Place: Iran

Announcing Our December Book Club Selection: In Case of Emergency by Mahsa Mohebali

December 30, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

In Case of Emergency displays a gift for description and a masterful knack for challenging the expectations of structure.

What’s more pressing than a natural disaster? An opium addiction. The titular “emergency” in Mahsa Mohebali’s award-winning novel refers simultaneously to shuddering Tehran and the pressing urge of its protagonist, Shadi. In vernacular as electric as it is poetic, In Case of Emergency paints a mad portrait of Iran and its electrifying counterculture, as we follow the brilliantly acerbic Shadi on dissolving boundaries of need and want, of gender, of revolution. The Asymptote Book Club is proud to select this defining text as our last selection of 2021.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.  

In Case of Emergency by Mahsa Mohebali, translated from the Farsi by Mariam Rahmani, The Feminist Press, 2021

Shadi wakes up to a brutal comedown in her family’s Tehran home. The earth’s been “dancing Bandari”—shimmying, stamping, and shaking, all night, which she actually wouldn’t have minded so much if it weren’t for her mother’s screaming “ten times for each tremor: How many screams does that make?” After a night of earthquakes that show no sign of stopping, her family is preparing for an exodus, but Shadi only has two opium balls left, and that won’t do in the middle of a crisis—or any other day. So she, the well-off daughter of a philandering university professor and a revolutionary-turned-housewife who absentmindedly clicks digital prayer beads, dons masculine clothing, setting off through the upended streets of Tehran to find her next fix.

Shadi, like many of her peers who grew up in post-revolutionary Iran—the majority of the population—is well-educated, jobless, and disillusioned with the repressive regime that hasn’t delivered on its promises. Mahsa Mohebali’s In Case of Emergency (“Don’t Worry” is closer to the Farsi title) was released just one year before the thirtieth anniversary of the Iranian Revolution, and its fictional earthquake, as well as the ensuing chaos and the repeated refrain of the city’s hardened youth—“Everybody relax. This city is ours”—was said to have foreshadowed the real-life Green Movement protests soon to come. Shadi herself, however, is a far cry from either the revolutionaries of her mother’s generation or the protestors of her own: “Arash’s dumb-ass logic is spreading like a breed of Barbapapa,” she laments. “Was the earth fractured or just these idiots’ skulls? This city is ours—I’d really like to know what that actually means.”

Though her profile—including the opium addiction—matches many of her country’s youth, it isn’t often represented in Irani literature. This is due, on one hand, to political censorship. The original version of the novel made it to press with only limited edits, and won the prestigious Houshang Golshiri Award—before being banned on and off. Mohebali is also, as of this writing, prohibited from public speaking. However, social censorship is also at play; Shadi speaks the crass, cosmopolitan slang of the streets, not the lyrical Farsi of the page. Globally, in all four cardinal directions, the expansion of a literary establishment to include vernacular languages and subculture has been characterized by both resistance and fascination; this would be one such catalytic work.  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Five Poems from The Book of Absence by Alireza Roshan

July 13, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Erfan Mojib and Gary Gach

You did to me / what black mulberries / do to fingertips

This week’s Translation Tuesday features a haunting sequence of short poems by the Tehran-born Alireza Roshan. Known widely as “a poet without a book,” Roshan began writing these brief poems on the Internet around 2008, and subsequently gained a popular readership for his evocative verses. For that reason, we may think of these poems as subsisting on a specific cultural moment when the tweet started to be conceived as a unit of thought. On the other hand, these poems can also be said to draw on the tradition of the haiku form that has made its way through world poetics. In Gary Gach and Erfan Mojib’s translation, these poems from The Book of Absence (where Roshan’s poems were eventually collected) flicker dramatically into existence and—in their quick apprehension of a strange image—dissipate, only to have their absence linger in the mind of the reader.

You did to me
what black mulberries
do to fingertips

*

No matter how many windows
I open—darkness
won’t leave my home

*

Solitude
is an invisible thread
which begins from the tip of your toe
encircles the earth
then reaches your heel READ MORE…

The Indeterminacy of the Human: An Interview with Rainer Hanshe of Contra Mundum Press

March 31, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Rachel Allen

. . . we say to read for difference, for dissonance; read not to identify, or to sympathize, but from a principle of fascination.

