Posts filed under 'writing'

Translation Tuesday: “I, The Executioner” by Srđan Miljević

She did not think of how people, even the richest, humiliated themselves by picking up their own small coins off the street.

Today, we’re thrilled to debut in English the runner-up of the 2017 Festival of the European Short Story, “I, The Executioner” by Serbian writer Srdjan Miljevic. Distilled in nine bracing vignettes, the flash fiction centers on former prostitute Jasna who, on the brink of literary success, meets a gushing reporter—except, her mind elsewhere, she finds herself unable to concentrate. Through the stilted interview questions, which recall the stilted essay assignments she was given in a childhood disrupted by refugeedom, we are given to understand that Jasna’s life from the margins is one that does not fit the neat checkboxes that society has imposed.

*

In Sarajevo, in her second year of primary school, she got a D on her essay on the topic: “When I grow up, I want to be . . .” 

She never found out why a D, because the very next day she became a refugee.

*

A man in a worn-out McCloud jacket stopped in front of her. He bent down, trying to pick up a coin that fell out of his pocket from the pavement. He made it on his second attempt. Two dinars. She did not think of how people, even the richest, humiliated themselves by picking up their own small coins off the street. She thought how good it would be to try not to smoke more than one pack of cigarettes today. Up to two drinks. And one joint max. 

She had been smoking for nineteen years. More than half her life. On a daily basis. She could burn through up to three packs. Theories about what a cigarette was a substitute for and what processes occurred in your brain were comprehensible to her, but she could not think about that now. She would quit one day. And she would take more care today. It was different with alcohol. She had no craving for it, but she did not refuse it either. She did not like to lose control. The same went for ganja. READ MORE…

On Meaning and Black Holes: Reading, Writing, and Translating with Marguerite Duras

Duras would have us remember the gaps between what is said and what is meant: between signifier and signified.

Renowned French writer Marguerite Duras published, amongst many highly regarded novels, plays, and screenplays, a fascinating text about the art of writing. Écrire (Writing), published in 1993, is a series of fragmented meditations on her experience of writing and what impels her to do it. Duras takes the reader into her confidence, tracing the complexities and contradictions of her artistic practice that leads to a profound reflection on the limitations of the written word. In this essay, Georgina Fooks, Asymptote’s Social Media Manager, explores Duras’s philosophy of writing laid out in Écrire, and considers how her thoughts on writing’s inherent contradictions and limitations might also be applied to translation practice.   

Writing and translating could be described as sister arts. Writers become translators, and translators become writers. After all, what is writing but the translation of ideas, experience, and memory onto the page? As writer-translators, we might seek guidance and models to follow—a way out of the text to be translated, or a way through.

One writer I turn to again and again to help navigate the complex threads tying together reading and writing—both so key to a sustainable translation practice—is Marguerite Duras, the celebrated French writer and experimental film-maker. Best known for The Lover (a hybrid work that is best described as fictionalised autobiography, which won the 1984 Prix Goncourt), her oeuvre is distinctive, addressing themes of desire, loss, and death, in a style that can be repetitive, sparse, but striking all the same.

Duras enjoys a certain infamy as a public figure in France—born in French Indochina (modern-day Vietnam) in 1914, she moved to her parents’ native France at aged seventeen. During World War II, she was a member of the Communist Party and of the French Resistance, alongside François Mitterrand (who later became President of France). Her husband was deported to Buchenwald, the notorious concentration camp—an experience she later drew on for her work The War. Later in life she was a notorious femme de lettres, known for her alcoholism and at times controversial opinions, as well as her literary success.

Duras never wrote directly about the art of translation, but her work does testify to an interest in foreign languages. Non-Francophone names populate her work, as in The Ravishing of Lol Stein, whose protagonist Lol V. Stein falls in love with Michael Richardson and frequents S. Thala and T. Beach. This interest in language as a tool and practice is evidenced in her essay on writing, Écrire, a reflexive piece that provides fruitful new ways of thinking about translation as a mode and as a discipline. It’s a piece full of contradictions—thought-provoking statements that lead us towards a Durassian conception of writing and style, which is in turn fruitful for our thinking about the arts of reading and writing, and their impact on translation. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “My Friend Daniele’s Flight” by Ernesto Franco

His hands were so clenched on the wheel that the knuckles stood out white from the force and concentration.

