The title of Meryem Alaoui’s debut novel, Straight from the Horse’s Mouth, suggests a direct, candid style—and that’s exactly what we get. Alaoui’s charming and at times profane protagonist, Jmiaa Bent Larbi, shares her harrowing story with unflinching clarity: after being pressured into an early marriage, Jmiaa and her new husband Hamid move to Casablanca, where their lusty honeymoon phase soon gives way to a much more sinister relationship. Hamid sees start-up capital in his young wife’s body and pimps her out to fund his get-rich-quick schemes. The only plot that ends up working out, however, is a passage to Spain, where he finds a new wife and a raft of financial troubles. Jmiaa tells us all about the turns her life takes from there, and Alaoui infuses the seemingly casual narration with careful observations of Moroccan life, tracing the fault lines where the country’s social classes collide.

In Casa, as Jmiaa calls the seaside city, she builds a life among a rich milieu: her fellow sex workers, who tease and joke and squabble like sisters; her young daughter, Samia, who Jmiaa fears will soon unravel the true nature of her work; and her mother, who must grapple with various aspects of her daughter’s unusual life. The women here aren’t sketches or stereotypes, but fully drawn characters with a complex set of motivations and relationships. The men vary in their own way. In one haunting passage, Jmiaa describes those who seek her services:

You straddle all of them. The loser, the frustrated guy, the lonely guy, the son of a whore, the one just passing through.

The one who blames the warmth of your hand for his weak, sterile joy.

And the one for whom no hole satisfies his hatred. Who is not appeased until he hears the ripping sound of a brown and bloody stain.

And the one who pumps his useless sweat into your stomach. He has been cursed never to eat his fill, so he bites your flesh. So that his teeth—today at least—serve some purpose. And in the wheeze of his sulfur breath, he spurts his bitterness onto your cheek and your tangled hair.

It’s no wonder, then, that Jmiaa often loses herself in television. Whether they’re set in Morocco or Mexico, the stories that unfold onscreen offer an escape from the familiar pattern of her days. Like Jmiaa’s drinking habits, her TV binges initially provoke concern, but as the novel progresses, those movies and shows unexpectedly offer a path to a different kind of escape. (At the risk of spoiling the plot, I won’t elaborate.) READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2020

New work from Guadalupe Nettel, Małgorzata Szejnert, and Daniel Galera!

This month’s selections of newly translated world literature seem to revolve around the unknown, be it to uphold or dispel it: a Mexican short story collection explores its protagonists’ dark psyches while providing no easy answers, a piece of Polish reportage rediscovers lost voices on nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrant experience in America, and a Brazilian novel hilariously tackles a group of friends’ exploits in almost unchartered digital territory during the nineties.

bezoar

Bezoar: And Other Unsettling Stories by Guadalupe Nettel, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine, Seven Stories Press, 2020

Review by Samuel Kahler, Communications Director

Unusual as they may be, the strange and wistful short fictions in Guadalupe Nettel’s Bezoar: And Other Unsettling Stories are not only clever in their portrayal of human desire and obsession; they are often wise as well. Nettel, an acclaimed Mexican author, was named as one of the Bogotá 39 and is a recipient of the largest Spanish-language short story collection prize, the Premio de Narrativa Breve Ribera del Duero. Bezoar is her second collection of stories, published in the original Spanish in 2008 and now translated into English by Suzanne Jill Levine.

Over the course of the book, Nettel and her characters have something fresh to reveal about their unique obsessions and secrets (the stories are told from the first-person perspective). But at just over one hundred pages, Bezoar is an all-too-brief journey through the grey areas and dark recesses of hidden passions, lusts, and compulsions.

Depending on one’s subjective definition, the narrators of Bezoar might be considered everyday people who, at face value, live quiet, unremarkable lives: a photographer in Paris, a man strolling through Tokyo’s botanical gardens, a teenager on a summer vacation, and—yes—a voyeur here, a stalker there, and one supermodel under psychiatric supervision. While memorable and idiosyncratic, these are not outsized characters with grand schemes; instead, they look inward and act in near-singular pursuit of resolving psychological issues. Fittingly, their stories are intimate chamber pieces that delight in the details of unfulfilled needs and wants, emotional attachments and detachments, and traces of personal insight that at times reflect a broader general truth about human dissatisfaction. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2020

New publications from Argentina, Quebec, and Portugal!

