Posts featuring Walter Benjamin

Seas Otherwise Too Treacherous To Navigate: Mario Aquilina on the European Essay and Its Planetary Histories

December 4, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

. . . the essay sustains a tension between experience and the attempt . . . to derive ideas or abstractions from experience . . .

In The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form (2021), Mario Aquilina, a Maltese literary historian and scholar, probes through the philosophies and ethos of the genre’s figureheads—from Montaigne and Francis Bacon to Samuel Johnson and Ralph Waldo Emerson—and considers the “paradox at the heart” of the essay: “the more resistant to genre an essay is, the more properly an essay it is.” The foundations of the ever-expansive, proliferating possibilities of the essay as a genre, form, and mode can be found in its pre-Montaignean roots from Azwinaki Tshipala of 315 CE South Africa, al-Jahiz of 8th-century southeastern Iraq, and Heian Japan’s Nikki bungaku (diary literature) comprising of court ladies Sei Shōnagon, Izumi Shikibu, Lady Sarashina, and others, to the Graeco-Roman philosophers Plutarch, Seneca the Younger, St Augustine of Hippo, and Marcus Aurelius.

In the contemporary era, this obscured historico-aesthetic timeline courses through the genre, from the New Journalism movement of the 60s (Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Annie Dillard, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe) to ‘memoir craze’ of the 90s (David Sedaris, Mary Karr, Frank McCourt), from the British life-writing movement and its American counterpart, creative nonfiction, to its present-day extra-textual permutations: essay films, graphic memoir, the imagessay, and video essays. But what of this “memoirization of the essay” and “essayification of the memoir”—to quote from David Lazar? “If we think of the ‘I’ of the essayist as collaborative, then we understand that the essay does not have to be as narcissistic a genre as it has sometimes been presented. Its value—literary or communicative—not simply expressive,” writes Aquilina for The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay (2022). 

In this interview, I spoke with Prof. Aquilina on, among other topics, the histories of the essay within and beyond the Western literary imaginary, his thoughts on Montaigne and Montaigne’s Euro-American stalwarts Georg Lukács, Theodor W. Adorno, Phillip Lopate, and John D’Agata, and the genre’s recalcitrant relationship with categorisation, alterity, and selfhoods. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): I would like to begin this interview with your opinion on John D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) which was part of his trailblazing yet contentious trilogy. D’Agata follows the essay to its genesis in ancient cultures of Sumer, Greece, Babylonia, South Africa, and China: miscellanies of Ziusudra, dialogues of Ennatum, self-interviews of Azwinaki Tshipala, and biographies of T’ao Ch’ien. 

Mario Aquilina (MA): Editing an anthology is always a contentious act. Literary anthologies are political in the sense that they organise a body of knowledge in specific ways, bringing to our attention that which we might otherwise not see or something hiding from us that we should see. Anthologies establish or disrupt hierarchies of value and relevance, and they influence in decisive ways what is preserved and circulated as well as what is lost. Anthologising is inseparable from canonisation, archivisation, but also representation and social relations as shown in the well-known debate between Rita Dove and Helen Vendler in The New York Review of Books around The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2011). 

John D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) is provocative in the sense that, unlike some other accounts of the history of the essay, it does not begin with Michel de Montaigne. It also casts its net beyond the Western Canon. It thus stretches both the temporality and geographical positioning of the story of the essay that we often tell ourselves. It forces us to consider the possibility that the essay is not necessarily a fundamentally modern form (Jacques Rancière calls Montaigne the ‘first modern man’) and not necessarily tied to the rise of humanism and a human-centred perception of the world. However, what is perhaps even more contentious for some is that, through this alternative history of the essay, D’Agata also makes an intervention in the present by shifting the parameters within which one might think of the essay as a genre. D’Agata’s instinct in this anthology is to open the genre, to find it in places and times in which we did not see it before. The consequence of this is that as readers we are fascinated by the extent of the potential of the essay but also possibly confused by being presented with a form that is so stretched that it almost starts to incorporate everything. I personally think that D’Agata’s book does important work and I consider it to be a valuable contribution to not only studies of the history of the essay but also to its theory. 

