For this week’s Sunday Read we present to you a delicious platter served by Asymptote,
the literary translation journal which took home the London Book Fair’s International Translation Initiative Award in April this year.
Their July issue, the first since winning the award, packs a mighty punch in terms of world literature. It features fiction, poetry, essays, visuals and interviews by a wide range of internationally acclaimed authors, including brand new writing from 2014 Nobel Laureaute Patrick Modiano. Over thirty countries are represented in their “Parallel Worlds” issue which is available for free online.
We have selected a few of our personal highlights from the Summer edition of Assymptote to offer you some literary warmth as winter digs it’s claws even deeper here in the southern hemisphere.
Enjoy!
Fiction
Paris Nocturne
An excerpt – translated from the French by Phoebe Weston-Evans
Patrick ModianoI was having trouble sleeping. I was tempted to go and ask the pharmacist for one of the midnight-blue vials of ether I knew so well. But I stopped myself in time. It wasn’t the moment to give in. I had to remain as lucid as possible. During those sleepless nights, what I regretted most was having left all my books in my room on Rue de la Voie-Verte. There weren’t many bookshops in the area. I walked towards l’Étoile to find one. I bought some detective novels and an old second-hand book, the title of which intrigued me: The Wonders of the Heavens. To my great surprise, I couldn’t bring myself to read detective novels anymore. But hardly had I opened The Wonders of the Heavens, which bore on its first page the words ‘Night reading’, than I realised just how much this book was going to mean to me. Nebula. The Milky Way. The Sidereal World. The Northern Constellations. The Zodiac, Distant Universes …
Poetry
Letter to My Friends Overseas
Translated from the French by André Naffis-Sahely
Abdellatif LaâbiFriends
you’ve become
one of those beacons of light
who help to defend me
from the forceps of the night
You find your way to me
through the mercy of the poem
and I’ll see you again
beyond the barbed wire of exile
in a stillborn continent
that never surges out of the sea or the sky
nor is fashioned out of clay
but by the hands and the fervour
of voices that plead and jump out of the window
to plunge into the swell of possibilities
A human continent
that nurses the preamble
of all the sleeping or reawakening gifts
inside us all
which despite the hurdles of baseness
work their way through our flesh
and our consciences
Non-fiction
Simple Language, Name
translated from the Spanish by Margaret Carson
Sergio ChejfecThough they may use lengthy sentences, and may have a weakness for complex thoughts or stylistic displays, privately all writers dream of wielding a simple language. Not always to put it into practice, that is, to write in it and show it off, but instead as an ideal of verbal expression that encloses a more elemental or compressed truth, a transparency, linked to each one’s past, even when it is difficult to represent. That rhetorical heritage at times approaches a tautological mechanism devised by memory, as if each object or idea carried into writing were nothing more than its isolated name. A writer knows that what is written is meant to be understood, but also that it contains a facet of intimate correspondence with his or her past, which is often uncontrollable.
Special Feature
A Land Made of Words
Fakhri Saleh on Palestinian WritersIn Memory of Mahmoud Darwish
The Palestinian catastrophe lies at the heart of many Palestinian writers’ oeuvres. Through a variety of literary forms and genres, they have attempted to show the world the looming horrors of a people dispossessed, exiled, and crippled. In particular, the poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) and the novelists Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972), Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1920-1994), and Emile Habiby (1921-1996) stand out by virtue of the uniquely innovative literary styles through which they capture the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe): the tragedy of a people who lost their land.
Interview
An interview with Yuko Otomo
Exophonic writers are given a rare opportunity to mirror ourselves in a multi-language identity.
…
In many of your poems there is what I would call a narrative sense of a female who has no words. This wordlessness or refusal to put into words some essential idea of art is central to your approach. Can you elaborate on the role of gender in your poetry?
The Japanese culture embraces its feminine qualities unusually well, compared to most other cultures in the world. The sun was a woman in our Genesis tale. The Japanese literature that flourished in the classical era with feminine language carries its tradition to now. The tea ceremony and flower arrangement are considered human acts, not just for women, with grand masters usually being men. I come from a society with a unique gender consciousness, so I never felt uneasy about my sexuality. But I try not to be too conscious of it since I see myself as a woman/human, instead of just a woman.
Book details
- A Trace of Malice by Patrick Modiano
EAN: 9780856281631
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- Villa Triste by Patrick Modiano
EAN: 9780575022348
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- Suspended Sentences by Patrick Modiano
EAN: 9780300198058
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- The Bottom of the Jar by Abdellatif Laabi
EAN: 9781935744603
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- My Two Worlds by Sergio Chejfec
EAN: 9781934824283
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- Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems by Mahmoud Darwish
EAN: 9780520273030
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- Study by Yuko Otomo
EAN: 9781937027186
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