Contra Mundum is a New York-based independent publishing house expressly committed to Modernist work and principles. Its catalog includes the dramatic writings and theatre criticism of Robert Musil; Celan’s posthumous prose as translated by Pierre Joris; two “pre-heteronymic” works from Pessoa; the generously-illustrated Letters of Otto Dix; and a late film script from Marguerite Duras. Preference is given texts with limited circulation, the under-translated and outré in particular. 

In 2012, for instance, Contra Mundum published Marginalia on Casanova, Tim Wilkinson’s rendering of Volume 1 in Miklós Szentkuthy’s cathedral-commentary-catalogus rerum, St. Orpheus Breviary. Contra Mundum is now five books into its tremendous project, bringing into English an immense cosmophagic-and-collapsing body of prose from a modernist still known as the “sacred monster” of Hungarian letters. In addition to works from the Breviary, Contra Mundum has so far contributed translations of Prae and Toward the One & Only Metaphor (also translated by Wilkinson, who died in October of 2020) and Chapter on Love (translated by Erika Mihálycsa, who will continue as translator for subsequent Szentkuthy works). That CMP should be the publisher to finally give Anglophone readers an adequate Szentkuthy is fitting: press and author share an understanding of zeitgeists alive—in art, in language—across history, unthreatened by chronology or multilingualism. Contra Mundum too experiences its periodic connection to modernism(s) without—or with different—temporal allegiances. In addition to Musil and Pessoa, CMP has published not only Baudelaire and Wordsworth and the Ghérasim Luca of Mary Ann Caws, but also Iceberg Slim, a new Gilgamesh (Stuart Kendall’s), Ahmad Shamlou, Maura Del Serra, and the collected prose of Robert Kelly. Many texts converge around performance, whether onstage, on screens, or in person(ae): CMP has published Elio Petri, Richard Foreman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, Rédoine Faïd, and Carmelo Bene. Adjacent to this swirl of codexical text and idea is Hyperion, CMP’s in-house and aptly subtitled journal: On the Future of Aesthetics.

Rainer J. Hanshe is the founder, editor, and publisher of Contra Mundum Press, as well as the author of two CMP titles, Shattering the Muses and The Abdication, and the translator of its three works by Baudelaire. We spoke recently about the nature of (his) modernism and its role in contemporary literature. Deviation, ambition, and heteroglossia were our major subthemes.

Rachel Allen (RA): How does Contra Mundum understand “modernism”? How do you recognize modernist work when you encounter it? (Is modernism limited, temporally? Geographically? Relationally? Formally? To whom is it available to be modernist?)

Rainer Hanshe (RJH): Although Modernism does occur within a specific epochal moment, I don’t see it as bound to that cluster of time, nor do I see it in absolute or purist terms. There is no kind of totemic Modernism with a unified set of precepts that every modernist abides by. Any kind of doctrinaire, sectarian, or dogmatic form of something cannot be abided. We are advancing modernism more as a kind of mobile act or event, like a type of living roving machine (not in a mechanistic sense but as a generative force) or combustion furnace and monster of energy. It is a question of extracting from any period, any event, any moment, its active, productive elements, like taking an arrow shot by Nature, picking it up where it has fallen, and shooting it in new directions, as Deleuze said of Nietzsche.

In that way, art is no different from science in terms of advancements—once a certain insight or knowledge has been developed, there is no reason to abandon it, let alone restrict it to its original moment. Modernism (let’s avoid the term neo-Modernism) is to us protean and metamorphic, an open, indeterminate constellation. Beyond seeing it solely as a specific movement in time then, consider its principal elements as if they were discoveries: a conscious break with tradition (abandoning outmoded elements of classicism); a rejection of historicism and the grand narratives of Western metaphysics, not to speak of its morals and values; the displacement of reason as a ruling force (the curse of the Enlightenment) and fostering in its stead a chiasmic fusion of the rational and the irrational; an abandonment of bankrupt forms of art, such as naturalism and realism (and so representation), which different scientific developments essentially undermined, and Enlightenment-type encyclopaedic projects of totality; related to consciousness and new conceptions of the self and the indeterminacy of the human: interior monologues; stream of consciousness; perspectivalist viewpoints; fracturedness, fragmentation, heteroglossic language, en plus.