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Translating the Caribbean

November 1, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Aaron Coleman, C. Francis Fisher, Kaiama Glover, and Urayoán Noel

The translations lead to thinking about what translation makes possible in a critical sense and in a differently shaped and understood archive.

The following conversation took place after a reading as part of “Colloquy: Translators in Conversation,” a series based in New York City and sponsored by World Poetry Books. In April 2023, the Clemente in Manhattan hosted the fifth installment of Colloquy, “Translating the Caribbean” with Aaron Coleman, Urayoán Noel, and Kaiama Glover. After the reading, the curator of the series, C. Francis Fisher, engaged the translators in the following conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length.

C. Francis Fisher (CF): I want to start by asking about the title of this event. I named this evening “Translating the Caribbean” and I’m wondering whether that idea of translating the Caribbean is helpful in terms of the work that you do or whether it glosses over important differences between the cultures, languages, and realities of different islands in the Caribbean. 

Aaron Coleman (AC): I’m glad that you opened with this question because for me “the Caribbean” is just one of the many frames that we can have in mind when translating. I’ll say for me, there are various frames that I try to hold in my mind at the same time. One would obviously be the national, but even within the national, we see the way that blackness sometimes complicates national identities. So, there’s the national and then there’s frames within the national, but then there’s also a regional frame to the Caribbean.

For me, the frame that I’m always searching for and curious about is beyond the national at a diasporic scale. So, we could call this translating the Caribbean, but I was also thinking about translating the African diaspora.

Kaiama Glover (KG): I’m glad you spoke first. I had a hot take. I still have the same take, but now I’ve sat with it for a second [laugh]. I have no problem with that grouping that in some ways elides the borders between the various nation states of the Caribbean because the Balkinization of the islands was based on legacies of colonialism that are still intact and have left us with language that makes it difficult for people who are of the same broad history and related culture to communicate. First, there was the initial break of community, the kidnapping of the middle passage, and then there is the persistence of that breaking through the nation language borders of the Caribbean. So, I love translating the Caribbean outward toward the diaspora. READ MORE…

I Was Young: On Mutsuo Takahashi’s Only Yesterday

October 25, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

[Takahashi] folds time’s unforgiving continuum in one motion, collapsing it into that narrow, white space between one line and the next . . .

Only Yesterday by Mutsuo Takahashi, translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles, Canarium Books, 2023

Classicists are not known for pared-back prose, but in the June 1936 edition of The Classical Journal, Hanako Hoshino Yamagiwa penned a candid, simple piece on the multiple, “surprising” similarities between Ancient Greece and the Japan of her time—a comparison drawn not through extensive research, but the “things which I actually saw, heard, or read from my childhood”. Published for its novelty more than its expertise, this quiet, strange essay touches on a myriad of surface resemblances: agricultural practices, the affinity of Athena and Amaterasu, the lack of romance in marital matters, the habit of passing things from left to right. Together, these daily observations hint towards a woman who, while reading about a nation that could not be further away, had seen a vision of her own life. And so, what emerges is not a convincing portrait of how these island countries may mirror one another between their spatial and temporal distances, but testimony for a vaster pattern: the travelling body hunting the ontological material of geography to retell history, to excavate an expression of the self from the mired cliffs and centuries. It is the story of a body curious, remembering, and in motion. Its muddied tracks.

In Mutsuo Takahashi’s Only Yesterday, Greece is the poet’s material, base, and centre. Through over one hundred and fifty short poems, each translated with much care and expertise by Jeffrey Angles, the poet casts upon shores and mountains, daybreaks and cicada-filled treelines, portioning out a lifelong fascination with the archipelago and all that links it to the world. An extensive corpus has already attested to the depth of Takahashi’s affinity for the Hellenic—from translations of Euripedes and Sophocles to a repertoire of essays and interpretations—but this collection, largely written in his seventy-ninth year, is the first to be entirely dedicated to Greece. And perhaps it is because of this timing, in the winter of the poet’s life, that the view presented in these brief lines is not one of raw precision, of wandering or travelogue, but of Greece dissolving, slowly, into the liquid called reflection.

