Posts featuring Juan Pablo Villalobos

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Mexico and Bulgaria!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us to bi-national experimental poetry festivals and a community for children’s literature. From prize-winning novels to poetry that spans genres and mediums, read on to find out more!

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

On Monday, January 15, Mexican poet Rocío Cerón launched the online series of panels “Diálogos Bifrontes” (Bifrontal Dialogues), alongside digital artist and poet Carlos Ramírez Kobra. Their conversation was the first of several upcoming chats about experimental, transmedial, and expanded poetry, a genre of literature that combines sounds, performance, and visual elements with poetic writing. They talked about how the transformation of poetry into different artistic and sonic registers entails a process of thinking, reflection, and attention that dissolves traditional boundaries between genre, media, and performance. They also reflected on their creative processes, highlighting how their works consist of — paraphrasing Cerón — an infinite codifying and re-codifying of language and symbols.

These Dialogues complement last year’s special, celebratory 13th anniversary edition of Enclave, an annual festival of expanded poetry founded by Cerón, which ran between November 23 and 25. As a bi-national event, Enclave 2023 was co-sponsored by several Mexican cultural institutions and the Goldsmiths University of London, and co-curated by Cerón and the German-British sound artist Iris Garrelfs. It invited collaborations between Mexican and British artists and poets exploring intersections between poetry, sound, music, and visual art.

Diálogos Bifrontes builds on Enclave’s mission of bringing together poets, artists, and musicians. Like the festival itself, the series will feature conversations by cutting-edge poets from Mexico and the U.K. who are redefining what poetry can mean. READ MORE…

The Tactility of Translation; The Translation of Tactility

. . . just the original, the blank page, and the translator’s knowledge, experience, intuition, artistry.

Each translator’s relationship with their source text is utterly singular, and occupies all the emotional registers of human relationships: reverence, intrigue, and frustration. In the following essay, translator Marta Dziurosz, who works between the Polish and English, ruminates on the intricate development of this relationship: its precisions, intimacies, and sensitivities.

There’s joy in repetition

Prince

In January 2020 I was due to speak at the British Library. It was a Holocaust Memorial Day event, and I was there to talk about my co-translation—with Anna Błasiak—of a book entitled Renia’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust, the wartime diary of a young Polish Jew, Renia Spiegel. The third speaker at the event was artist and writer Edmund de Waal, whose astonishing book The Hare with the Amber Eyes I read when it first came out. Half preparing for the event and half procrastinating, I watched Make Pots or Die, a documentary about de Waal’s work.

De Waal spoke about his work as evidence of spending time—how he places his pots in the vitrines in which they’re displayed very quickly and it’s almost always wrong or almost right, and then he needs to come back and look at them, look at them for a very long time, because there’s an enormous difference between almost right and right. The process struck me as familiar; as a translator, I think about the weight of a comma. I put it in, I take it out, I put it in, I take it out, I put it back in. I put a semicolon at the end of a sentence instead of a full stop, change it back to a full stop. I switch the second and the fifth words around. I change a noun to its diminutive, reconsider.

Once I had that thought, de Waal’s pots started to look like drafts. Perhaps he’s iterating. To me, every pot within an installation looks like a re-translation of a word, sentence, thought, text. The vitrine, taken together, is a mind subtly improvising on a theme. The difference is that in a de Waal vitrine, the audience can see many iterations, many expressions of a thought, if this is what they are; the reader of a translation only sees the last version, the one the translator (and, possibly, her editor) deemed the best, whatever that means.

the poems of our climate (detail), 2018 © Edmund de Waal. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian. Photo by Mike Bruce.

the poems of our climate (detail), 2018
© Edmund de Waal. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian. Photo by Mike Bruce.

What would a translation look like if every draft of every sentence, or even of just one sentence, was present at the same time? Unreadable, of course, but for a translator—how informative, how interesting. De Waal: “Repetition isn’t about repeating the same thing. It’s about minute differences between each moment, between each sound, between each object that you’re making.” Having to appreciate every shade of a sentence, calibrate every word choice so that meaning, register, mood, rhythm, emotional effect all work, and putting all those carefully chosen words in an order that suits the sentence, the paragraph, the whole book—all this makes translation seem impossible, but as some point you make the decision. You place pot A next to pot F and slightly behind pot R, and then lean tile N against pot V and somehow, you’ve arrived. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

Our weekly roundup of literary news brings us to France, Brazil, and Argentina.

It’s never a slow news day on Fridays at Asymptote. This week we bring you the latest publications, events, and news from France, Brazil, and Argentina.

Barbara Halla, Editor-at-Large, reporting from France

Is it perhaps time to talk about a renaissance for French literature in English translation? More classic French literature has always had an audience in the English-speaking world, but in the past few months new authors are taking the literary world by storm. Édouard Louis is only twenty-five but already a public figure in France. His latest book, a semi-autobiographical work, History of Violence (translated by Lorin Stein) was published to great acclaim in late June. Alison L. Strayer translated for Seven Stories Press Annie Ernaux’s The Years (published in the UK by Fitzcarraldo Editions), an innovative collective autobiography that is both memoir and social critique of our times. To continue the trend, in June came also the publication of Gaël Faye Small Country (translated by Sarah Ardizzone), a coming-of-age story that tackles hard issues, including the Rwandan genocide and Civil War in Burundi. The Guardian went so far as to call Faye “the next Elena Ferrante.”

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

Our weekly roundup of literary news brings us to Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, and Indonesia.

June is upon us and we are settling in for some summer reading. Join us as we catch up with our international correspondents about the literary happenings around the world. This week brings us the latest on indigenous literature from Colombia and Mexico, book fairs in Argentina, and new artistic endeavors in Indonesia!

Paul Worley and Kelsey Woodburn, Editors at Large, reporting from Colombia and Mexico:

From April 25 to 29 in Bogotá, Colombia, indigenous writers and scholars and critics of indigenous literatures from throughout the Américas came together in the 5th Continental Intercultural Encounter of Amerindian Literatures (EILA). The theme for this iteration of the bi-annual conference was “Indigenous Writing, Extractivism, and Bird Songs.” The centering of these concerns reflects a turn in the field of Indigenous literatures towards recognizing indigenous ways of writing that take place beyond Latin script, as well as ongoing ecological concerns that are at the heart of a good deal of indigenous literatures and Indigenous activism. In addition to literary readings and panels held at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, writers and critics presented to the general public at Bogotá’s International Book Festival (FILBO), and indigenous poets gave a reading in the town of Guatavita, home to a lake sacred to the Muisca people. Among the writers in attendance were (K’iche’) Humberto Ak’abal, (Yucatec) Jorge Cocom Pech, (Wayuu) Vito Apüshana, (Wayuu) Estercilla Simanca, (Wayuu) Vicenta Siosi, and (Yanakuna) Fredy Chicangana.

READ MORE…