Yismake worku biography of michael

  • For this week's Translation Tuesday,

    • The Lost Spell

    Didimos Dore has turned himself into a dog. Unable to remember the spell to turn him back, he must journey home to Addis Ababa; to a wife and children who suspect nothing of his dabbling in the occult.

    The proud, respectable businessman tries to keep himself at the centre of his world, despite his sudden lowly status. As he scampers fearfully through bustling towns and awe inspiring landscapes, he sees Ethiopian history and politics from a new perspective. With a mixture of self-importance and compassion, Dore sees his literal dehumanisation echoed in the state of the nation around him. Yet through a series of hapless, sometimes funny schemes, he must seek out human kindness to survive.

    Yismake Worku is an innovative, bestselling Ethiopian novelist. He was acclaimed for his courageous and keen observation of the 2012 political scene in the Amharic original. The Lost Spell weaves the legends of Ethiopia into a contemporary cautionary tale about the transformative power of words.

    Bethlehem Attfield is an Amharic-English literary translator, born in Addis Ababa. She specialises in translating contemporary Ethiopian fiction. She founded the Ethiopian Translators Network and hosts the YouTube podcast Journey To Ethiopia with Story. She is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD at Birmingham University.

  • Yismake Worku, 22 years old

    • For this week’s Translation Tuesday, visionary novelist Yismake Worku adopts fantasy and satire as probing social commentary in this excerpt from The Lost Spell. While researching a book of spells, a wealthy man transforms himself into a dog. We follow the (now) canine protagonist as he journeys to Addis Ababa, and through his eyes we witness the sublime beauty of the Ethiopian landscape. The story of one man’s literal dehumanization allegorizes the abasement our narrator witnesses around him as he simultaneously lauds and laments his country. Through the narrator’s unique position as both subjective participant and objective bystander, Worku presents a fly-on-the-wall (or a dog-on-the-road) view of contemporary Ethiopia that is at once a critique and a bittersweet love letter.

    It has been a horrible few days. I feel like some life has been drained from my short dog existence. If I hadn’t managed to drag myself into the middle of a corn farm, I would have been picked apart by merciless scavenging birds.

    The cause of my pitiful circumstances was an auto-rickshaw accident. If the God of dogs and all creation hadn’t spared me, I would have departed my dog life by now. The rickshaw didn’t hit me full on; it knocked me on my left rear, bending me like a rubber and causing me to plunge into a drain. An unseasonal rain had been pouring down all evening. So, the flood could have carried an elephant, let alone a battered dog. It hauled me along the garbage of Shashemene. Banging me around with every object it carried along, the flood finally threw me into a small river. The river in turn dragged me through shrubs, sometimes battering me against rocks, and deposited me near a cornfield.  

    I spent the night looking like a chick covered in mud. I couldn’t get up in the morning, so I spent the whole day baking in the sun. Towards the evening I dragged myself with all my strength and collapsed in the cornfield.

    I have no idea how many days I had spent in the cornfield.

  • Title: The Lost Spell Item

    • Translating African Realities with Indigenous Perspectives and Digital Archives

    By Bethlehem Attfield

    Bethlehem Attfield discusses her PhD research on Amharic literature, the silencing of African knowledge, and the potential of AI in preserving and promoting African languages and culture.

    In March 2024, I came across the call for papers for the African Studies Association of UK (ASAUK) conference which was to be held at Oxford Brookes University in late August.  As I skimmed through the call, the panel on ‘Digital Humanities and Translation in Africa: Bridging the Past and Future’ particularly inspired me to explore how my current PhD research at the University of Birmingham could effectively be linked with digital humanities.  My PhD research is about translating African language literature with a particular focus on Amharic contemporary fiction. Amharic is the official working language of Ethiopia. It has an indigenous writing system which has been used to write Ge’ez – Ethiopian classical language since late antiquities.

    This blog post is a summary of the paper I prepared to present at this panel.

    African realities and culture have often been misinterpreted and will continue to do so if colonial and ethnocentric perspectives are used. As long as outlooks that prioritise Anglo-American socioeconomic interests continue to dominate, the rich diversity and complexity of African societies will remain misunderstood.  If this trend continues, there is a high chance that Artificial Intelligence (AI) language models will be created with the same Eurocentric bias, thus continuing the trend of distorting and misrepresenting African history, society, knowledge and culture.

    The Historical Silencing of African Culture   

    There is a bias in the field of Translation Studies towards using interlingual translation (or translation between languages) and looking at high culture at the expense of popular and informal culture.

  • He was acclaimed for his

    • We are coming up to halfway through the year, which is a pretty good time to take stock. For various reasons I haven’t read as much as I usually would (partly through getting stricter at abandoning books, partly through taking more time), but let’s have a look anyway. I found this set of questions on Nina Allan’s blog; here are my answers:

    Best book you’ve read so far in 2022. I would have to say Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung (tr. Anton Hur), a story collection which had me from the first page to the last. Chung goes straight on to my list of must-read authors.

    Best sequel you’ve read so far in 2022. Well, Marseillaise My Way by Darina Al Joundi (tr. Helen Vassallo) is the only actual sequel I’ve read this year. It’s very good, but also kind of a default answer to this question. Perhaps I could add J.O. Morgan’s second novel, Appliance. This is not a sequel to Pupa, but it is definitely a companion piece aesthetically. I will be reviewing Appliance for Strange Horizons, but I can tell you now that it’s excellent.

    Most anticipated release for the second half of the year. The first book that comes to mind is Life Ceremony, the forthcoming story collection by another of my must-read authors, Sayaka Murata (tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori). I also can’t leave out Malarkoi, Alex Pheby’s sequel to the wonderful Mordew – sure to be a treat.

    Biggest disappointment. I’m chary of calling books disappointments these days, because I know from personal experience that it can be that you’ve just caught a book at the wrong time. So I will say that I’d been looking forward to reading Damon Galgut for the first time, and I was disappointed that I didn’t click with In a Strange Room. Maybe another book, another time. 

    Biggest surprise. I’m going to say Homelands by Chitra Ramaswamy – not because I didn’t expect to like it (I did), but because it was not on my radar at all until I found it in the publisher’s