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2023

January 23, 2023  |  in News  |  by Bella Creel, Meghan Racklin, and Xiao Yue Shan

. . . di Giorgio, standing in front of the rosebush, flicks the switch on, invites us to see.

Asymptote’s Winter 2023 Edition is out, showcasing literature from thirty-four countries and fifteen languages! Marking our twelfth year in world literature, this issue is headlined by César Aira, Geetanjali Shree, and César Vallejo. Here, blog editors Xiao Yue Shan, Meghan Racklin, and Bella Creel introduce their highlights from the issue, from an explosive, violent garden, to a perverse love story and vengeful doll, to a piece of criticism that reads more as art than review. 

In a short eulogy for the brilliant, transportive Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda, Gabriel García Márquez recounts a brief visit he once paid her in Barcelona, around a decade before her death. Slightly taken aback by her impeccable resemblance to her characters, namely in what she had described as her “innocence,” the García Márquez intuited that Rodoreda, like the people she had raised to such stark emotional reality, had a penchant for growing flowers. “We spoke about [gardening], which I consider another form of writing,” he recounts, “and between our discussion of roses . . . I tried to talk to her about her books.”

The botanic, as both these great writers knew, is transportive. There is nothing so beguiling as the language of flowers—their ancient names, colour, perfume, their mystic properties and secret variety; we know this, because the writers before us had long known it, just as the writers before them had known it, and on and on backwards, ever since the first poets looked at the world in bloom, and saw in it an opening to the sublime. Over and over, we’ve harvested from the natural world to give our poems tint and fragrance, to purple our prose and frame our visions, and in the same way that soil can be exhausted, the power of this invocation has since waned through countless verses. The challenge to the text now, when evoking landscape, is what García Márquez knew: the writer cannot simply pick the flowers—she must grow them herself.

In Marosa di Giorgio’s excerpt from The Moth, the garden is explosive. Translated with a musical ear by Sarah María Medina, the prose poems luxuriate in their sheer volume of lush imagery, of ripe fruit and their rainbow palette, bacchanalian sweetness and insatiable appetite. Di Giorgio has always been an exceptionally visual writer, with her prodigious use of images inspiring comparison to the works of Bosch and Dalí—and here her painterly instincts are once again ravishing. In broad strokes a feast is spread before us, peaches and dates and syrup, as her image-language fills the lines with taste and spectacle. She once said that “only the poet knows what colour to give each word . . . In The Moth, I paint myself as a reciter who interprets in front of the rosebush.” 

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Principle of Decision: Translation from Armenian

January 2, 2023  |  in Principle of Decision  |  by Kristina Tatarian and Meghan Racklin

[This] will, we hope, allow for a more direct look at the choices translators make—at the principle of decision they employ in their practice.

Each translation speaks with two voices; that of the author and that of the translator. Yet, it is often when they have done their work well that the voices of translators go unrecognized. Their names are left off of covers, and their efforts mentioned only as brief asides in reviews. 

This neglect fails to give translation its due. Walter Benjamin wrote: “Reading a translation as if it were an original work in the translation’s own language is not the highest form of praise;” it is, rather, a failure to fully considering a work in translation, with its two voices and two languages. In an essay for Astra, translator and writer Lily Meyer references Susan Sontag’s definition of style when discussing translation as an art, stating that “to make art without having or consulting your own stylistic preferences strikes me as impossible . . . [Sontag] defines style, more or less, as ‘the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of an artist’s will.’ Surely a translator’s will can also be found inside anything they translate, animating the text and powering it to full-fledged life.” 

This new column, Principle of Decision, is an effort to make the styles of translators more visible. In each installment, one translator will select a famous sentence or brief passage from the literature of a certain language, and several translators will then offer their own translations of it. The differences and similarities between the translations will, we hope, allow for a more direct look at the choices translators make—at the principle of decision they employ in their practice.