It is a literature of incommensurabilities, of a dynamism in signification, of a rejection of absolute truths, of an embracing of dissonance. A literature that is aware of language’s limits, of its fissures, of its cul-de-sacs and cracks, and it vigorously pursues such. Flaubert’s book about nothing; Mallarme’s Le Livre; Beckett’s search for a literature of the unword; et cetera. Modernism understands language as Bakhtin spoke of it: a dynamic entity consisting of an interplay between centripetal and centrifugal discursive forces. The combustive furnace. Heteroglossia. An amalgam of linguistic registers. The Tower of Babel is not a curse. READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Persepolis

February 17, 2021  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Sarah Moore and Xiao Yue Shan

Persepolis stands out for being able to narrate the political through this fierce character.

“Although this film is universal, I wish to dedicate the prize to all Iranians,” spoke Marjane Satrapi as she accepted the Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival for Persepolis. Adapted from her bestselling graphic novel of the same name, Persepolis is the autobiographical story of young Marjane as she comes of age against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution. Although she left Iran for Europe as a teenager (briefly returning to Tehran at the age of nineteen) and has lived in France since 1993, her words clarify Iran’s continual importance to her, as well as its enduring presence throughout her work. Written in French, Persepolis is both a memoir about the challenges of growing up and finding an identity and a fierce, intelligent, and nuanced depiction of Iran following the 1979 Revolution. It is at once enlightening, wise, funny, horrific, melancholy, and profound. In the following conversation, Blog Editors Xiao Yue Shan and Sarah Moore consider this groundbreaking graphic novel, which has sold more than two million copies worldwide, and its 2007 film adaptation. 

Sarah Moore (SM): Interestingly, Marjane Satrapi co-directed and co-wrote the film, so in Persepolis we can see how the author wanted to transform the drawings to animation. Satrapi recreates her own work, and she does so in a way that is loyal to the graphic novel, whilst clearly making use of what a new form can offer. Marjane is not a typical heroine. She is bold, honest, relatable, and she is blunt about the uncertainties she experienced growing up. The film transfers her to the screen with remarkable success, without losing any of her spark, humour, or complexity; Persepolis stands out for being able to narrate the political through this fierce character. It is the story of Iranian politics and life, as well as the story of a girl traversing through adolescence. Satrapi has often stated that one individual is the only universal thing—so whilst we witness the Iranian Revolution, the killing of political prisoners, and the Iran-Iraq War, we also follow Marjane as she dreams of being a prophet, goes through puberty, falls in love, has her heart broken, and suffers depression. I think Persepolis is rare in being able to move so much of the atmosphere and energy of a text into film, and one that genuinely works as a cinematic narrative as well. Of course, the plot is condensed, especially during Marjane’s time in Vienna. But the subtlety of emotion and the fullness of the characters carry through to the film, as well as the blend of humour and tragedy. What did you think of the move from book to film in a general sense?

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): There is something more automatic in the transition between graphic novel to film; in textual adaptation, a director must enforce their own visions in a discrete—albeit secondary—architecture, but the graphic novel has an established visual vocabulary. It is a transition that is made with minimal sacrifice. Still, I think there is a certain magic that is rendered between the pages of a graphic novel, in which two frames are juxtaposed by not the logic of movement or chronology, but mimics instead how a scene is pieced together in the mind—with interrupting segments of memory, reference, and unconscious categorization. The rationale of film narrative has to preserve a certain logic: the sense that something is always coming up next, much more resembling the way that biography proceeds—in the distinct knowing that a life continues.

In an interview published in Fourth Genre, Marjane Satrapi says: “When you watch a picture, a movie, you are passive. Everything is coming to you. When you are reading comics, between one frame to the other—what is happening, you have to imagine it yourself . . . It is the only medium that uses the images in this way.”

persepolis 1 READ MORE…

An Architect of Words: Mahmoud Rezvani on the Decade-long Translation of Golestan

January 18, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Siavash Saadlou

All we can do is do a better job translating our poets instead of picking on others for what a poor job they might have done in the past.

For all its punishing workload, translation can be a thankless task, and translators are often the unsung heroes. This is especially true when it comes to breathing fresh air into a work of medieval literature wherein the translator perseveres with a bygone zeitgeist that challenges his artistic and literary prowess alike. To say that writing and translation are inextricably linked is to state the obvious. Sometimes, however, the translator needs to reexamine the history through the lens of literature and vice versa. The most ingenious translators aren’t the ones who faithfully rewrite the original work in the target language, but those who creatively reimagine it as well. In doing so, they might have to gingerly zigzag their way through a stilted language drenched in obsolete words that nevertheless communicate timeless ideas. In one such case, Mahmoud Rezvani, an Iranian scholar, teacher, and literary translator, has been able to do exactly that—bringing Sa’di’s Golestan, a work of classic Persian literature, to life in all its austere grandeur by preserving the rhyme in the poems and the musicality in the rhymed prose in ways never done before.   

