Posts filed under 'Seagull books'

What’s New in Translation: March 2024

New works from Alexander Kluge, Marjane Satrapi, and Jón Kalman Stefánsson!

The latest text from one of German New Wave’s founding members and all around heavy-hitter; a wide-ranging compilation of art and testimony championing the Iranian feminist movement from Marjane Satrapi; and a moving, braided narrative of grief and recovery from a lauded Icelandic author. Our editors review some of the most exciting works in translation coming to the Anglophone this month. 

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The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul by Alexander Kluge, translated from the German by Alexander Booth, Seagull Books, 2024

Review by Bella Creel, Blog Editor

Filmmaker, author, and philosopher Alexander Kluge’s most recent oeuvre, The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul, is an act of rethinking. Born in Germany in 1932, Kluge blurs the edges of the many years of his life in this ambitious work, expanding beyond the first-hand, beyond generations, drawing connections between now and before, all in order to fully describe the experience of a single life. Alexander Booth offers a wonderfully dense and witty translation from the German, with no aversion to a confusing syntax that demands rereading and rethinking.

Kluge is trying to find the right words throughout this collection, which, in the process of its creation, must have been turned over and inside out, stretched to snapping and magnified to the molecular; reading it, in turn, requires a certain liquifying of the brain. This giving-in allows one to absorb the words, which only then can be reformed into some sort of meaning. Kluge himself seems to follow a similar process:

Where does all my ‘fluent speech’, my rabid desire to write, come from? I listen to others. And carefully! A word that flies towards me, an observation that charms me into conversation, a quotation that I read: all of this gets stored inside me for the long-term.

I usually tear books to shreds, marking any places that captivate me in colour pencil before ripping the page out. These I attach to other findings of mine with a paper clip. They’re often annotated. My flat is full of these piles of paper. My personal bastion against the ‘ignorance that shakes the world’.

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What’s New in Translation: February 2024

New writing from Etel Adnan, Satish Alekar, and Djamila Morani!

This month, our selected titles of new publications carry wisdom, mystery, and humour. Below, find reviews of plays by one of India’s most accomplished and innovative playwrights; a compilation of interview with the inimitable Etel Adnan, conducted by Laure Adler; and a PEN Translates Award-winning novel of revenge and self-discovery, set in the Abbasid period.

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Two Plays: The Grand Exit and A Conversation with Dolly by Satish Alekar, translated from the Marathi by Shanta Gokhale, Seagull Books, 2024

 Review by Areeb Ahmad, Editor-at-Large for India

This nifty volume of plays collects two of Alekar’s works, “Mahanirvan” and “Thakishi Samvad”, written forty-six years apart—Born in 1949, Satish Vasant Alekar is a Marathi playwright, actor, theatre director. He was a founding member of the Theatre Academy of Pune and is well-known plays such as for Mahapoor, Begum Barve, Atirekee, and Pidhijat. He is considered among the most significant playwrights in modern Marathi and Indian theatre, along with Mahesh Elkunchwar and Vijay Tendulkar, and lately, he has come to be recognised for his acting in Marathi and Hindi feature films.

“Mahanirvan” or “The Grand Exit” was first performed in 1974, and is a play where a dead man has more dialogue than any living character. The description on the cover is not wrong to equate the character with Sophocles’ Antigone, for he also strongly insists on the method of his last rites; Bhaurao wants to be traditionally cremated at the shamshan ghat, but the cremation ground is in the process of being privatised. Thus, the dead—or rather their relatives—are now being redirected to a new facility which uses electrical incineration.

So Bhaurao lingers around as his body malingers, rotting and fly-infested, while his wife Ramaa grieves intensely, coming to terms with the sudden loss, and his son, Nana, tries to convince him to just go ahead with the cremation, and pass on. While working on the play, Alekar had realised that a dead man cannot speak prose, so Bhau’s dialogues instead take the poetic form—one resembling keertans (religious recitations). READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2023

New titles from Italy, Hungary, and Cuba!

In our final round-up of the year, we’re presenting a selection of titles that capture the human condition with various, masterful depictions and incisive intelligence. From Italy, the first volume of artist and writer Guido Buzzelli’s collected works present scrupulous and unwavering critiques of society; from Hungary, the master poet Szilárd Borbély writes the life of Kafka in relation to his father’s; from Cuba, a stunning bilingual collection from Oneyda González explores the surreal nature of the mirror.