For our first edition, we are proud to feature a selection from the Armenian, chosen by Editor-at-Large Kristina Tatarian. Kristina’s word-for-word translation is accompanied by translations from three translators, whose work can also be found in the Fall 2022 issue’s Special Feature on Armenian literature. Kristina has also provided explanatory commentary on her selection, as well as on the translators’ choices.

—Meghan Racklin

 

One peaceful morning  was   one     sad      morning

Մի խաղաղ  առավոտ  էր  .  մի  տխուր  առավոտ :

Mi  haghah    aravot         er      mi   tehur  aravot
˘       ˘     ¯      ˘  ˘   ¯          ˘        ˘    ˘   ¯    ˘  ˘  ¯

This sentence is from the beginning of “Gikor” by Hovhaness Tumanian, one of the central figures in Armenian literature. Based on a real story that Tumanian had heard as a child, “Gikor” is a tale about the dreams and hardship of a twelve-year-old boy, the eponymous Gikor, as his father sends him away from his home in the village to “become a man” and earn a living in the big city. Unfortunately, the boy’s precocious aim to alleviate his family’s hardship eventually ends his life. This sentence marks the moment in the story when Gikor’s mother and siblings watch him leave; accompanied by his father, he moves further and further away from home. The story comes full circle as the father returns to the village—only this time, Gikor is not there anymore. The different translations of this sentence, which presages the early death of the young protagonist, highlight the theme of the Armenian Special Feature (half-lives) by presenting us the “half-life” of the protagonist, a life that prematurely ended. This poignant story may be seen as an emblem of cultural memory about the Armenian Genocide, as Tumanian himself was at the forefront of humanitarian efforts to save children. The contributing translators have each found their own way of translating this memorable sentence, which marks the day when this young and sensitive boy leaves his home, and never returns. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2022

August 15, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Laurel Taylor, and Samantha Siefert

Introducing new translations from French, Persian, and more!

As the world reverberates with the powers and consequence of language, this month’s round-up of translations are especially resonant with their assertion of how texts can subvert, heal, and ascribe meaning to life. Below, find reviews of a text that gathers poetry and its translators in boundary-defying dialogues of methods and ideas; a novel that powerfully uses silence to address the transgenerational trauma of the Rwandan genocide; and a sensitive story of an Iran on the precipices of change by celebrated modern novelist Simin Daneshvar.

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Poetry’s Geographies: A Transatlantic Anthology of Translations, edited by Katherine M. Hedeen and Zoë Skoulding, Eulalia Books, 2022

Review by Laurel Taylor, Assistant Managing Editor

How does one review a translation (or rather a set of translations) which center the translator? This is the question I’ve been asking myself as I make my way through Poetry’s Geographies: A Transatlantic Anthology of Translations, edited by Katherine M. Hedeen and Zoë Skoulding. This ambitious collection is unique in bringing together translation practitioners from the heart of the Anglosphere and giving them a space to speak about their practices—what Hedeen might describe as “countermapping,” what Don Mee Choi might describe as “lilymethod” mapping, and what Erin Moure might call “in”mapping.

As you may have gathered from this description, Poetry’s Geographies begins not with the text-in-translation but with the translator, with their essays and methods which speak in sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary dialogues. Through these, we, the readers, are asked to sit with the very contradiction of translation itself—the notion that one language can be “deformed” or “twinned” or “exploded” into another. Indeed, the acknowledgement of this impossibility, the greatest and most repeated cliché concerning poetry and translation, drives the collection. As Skoulding writes in the introduction, “Rather than making the world more transparent and ‘accessible’ for quick consumption, poetry and its translation can sustain opacité…as an opaqueness that allows the Other to exist in full, not to be reduced or subordinated.” Put differently in the essay from Sasha Dugdale:

I stand against this idea of translation as a vitrine in which we see the original. I stand against it here, me, many kilos of proteins, lipids, water, with a slow local history of my own composition and concurrent decomposition (I see also that it is a grave act to scribble in these lines)

no person is a pane of glass no person is of pure intent no person is devoid of history