This month, our selections of the best in newly translated global literature consists of a thrillingly varied medley of styles, from a fictional Argentine study on an obscure poet, a French-Canadian narrative of images and their thrall, and Fernando Pessoa’s cheekily fabricated dossier of a fascinating character. Though they may perhaps be united by a mutual captivation for how the mundane strikes the artistic process, the writers of these exciting works are transforming what may be familiar matters with a unique and singular language. Read on to find out more!

NotesTowardAPamphlet-promocover-640x1024

Notes Toward a Pamphlet by Sergio Chejfec, translated from the Spanish by Whitney DeVos, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020

Review by José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large

As much as Sergio Chejfec’s Notes Toward a Pamphlet offers a detailed voyeuristic look on trains, passengers, silence, and a radio announcer eating carrots, it’s also a gripping character study filled with philosophy and subtle humor. The use of randomness and meticulous narration of everyday, seemingly ordinary events, are no rarity in Chejfec’s work—the internal monologue of Masha, the meditative hotel clerk in his novel The Incompletes, as one example. Though they may appear disjointed, they often ignite the narrative and strengthen the enigma.

I think of Onetti and Piglia, and Chejfec, with his hidden tension and disarmingly beautiful writing—amplified by Whitney DeVos’ fiery translation—holds his ground against such giants.

In Notes Toward a Pamphlet, we see a nameless narrator following, or rather, discovering a poet named Samich. Unknown and unpublished, Samich does not even have a completed book to his name. He is solitary and lives a sedentary life in rural Argentina. His work, we learn, is scattered in magazines and “collectively-authored books.” But we can’t talk about poems per se. For these publications, Samich takes a fragment, at random, from the “writing mass.” There are no themes in his writing. No topics, concerns, or inspiration. No coherence or unity. But this is not an eccentricity. This, we understand, as we get to know Samich, is the way he viewed and experienced literature, based on “intuition instead of ideas.” Samich’s literary ways and lifestyle are almost like the antithesis of Bolaño’s Visceral Realists.

Notes Toward a Pamphlet is not bound by plot. There is no plot, but there is movement. But movement, motion, progression, and development, though noticeable, is rarely explicit. There’s barely any dialogue, action, interaction between characters, or issues to be resolved. Instead, we watch Samich grow. We see his flaws and contradictions. But his evolution occurs not in an artificial, literary way, but closer to how people experience it in real life: subtly and slowly. Samich’s growth is almost imperceptible. And while his life seems unexceptional and tedious, Chejfec’s mesmerizing writing, and the narrator’s prying, maintains the momentum. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: May 2020

New work from Hye-Young Pyun, Keiichiro Hirano, Andrés Neuman, and Jazmina Barrera!

The best that literature has to offer us is not resolution, but that Barthian sentiment of recognition—the nakedly exact internal sentiment rescued from wordlessness and placed in a social reality. In this month’s selections of translated works, the authors confront a myriad of trials and ideas—despair, rage, guilt, purpose, obsolescence—with stories that attest equally to the universality of human feelings and the precise specificities of localities. Read reviews of four spectacular texts from Japan, Korea, Spain, and Mexico now:

law of lines

The Law of Lines by Hye-Young Pyun, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell, Arcade Publishing, 2020

Review by Marina Dora Martino, Assistant Editor

How does the world change us? Is it life and its unpredictable events that bend us; or is it something more fundamental, something that has always been hatching inside ourselves, ready to ripen at the right occasion? These questions act as the fundamental hinges of The Law of Lines, a novel written by South Korean author Hye-Young Pyun and translated by Sora Kim-Russell. Although ambitious and abstract, these existential questions acquire here a concrete form—they are investigated—not by philosophical or religious means—through the stories of two young women, Se-oh and Ki-jeong. Set in the vast South Korean suburban world, The Law of Lines travels through injustice, poverty, and grief, and exposes the thin threads that run between people who didn’t even know they were connected.

