Hello, and welcome to the inaugural edition of Fortnightly Airmail, our new and improved bulletin of all things Asymptote! Every two weeks we’ll appear in your inbox with exclusive content, bringing you diverse perspectives from writers, translators, and critics the world over.
Your Itinerary Today
1. TAKE OFF: Our new podcast episode is now live!
2. IN THE AIR: Join us for our first Twitter event this Sunday
3. POSTCARD ONE: What happens when the author you translate receives death threats? A dispatch by Jennifer Croft
4. FRIENDLY SKIES: Welcome to our new partners, The Guardian and Lithub
5. POSTCARD TWO: Part I of a Q&A with Kaitlin Rees, translator from Vietnamese to English
6. IN TRANSIT: What we're reading
7. PASSAGES: Spotlight on Omar Pérez's Cubanology
8. TOUCHDOWN: Reminder about our $4,500 Translation Contest
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Our latest podcast episode is here! In it, Yardenne Greenspan, our Israel Editor-at-Large, asks: How do we process trauma—and more importantly, how can we heal ourselves? Ranging across genre lines and throughout modern Israeli literary history, from the postwar period to the twenty-first century, Greenspan explores responses from figures as varied as Yonatan Berg, Ron Dahan, and Holocaust survivor Ka-Tzetnik 135633, and turns up some surprising answers. In the second half of the podcast, Assistant Editor Daniel Goulden offers his own investigations into concepts of identity and home, with a careful eye toward the ways these forces shape and inform writers and readers alike. Download the podcast here.
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YOU'RE INVITED: This Sunday, Nov 1, 10am EST, join us for our first Twitter event as we blast Alberto Chimal’s entire twitter novel, The Time Traveller, from our current issue, tweet by 140-character tweet. After all, that's how the original premiered! McLuhanists that we are, we'll be tweeting translator George Henson's English version of Chimal's twitterature with the hashtag #TheTimeTraveller. Subscribe to our Twitter feed and retweet some of these microfictions, so that your friends also get to time-travel. ¡Viva la twitteratura!
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Acclaimed Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk has received a steady stream of hate mail and even death threats after questioning her country’s view of itself as “an open, tolerant country.” As one person put it in a post to Tokarczuk’s Facebook page, “The only justice for these lies is death. Traitor.” Many agree that Tokarczuk’s “betrayal” must be punished; milder comments call for her expulsion from Poland. On a visit to Kraków last week, Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich spoke out in support of Tokarczuk, whom she called a “magnificent writer,” saying, “Some people would happily kick me out of Belarus in just the same way others are now calling for Tokarczuk to be removed from Poland.” While others have also expressed their solidarity with the author, the widespread outrage at Tokarczuk’s remarks has yet to subside.
The remarks in question are taken from a television interview Tokarczuk gave shortly after receiving Poland’s highest literary honor, the Nike, on October 4. She was awarded the Nike for her latest book, Księgi Jakubowe (The Books of Jacob), a monumental novel that delves into the life and times of controversial historical figure Jacob Frank, leader of a heretical Jewish splinter group that ranged the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, seeking basic safety as well as transcendence. Tokarczuk’s twelfth book, considered by many critics to be her masterpiece, The Books of Jacob is also a suspenseful and entertaining novel that remained a national bestseller for months after its November 2014 release.
Read on...
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BIG NEWS: We’re proud to announce a new partnership with The Guardian that will see content from both Asymptote's quarterly and blog appear on their new Guardian books network up to eight times a month, alongside pieces from other partner sites, including Electric Literature, Tin House, and Hazlitt. Of the eleven launch partners The Guardian revealed in their official announcement last week, ours is the only journal dedicated to literary translation and world literature. The first of our stories to be shared was Paul Wilson's new translation of a Bohumil Hrabal short story, "Breaking Through the Drum".
Also, in case you missed it, this month we kicked off another new partnership with Literary Hub, starting with an essay from our current issue by Roland Glasser on translating Congolese author Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s polyphonic “jazz novel” Tram 83.
