Posts filed under 'prison'

What’s New in Translation: January 2024

New titles from Japan, France, and Mexico!

The new year is all dressed up with a powerful display of voices in translation: a Japanese epic, a tri-lingual edition of Mexican poetry, and the latest collection of prose from one of France’s most spiny and entertaining voices. Read on to find out more!

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Marshland by Otohiko Kaga, translated from the Japanese by Albert Novick, Dalkey Archive Press, 2024

 Review by Iona Tait, Copy Editor

In a 1986 article published in Japan Quarterly, the Japanese psychiatrist-turned-novelist Otohiko Kaga wrote about his captivation with the Japanese marshes, describing them as “a wasteland, totally resistant to human attempts at exploitation.” These same untouched regions make up the setting of his novel Marshland, originally published in 1985 and translated now into English by Albert Novick. In this sprawling epic, the marshes, as a virgin land, act as a counterpart to the oppressive state structures of the metropolis. They—being of no use—allow Kaga to explore his central theme: space, and the reclamation of space for freedom and freedom of thought.

Hailing from the marshes, the protagonist, Atsuo Yukimori, is a middle-aged former convict whose job as an auto-mechanic in Tokyo keeps his life together—but only barely. Spending the majority of his life “as a slave to the state,” he lives in fear of the army and the police, and his job security depends on the whims of his boss, to whom the former speaks “like a puppy dog.” All the while, Atsuo’s criminal past lingers in close quarters, with a burn on his finger (punishment for stealing as a child) standing as a reminder. The delicate order of this life—his tidy bedroom, his punctuality—soon begins to unravel, however, when he meets a young student called Wakako Ikéhata at an ice rink. The pair develop an intense relationship, and eventually find themselves entangled in the violent student protests of 1968. Falsely accused of placing a bomb on a train, Atsuo and Wakako are detained by police and imprisoned, spending ten years in prison waiting for a judicial appeal.

Spanning over eight hundred pages, Marshland details governmental abuses of power in post-war Japan through various narrative perspectives, various institutions, and across a vast period of time. Kaga masterfully demonstrates the grueling legal process that kept Atsuo and Wakako in prison, including their detention before being forced to give a confession (detaining individuals before they were sentenced was a feature of Japanese criminal law until it was overturned in 2023). Repeating the details of the trial throughout the majority of the novel, Kaga shows the mentally and physically taxing effects, ranging from psychosis to suicide, of institutionalization and detention on every victim involved—which include Atsuo’s nephew, Yukichi Jinnai, and Wakako’s former lover, the radical student Makihiko Moroya. Whilst this technique does result in a few tedious episodes in which legal particularities are rehashed at length, the approach heightens the all-consuming nature of the trial for the convicts, and succeeds in conveying the lengthy passage of time; the novel alternates between the day-to-day pace of scenes in Tokyo, visits to the marshes, long periods in prison, and swift logs or diary entries which reveal the laboring process of the trial and work done by Atsuo’s lawyers.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary news from India, El Salvador, and Guatemala!

Our team of editors across the world is back with the latest literary news as summer winds down. In India, the recently released longlist for a major literary prize has put translations  center stage. In El Salvador, a newly published book of poetry interrogates the concept of terrorism in Central America and the United States. In Guatemala, the city of Mazatenango played host to an international book festival. Read on to find out more!

Areeb Ahmad, Editor-at-Large, reporting on India

First awarded in 2018, the JCB Prize for Literature is India’s biggest literary prize and is given every year to “a distinguished work of fiction by an Indian author.” It is one of those rare prizes that gives equal attention to books originally written in English and translations from other languages, without putting them into separate categories as the Booker does. In a first for the prize, there are six translated titles out of the ten that comprise the 2022 longlist, which came out on September 3. This far exceeds the previous record of three longlisted translations. Two of this year’s longlisted books were translated from Urdu, and the rest were translated from Hindi, Malayalam, Bengali, and Nepali. One notable exclusion is Nireeswaran by V.J. James, whose novel Anti-Clock (translated from Malayalam by Ministhy S., who also translated Nireeswaran) was shortlisted last year.

Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, needs no introduction. After winning the International Booker Prize earlier this year, its chances of taking home the JCB Prize are high. Another promising title is Sheela Tomy’s Valli, a work of eco-fiction translated from Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil. Kalathil’s translation of S. Hareesh’s magical realist novel, Moustache, won in 2020 , meaning three of the prize’s four past winners were originally written in Malayalam.

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Close Approximations: In Conversation with Poetry Runner-Up Keith Payne

Language is local; for all our travel and world-webbed wideness, we are beasts of habit and most often stay within the same 10 square miles

Today, we continue our spotlight on the winners of Asymptote’s annual Close Approximations translation contest, now into its third edition. (Find the official results and citations by judges David Bellos and Sawako Nakayasu here.) From 215 fiction and 128 poetry submissions, these six best emerging translators were awarded 3,000 USD in prize money, in addition to publication in our Summer 2017 editionAfter interviews with fiction winner Suchitra Ramachandran, fiction runners-up Brian Bergstrom and Clarissa Botsford, and poetry runner-up Sarah Timmer Harvey, today we have poetry runner-up Keith Payne in conversation with Asymptote Assistant Interviews Editor, Claire Jacobson. 