A flying lesson allegorizes the lifework of Italian writer Daniele Del Giudice in “My Friend Daniele’s Flight,” our selection for this week’s Translation Tuesday. In this philosophical essay, writer and editor Ernesto Franco recounts Del Giudice’s views on the writer’s vocation, a discipline defined by the responsibilities of precise language and careful attention to the world. Del Giudice gives Franco the controls of his plane—upon which we are guided through Del Giudice’s philosophies on writing, friendship, and ways of knowing the world. Franco turns to three key words to describe Del Giudice’s enterprise: Sentire, the feeling that relies upon lived knowledge and experience to avoid sentimentality; Mania, the obsessive energy that demands precision and allows one to know the world; and Phantasia, a creative contrast to shallow, mimetic ways of writing. Franco’s memoir comes to a tragic revelation, but the allegory nonetheless has Del Giudice safely returning us from our flight, illustrating what his philosophies can teach us outside of literature.

“Here, now you take it,” Daniele tells me, continuing to look straight ahead while at the same time taking both hands off the controls. It is a cold, sunny autumn morning toward the end of the nineties. We have just taken off from Nicelli Airport in Venice-Lido aboard a single-engine touring plane, whose model I don’t remember, and which Daniele has stabilized to maintain altitude. I had just experienced the words that I have not forgotten and that I won’t ever forget: “The run-up to take-off is a metamorphosis; here is a pile of metal transforming itself into an aeroplane by the power of the air itself, each take-off is the birth of an aircraft, this time like all the others you had had the same experience, the same wonder at each metamorphosis.” The precise, imaginative words of Staccando l’ombra da terra for something I had never experienced before, because taking off on the grass aboard a small airplane, a small “machine” as Daniele would say, sitting beside the pilot, is something completely different from taking off on a normal airliner. Among other things, with the title Staccando l’ombra da terra he formulated for all of us non-pilots an action and an emotion that did not exist before, and did so with the paradoxical effect (how can a shadow take off from the ground?) of the precision of the words concurrent with the added “shadow” of meaning which they alluded to. I actually felt as if wings had sprouted from my shoulders, but I didn’t dare move. “Go on . . .” Daniele says with a knowing smile. And I place two hands on the control wheel, remaining stock-still amidst the roar of the “machine.” Who knows why, but I feel like I have to be ready to make a move and resist with a decisive, forceful action. Perhaps, simply, my body is thinking about the powerful, rotational thrust of the rudder of a sailboat, with which I am much more familiar. But that’s not the case. The flight control is very light. You can practically move it just by thinking of moving it, but doing so moves the entire world in which we find ourselves. Steering on the edge of a subtle, brand new sense of equilibrium. That’s the sensation that I will have the whole time spent inside Daniele’s mania.

When I think of Daniele, of his books, his writing, his idea of literature, his way of thinking and understanding, even when I think of our friendship, the feeling I had at that moment comes back to me. I think about it even now, when I arrive in Venice and instead of San Polo or the hangar, I head for Giudecca, make my way through the maze of calle to the residence where he is housed, and speak my name into the intercom. Everyone here is very kind, the grounds, which overlook the lagoon and the Lido, are beautiful, but of no use to Daniele now, whom I always find in his room. A room that I could not distinguish from the outside, a room that is his, so to speak, in a neutral way: containing him, but without any trace of him. It seems strange only to me. His traces can be found, however, not only in his books, but in some universal words that speak of Daniele Del Giudice better than any other utterance. I will choose three. Sentire, to feel, to experience, has been one of “his” words since Lo stadio di Wimbledon and Atlante occidentale in fact. He applies it, I’ve always thought, not so much as an antidote to sentiment, but to sentimentality employed as an element, as recourse, rhetoric, to compensate for the aphasia of a lack, or absence, of experience. Sentire, on the other hand, is like improvisation in jazz: you can’t do it if you don’t know all the music, but you can’t do it if you don’t venture to the edge of the music you know, and from there love and know in one sound, in one action. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Cyntha Hariadi (UWRF Feature)

you materialize an ocean / and I, a fish inside.