Abu-Muhammad Muslih al-Din bin Abdalah Shirazi, better known as Sa’di, was a thirteenth century Persian poet whose plangent poetry and compassion for humanity once received effusive encomium from the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Even the oft-quoted opening lines of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—I celebrate myself, and sing myself / And what I assume you shall assume / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you—have arguably been inspired by Sa’di’s timeless bani adam poem.

Rezvani is sixty-six now, with a salt-and-pepper handlebar mustache and a gregarious affect. He first began teaching in 1971 at the age of seventeen, and has since taught through such turbulent times as the Islamic Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, and now the COVID-19 pandemic. “I still remember the very first air strike in Tehran during the war,” he says, “and I even remember what exactly I was teaching that day.” Still, Rezvani has never relinquished his sanguine attitude over the years. In the classroom, he is well known for his exuberance, oratorical bravura, and improvisational teaching style. Beyond that, his Renaissance-man bona fides—he has had serious grounding in math, Persian calligraphy, awaz (traditional Persian singing), literature, and martial arts—are also worth noting, most of which have served him well in his preparation for translating Sa’di.

Starting in 2008, the translation took Rezvani ten good years to finish. In March 2016, in an interview with Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation, he cited “love” as the most important driving force behind his labor. That same month, he gave a first public reading of his translation at the University of California, Berkeley. Among the attendees were former US poet-laureate Robert Hass and his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, both of whom applauded the decade-long effort. Since then, Rezvani’s translation has been endorsed by UNESCO and published—quite apropos to Sa’di’s hometown—by the University of Shiraz.

Our conversation took place on two separate occasions, and with diametrically opposite vibes. For the first part of the interview, I met Rezvani at his office after his last online class of the day which had ended around 10 pm. He was characteristically lively and rather voluble in his responses. For the second part, however, a somber mood was on full display during our discussion, following the death of Grand Maestro Mohammad-Reza Shajarian—Iran’s most internationally recognized awaz songster—who happened to be Rezvani’s longtime and beloved friend.

Siavash Saadlou (SS): How did the decision to translate Golestan come about? Why did you begin in 2008 and not sooner or later? 

Mahmoud Rezvani (MR): I considered translating Golestan several times, but I was too afraid to give it a shot. Part of this had to do with my perfectionist nature, and part of it had to do with the enormity of the task. But an interesting incident gave me the belief that I could translate Golestan after all. About twenty years ago, Mohammad Hoghooghi, the late poet and literary critic, had a niece living in the United States who was getting married. He had written a letter in Persian for the wedding, and he needed someone to translate it into English, since his niece understood very little Persian. The letter was filled with purple prose, and Mr. Hoghooghi couldn’t find the right translator for the job. One day, he came to my language institute and asked if I could translate the letter. When I did translate the letter, it became somewhat of a sensation in small literary circles in the US at the time. Flash forward six months, Mr. Hoghooghi invited me to a get-together where many renowned Iranian translators were present. The moment I entered, he introduced me to everyone as “the one who translated the impossible,” and this served as a huge confidence-builder for me. That was the first time I seriously considered translating Golestan.

You asked me why I didn’t put off the translation until later, and I can only think of Sa’di’s own words from one of his poems, about how none of us can be sure if we would still be here in this world when the next spring comes around. That’s why I told myself, there’s no time like the present, and began to translate the book. When I first started working on Golestan, I never thought it would take me a decade to finish it. I still teach full-time, so I can’t solely focus on translation. When I was working on Golestan, I mostly translated on Thursday afternoons sitting in my office. Sometimes I used to translate as many as ten or twenty lines at a time, and other times I struggled with one particular page, even a single word, for days.  READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2020

October 26, 2020  |  in News  |  by Ah-reum Han, Garrett Phelps, Lee Yew Leong, Michele Hutchison, and Sam Carter

Our Section Editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2020 issue!