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Buzzelli Collected Works Vol.1: The Labyrinth by Guido Buzzelli, translated from the Italian by Jamie Richards, Floating World Comics, 2023

 Review by Catherine Xin Xin Yu, Assistant Director of Outreach

What happens if, at the end of a normal workday, a sudden blast razes the world to the ground and you become one of the few survivors? Or if, waking up on an ordinary morning, you find your head and limbs dissociating from your torso and taking off on their own? Setting the scene with these Kafkaesque premises, Italian comic master Guido Buzzelli explores the monstrosity and power of dystopian societies in his graphic novellas, The Labyrinth and Zil Zelub, with a compelling visual language that is dense yet dynamic.

Buzzelli stands apart from his peers in every way—style, form, and theme. Born into a family of artists and trained in figure drawing, he is lauded as both “the Michelangelo of monsters” for his naturalism, and “the Goya of comics” for his chimeric blend of the real and the fantastical (as pictured below). He was also one of the first Italian comic artists to tackle complex literary subjects in uncommissioned, standalone works, counter-current to the Italian comics industry of the 1960–70s that pumped out commercial series with fixed characters and simplistic plots. As a self-proclaimed “man in doubt,” Buzzelli also rebelled against the progressivism of 1960s Italy, satirising the hypocrisy of political discourse and the violence of utopian mirages while alluding to the political upheaval at the time, from terrorist bombings to murky electoral campaigns. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2023

Discover new work from Venezuela, Poland and India!

In this month’s round-up, we present three works in singular styles. From Venezuela, Maria Pérez-Talavera gives us non-linear journal entries composed from a mental hospital. From Poland, modernist master Witold Gombrowicz puts his own spin on the Gothic tale, painting a psychologically sensitive portrait of a shifting society. And from India, some of the bold, experimental short stories of Rajkamal Chaudhary are gathered in a sharp and comic collection of unconventional plotlines and characters. Read on to find out more!

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The Possessed by Witold Gombrowicz, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Fitzcarraldo, 2023

Review by Iona Tait, Executive Assistant

A haunted castle, a mad prince, a pair of doubles, and a clairvoyant who saves the day—Witold Gombrowicz’s The Possessed has all the quintessential trappings of nineteenth-century Gothic fiction. Originally released as a serial in the summer of 1939, The Possessed merges its classic motifs with mystery and a comedy of manners, offering a remarkably profound reflection on authenticity at a time when older Polish divisions of social classes were being transformed.

Neighboring the Gothic castle—that relic of “antiquity breathing its last” where a deranged prince and his cunning secretary reside—lies a manor-turned-boarding house. Mrs. Ocholowska, the landowner and member of a downwardly mobile minor nobility, receives guests across all social classes: the petit-bourgeois Councilor Szymczyk, nosy and bickering middle-class women, a curious academic known as Skolinski, and a working-class tennis coach and parvenu named Marian Leszczuk. The latter proves to be a formidable rival to the tennis superstar and spritely daughter of the landowner, Maja Ocholowska, who is at the novel’s outset engaged to the secretary.

Lesczuk and Maja, however, are not only an equal match on the court; they also exhibit an uncanny similarity in their gestures and ways of speaking. Simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by this similarity, the pair undergo a process of self-discovery together, journeying between the manor and the haunted castle, with intermittent getaways to Warsaw. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest in festivals, awards, and literary developments from Spain, Mexico, and India!

This week, our editors are bringing some very exciting news from the ground. In India, a working-class writer has been lauded by the prestigious Kerala Literary Academy, and a new documentary has been unveiled with one of our favourite publishers, Seagull Books, as its subject. In Mexico, the country celebrates its most promising young writers with a week-long festival. And in Spain, a comics festival sees the medium undergoing some radical new developments—including, surprisingly, a venture into audiobooks. 

Zohra Salih, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

Without a doubt, the most heartening literary news we received this month was that of Akhil Kavintarikath being feted by the Kerala Literary Academy. Akhil, at twenty-eight years old, won the academy’s annual Geetha Hiranyan endowment award for his 2020 short-story collection, Neelachadayan. This is an especially significant recognition because of Akhil’s unconventional background; he works as a JCB construction operator at a sand mine by night and a newspaper delivery man in the morning—quite contrary to the popular image of a young and upcoming novelist these days. As a fellow aspiring writer and friend commented while forwarding the link to the news to me, “Now we don’t have any excuses for not practicing our craft!” I completely agree, what better incentive can there be!