Welcome to the seventh and final installment of A World with a Thousand Doors—a multi-part collaboration with the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival to showcase previously untranslated contemporary Indonesian writing. This week, we feature three poems by award-winning Indonesian writer Cyntha Hariadi, translated by Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Indonesia, Norman Erikson Pasaribu.

We suggest reading installments onetwothreefourfive, and six of the series if you haven’t already. We also recommend the final reflection by Festival attendees Norman Erikson Pasaribu and Tiffany Tsao, Asymptote‘s Editor-at-Large for Australia.

Hands

they used to paw the sky, squeeze the clouds

they fought the wild crows, bargained with the gatekeeper of heaven

 

these hands—they took down the moon, put it here to light this bedroom

they tickled the sun, so it shone longer, brighter

 

now, they cave in every time I raise them up

they squeal in pain at the mere task of tying up my hair

 

sewn-up to this chest, they can only wait

for the saviour to stop its never-ending sob READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Notes of a Writer” by Almaz Myrzakhmet

Don’t writers employ souls of innocent people?

Our Summer 2018 issue launched a few days ago and it is filled with gems from around the world. This Translation Tuesday we bring you another fabulous translation from a language and country never before featured on the blog! Translator Mirgul Kali introduces us to the piece:

Kazakh writer Almaz Myrzakhmet’s brilliant prose is often described as detached, but this is the detachment of a sharp and skillful writer confident in his ability to lure an unsuspecting reader into his story and play with their mind. “The Notes of a Writer,” which follows a young author who is anguished by the visions of his own unwritten story, is both a puzzle and a taste of the joys and struggles of the creative process.

The most delightful and challenging moments in translating this short story concern the old Kazakh expressions which refer to images that might not be easily invoked in an English-language reader’s mind. Yet they offer a rare and intimate glimpse into the culture and history of the nomadic people who had for centuries roamed the steppes of Central Asia. The language of the Kazakhs, who bred horses, maintains that misery can be “the size of a long trough,” evoking an image of an old wooden tub filled with putrid water; that the laughter of happy lovers sounds like a “jingle of coins,” perhaps at a lively, colorful market in a town along the Silk Route; and that fear feels like “a snake coiled in your bosom.” You are invited to discover these expressions, scattered like vintage jewels throughout Myrzakhmet’s striking post-modernist story.

The sound of her heels—like a tongue clicking—would begin at the bottom of a staircase, eventually reach the brown door of my rental apartment on the third floor, reverberate weakly and pause. At this point, she would become unusually still as if she was holding her breath and listening. A moment later she should tap the door timidly with the tips of her fingers.

I would open the door immediately. Acting as if she came to her own place, she barely looked at me and walked in, grazing me with her shoulder. The usual moves. Her, glancing over a picture of a bear playing with cubs, listlessly flipping through scribbled pieces of paper on my desk, walking over to a window and looking out—these actions were her daily routine. A bed would squeak as she sat on it. I would lock the door and take a cigarette from the desk.

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Announcing Our June Book Club Selection: The Tidings of the Trees by Wolfgang Hilbig

In just under a hundred pages, the protagonist traces a redemptive arc from artistic defeat to political defiance.

In its first seven months, the Asymptote Book Club has brought subscribers brand new translations from seven languages: Spanish, Bengali, Norwegian, Italian, Catalan, Chinese, and now German.

Our magnificent seventh selection will be Wolfgang Hilbig’s The Tidings of the Trees, translated by Isabel Fargo Cole and published by Two Lines Press. Writing for an Asymptote feature in memory of Hilbig, Ingo Schulze said that, “It is difficult to talk about Wolfgang Hilbig in terms of a magnum opus. His early or late poems, his early short prose, his novels, his stories—with him, everything is good.”