This year’s events have made us all a little rusty in the art of travel, so hopping across our fortieth issue’s thirty-two countries may feel equal parts thrilling and daunting. Luckily, our section editors (including our Dutch Literature Special Feature curator, International Booker Prize co-winner Michele Hutchison) are happy to lay out a road map. Read on for literary duos on life and love in the Netherlands, a Norwegian’s popular fury, a Mexican novelist’s elusive but lasting influence, and a German author’s and Iranian poet’s exquisite study of silence.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction and Nonfiction Editor:

Not quite as stunningly “out there” as The Haunting of Bly Manor’s episode five, Paweł Sołtys’s deeply moving “The Kiev Sea” (translated with great aplomb by Eliza Marciniak) nevertheless reminded me of it: we are in such close third-person mode that even the reading material that the protagonist uses to while away time seems to be directly absorbed as consciousness while operating as pivotal mise en abyme. Memories and regret flit through this consciousness, “maintain(ing) the other me within the present me,” even as everything is “already slipping towards an invisible edge.” In truth—as we follow the protagonist down the rabbit hole of nostalgia—the slippage began much earlier: “it seemed that since he’d turned forty, he could only discard things. Friends, women, memories even.” What is the sum of life then? How much can we hold on to? On this fateful October day of reckoning, this fictional protagonist is reminded, via fiction, as we all are perhaps, of how removed and frightfully impersonal existence finally is: “It really happened, all of it, but it’s as if it were a story, told not to me but to someone nearby, in the noise of a bar or during a fight, a proper one, when the sound of the blows drowns out the wailing.”

From Michele Hutchison, Guest Editor of Dutch Literature Special Feature:

Good fortune would have it that I was working on the selection of Asymptote’s Dutch special when my translation of The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld was awarded the International Booker Prize. Perfect timing for sharing these stunning new Dutch voices with you, coinciding with the spike in interest in our national literature. (I wrote ‘our’ without thinking: I’m a defected Brit, resident in Amsterdam.)

To be honest, Dutch literature has long had plenty to offer, and there have been other recent successes. Think of Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin (translated by David Colmer) winning the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award ten years ago, and think of the great reception Gerard Reve’s classic The Evenings (translated by Sam Garrett) and Tonke Dragt’s The Letter for the King (translated by Laura Watkinson, recently a Netflix series) have had in English. We haven’t exactly been hiding our light under a bushel. Nevertheless, it was wonderful to put together this selection of Dutch talent to entice you to read further. READ MORE…

Narrating State Violence in Chile and Iran: For Raúl Zurita, with Gratitude

October 21, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Poupeh Missaghi

Finding one’s literary lineage is strange . . . You don’t necessarily find the voices that speak to you among your own people or your own language.

Last month, Chilean poet Raúl Zurita won the prestigious Reina Sofia Prize for Ibero-American Poetry. He is esteemed as one of the most talented Chilean poets of the twentieth century, alongside Pablo Neruda and Vicente Huidobro. María de los Llanos Castellanos, the President of National Heritage, said that Zurita had been awarded the prize in recognition of “his work, his poetic example of overcoming pain, with verses, with words committed to life, freedom, and nature.” Having lived through Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–1990) and, like many other Chileans, having been arrested and tortured under Pinochet’s regime, Zurita’s work addresses the violence committed against the Chilean people. His books in English translation include Anteparadise (translated by Jack Schmitt), Purgatory (translated by Anna Deeny), INRI (translated by William Rowe), and Song for His Disappeared Love (translated by Daniel Borzutsky). 

For a year now, since October 2019, Chile has been gripped in fresh political protests, sparked by a rise in subway fares. These have been the biggest protests in Chile since the end of the dictatorship and violent clashes between protestors and police have resulted in deaths, injuries, and arrests. In this essay, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Iran, Poupeh Missaghi, reflects upon Zurita’s response to state violence in his work. She draws a comparison with her native Iran, which similarly faced a US-backed coup (1953) and has recently experienced mass protests in response to economic injustice. By exploring Zurita’s ability to express the history and suffering of his country, as well as her own relationship to his body of work, Missaghi considers the importance of finding one’s literary heritage.  

The first time I saw Raúl Zurita read was in 2016 at the University of Denver. My skin felt raw, not just in the presence of his words (some of which I had read before), but also in proximity to his voice—deep and powerful yet carrying its fragility on its every note, accompanied by the trembling in his hands and torso. Trembling that wasn’t hidden or performed, but simply part of the way he carried, had to carry, his body and his voice as they carried with and in them the bodies, voices, and memories of others.