Ki-jeong is a teacher. She doesn’t like teaching—actually, she hates it. To get through her day, Ki-jeong transforms her life into a performance, and herself into a mere act of herself. Only in this way she manages, with varying degrees of success, to hide her frustration, her disengagement, and her lack of empathy for the people around her. Se-oh is a young woman who lives as a semi-recluse at her father’s house. She doesn’t go out because she fears the world, that churning machine that ruins and distorts everything. Ki-jeong and Se-oh don’t have dreams of a better life, or not exactly. They are dormant and static. But their stillness is not only a desire for tranquillity—it’s a method for concealment.

Soon, the world presents them with irreversible and unpredictable events, and their apparently quiet lives break irrevocably. In the middle of a stressful day at school, Ki-jeong receives a mysterious phone call that throws her on a desperate search for the truth. Her half-sister, the one Ki-jeong and her mother had never managed to really love, becomes her only thought and anchor to reality. Se-oh is almost home after one of her rare trips to the stores when she is startled by the view of her house enveloped by fire. She sees the paramedics carrying away a man on a barrel, and from then on, her life turns into a quest—to track down and plan the destruction of the man she blames for everything that went wrong. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: April 2020

New literature from Algeria, Guadeloupe, Italy, and Japan!

In the newly ruptured world, the questions that arise all seem perplexingly novel. It is somewhat of a tonic, then, that one turns to literature to find that the queries that confound us now are more specific reiterations of questions that have plagued humanity for a long, long time. What is freedom? How do we persist through the turmoil of our nations? What does the past mean for the present? And, perhaps most pertinently, what survives? In this month’s selections in translated literature, four astounding works from around the world encounter and contend with these problems in their singular styles. Below, discover a passionate novel about a real-life Algerian bookseller, a Guadeloupe-set fiction that intermingles personal and national revolution, the latest English-language volume in Roberto Calasso’s grand series on human civilization, and a Japanese literary sensation which contends with feminine pain and perseverance.

our riches

Our Riches by Kaouther Adimi, translated from the French by Chris Andrews, New Directions, 2020

Review by Clémence Lucchini, Educational Arm Assistant

Though one cannot truly stress all the qualities of Our Riches, Kaouther Adimi’s first translated novel into English by Chris Andrews, within the limits of a book review, Adimi has certainly proved that she is able to convey Edmond Charlot’s life long passion for books in less than two hundred pages. In this historical fiction, recognized with two French literary awards, Adimi finds a new way to portray her native Algeria: through Edmond Charlot’s many literary endeavors.

For those who do not know Edmond Charlot (I was among that group before reading this book), he left a great gift to the publishing world by being Camus’ first publisher, by publishing under-represented authors, and last but not least, by pioneering the design of book covers as we know it today in Western Europe, referred to as “the talk of the publishing world” in Adimi’s work. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2020

We're feeling the need for great literature in these strange times.

These last few weeks of winter will be known as the time of stockpiling, and as countries around the world are shutting doors in response to COVID-19, stores are being cleared out and preserved goods and household necessities are piled up in cupboards. But just as it is vital to care for your body in these perplexing times, it is equally important to nurture your mind. So it is with that in mind that we present the newest and brightest in translated literature from around the world, in hopes that what is available to us remains our compassion, our desire to understand one another, and the privilege to travel amidst isolation. Below, our editors present a book of poetry written in a defiant border-language, a poignant Turkish critique of human cruelty, a Colombian novel depicting a young girl’s inner wildness, and the latest translated poems of Jacques Roubaud, written in the Oulipo tradition of valuing absence as equally as presence. 

night in the north

Night in the North by Fabián Severo, translated from the Portuñol by Laura Cesaro Eglin and Jesse Lee Kercheval, Eulalia Books, 2020

Review by Georgina Fooks, Communications Manager

How do we choose which language to write in?

For some of us, that choice can be fraught. Whether you’re a child of immigrants (as I am), or from a contested border region (as Fabián Severo is), there is a great deal at stake when making that choice. It impacts your identity, it shapes your politics. There’s no doubt that when reading this collection, Severo’s decision to write in Portuñol is a political act. READ MORE…