Akhil, who hails from a small village in Kannur in the southern state of Kerala, dropped out of school at the mere age of sixteen to support his family by doing odd jobs, all the while sustaining a deeply personal passion for literature and writing. He found inspiration in the mundane, managing to read a few lines here and there from the stories in the newspapers he would deliver, and then, with curiosity getting the better of him, filling in the blanks through inventive speculation. It was this curiosity to delve into the lives around him that drove him to write. This was further bolstered by his time spent working in the mines during night shifts, where the same imagination served as an antidote to the fear and loneliness that accompanied the dark.

Akhil has since authored Story of Lion in 2021, which draws from the ancient practice of theyyam, followed by Tharakanthan in 2022, which is inspired by the epic Ramayana; both are released by Mathrubhumi Books, one of Kerala’s foremost publishing houses. However, winning the prestigious honor has not meant that the tides have completely turned for Akhil, as the reality is that the award money is not enough for him to leave his job and commit to writing full time. This only underscores the need for more avenues in India to support such talent, through both monetary and social encouragement, lest we lose their brilliant voices to the margins.

Speaking of unconventional news, it is not often that one comes across a film celebrates an independent publishing house, so I was surprised to learn about the release of the documentary Of Books and Other Stories—but I was not surprised that the subject of this film is Seagull Books. I came across this publisher while working for the Jaipur Literary Festival in India back in 2019; Naveen Kishore, Seagull’s founder, was an important panelist for the event, and I had the privilege of witnessing his genius in person. While the saying does caution us against judging a book by its cover, I have to admit that I have often been drawn to literary works based on their aesthetics, and this is something that Seagull Publishers understands fully. Their commissioned books are works of art in themselves; you want to have one in your room as you would a gallery piece. Seagull works are distinctive, painstakingly curated, and the attention reflects in their design. The palette is astonishingly wide in breadth, with translations culled from across the world, on topics ranging from philosophy, art, theater, to literature. Fittingly, Seagull Books was awarded the Cesare De Michelis Prize this year for their contributions to the publishing world, and the film, directed by Pushan Kripalani, is an ode to this landmark literary institution, as well as to the joys of publishing and participating in the exchange of books across all barriers.

Marina García Pardavila, Editor-at-Large Spain, reporting from Spain

The Viñetas desde o Atlántico Comic Festival, which takes place in A Coruña (Spain) from August 7 to 13, has opened up its twenty-sixth edition to a striking response from the audience. Streets have been crowded and many visitors dashed to engage in the workshops, book discussions, exhibitions, and literary events organized in the city center, displaying an eager interest for the refreshing ventures of this artform—which will certainly continue to proliferate in the future. The festival highlights the narrative brilliance of authors such as David Rubín, who has been nominated four times for the Eisner Prize; the artistic couple Teresa Radice (screenwriter) and Stefano Turconi (illustrator); Emma Ríos; Xulia Vicente; Luis Yang; as well as the underground pioneers of the female scene—Ana Miralles, Roser Oduber, and Laura Pérez Vernetti. But it does not stop there; as the festival makes clear, times are changing in the comic world.

In collaboration with the actor Xosé Barato, David Rubín presented an audiobook of his last work O lume (The Fire)—his most personal comic up to this day. This new medium has the great potential to spark interest among new readers, who perhaps have not considered the comic, beyond its visual stimulation, as a thrilling opportunity to find good stories. It also fosters a more inclusive audience, as the acting work conveys a vivid feeling which mirrors the exact tone of the comic book. When the theater lit up, I witnessed an overwhelming applause, filling the room with excitement.

Laura Pérez Vernetti guided the exhibition surrounding the release of the Spanish poet Luis Alberto de Cuenca‘s comic, Vive la vida y otras poesías (To live life and other poems). The exhibition, curated by Asier Mensuro, originated from the question: “And why not meld the poetic language with the comic form?” Vernetti has a long track record in the visual translation of poetry into comic strips, having transformed Vladimir Mayakovski, Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Schwob, and Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry into eye-catching comics.