In a foreword to Purgatory, C. D. Wright says, “Instead of speaking for others, Zurita channels their voices.” There is an important difference here: the poet is not sitting on the sidelines and observing, but rather entering the purgatory himself. Whether through the intentional acts of hurting himself in his younger days (“branding his face and burning his eyes with ammonia”) or through the unasked-for Parkinson’s disease in his later years, Zurita literally embraces the pains he and his people have lived through. About his disease, Zurita notes,

I feel potent in my pains, in my curved spine, in the increasing difficulty of holding the pages when I read in public . . . I might have a bizarre sense of beauty, but my disease feels beautiful to me. It feels powerful.

Being in his presence over the years, I cannot help reading his Parkinson’s as another layer of his life-long labor of memory—his nerves being affected, being burdened, and his whole body becoming a witness who speaks even when he is not using verbal language.

***

The first work of Zurita I read was Song for His Disappeared Love, which for some reason I always remember as Song for His Disappeared Self, which is perhaps just a ghost of the same title. I read the book in a documentary poetics class taught by Eleni Sikelianos, and that was the beginning of my fascination with Zurita’s work, as well as with that of the translator Daniel Borzutzky. In Song for His Disappeared Love, Zurita narrates the pains of different countries of the Americas. Toward the end of the poem there are two drawings that resemble maps of some imaginary terrain. The niches in the first map are empty, filled with a void. The ones in the second include names of countries. Looking at them, the preceding pages of text begin to seem like another map, of partitioned city blocks or a cemetery with tombstones made of words. The last stanza of the poem before the drawings reads,

30. Is the tomb of the country’s love calling? Did you call out of pain? Out of pure pain? Was it out of pain that your love cried so hard? . . . are they calling me? Are you calling me?

This is one of the recurring themes in Zurita’s work: the psychological traces of political history on both the people and the landscape, and how one responds to being called by the voice of one’s pained country coming from the depths of darkness, long after the sources of that pain and the bodies emitting that voice are gone. This voice carried through in Zurita’s poems and the embodied, circular manner with which he approaches the topic have become, since those first encounters, a signpost on my path to addressing the pains of my own country, Iran, miles away from his. Because, of course, history repeats itself; even if this repetition is not in the details—though it can be—but more so in the psychological effects and fissures it leaves in our souls. READ MORE…

Who Will Win the International Booker Prize?

August 19, 2020  |  in Essays, News  |  by Barbara Halla

One of my least favorite strands of Booker discourse [is that] . . . a particular book wins . . . because it ticks . . . marketing-friendly boxes.

The long-awaited announcement of the International Booker winner is finally around the corner, and with a shortlist explosive with singular talent, the gamblers amongst us are finding it difficult to place their bets. To lend a hand, Asymptote’s very own assistant editor Barbara Halla returns with her regularly scheduled take, lending her scrupulous gaze to not only the titles but the Prize itself—and the principles of literary criticism and merit.

In my previous coverage of the International Booker Prize, I mentioned that there is always an element of repetition to the discussions surrounding it; quite honestly, there are only so many ways one can frame the conversation beyond mere summarizations of the books themselves. I find myself hoping that each year’s selections will reveal some sort of larger theme looming in the background, giving me at least the pretense of a cohesive thesis statement. I think that was definitely the case with last year’s shortlist and its explicit concern with memory, but considering how English translation tends to lag behind each book’s original publication by at least a couple of years, it was probably a coincidence. I’ve had no such luck with the 2020 shortlist; most of my attempts at finding a common theme have felt like a stretch.

In an attempt to avoid making this simply a collection of bite-sized reviews, I want to talk about one of my least favorite strands of Booker discourse: the tedious—sometimes almost malicious—assertion that if a particular book wins, it does so not because of its “literary merit,” but rather because it ticks a number of marketing-friendly boxes. Maybe it has been translated from a language that rarely gets published in English, or perhaps it seems particularly relevant to our present, directly tackling racism, homophobia, or misogyny. Regardless of the source of such a statement, it has this irritating “political correctness is ruining literature” thrust to it.