Keith Payne is the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award winner 2015–2016. His collection Broken Hill (Lapwing Publications, Belfast, 2015) was followed by Six Galician Poets (Arc Publications, 2016). Forthcoming from Francis Boutle Publishers is Diary of Crosses Green, from the Galician of Martín Veiga. Keith is director of the La Malinche Readings between Ireland and Galicia and the PoemaRia International Poetry Festival, Vigo. His translation of Welcome to Sing Sing, by Galician poet Elvira Ribeiro Tobío, was a runner-up in Asymptote’s Close Approximations contest. A poet in addition to being a translator, he shares his time between Dublin and Vigo with the musician Su Garrido Pombo.

CJ: The motif of imprisonment strongly undergirds these poems, from Bob Dylan to Ethel Rosenberg and everything in between, with Rosenberg’s Sing Sing prison providing the title and backdrop for these reflections. Where does this theme come from, and what was the significance of writing (and now translating) these famous imprisoned women in verse? 

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2017

The blog team's top picks from the Summer Issue!

Juxtapositions are rife in Intan Paramaditha’s enchanting story, “Visiting a Haunted House,” translated from the Indonesian by Stephen Epstein. To me it read almost like an incantation, the words constantly looping memory upon the story’s present. As a granddaughter visits her dead grandmother’s house, she paints a pointillist picture of her grandmother’s life, whose colors soon run into her own. A broken red lipstick, a cloudy mirror, vanished smells of Gudang Garam cigarettes—the world spins, and so do familial memories, ancestral souvenirs, and time.

The granddaughter is an eternal migrant, “dashing around in bus terminals and airports with a backpack.” She remembers how her grandmother had always wanted to go abroad but contented herself with the thrill of riding a minibus to market while dressed in a flowery cotton dress. The story is ostensibly a simple tale of returning to an ancestral home. But the narrator’s voice soon bifurcates like a snake’s tongue, each sentence describing the grandmother and the granddaughter both. When speaking of a kuntilanak, “a woman no longer here, in our world, but not ‘over there’ either,” is she describing the ghost, or herself?

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

This week's literary updates from the Czech Republic, Iran, and England

This Friday, we present three very distinct reports from the world of literature. Slovakian Editor-at-Large Julia Sherwood looks back at what was a great year of Czech literature in translation and gives us a sneak peek at what to look forward to this year. Her Iranian colleague Poupeh Missaghi reports on language-related issues in a human rights Twitter campaign. And finally, the UK Editor-at-Large M. René Bradshaw tells us where to head for great readings in London this month and next.

Julia Sherwood, our Editor-at-Large for Slovakia, has good news from the publishing world:

Last year proved to be a big year for Czech literature in English translation, with no fewer than eighteen publications from eight different presses at the latest count. They include, to mention just a few, Worm-Eaten Time, poet Pavel Šrut’s elegy for his homeland after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, translated by Deborah Garfinkle, and symbolist poet Jaroslav Durych‘s (1886-1962) 1956 novella God’s Rainbow on the expulsion of the German-speaking population from Bohemia after World War II. First published in censored form in 1969, it is now available in full in David Short’s translation as part of Karolínum Press’s Modern Classics series, which also features Eva M. Kandler’s translation of the World War II literary horror The Cremator by Ladislav Fuks, a study of the totalitarian mindset that still resonates today (extract in BODY Literature), and served as the basis for one of the key films of the Czech new wave, directed by Juraj Herz.

Stoppard_and_Bajaja,_photo_by_Pavel_Stojar

On 30 November, a packed audience at the launch of Antonín Bajaja’s Burying the Season (also translated by David Short) at Waterstones Piccadilly in the heart of London included the playwright Tom Stoppard. Stoppard’s father came from the town of Zlín, the setting for this novel depicting the early years of communism in Czechoslovakia. Czech literature scholar Rajendra Chitnis introduces the book as part of an Istros Conversations podcast on Audioboom, while Michael Tate of Jantar Publishing discusses on Czech radio the challenges of bringing Central European literature to English readers.

World Literature Today picked Czech writer Magdaléna Platzová’s The Attempt as one of its Notable translations of 2016, characterizing it as “historical fiction at its best”. In an interview with the Czech cultural bi-weekly A2, the novel’s translator Alex Zucker points out that while more books by Czech authors are now being published than ever before, they don’t necessarily reach many more readers since—like translated literature in general—quite a few are brought out by small independent presses and are therefore not visible in major bookshops and rarely reviewed.

In 2017, we can look forward to Zucker’s translations of two the most acclaimed contemporary Czech writers: Jáchym Topol’s Angel Station is due from Dalkey Archive in May, and Petra Hůlová’s taboo-breaking Plastic Three Rooms will be brought out by Jantar Publishing. Budding UK translators keen to be part of this unprecedented boom in Czech literature in English can participate in the fourth annual international competition for young translators, who this year are asked to tackle an excerpt from Bianca Bellová’s The Lake by 31 March (see their call for submissions). Budding Czech-to-English translators can also dip into the treasure trove of tricky issues, complete with solutions generously shared by Melvyn Clarke, in his blog post Translating Hrdý Budžes.

Acclaimed writer Zuzana Brabcová, who sadly passed away in 2015, was posthumously awarded the Josef Škvorecký prize for her haunting last novel Voliéry [Aviaries]. And as the year drew to a close, scores of students and literature lovers mourned the loss of the legendary Fišer bookstore in Kaprova Street near Prague’s Old Town Square, which closed its doors after selling books since the 1930s.

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