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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 talked with Ryan Mihaly, our Interview Features Editor, about her translation of Thuyên's "the ship" in our Fall issue.
Nhã Thuyên's poem "the ship" is one continuous sentence, nearly 1,300 words long. What was your approach to translating the poem?
I read the first several lines without a dictionary, to get a sense of the rhythm. Something happens in the body when reading "the ship," something like a beat dropping.
And then, the dictionary. I have an intimate relationship with my dictionary. I spend a lot of time looking up and reading about words. With this text, it's such a brick that I would translate phrase by phrase in between the commas.
I always send Nhã Thuyên a first draft. I highlight the words in the text that are problematic or have a meaning that I can't quite understand. It can even be a word I know very well, but just not how or why it exists where it does in the piece. Then there are other words that are so full of possible meanings that I need help with her intention. She will send back the document with comments in the margins. I want to make a book out of these margin comments alone, out of what we talk about when we talk about words.
I was wondering about the word "spleen" from this poem. Is it a reference to Baudelaire?
Yeah! Originally I had translated it as many words: depression/melancholy/moroseness/weariness/pall/tedium . . . the slashes can go on for a while in a first draft. Then she directed me to Baudelaire. She had this word in mind when she wrote it in Vietnamese. The literal Vietnamese construction of the phrase "ngao ngán" is "depressed clam" or "bored clam."
Is that a Vietnamese idiom?
I'm not sure. It could also just be the word that is used to talk about boredom and dark feelings. If you put a rising tone on the first part "ngao", the word for clam, it becomes the word for dull and stupid. One of the things I love most about Vietnamese is that each word could have up to five look-alikes with only subtle tonal differences. Before I wouldn't have thought that clams and ennui were related at all, and now, because the language puts them together, I can see some relationship there. I translated this poem over a year ago. Nhã Thuyên had read Paris Spleen by Baudelaire, and I hadn't at the time. I read it after I translated the poem, when I was back in New York and could find the book. I realized that the voice in "the ship" and of Paris Spleen share something. In both, there's a sense of being tormented and unemotional, naked but not vulnerable.
Part Two of this interview will appear in the next Fortnightly Airmail.
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David Maclean, Marketing Manager:
Valeria Luiselli's The Story of My Teeth, translated by Christine MacSweeney, is a picaresque novel for the 21st century: here is Swift in the age of selfies, or perhaps it's Joyce keeping up with the Kardashians. Uproariously funny and surreal, the novel climaxes with a Baudrillardian farce in which the protagonist wanders the streets of Mexico City, smiling at passersby with Marilyn Monroe's teeth installed in his mouth. Luiselli proves herself a vanguard of metamodernism—if indeed it can be constrained by the limitations of such distinctions. |
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Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor:
Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street by Heda Margolius Kovály, in Alex Zucker's zippy translation, engages the reader as much through its backstory as it does through the murder mystery at its center. Kovály is best known for her memoir about surviving the years of Czechoslovak repression, and this manuscript was only brought to light after her death. An accomplished translator, Kovály's translations of Raymond Chandler clearly inform the way she wrote Innocence. The story of several murders in Prague revolves around a movie theater and the ushers who work there. It is a fine translation and breathless page-turner. |
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Julia Leverone, Assistant Editor:
The Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante, in particular The Story of the Lost Child, have told me things about my life that I have been neglecting in the recesses of my mind—notably through the characteristically obvious prose of the series, in which understanding of human interaction is exquisitely fine and described in an impeccably accessible, humorous and rapturous way. The progression of Lenuccia's life is telling and artfully constructed, a story as much for Italy in the 70s as for us all. |
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Luisa Zielinski, Writers on Writers Editor:
Lorem Ipsum is my bugbear. Well, one of them. But it's the one that tells me that I haven't done my work, while someone else–a typesetter or designer, usually–has fulfilled their part of the bargain. But now I've made my peace with it. That is entirely thanks to Nick Richardson's short essay Translating Lorem Ipsum on the London Review of Books Blog. It has shown me the essential beauty and truth inherent to that most ubiquitous (and accusatory!) of placeholders. It begins, in translation: "(So)rrow itself, let it be sorrow; let him love it; let him pursue it..." Which, incidentally, is exactly how I feel about writing. |