In this approach, the notion of language as a window is cast aside. Language is smoke and mirrors (me). Language is air (Ziba Karbassi). Language is sound (Skoulding). Language is an infestation (Moure). Language is a sufism (Stephen Watts). Poetry’s Geographies asks us to stare into the mist and watch the swirling shapes, the fleeting shadows, the forms familiar, menacing, and absent. The thing we perceive, in Hedeen translating Victor Rodríguez Nuñez, may in fact be absence:

your existing is not shaped
from the knot that resembles the foliage weave
your being is not shaped
from the board sanded down by countless downpours
barely the keyhole owl eye
to look inside so nothing was left outside
an image in heat

fertilized by the void

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Translating Past Into Future: Joshua Lee Solomon and Megumi Tada on Dialect Storytelling in Northeastern Japan

January 5, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Mary Hillis

No matter how different the languages are, there are similar emotions.

In their work introducing the rich tradition of oral storytelling in the Tsugaru dialect, Joshua Lee Solomon and Megumi Tada of Hirosaki University are moving beyond traditional geographic and linguistic boundaries. Having translated the unique folklore of northeastern Japan from its local vernacular into English, they’ve also facilitated a workshop combining English language education and studies of the region. In the workshop, students learned to perform the tales under the guidance of master storytellers from the preservation society Wa no mukashi-ko, and eventually performed in English alongside the storytellers performing in dialect. We discussed, via Zoom, the interrelated areas of translation, cultural preservation, and language education. Listening to their retellings of favorite folktales, I experienced firsthand how the emotions of storytelling—nostalgia, laughter, heartache—transcend space and time.

Mary Hillis (MH): Could you give some background information about the local Japanese dialect in Tsugaru?

Joshua Lee Solomon (JS): There is a lingering perception that the Tsugaru dialect is used by uneducated or somehow uncivilized people, and this is connected to a long history of prejudice against the poorer regions in northeastern Japan. The Tsugaru region was historically isolated for a very long time by mountains and its relative distance from the political and economic centers of the country, so it’s a repository of very old Japanese words.

One of my favorite examples of this is the word in the Tsugaru dialect of “udade.” Depending on the age of the person you’re talking to, they might say this word only means something really bad or uncomfortable, whereas young people are more likely to use it meaning cool and good—the same way you use “yabai” in contemporary standard Japanese (like certain expletives in English used in either positive or negative connotations). But actually, I think this word comes from the Manyoshu, which is an ancient collection of poetry. In the text, there’s the word “utate” and that word is an intensifier—meaning “extreme” or “very much.” In this way, there are older Japanese words that are kept in the current language.

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Emma Bovary’s Adventures in Saigon, Part I

June 2, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Thuy Dinh

Hoàng Hải Thủy’s 1973 Vietnamese translation of Flaubert’s classic complicates perceptions of domestication and foreignization.

This is the first in a two-part series that explores the indeterminate translation effects of foreignization and domestication, as illustrated by Hoàng Hải Thủy’s 1973 Vietnamese adaptation of Madame Bovary. Read the second part here.

Note: The below version has been revised to reflect important corrections. Lawrence Venuti’s theoretical framework, as reflected in the revised essay, does acknowledge the subaltern’s perspective and show that domestication and foreignization encompass both discursive approaches and their multifaceted effects.

Since the earlier version did not fairly reflect the full implications of Mr. Venuti’s work, the author owes Mr. Venuti an apology and would like to thank him for his forbearance and collegial support.

In 1813, Friedrich Schleiermacher, the German translator of Plato, had proposed that a translator has two choices, “either such translator leaves the author in peace as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him; or the translator leaves the reader in peace as much as possible, and moves the author towards him.” The former technique could be defined as foreignization, and the latter domestication. Today translation scholar Lawrence Venuti has expanded on Schleiermacher’s perspective by constructing an ethics of difference in translation. According to Venuti, translations geared toward domestication effects risk perpetuating certain uncontested beliefs in the maintenance of the status quo. As a corrective, he has proposed a meticulous yet adaptable theoretical framework that can illuminate any translation, regardless of language and culture, regardless of their status as dominant or dominated, major or minor. In his view, foreignizing translations can expand the linguistic and stylistic resources of the translating language by broadening the parameters of readability.