If you’re already a Book Club member and would like to join our discussion on the writer Krasznahorkai described as “an artist of immense stature”, head to our online discussion page now. If you’re not yet a member, find out how to become part of our community here.

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Translation Tuesday: “The Artist’s Life” by Pierre Autin-Grenier

I will therefore continue to numb the sorrows of old age by manufacturing my hand-made lace in the shadows.

Playing with food imagery and writing in a jazzy rhythm, this metafictional musing on the economic reality of being a writer gives the reader a glimpse at the rationale behind microfiction. The sprinkling of French terms places us in a specific context, but the endeavor feels universal as the narrator works to eat. For more microfiction, head over to the brand new Winter 2018 issue of Asymptote!

Business is much too slack these days to imagine treating oneself to a simple sherbet dip after a day spent scribbling in the light of the desk lamp, and going off, just like that, to lick the liquorice stick while daydreaming under the moonlight. It’s drummed into me from all sides that one must breathe frugally and through clenched lips, measure my steps parsimoniously, mind the tallow on the end of the candle and above all cut down on my extravagances. Times are for cutting the kipper in quarters, you see, my wife said to me just yesterday and as we sat down to eat, and I won’t even go into how much your ciggies are costing us. I blushed slightly. Soon we’ll have to go up the stairs two by two to protect the steps, I thought in petto, not wanting to be outdone.

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Translation Tuesday: “I’m Scared of Those Dots” by Mirka Szychowiak

Somebody said that the healthiest ones die most easily.

Today’s Translation Tuesday comes from the Polish writer Mirka Szychowiak. “I’m Scared of Those Dots” is a haunting ellipsis of a story, concealing just as much as it reveals.

I came earlier today, let’s spend as much time together as we can, let’s enjoy each other’s company, stock up on it. As usual, we won’t be able to answer the same questions, but they will be asked nonetheless.

Zbyszek, who pushed you out of that dirty train? Your bloody blonde mop on the tracks, it still hurts. Who did it to us? How are you, Basia, do tell. What’s up? You were the fastest among us, made us so proud. Somebody said that the healthiest ones die most easily. You didn’t want to be an exception, did you? You passed away at a faster pace than when you broke the 100-metre record. Rysiu, your last letter made us angry. You better all come, you wrote. Your life with us was filled with laughter, but you were alone when you shot yourself for some strange girl. We were furious, but almost all of us did come. Almost, because Bolek had left by then, as was his custom, quietly. He fell over and that was it. Two hours after his death, he became a father. Both prematurely. Youth gave us no guarantees, we understood it early on and only Adam didn’t get it in time—it was the youth, which tore his heart apart, like a bullet. It was so literal it stripped him of all romanticism. It poured out of him, ripped him inside and that was it. Later it was Bożenka and Janusz. The two of them and the carbon monoxide from the stove. A potted fern—a nameday present—withered and then somebody called to say that there were less of us yet again.

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Variations on a Theme: Carolina Schutti & Joanna Walsh on Poetic Prose

"Poets have long been questioning the usefulness/uselessness of the label 'prose poem.'"

When I was invited to create a miniseries of semi-regular author events as translator in residence at the Austrian Cultural Forum London, I wanted to make sure that the Austrian author would always be in dialogue with a British counterpart about something they have in common in their writing. My motivation is to juggle the foreignness and uniqueness of German-language literature with where it meets and overlaps with literature written in English in order to show that writing comes from a specific linguistic, cultural and literary context, but one that connects and communicates with others. As journalist Judith Vonberg summed it up in her review of the event for Literaturhaus Europa: “it’s a simple but unconventional idea. Instead of highlighting the differences between British literature and literature made on the continent, the starting point is similarity, which opens up far more interesting discussions.”

