Posts filed under 'social realism'

Inside the Mind That Falls Apart: Aron Aji and Selin Gökçesu on Lojman

September 21, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

"Words by themselves don’t do much in literature; we encounter them inside syntax."

Our August Book Club selection, Ebru Ojen’s Lojman, is a vivid and absorbing novel that traces the depths and illusions of psychic agony, pulled along by a singular, poetic style. Within these flowing, absorbing pages of emotional surges, however, is a representation of how imposed orders and hierarchies can rob the individual of humanity. In this following interview, translators Aron Aji and Selin Gökçesu speak to us on the process of working with this language its rawness and its darkness, the narrative’s subtle political symbols, how it moves on from the Turkey’s social realist movement and its sociolinguistic history.

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 USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Lojman is a book that unleashes its narrative and its characters on us. There are so many uncontrollable elements in it, but what reigns it in is the prose, which is so precise and lyrical. I’m wondering what it was like reading this book in the original Turkish—if there was that similar effect, and if there were stylistic elements you were seeking specifically to preserve in translation.

Selin Gökçesu (SG): Lojman is very immersive, beautiful, and lyrical and Turkish too. I don’t keep up with contemporary Turkish literature as much as I would like to, but within what I’ve seen come out, this book is very in its lyricism—but also its topic and voice. Part of the unruliness of the narrative can perhaps be attributed to the Turkish editing style, which is definitely more open than in the American publishing industry; different voices will enter and come out barely edited—which has its drawbacks. The final translation, after Aron put the final touches on it, is a lot more polished in English then it’s in Turkish, but it still has the spirit of the original.

But I will say that Lojman’s forcefulness and gushing and uncontrolled quality, the very untamed writing—some of that is a product of how open the Turkish publication system is. They’ll allow people in, and they’ll publish things with very little editing or external control. So you get these really raw, powerful stories in different voices. Turkish contemporary literature is maybe less middle-class than American literature, so the class boundaries of allowing different voices in is a little bit more flexible, resulting in such unique products. I’m so glad we came together and caught Lojman amidst so many books being published in Turkey. It’s really serendipitous that this landed where it did.

Aron Aji (AA): I agree with everything Selin said about Ebru’s voice and writing style. To add to that, I was in Istanbul with Ebru this summer—she just finished her new novel. It’s being edited, and hopefully will be coming out in the next couple of months. It’s an entirely different novel. The form is entirely different, the language is incredibly elevated, but there was something very, very similar to the way she built the main character. I asked her to tell me what she was trying to do, and she mentioned how people always talk about the author as the witness of a character’s life and an author as the witness of her time. Then she said, “I want to put the reader in a position of witness, and the way I can do that is by pushing the reader as far into the mindset of the main character as possible.”

As you know, the characters in Lojman are very damaged, to say the least; your review also shows how that damage becomes pervasive. Ebru really is a writer that doesn’t want to stand in the way of the reader, so she writes with this incredible euphoria. There is another Turkish author, Aslı Erdoğan (also published by City Lights), who writes with euphoria, but it’s a lot more controlled, oddly enough. What we have in Ebru is really the rawest possible witnessing of a mind falling apart.

So by choosing to do this as a co-translation, we actually mixed two voices and two consciousnesses into the process—the splitting of voices. I should also say that Elaine of City Lights was incredible in her later editing. And the more voices and consciousnesses we incorporated, the more we were able to crystallize the language, but also retain its rawness. READ MORE…

Announcing Our March Book Club Selection: Siblings by Brigitte Reimann

March 30, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Samantha Siefert

Siblings transports us to post-war Berlin, when the lines were still being drawn around the nascent socialist dream.

In a time of deepening divisions, when the bipartisan nature of contemporary politics feels increasingly intimate and personal, Brigitte Reimann’s lauded autobiographical novel, Siblings, hits close to home. In a vivid and passionate depiction of a family torn apart in the division of 1960s Germany, Reimann writes with profound emotion about the brutal lines drawn by ideology, the inner turmoil of living under orthodoxy, and still—the bright ideals of socialism’s promises. As our Book Club selection for March, Siblings is a bold assertion of unities and divisions from one of East Germany’s best writers—a boundless voice speaking to the limits of individual perspective. 

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 USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.    

Siblings by Brigitte Reimann, translated from the German by Lucy Jones, Transit Books, 2023

Much of translated literature focuses on fresh, contemporary voices, but projects that arrive after a long simmer hold the special promise of an enduring story, one that has earned its place in the cultural conversation; the work of Brigitte Reimann triumphantly takes this route towards English-language readers. Prolific and storied in the German sphere—where her work has never gone out of print, Reimann is a cornerstone writer of social realism and the German Democratic Republic. Born in 1933, she wrote prolifically from a young age, racking up literary awards from her school days until her untimely death from cancer in 1973, with her 1976 posthumous novel going on to become a bestseller and new, uncensored versions of her work continuing to attract new readerships. Siblings, winner of the 1965 Heinrich Mann Prize, is her first novel to be translated into English, following the 2019 publication of her diaries under the title I Have No Regrets—both translated by her persistent advocate, Lucy Jones.

Siblings transports us to post-war Berlin, when the lines were still being drawn around the nascent socialist dream. Formulated as an impassioned political debate, the novel follows young artist Elisabeth Arendt’s pro-socialist bent in a familial battle of virtues—East versus West—with her titular siblings. Her older brother, Konrad, has already defected. A former member of the Hitler Youth and an “elbow-man” who is used to getting his way, Konrad’s fate is of little consequence to Elisabeth: “I had nothing else to do than come to terms with the idea that I’d lost my brother (and lost meant permanently, for ever); a brother who was alive and well, sitting at a table with a white tablecloth a few streets from where I was, who would fly back to Hamburg the following morning, build tankers, save up for a Mercedes, sleep with his beautiful wife, go to the cinema, and carry on with his life.” Instead, her passion is directed towards her other brother, Uli, closer to her in both age and ideology, who has announced that he too will defect the following day: “I can’t stay here, I can’t breathe . . . I feel like a prisoner trapped behind bars, just stupidity and bureaucracy everywhere.” Set in 1960 before the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, defecting was not the daring escape it later became: at the time, when a person could simply walk from one side of the city to the other, weight of this journey fell firmly on moralistic grounds.

Elisabeth spares no conviction in arguing for the socialist dream. She is young and idealistic and works as a painter, charged with documenting the spirit of the factory worker through art. She herself lives and works at the factory, as was customary through a program known as the “Bitterfelder Weg,” designed to foster relationships between artists and workers and foment equality. The program’s ambition offers some of the most compelling writing in the novel, as Elisabeth shares her own revelation that the “production plant like any other, barren, flat land, milling with a few thousand workers building chimneys, halls and roofs, functional buildings made of glass or cold, dead concrete” may indeed be worth loving and fighting for.  READ MORE…