If we define foreignizing as a translation approach that creates noticeable effects and variations from the prevalent standard, and domesticating as conforming to pre-existing norms, how do we gauge these effects against a translator’s stated intention, his unconscious bias, inadvertent omissions or errors? My essay attempts to illustrate these questions by discussing Hoàng Hải Thủy’s Người Vợ Ngoại Tình—his 1973 adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

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Honoring the Art of Translation: Carolina Orloff

September 29, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Carolina Orloff

There is so much of us in the language we inherit, the language we’re nursed in. Our mother tongue defines us, whether we like it or not.

As National Translation Month draws to a close, so does our four-part special feature on the subject—a series of first-hand, original essays by key players in the translation process: an author, a platform, a translator, a publisher. And since translating also means shifting coordinates, we made sure to hit four different corners of the world. Over the course of the past few days, we’ve brought you a Romanian poet, a Chinese online literary hub, and a Turkish translator, all at the very top of their game. Today, we wrap it up by traveling from Buenos Aires to Edinburgh with Carolina Orloff, co-founder and publishing director of the award-winning Charco Press (we figured the trip was worth postponing our usual “Translation Tuesday” column, back next week).

In this thoughtful, moving piece, Carolina masterfully intertwines personal experience with theory. She dives into the challenges of living between languages (she’s a longtime Argentinian expat in the UK), explaining how that has influenced her own views of translation and, more broadly, Charco’s publishing philosophy. From missing dulce de leche to musing about Benjamin, she covers almost as much ground here as she’s done throughout her life as a bona fide globetrotter.

Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrious memory. Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough—he wanted to compose the Quixote.

‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,’ Jorge Luis Borges

When I think about translation, I’m seized by a host of thoughts and emotions—some varying, some constant. It goes beyond the years I’ve spent studying and writing theory, or the fact that I’ve been living between languages (‘entre lenguas,’ to quote the extraordinary Sylvia Molloy) for more than half my life now: there is something within my matrix, my emotional framework, that is made of languages, of gestures from different cultures, different geographies. As is the case with many compatriots, I’m a second-generation Argentinian (most of the country’s indigenous population was wiped out by a nefarious ‘whitening’ campaign during the late 1800s); like many in my generation, I have also emigrated from that southern land. All my grandparents were foreigners, and I use this word with the utmost care and precision. My parents fed off that simultaneously strange and normalised state of living in Buenos Aires while immersed in the echoes of Russian, English, Yiddish, Polish, and Andalusian Spanish. They soaked up these acquired traditions and dressed them up in new meaning—a meaning that they could call their own and that could be freer, albeit loaded with so many other foreign codes. In sum, they were constantly translating.

I recall a conversation I had with a fellow student once, when I was at the University of York. His porteño accent was much stronger than mine. I was twenty years old and had been living in English for three. When I asked him when he’d last been to Argentina, he said nonchalantly that he had actually never ‘crossed the pond.’ His mother was from Buenos Aires and yes, he had been born there, but when he was just one or two years old, they had left for Sweden in search of political asylum. They had never returned. It was an epiphanic moment for me. And now that I am a mother, an Argentinian mother living in Scotland with a daughter born in Edinburgh, I can’t help but re-signify it. There is so much of us in the language we inherit, the language we’re nursed in. Our mother tongue defines us, whether we like it or not, and I feel that there is no satisfactory way of translating that identity; it can only be transmitted. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: February 2020

February 17, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andreea Scridon, Barbara Halla, and Daniel Persia

Staffers survey new releases from around the world.

Decisions about the books we read are more important than ever in the outpouring of the Information Age, so for this month, we bring you three texts of learning, authenticity, and artistry. An Argentine novel that rescues silence, a Hungarian volume that engages the incomprehensible, and a collection of Russian poetics from a master of Moscow Conceptualism—these works accentuate the diverse revelations and immense endeavours of world literature. 