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Rosie Clarke, Marketing Manager:
Having just finished Indonesian novelist Eka Kurniawan's modern epic Beauty is a Wound, I'm currently devouring Marlon James's Man Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, which is reminiscent of Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, although much bloodier, more chilling, and uniquely Jamaican. In between readings, I'm educating myself with Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, which leaves me shaking with tears and anger in equal measure. |
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Sam Carter, Assistant Managing Editor:
Although Severo Sarduy might be most famous for his novels and poetry, his collection of radio plays, Para la voz, which was translated into English by Philip Barnard as For Voice in 1985, contains some of the Cuban writer's most engaging reflections on identity and language. Recordings of performances are hard to find, but reading them on your own—as a way to exercise your sonic imagination—is well worth the trouble of tracking down a copy of the text. |
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Omar Pérez's Cubanology, translated by Kristin Dykstra and excerpted in our July 2011 issue, is a favorite of mine, thrilling, shaggy, and profound: the freedom of association on display, the persistent intertexuality of Pérez's musings, his fraught forays into globalized areas of art and commerce, all coalesce into a document that is part diary, part manifesto, part theory, part poem. Here we see the essayist and translator as he goes about his day in Havana: walking his son to school, catching up with his neighbors, performing small chores around the house, working on translations, meeting with fellow writers, and reading, tirelessly reading.
There's a beautifully liberated, seemingly tossed-off feeling to Pérez's text, an expansiveness and playfulness that make repeated readings a true pleasure. Pérez writes, "The poet acts as pilot, but purely for drifting." Whether he stays on course, or is merely set adrift, I, for one, would follow this pilot anywhere.
—Matthew Phipps, Communications Manager
I organize my living like a martial arts show: exercises, long walks, races, meditations, koans (with salesclerks and in markets), readings for the devout: the Koran and the Odyssey; industrial arts, sweeping, collecting pieces of driftwood, a humble servant. Today, for example, I recover six tarred pieces at the coast: tree trunk, board, plank, strip, beam, and tie. As Robinson noticed: all things exist on the island; the hard part is carrying them around. Wheelbarrow. Sometimes buying the thing. Market. Charles III: consumes as if the world were going to end. Maybe it's true; apocalypses at three to the kilo, four confused layers of so much crap: little plastic Christmas trees, fake Chinese porcelain, and very few tools.
Last night we watched Cinderella Man, the story of James Braddock, Irish gladiator: Russell Crowe in the perennial role of the hopeless centurion, stevedore and duende, derelict exemplar, hope of the poor d'esprit: heavyweight with beautiful mind. Greek in the Irish sea the ageless voice: Proletariat of all the nations: off to your labor! Get into the ring, onto the dock, out there in the art world.
Today I re-encountered Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. I read the history of Geronimo, "the last Apache chief," again. On November 3 1883, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that "every American Indian is, by birth, alien and dependent." Based on this logic, we're all American Indians.
Last Friday a small bird got into the house; apparently a songbird escaped from its cubicle. It doesn't know what to do with freedom; I think it finally went back to its apartment. Havana prepares for its next birthday: 486, and there's a storm of habaneras on the radio and an irradiation of stormy habaneras on the streets. There are rumbas that are boleros.
Read the rest of Omar Pérez's Cubanology here, and visit our Archive for more such treasures.
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We hope you've enjoyed our first Fortnightly Airmail. Remember, there are many ways to connect with Asymptote! Besides immersing yourself in our latest quarterly issue, you can also visit our blog, listen to our latest podcast, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter! |
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| Are you an emerging translator? Be sure to check out our contest, Close Approximations, awarding $4,500 in three categories (fiction, poetry, and—a new genre this year— nonfiction) and judged by acclaimed translators Michael Hofmann, Ottilie Mulzet, and Margaret Jull Costa. The deadline is December 15—we look forward to reading your work! |
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Warmly,
Your friends at Asymptote |
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