Going along with his astonishing passion for the Greco-Roman classics, Luis Alberto de Cuenca regards comics as a perfect medium wherein the clash between high and low culture is blurred. Despite its underground beginnings, the comic form has reached outstanding recognition in the last decade. In this regard, Vernetti remarked on the anti-academicist nature and thought-provoking power behind this hybrid art.

From this quick contact with the vibrant comic industry, I dare to claim that comics are in the process of reshaping our literary landscape.

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

In recent news, the diverse literary communities in Mexico have proved that they remain vibrant and dynamic forums for both established and emerging voices. Between August 12 and 18, the prestigious cultural center, Xavier Villaurrutia, will hold the Semana de Letras Emergentes (Week of Emerging Literature). The event will give center stage to young poets from all over Mexico: Leopoldo Orozco (Baja California), Mónica Licea (Jalisco), Fabián Espejel (Ciudad de México), Marjha Paulino (Oaxaca), Rebeca Favila (Chihuahua), Delmar Penka (Chiapas-Tseltal), Luis Alberto Mendoza (Colima), Diana Mireya Tun Batún (Quintana Roo-Maya),  Ángel Vargas (Guerrero), Diana Domínguez (Oaxaca-Ayuujk), Roberto López (Tamaulipas), Gabriela Muñoz (Sinaloa), Anaid Gálvez (Hidalgo), and Yolanda Segura (Querétaro). Though all of the presenters have already shown their promise with publications of work accesible online, the most famous name in the lineup is Yolanda Segura. Self-decribed as “a lesbian-queer transfeminist writer,” she has been at the forefront of contemporary queer poetry in Mexico, with three published books under her name and a raft of prestigious awards.

Segura is from Querétaro, the state that hosts the annual Hay Festival, which just announced its lineup for this year. Running between September 7-10, the Hay will feature diverse panels, books readings, and presentations with acclaimed writers from around the world. Among the most well-known participants this year is the Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra, whose short stories have been featured in Asymptote several times. But the ambitious event will also feature other famous individuals from beyond the literary world. One of them is the Mexican actor Gael García Bernal, known worldwide for starring in internationally acclaimed films such as Y tu mamá también and Amores Perros. Bringing together these cultural luminaries, this years’ Hay Festival is poised for an exciting and vivacious edition.

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What’s New in Translation: December 2022

New work from the Philippines and Palestine!

This week, we’re proud to present two brilliant publications from authors Hussein Barghouthi and Rogelio Braga. From the former comes a wondrous autofiction that uses the vehicle of a companionship to explore philosophies of life, memories, country, and conversation. From the latter,  a vivid collection that examines the various intersections and conflicts between life and work, concentrated in the electrifying, volatile urbanity of rush hour. Read on to find out more!

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The Blue Light by Hussein Barghouthi, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah, Seagull Books, 2023 

Review by José García Escoba, EaL for Central America

Hussein Barghouthi’s The Blue Light is the story of a Palestinian writer also named Hussein, as told through his relationship with Bari, a Turkish American Sufi. Though their lives come to be somehow intertwined, one can hardly think of Hussein and Bari as friends. They’re acquaintances. They may, objectively, care for each other. There are signs of concern, empathy, and camaraderie. Solidarity, even. Pity. The connection between them is not a simple development of shared experience or mutual interest, but forms from the fleeting yet memorable encounters between the two, wherein our protagonist learns about life, the meaning of life, life after death, addiction, the mind being “an expansive entity,” and other philosophies.

—What’s the mind? I asked.
—The mind? Oh, man, it’s horrifying. See. . .
He gestured to the neon light, asphalt, skyscrapers, the pier, the closed supermarket, the university library, and said, “That’s the mind.”

Hussein, the protagonist, is a Palestinian writer who grew up in Lebanon, and goes on to study Comparative Literature at the University of Washington in Seattle. Bari, on the other hand, is an elusive figure, introduced as “that Sufi from Konya.” His theories and messages are cryptic and mysterious at best, often escalating into the contradictory and nonsensical. “He wants to control my mind. He might even be a secret agent,” Hussein writes. Nevertheless, their interactions are always memorable, filled with tension, sarcasm, empathy, and dry humor—somewhat reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. Within the novel’s dialogues, its characters discuss philosophical issues such as death and reincarnation, lucid dreams, the meaning of life, the meaning dreams, religion, and so on; not in an academic way, but in the discursive, organic way of friends.