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Include Me Out by María Sonia Cristoff, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver, Transit Books, 2020

Reviewed by Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large for Brazil 

A mishap at an international conference prompts simultaneous interpreter Mara to change course in Include Me Out, by María Sonia Cristoff, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver. Mara, tired of the monotony of her everyday interpreting, designs an experiment: she will spend one year in silence, as a guard at a small provincial museum outside of Buenos Aires. It is a job that will allow her to interact with nothing but her chair, she thinks. A job that will allow for stillness, for time to plant in her garden, she hopes. But when an unwanted promotion forces Mara to assist the museum’s gregarious taxidermist as he restores two of Argentina’s heroic horses, Gato and Mancha, an experiment in silence quickly transforms into frustration over static noise. A careful and deliberate portrait, pointedly translated, Include Me Out paints a memorable, authentic cast that stays with us long after we have finished reading. 

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Section Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2019

April 29, 2019  |  in News  |  by Ah-reum Han, Caridad Svich, Ellen Jones, Eva Heisler, Joshua Craze, Lee Yew Leong, Sam Carter, and Victoria Livingstone

Special selections from our Spring 2019 issue!

If you have yet to read our spectacular Spring 2019 issue, what are you waiting for? Maybe for our Section Editors to give you their favourites so you can get off of the right foot—well, we’ve delivered. From the poetry by the hand of acclaimed fiction writers, to century-traversing tales, to contemporary criticism on the role of the translator, here are the highlights, straight from those who have devoted themselves to perfecting this issue.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction and Poetry Section Editor:

This issue’s fiction lineup is bookended by two Argentine authors (born in 1956) who grapple with Jewish identity in their work. With The Planets shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award in 2013, Sergio Chejfec is much better known to Anglophone readers, but Daniel Guebel is not exactly an unknown entity—recently the publisher Beatriz Viterbo released an anthology of essays contributed by such writers as César Aira celebrating Guebel’s work. Via “Jewish Son,” Jessica Sequeira’s perfectly pitched translation, English readers are introduced to bits of a weltanschauung that include pilpul (aka spicy thought, a method of interpreting the Talmud), tango singers, readings of Kafka and The Aeneid, all taking place in the last act of a father-son relationship. Yet, it is also very emotional—despite, or perhaps all the more so because of, the philosophical exposition. As with the best fictions, Guebel gestures toward a gestalt beyond the text. I can’t wait for more of this heavyweight to appear in English.

In the poetry section, which I also assembled, two highlights (also bookending the section) are Raymond Queneau, co-founder of the now-international formalist Oulipo movement, and Georgi Gospodinov, acclaimed for The Physics of Sorrow, showing that they have as much talent as poets as they do as fiction writers. An especially exciting discovery is Gertrud Kolmar, nom de plume of Gertrud Käthe Chodziesner, advocated by cousin Walter Benjamin, but only now celebrated as one of the great forgotten poets. Characterized by mystery, the taut but dreamlike poems channeled with elan by Anna Henke and Julia Gutterman are fueled by an “ache unnamed”; “a glimmer burning out its flame.” 

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Literature on the Margins: Tess Lewis on Translating Monique Schwitter

April 11, 2019  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Chris Power

To me, much of the most exciting and innovative writing in any language takes place on the margins.

Award-winning translator Tess Lewis was first drawn to the Swiss author Monique Schwitter by two “quirky and rather dark” short story collections. Schwitter’s first full novel, One Another, is now an Asymptote Book Club selection, and Tess Lewis tells Asymptote Assistant Editor Chris Power why she couldn’t wait for a chance to translate it to English.

In the latest edition of our monthly Book Club interview series, we also discover the roles Rachel Cusk and Jenny Offill played (indirectly!) in translating One Another and learn why a particular type of coffee nearly led to the English edition of the book being published with extensive endnotes.

Chris Power (CP): How did you end up translating One Another?