The first of these events brought Austrian writer and musician Carolina Schutti and author and illustrator Joanna Walsh together to discuss poetic prose and how poetry permeates their writing in terms of language, effect and form with me in the ACF London’s Salon back in February. As a writer of both poetry and short fiction, I’m interested in why sometimes one form does and then other times won’t do at all, and why it sometimes happens that I can read the poetry and prose of others interchangeably as if in the other form. What are the markers and where is the boundary? READ MORE…

Translating Magpies: A Writer’s Travails in Translation

Author Rachel Cantor on faking it until making it in Italian translation and her novel, Good on Paper

Shira, bless her heart, is a good but underachieving translator. She usually translates the lesser-known works of lesser-known writers (her relationship with translation is ambivalent, to say the least); more often, she temps in New York City’s outer boroughs. But because of a ground-breaking translation she wrote in grad school of Dante’s La Vita Nuova (using a Buber-Rosenzweig leitwort approach), the Nobel Prize-winning poet Romei commissions her to translate his latest work, which riffs off La Vita Nuova in ways he promises to explain. As Shira begins to translate his Vita Quasi Nuova, however, she begins to suspect that Romei has another agenda, one that involves her personally and has nothing whatsoever to do with poetry…

Shira is not real, of course: she’s the narrator of my novel Good on Paper. To do justice to her work, I read books about literary translation, theories of translation, the practice of translation, especially from the Italian. I used as much detail as I plausibly could, so that Shira’s work could feel real, and her translation dilemmas—essential to the plot—would seem both urgent and specific. She talks—knowledgeably, I hope!—about terza rima and the “eleven-syllable Italian line.” Research because I couldn’t draw on my own experience. Like Shira, I spent my formative years in Italy, but her skill with the language far exceeds mine. Asked to read Italian novels in school, I labored; asked to translate something (anything) once in high school, I chose a Petrarchan sonnet, and did a serviceable job, though there was one line in the octave I just couldn’t get right. READ MORE…

Interviewing Alexander Beecroft, author of An Ecology of World Literature

"The idea seems to be that globalization isn’t one simple story, but neither is it a collection of unrelated stories—it’s a tangle of narratives."

Alexander Beecroft is Associate Professor in Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. He teaches courses in Greek and Latin language and literature, ancient civilizations, both ancient and modern literary theory, and theories and practices of world literature. His key fields of research specialization focus on the literatures of Ancient Greece and Rome, and pre-Tang (before AD 600) Chinese literature, in addition to contemporary discussions regarding world literature. His second book, An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day, was published by Verso in January. In it, he argues for the benefits of an ecological, rather than the conventional economical, framework in the discussion of global literatures, shedding light on the difficulties involved in ascertaining, defining, and assimilating multifarious linguistic forms.

I spoke to Professor Beecroft through email about the intersections between world literature, politics, geography, and the advantages and disadvantages that literary translation can have on upholding minority languages.

Rosie Clarke: Could you begin by briefly outlining your academic background, and explaining what brought you to write An Ecology of World Literature?

AB: My earliest training, as an undergraduate, was in Classics, and from there I moved into an interest in early China. As I entered graduate school, I knew I wanted to combine those interests, but struggled for some time to figure out how. As I worked on my dissertation, I began to realize that, while many things about archaic and classical Greece and early (pre-220 BC) China were different, they did have an intriguing similarity. Both were politically fragmented regions within which circulated some sense of a shared culture. That first book explored that particular connection, but led me to think about how those kinds of structural similarities between literatures might be discussed in a more general way.

RC: Can you explain why you chose to structure the investigation here with an ecological framework?

AB: We’re very used to thinking about modes of cultural production, circulation, and exchange in terms of economic metaphors. Those metaphors have a real value: cultural recognition, like just about everything else, is in scarce supply, and so the language of markets and economic efficiency has much to teach us about culture.

I thought it might be helpful, however, to consider ecological models as an alternative. Ecology, like economics, deals in how scarce resources get distributed in a given context—but where economic models tend to suggest a single winner, and a single winning strategy, ecology suggests that there can be multiple strategies for surviving in different niches.