On one occasion, Hussein and Sufi play chess, and their conversation veers from the meaning of Bari’s name, to the duality of bodies (mental and physical), to Arabic poetry, to Palestinian culture, and on. Eventually, however, Bari’s critical theories and aimless monologues veer into the territory of indoctrination. At one point, he asks Hussein to watch the water fall from his shower. Hussein does as he’s told, and additionally writes a poem about the experience of watching the water. “To hell with poetry,” says Bari. “Watch the water.” READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2022

We review new releases from Romania, Guatemala, and Turkey!

In these brilliant feats of literature, three writers drive the vehicle of language through time and space to learn profound, painful, and complex truths about history and our inheritance of it. From Romania, Zsolt Láng braids imagination and reality to paint multitudinous portraits of the individual and society. From Turkey, Defne Suman tracks a family through present hauntings into the dark, deceptive recesses of the national past. From Guatemala, Eduardo Halfon opens up the question of a name as it is passed down through generations, delving into the chasm between who we are and what we are called. Read on to find out more. Also, for the first time since the magazine’s inception, we have included affiliate links to books under review. Please take note that we may receive a small commission for purchases made through these links, which will go toward supporting our mission of advocating for greater inclusiveness in world literature. Other ways include joining our Book Club or becoming a sustaining member

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The Birth of Emma K. by Zsolt Láng, translated from the Hungarian by Owen Good and Ottilie Mulzet, Seagull Books, 2022 

Review by Rachel Stanyon, Senior Copy Editor

What a swirling, kaleidoscopic reading experience. Zsolt Láng’s The Birth of Emma K. is a cracker of a book—albeit one that forces readers to commit to intricate twists and turns, before arriving at meaning within its refracted reflections on modern life.

Láng—a Hungarian writer from Transylvania, Romania—presents a plethora of perspectives in these twelve short stories, but unites them through a shared narrative style that constantly questions and blurs one’s sense of reality, while never quite descending into fantasy. The stories themselves are often equivocal, with endings that invite conjecture or remain opaque, and the plotlines that lead to these often ambiguous conclusions are full of hypotheticals, the language replete with conditionals and revisions, making every situation feel provisional and emphasising the contingent nature of the world.

The characters, meanwhile, are often driven by love, lust, hatred, or other forces of reproduction, but often also seem adrift, questioning their existence. This is evident from the very opening of the collection, which sees God observing and vacillating over the degree to which he should—and is able to—intervene in the lives of his creations. This version of God is not only not omnipotent, he has a heightened, anxiety-inducing awareness of the potentially negative consequences of his actions, and prays to another higher being that gave him his “not-quite-absolute power.” In the collection’s arch postmodernist style, which seems to use this initial framing by a semi-powerful God to parallel the figure of the author, scenarios are constantly retracted and resketched, and we are often told what is not happening, rather than what is:

That our Lord was sitting or standing about on the side of Gellért hill, at the top of Számadó street near the Sióvölgyi family’s villa, would be an exaggeration. Our Lord doesn’t tend to sit or stand about, he floats. But just so we aren’t constantly searching for words and forever refining what we come up with, let’s postulate that we’re not talking about the Father or the Holy Ghost, we’re talking about the Son, and then we can confidently say that there stood the Son of God…

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Festivals and prizes from India and Lebanon!

This week, our editors from around the world highlight literary festivals, events, and publishing trends in India, along with accolades for previous contributors to Asymptote from Lebanon. Read on to find out more!

Matilde Ribeiro, Copy Editor, reporting from India

Geetanjali Shree’s novel Tomb of Sand was shortlisted on April 7 for the International Booker Prize. This is the first novel written in Hindi to have come this close to winning the prestigious award. The novel was translated to English by Daisy Rockwell, who emphasized the polyphonic nature of the text, which uses loanwords from other Indian languages like Punjabi, Hindustani, Urdu, and Sanskrit.

This linguistic choice, which mimics the way in which speakers of many dialects of Hindi borrow words from other languages, is especially important in light of persistent attempts to “purify” and standardize the Hindi language by removing all non-Sanskrit words. Moreover, in a literary field that is still dominated by twentieth-century authors like Premchand and Yashpal, Shree’s achievement could encourage more contemporary authors writing in Hindi.