Tess Lewis (TL): Monique’s quirky and rather dark short stories in Goldfish Memory and If it Snows at the Crocodile Pen won me over when I read them years ago. So when I had the opportunity in 2014 and ’15 to curate Festival Neue Literatur, the New York City literary festival that showcases fiction from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, she was at the top of my list of writers. In 2015, the Festival’s theme was “Love and Money,” and because so many of her stories are about the different forms intimacy can take, about connections made and abysses that open up between friends, lovers, family members, and even strangers, she was a perfect fit for the “love” side. In fact, her participation in the festival was a great preview of how deftly she plays with readers’ expectations on a topic as well-trodden as love, sometimes meeting these expectations, sometimes subverting them, and sometimes going off on a tangent.

I couldn’t wait for her to finish her first novel—which turned out to be One Another—and am delighted that I was able to translate it.

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Reinventing the Novel: Gregor von Rezzori’s Abel and Cain in Review

April 4, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Chris Power

This book is as much a novel as it is a repudiation and critique of novel-writing.

Abel and Cain by Gregor von Rezzori, introduction by Joshua Cohen, translated from the German by David Dollenmayer, Joachim Neugroschel, and Marshall Yarbrough, New York Review Books, 2019

Gregor von Rezzori published Der Tod meines Bruders Abel in 1976, and the book was translated by Joachim Neugroschel into English in 1985. What the back of the book describes as a “prequel” (the term doesn’t quite fit) was published posthumously in German in 2001 as Kain. Das Letzte Manuskript and appears for the first time in English in this edition. The book is structured by four folders that lie in front of the narrator after he enjoys an evening with a prostitute: “Pneuma,” “A,” “B,” and “C.” The contents of the first three folders compose the first book (“Abel”), while “Cain” unveils the last folder (“C”).

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What I Learned: The Benefits of a Poetry Translation Workshop

November 21, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Andreea Scridon

Unlike in life, in translation you can generally decide what you can bear to lose, and you should know that there are multiple methods.

What should a budding translator read? What kinds of critical lenses should he or she apply to the process of translation? Assistant Editor Andreea Scridon shares some insights she gathered from the poetry translation workshop she attended this summer in Norwich, UK.

Every summer, the University of East Anglia in Norwich (home of the first Creative Writing program in the United Kingdom) holds an International Literary Translation & Creative Writing Summer School. This past July, the program was held in partnership with the British Centre for Literary Translation, and I attended the multilingual poetry translation workshop—led by internationally translated poet and writer Fiona Sampson—as an emerging translator of Romanian and Spanish into English. Below I recount musings on the most significant things I learned, which I hope will be of use to those potentially looking to break into literary translation.

A sound starting point in this discussion is the question of considering what to read as a translator. It should go without saying that a literary translator must necessarily be a well-read person in order to be able to make the best possible choices in terms of context, likely more so than anybody else. Having established this as a point of consensus, we discussed, both officially in workshops and amongst ourselves, what exactly a translator should be reading today. In my opinion, the library of a(n) (aspiring) literary translator should include contemporary literature, non-contemporary literature (both classics and obscure-but-lovely older works), and, of course, translations, preferably in as many languages as possible. For instance, examples of each subsection in my current library include Lauren Groff’s Florida and Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart (which are English-language works but useful examples of the spirit of today’s literary scene), Romain Gary’s The Kites and Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don, and Anna Akhmatova’s various poetry collections in translation by Yevgeny Bonver, Richard McKane, and Alexander Cigale, to name only a few. I asked Ian Gwin, an emerging translator of Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian who also participated in the Summer School, for suggestions. He recommends Keith Gessen’s A Terrible Country, noting that Gessen is himself a bilingual and that the theme of the two cultures meeting within the novel may be useful for a translator to consider. Regarding multiple translations, he recommends Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, pinning the more linguistically faithful translation of Eithne Wilkins and Ernest Kaiser against the newer one produced by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike. He also suggests the high-quality recent translation of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz by Michael Hoffman, citing it as a long work that shows an attempt to render a specific style in a second language.

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