I think this is a particularly important point in today’s world. The power of English and of the English-language publishing industry worldwide makes translation, especially into English, into the most lucrative form of literary success—but in fact writers can and do thrive through other strategies, including by writing work designed for their own local context. Further, we need to recognize that the ecologies within which literatures operated in the past were different, operating for example under court patronage or with other kinds of relationships to the political and social order.

READ MORE…

Our January 2016 Issue is Live!

Blog editors Allegra Rosenbaum, Patty Nash, and Ryan Mihaly share their favorites from our glittering 2016 issue

It’s that quarterly, magical time of year again, guys: Asymptote is loud and proud with a stellar January issue. And this is not just any issue—it’s our fifth anniversary issue, “Eternal Return,” and that means Asymptote is practically old enough to head off to kindergarten and start finger-painting and writing poetry (after winning an award a the London Book Fair and becoming a member of the Guardian books network, of course).

It couldn’t be more fitting, then, that this issue features some of our most inventive, thrilling work to date: interviews with Yann Martel and Junot Díaz, a really, really cool experimental translation feature, work and an interview with Caroline Bergvall, and writing from authors that will be sure to capture your literary imagination—like Olga Tocarczuk, who was featured on the blog in a gripping essay by her translator Jennifer Croft—or this fascinating anonymous story called “The Legend of the Dakini Ray of Sunlight (White Tārā),” handily translated from the Mongolian by Ottilie Mulzet. Really, you can’t go wrong, but we can still try to point you toward our favorite issue picks this time around:  READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 4 December 2015: Best-Of Lists Of Best Lists

This week's (and year's!) literary highlights from across the world

Happy Friday, Asymptote friends! The end of the calendar year is nigh, and that means one thing: there are no more new releases (or—there are less of them, as you’ll see in next week’s New in Translation post), and there are a whole lot of year-end lists. Impressively, the New York Times’ famous top 10 includes three whole books (!) in translation (Magda Szabo’s The Door, translated by Len Rix, Elena FerranteThe Story of the Lost Child, translated by Ann Goldstein, and Asne Seierstad’s One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre of Norway, translated by Sarah Death). If you’d like the scope to zoom out a bit, look at the Times’ notable 100 in 2015, thirteen percent of which is composed of literature in translation (given sad stats of the past, this is actually pretty darn good!—though the translation statistics of the past two years, available at Three Percent, make us less giddily optimistic). Finally, take a look at another English-language publication across the pond: the Guardian asks famous writers what their favorite reads of the year proved to beREAD MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Okinawa, Mon Amour” by Betina González

In Japan everything always happened in reverse: wolves did not eat people, kamikazes were not afraid of death, grumpy people smiled.

It’s #Giving Tuesday! If you’ve enjoyed our Translation Tuesday posts, please consider a $25 donation to our newly launched fundraising drive today! Every little will help us bring you more of what you love.

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In Japan everything always happened in reverse: wolves did not eat people, kamikazes were not afraid of death, grumpy people smiled, and Cinderella was a stoker’s son named Mamichigane.

Every day, Miriam thought about that typhoon-exhausted island she had never seen: Shuri Castle cloaked in flames, the drowned children of the Tsushima Maru, and the woman who came down from Heaven and had to stay on Earth because some man stole her magic kimono.

Every day, Miriam fed her fish, dusted off the glass cases of her tragic geishas, and cursed, with much gentility, her destiny as a South American. Her big brother’s explanations didn’t help much. As Kazuo so often reminded her, the Ryukyu Kingdom had little to do with Japanese traditions, and the people of Okinawa ever fled their island. Okinawa had to be the one place in the world with a commemorative statue of the Father of Immigration: Kyuzo Toyama, the hero who arranged the flight of the first Okinawan-Hawaiian citizens in 1899. For Kazuo, the argument reinforced a historical truth: their ancestors were in fact the first settlers of the Americas and, according to him, merely completing their millennia-long task. The Indian-American was practically Japanese; if Kazuo had any talent, he would draw a manga of the second wave of continental population, destined to perfect a race of supermen through dry-cleaning and karate. READ MORE…