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Absinthe
World Literature in Translation: Vol. 23 Unscripted: An Armenian Palimpsest
Edited by Tamar M. Boyadjian
Michigan Publishing Services, 2017

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Absinthe
World Literature in Translation: Vol. 24: World Hellenisms
Ali Bolcakan, Will Stroebel and Peter Vorissis
Michigan Publishing Services, 2018

Absinthe 24 pushes and prods Hellenism beyond its geographic and cultural comfort zones, and sets it tumbling off beyond both internal and external borders of its nation-state, in a wide-ranging but always site-specific and localized itinerary. At each stop along the way, this Greekness finds its plurals—hence the “Hellenisms” of the title. While they present no unified topography, tongue or even topic, these Hellenisms map out the contours of a shared conversation. Today’s Hellenism isn’t limited to Hellas, nor to the Hellenic language. The selected texts in this volume explore Greece from the perspective of visitors, displaced persons, and marginalized people looking in, or, conversely, from the perspective of locals striving to break out.


Absinthe: A Journal of World Literature in Translation publishes foreign literature in English translation, with a particular focus on previously untranslated contemporary fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction by living authors. The magazine has its home in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan and is edited by graduate students in the Department, as well as by occasional guest editors.
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Absinthe
World Literature in Translation: Vol. 25: Barings // Bearings: Contemporary Women's Writing in Catalan
Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall
Michigan Publishing Services, 2018

Edited by Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall, Barings // Bearings collects sixteen pieces of contemporary women’s writing in Catalan together with the brilliantly understated illustrations of the artist Elisa Monsó.

This special issue of Absinthe witnesses a living, Catalan language through the emotional labor of translation. It is also a testament to the thriving worlds of women’s writing in Catalan, with time-travelling fiction by Bel Olid (tr. Bethan Cunningham), regrets on pregnancy sublimated into an airborne taxi ride in a story by Tina Vallès (tr. Jennifer Arnold), Mireia Vidal-Conte’s poetry reflecting on Virginia Woolf’s suicide (tr. María Cristina Hall), a story of revenge on an abusive elderly woman by Anna Maria Villalonga (tr. Natasha Tanna), as well as reflections on war, bookstores, and generational conflict in post-Franco Spain. These often surreal pieces of Catalan fiction are informed by several essays and works of literary memoir, including those by Marta Rojals (tr. Alicia Meier) on the state of the Catalan language and Najat El Hachmi (tr. Julia Sanches) on the conditions of growing up in Catalonia as the daughter of Moroccan parents. These latter pieces resist and explore the contours of multilingualism, highlighting the intra- and interlingual reality of spoken Catalan alongside Spanish and Amazigh. Barings // Bearings invokes the feeling of a people through the work of a new generation of translators.

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Absinthe
World Literature in Translation: Volume 26: Vibrate! Resounding the Frequencies of Africana in Translation
Frieda Ekotto
Michigan Publishing Services, 2020

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Absinthe
World Literature in Translation: Volume 27: Through German: Contemporary Literature in Translation
Lauren Beck
Michigan Publishing Services, 2021
The voices of many countries echo through the selection of contemporary literature featured in Absinthe 27: Through German. Germany, Austria, and Switzerland are all represented in this issue, but so are England, Ghana, Israel, Moldova, Romania, Syria, Turkey, and Ukraine. And while Absinthe 27 does have a distinct international flair, it is not a selection of Migrantenliteratur, a category that fences in writers as foreign rather than German or Austrian or Swiss. Rather, the authors represented are all integral to the German-speaking world and its representation, whether the authors were born there, arrived decades ago, or came recently to perhaps find another home, perhaps pass through. Translated and edited by Lauren Beck, Elisabeth Fertig, Ivan Parra Garcia, Lena Grimm, Özlem Karuç, Michaela Kotziers, Elizabeth Sokol, Silke-Maria Weineck, and Veronica Cook Williamson, Through German presents a fuller picture of what it means to live in the Germanosphere in the 21st century.
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Absinthe
World Literature in Translation: Volume 28: Orphaned of Light: Translating Arab and Arabophone Migration
Graham Liddell
Michigan Publishing Services, 2022

Absinthe 28: Orphaned of Light features contemporary literature of migration translated from and to Arabic. In short stories, creative nonfiction essays, poetry, and selections from novels, a multiplicity of migration experiences is brought to the fore: life in diaspora, undocumented labor, refugeehood, human trafficking, internal displacement, exile. 

 

This issue brings together names familiar to readers of Arabic literature in translation, such as Ghassan Kanafani and Saadi Youssef, with writers making their English-language debuts, such as Dearborn, MI-based Kurdish Iraqi poet Gulala Nouri and Libyan novelist Mohamad Alasfar. Likewise, the issue includes veteran translators Marilyn Booth, Nancy Roberts, and Khaled Mattawa alongside newcomers, several of them graduate students at the University of Michigan.

 

Each piece is accompanied by a translator’s reflection that meditates on the work’s themes as well as the creative process of translation, and the issue’s poetry is presented in a side-by-side Arabic-English format. 

 

Absinthe 28 comes to us at a time when, according to the UN, one in every 78 people on earth is displaced. This collection serves as a reminder that translation and migration are inextricably linked.



 
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