However, there remains in general a fundamental disconnect between Indian literary awards and festivals and the choices of the Indian reading public, especially in non-English languages. This was one of the problems addressed during the online discussion “Karimeen for the Soul,” a panel on Malayalam literature hosted by the Bangalore International Centre on March 28, featuring Sahitya Akademi award-winning author Paul Zacharia, publisher Karthika VK, translator Nisha Susan, and journalist Nidheesh M K. Karthika noted that a major problem with regard to “mainstream” publishing and awards is their reliance on the novel as the main form of storytelling, rather than the short story, based on relative sales figures for the two forms. In the meantime, regional newspapers and magazines continue to publish experimental, pathbreaking local-language short stories, a medium that, Zacharia noted, “comes alive when innovation is dead.”

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A Silent Textual Revolution: On Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng’s In My Heart

Its words capacitate the human imagination’s ability to dream of change . . .

In My Heart by Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng, translated from the Sesotho by Nhlanhla Maake, Seagull Books, 2021

Despite an intent to explore beyond Anglocentric spaces, the framework of decolonial studies—defined as the analysis of dynamics between Anglocentrism and colonialism as well as of colonised populations—is still plagued with first-world privileges. Most decolonial texts are theorised and written by a dominantly white scholar community, within a hegemonic Euro-U.S. production. In fact, in the introduction to the original text of Pelong ya Ka (translated as “In My Heart”), Simon Gikandi quoted Karin Barber on how postcolonial criticism has failed to include texts written in African languages, “eliminating African-language expression from view.” By designating Anglocentrism as the form of knowledge production, academia defines what can be classified as “decolonial writing” based on an imperialist discipline of worth determination—comprising of research, praxis, theories, formulations, and discourses operating in materialistic space. To have decolonial texts navigate inter- and intrapersonal spaces is almost unheard of, and is unacknowledged as “real” decolonial scholarship in the Anglo academic sphere.

Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng’s In My Heart is a collection of meditative essays which enter and navigate these unheard-of spaces, introducing Sesotho worldview in radical decolonial studies. In this undertaking, he charts the territory of the heart, wherein the values and experiences largely considered universal—such as death and time—are interrogated instead as largely dominated by privilege. Gayatri Spivak introduces this book, the second publication of Seagull Books’ “Elsewhere Texts” series, as among the pivotal works of decolonial studies within their respective countries, essential in fighting  “against a rest-of-the-world counter-essentialism.” She criticises the “global” efforts in bridging multiple cultures, however, through “the imperial languages, protected by a combination of sanctioned ignorance and superficial solidarities . . . even when they are at these global functions.”

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

New festivals, publications, and films from Slovakia, Palestine, and Kazakhstan!

This winter, festivals and events across the globe introduce new literature in translation, while literary magazines and film festival screenings amplify underrepresented voices. In Slovakia, recent works explore sexual identity, the weight of twentieth-century history, and trauma. From Palestine, Arablit and Arablit Quarterly launched its first “In Focus” section, spotlighting Iraqi literature. In Kazakhstan, the film Akyn highlights the political power of writing, acquiring greater significance in the context of recent governmental restrictions on free speech. Read on to find out more!

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Slovakia

In October 2021, Barbora Hrínová was declared the winner of Slovakia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Anasoft Litera. The jury praised her remarkable debut collection Jednorožce (Unicorns) for writing “about otherness without exoticizing or exploiting it, thus enabling us to accept different ways of life or the search for identity.” As the author herself put in a recent interview: “Otherness in Unicorns occurs on two levels; one is literal, where the characters from the LGBTI+ community belong by definition, and the other is universal, all-human; after all, every person is a minority in their own right. I didn’t want to emphasize the element of sexual identity or outward difference in the characters, because I think that such people are part of everyday life and no different from the majority in any essential way. Rather, I was interested in and irritated by the way they are perceived by society, which often reacts very dismissively and critically to even a minor deviation from the norm. I wanted to create a space in the stories where we could also look at the ‘different characters,’ or a variety of shortcomings in a somewhat more human way.” The fact that Hrínová’s collection also won the 2021 René Prize, chosen by secondary school students, testifies to the author’s empathetic handling of a sensitive subject.

