Hello! We’re back in your inbox with another edition of Fortnightly Airmail, the newsletter that brings you updates on all of the latest goings-on at Asymptote and projects both treasured and new.

Your Itinerary Today

1. TAKE OFF: Announcing our 2015 Pushcart nominations
2. NAVIGATION GUIDE: Our first Asymptote guide for educators is released. Also: Ask a Translator, a new column by Daniel Hahn
3. POSTCARD ONE: Rajiv Mohabir translates Lalbihari Sharma (a PEN/Heim exclusive)
4. IN THE AIR: Spotlight on "The House That My Father Built (Once Upon a Time)" by Sadik Kwaish Alfraji
5. POSTCARD TWO: Part II of an interview with translator Kaitlin Rees
6. PASSAGES: An excerpt from Zhou Sivan's Zero Copula
7. TOUCHDOWN: Call for artists and a reminder about our Translation Contest (deadline: December 15)

In a new feature, we're partnering with PEN to offer you exclusive previews of work by the 2015 winners of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, which promotes the publication and reception of world literature in English. This year, sixteen winners were awarded grants to fund their translation projects.

Today we're highlighting an excerpt from Rajiv Mohabir's translation of Lalbihari Sharma's Holi Songs of Demerara, a 1916 collection of folksongs dealing with love, loss, and longing in the sugarcane fields of Guyana. For more on the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, please visit the PEN website. To read original poetry by Mohabir, navigate over to our July 2015 issue.

Chautal

I can’t stay inside, take me

with you, Mohan. Love, tell me,

“Come with me.” I’m shameless

for you, my life. Now love

finds you, listen son of Yashomati.

Without you I can’t tell

dawn from dusk, family from foe,

mother from father, I’ve lost everything.

Love once faceted doesn’t abate;

my eyes have become jewels.

Hearing Radha’s voice,

Nanda’s beloved son laughs.

         Lalbihari says,

“The lotus face can’t be forgotten,

no matter how you try.”

Chaupai

In this manner five years pass

     contracted to steady woe. With a ticket,

the heart, like a chitor bird,

    cries out to the moon.

Such mirth! Some act as sadhus,

     some fakirs, wildly prancing

all around, without any idea

     of what comes next.          

Kaitlin Rees is a translator and poet from New York who lives in Hanoi. She has written a self-published book of poetry, Language Without Color (2014), and co-edits AJAR, a bilingual literary and art journal based in Hanoi, with Nhã Thuyên. Her translation of Nhã Thuyên’s book, words breathe, creatures of elsewhere, is forthcoming from Vagabond Press (2015).

Kaitlin recently spoke with Ryan Mihaly, Blog Editor, about her translation of Thuyên’s “the ship” for our October 2015 issue. Part I of this interview appeared in the previous Fortnightly Airmail.

You published a book of poetry, Language Without Color. How does your work as a translator influence your own writing?

I think my English has been steadily changing since I started learning Vietnamese. A friend read a poem I published in a different book and his comment was that I sounded like a child. He meant it as a compliment, like a sophisticated child. But I do feel in my own writing, even in my own speaking, this kind of internal cracking.

Sometimes, I feel like I don't know whose language I am speaking, especially after spending so much time translating Nhã Thuyên’s book. It is really disorienting to hear someone else's language come from your mouth involuntarily. And I love it—I want to be infected like that. I think the English language needs more infections.

Translation is what makes the language grow and change—it's what pushes the language and the literature forward.

I have been thinking about appropriation lately, too. I wonder about the ways a language shifts, how it grows, how new words are born and other words die away. When does it start to feel uncomfortable? You can't really talk about translation without talking about power too, right?

At what point do you think that translation feels like appropriation? English is, no doubt, one of the most dominant languages in the world; it can erase other languages. 

To clarify, I don't think translation itself is wrong at all. Translation is a beautiful, albeit occasionally painful, experience for me. I think it is absolutely necessary. The world needs more good translators of literature. I want to say "minor literature" here but also I don't want to use this term because I'm still working out exactly what "minor" means. I think we need to hear from all languages spoken in the world, not just those with cultural and economic power. That said, it is wonderful to have a global language, to be able to erase borders, to talk and write across continents, to learn and grow.

Your work Fragments of an Infinite Dictionary will be on display in December in Hungary. You wanted to learn Hungarian words without resorting to a dictionary. How did this play out?

I started Fragments of an Infinite Dictionary in Zalaegerszeg, Hungary as part of a one-month residency with D'Clinic Studios. The core of it is the dictionary. I like the form of the dictionary as an endless source of knowledge and poetry, even fortune-telling, and I am interested in the dictionary as the site of relationships, a framework for how two strangers come to know each other, even through a single word. In Zalaegerszeg, I collected a list of simple Hungarian words that people were obliged to teach me in the street, or while I drank coffee, or bought useless things, or got drunk watching Transylvanian dance. And then I asked other Hungarians to pick one word from that list for us to talk about. I asked for a definition and then asked for one memory of this word. I think we reveal so much about our personal lives and worlds and perceptions when we speak into our words, and I think there is so much poetry there if we are listening to each other.

I was interested in meeting English from a greater distance. I want to be more foreign in my language, to know it better that way. By having conversations with non-native English speakers about Hungarian words, language—both theirs and mine—became somehow new. I felt that. We both walked away with something new in our mouths, even if the new thing was our own language.

Asymptote contributor Zhou Sivan's new e-chapboook, Zero Copula, has landed! We're thrilled to present the following poem from his debut collection. (If you're piqued, download the e-book for free here, or check out the poems we included in our Mythology-themed English Poetry Feature here.) 

An Ecology of World Literature, Or Not

Where the origina tabernaca was Bengali cows say humba.

They wear opinions like ruby red sea-slippers on dialectical

sticks chanting for the slain goats of the Galapagos mandala

go! and they protest and they puff no more vakrokti no more

alamkara since dogs which eat snow become polite as snow.

“In moo humba opinion, I am not a bum. I am a humbug.”

Sound poetry melts in the watershed of time. Mr. Winstedt,

first tell me, how did duck eggs come to mean rolling stones

and do wild grass and chalk burn in the belly of crocodiles?

Sirna ilang kertaning bumi and all I am left with is an orange

stool like the ark of incontinence and fishermen of the altar

incensed about origami and divine upholstery. Blue-footed

boobies pluck showbread off my flat key. Frisson is the gate

to everything evil. Pagar makan padi aka “the fence devours

the crop” is embraced by the dank politicians of the sphere.

Some cows speak more literally than others, and others are

born more literally than others. But just because you moo,

doesn’t mean that others have to moo like you too. Hover

above the fair world of the hovel and deep consanguinity.

Plain speech is not literal speech but also the love of Babel.

Zhou Sivan is author of two chapbooks, Zero Copula (Delete Press, 2015) and Sea Hypocrisy (forthcoming from Doublecross Press and Projective Industries, 2016). Recent poems have appeared in Lana Turner and Almost Island.