November 2021 marked the centennial of the passing of Slovakia’s national poet, Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav. This brief video, recorded for the Slovak consulate in New York City by Columbia University professor Christopher W. Harwood, is a great primer for anyone not familiar with Hviezdoslav’s work. Literature scholar Charles Sabatos gave a captivating Zoom talk on Gejza Vámoš (1901–1956), another Slovak writer not yet widely known in the English-speaking world. Sabatos, who is translating Vámos’s seminal Atómy boha (God’s Atoms), published in 1928 and 1933, focused on issues of language and identity in this book, summed up by one critic as “a novel of heroism and syphilis.”

While this translation awaits publication, two recent works by contemporary Slovak writers appeared in October, inaugurating Seagull Books‘s Slovak list: Boat Number Five by Monika Kompaníková (translated by Janet Livingstone) and Necklace/Choker by Jana Bodnárová (translated by Jonathan Gresty). TranslatorsAloud features excerpts from both books: a bilingual reading by the author and translator in one case and a reading by the translator in the other, while an interview with Jana Bodnárová is available on Trafika Europa Radio.

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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.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest in global literary news from India to Palestine!

This week, our editors on the ground report news of book fairs, award winners, and recognition of presses publishing translated literature. Suhasini Patni highlights recent Indian fiction receiving acclaim, while Carol Khoury introduces us to an award named after Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, a prolific Palestinian writer, artist, and translator. Read on to find out more!  

Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

The JCB Prize announced its longlist on October 4, 2021. Two out of the three translations have made it into the shortlist (Delhi: A Soliloquy and Anti-Clock). The winner of the Rs 25 lakh prize—with an additional Rs 10 lakh for the translator if it is a translated title—will be revealed on November 13. A longer discussion on the JCB Literary Prize is available here.

Naveen Kishore, founder of Seagull Books, won the 2021 Words Without Borders Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature. Seagull Books was founded in 1982 and began with translating works by Indian regional dramatists into English. For his contribution to publishing, Kishore was made a Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the government of France in 2014 and received the Goethe Medal from the Federal Republic of Germany in 2013. Seagull Books has published English translations of fiction and non-fiction by major African, European, Asian, and Latin American writers with over 500 books and authors such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Mahasweta Devi, and Hélène Cixous. Seagull author Mo Yan was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Kishore published “Notes from a Journal I could have kept [But failed to. Keep]” on Words Without Borders Daily.

GQ released their list of best Indian Fiction of 2021. In this list, they feature The Thinnai by Ari Gautier. Translated from the French by Blake Smith, the book gives a glimpse into the working-class quarters of Pondicherry. A Frenchman chases after a mysterious diamond named after Goddess Sita and explores the social history of the former French colony. An excerpt of the book is available to read here.

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What’s New in Translation: August 2018

Find respite from the heat with these new reads.

From Icelandic landscapes to art history, August brings with it an exciting new selection of books. Whether you’re looking for a book to pass the hot summer days, or are in the market for inspired poetry, the Asymptote team has something for you in this new edition of What’s New in Translation. And if that’s not enough, head over to the Asymptote Book Club for fresh reads, delivered to your doorstep every month!

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Öræfi: The Wastelands by Ófeigur Sigurðsson, translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith, Deep Vellum, 2018

Reviewed by Jacob Silkstone, Assistant Managing Editor

One of the many epic stories retold in Ófeigur Sigurðsson’s Öræfi: The Wastelands (“that punctuation mark… both pushes words (and worlds) away from one another and means they’re roped together,” according to translator Lytton Smith) is the story of Öræfi itself. Formerly known as Hérað, the Province, a place in which “butter drips from every blade of grass,” it was devastated by the most destructive volcanic eruption in Iceland’s recorded history:

The chronicles record that one morning in 1362 Knappafjells glacier exploded and spewed over the Lómagnúpur sands and carried everything off into the sea, thirty fathoms deep… The Province was destroyed, all its people and creatures annihilated; no sheep or cattle survived, no creatures left alive anywhere… the corpses of people and animals washed up on beaches far and wide… the bodies were cooked and tender and the flesh so loose on the bones it fell apart.

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Announcing Our January Book Club Selection

A classic of Bengali literature, available for the first time in English translation.

Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Aranyak will be our second Asymptote Book Club title. We’re delighted to be sharing one of the gems of Bengali literature with our subscribers: the novel’s English translator, Rimli Bhattacharya, describes it as “a chronicle of the dispossessed in visionary prose.”

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