Now, in the past I have relied on “non-literary” clues to try and guess the Booker winner, and to some extent, I still do. However, in my mind, whenever I try to glean the winner using such external factors, I do so based on a few assumptions. First of all, while not all shortlisted books will necessarily be my favorite or even to my liking, the judges at least believe them to be great books, and the winner might indeed be different under different (personal) circumstances. In fact, despite what some detractors of contemporary fiction might say, there is plenty to love about the books being published today, and in the presence of so much good literature, taking into account “external” factors is only natural. After all, as translator Anton Hur recently tweeted, in response to an article arguing against a translated fiction category for the Hugos, “Literary awards ARE marketing tools, they should be used to solve MARKETING PROBLEMS.” READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 14, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Jacqueline Leung, Poupeh Missaghi, and Sarah Moses

The latest literary news from Hong Kong, Argentina, and Iran!

Whilst coronavirus remains a concern for countries around the world, our weekly dispatches are a testament that world literature continues to thrive, with our writers reporting on new literary journal initiatives, publishing fairs, audio books, and newly released novels. In Hong Kong, writers are advocating Cantonese literature and boldly responding to the ongoing protests by launching two new literary journals, Resonate and Hong Kong Protesting. Lovers of Argentine literature will be excited by the release of English audio books from the Centro Cultural Kirchner, featuring authors such as César Aira and Hebe Uhart, and available for free. In Iran, the literary community mourns the passing of prominent linguistic scholar Badr al-Zaman Qarib but has also celebrated the new release by the renowned novelist and Man Asian Literary Prize nominee Mahmoud Dowlatabadi. Read on to find out more! 

Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

Two weeks ago, University of Edinburgh student Andrew Yu tweeted that one of the journal reviewers of his academic paper claimed that the name of Hong Kong is inappropriately “foreign” and needs to be amended to appear alongside its Chinese equivalent (香港) and its Mandarin romanization (Xianggang). Despite its roots in British colonialism, “Hong Kong” has been used for at least 180 years and is a closer romanization of the city’s name in Cantonese, its local language. What the reviewer proposed is unnatural, but it is also reflective of the city’s larger struggles as it tries to maintain its own identity amid political pressure and the sweeping national security law.

There have been recent initiatives to better protect Hong Kong’s unique culture and literature. Launched in June, Resonate is the world’s first literary journal written completely in Cantonese, which is seen mainly as a spoken language and is rarely written out in formal or literary contexts. Featuring fiction and criticism, the journal also publishes articles about the language itself, debunking myths long believed by its speakers—like the idea that Cantonese was spoken during the Tang dynasty. In fact, it is a modern variety of Middle Chinese, used from the Northern and Southern dynasties to the Song dynasty (roughly, from around A.D. 600  to A.D. 1200). Mandarin and Shanghainese also developed from Middle Chinese.

Cha, Hong Kong’s English-language literary journal, has also initiated a new project amassing writing about the Hong Kong protests, recently stifled by mass arrests of pro-democracy figures and the disqualification of lawmakers and election hopefuls. Hong Kong Protesting is a growing collection of original and translated poetry, essays, criticism, and art from various contributors. In particular, several translations of works by Hong Kong poets are available, including poems by Cao Shuying (trans. Andrea Lingenfelter), Derek Chung (trans. Tammy Lai-Ming Ho), Liu Waitong (trans. Lucas Klein), and Jacky Yuen (trans. Nicky Admussen). Many of the works evoke the start of the movement last summer when two million people marched peacefully, and when violating incidents, such as the attacks on journalists and citizens, became more frequent, altering the city once and for all. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2020

July 20, 2020  |  in News  |  by Edwin Alanís-García, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Oral poetry, plague journals, and surrealist masters: our blog editors are here with their selections from the Summer 2020 issue!

With our Summer 2020 issue, Asymptote has brought together new work from thirty-one countries drawn under “This Strange Stillness,” acknowledging all the fearful, sorrowful, and newly arriving things that are in great need of language. It is a timely collection, though we also hope that it is a lasting one, as the texts of this issue remains full of beauty, grace, craft, as well as a knowledge of these unnerving times. If you are in need of a place to start, let our blog editors be your guide.

In these varying todays that blend into one another, I am thinking of Audre Lorde: “seeking a now that can breed / futures.” With the daily cycles of news, statistics, and corresponding tides of political turbulence, the act of reading is accompanied by the weight of scrutiny into factual truths, and the attempts to form a set of principles out of them. All this in the hope that the formidable now will be rescued into a manageable, comprehensible future. As readers and thinkers, we find ourselves in the position of insisting on the importance that literature has always taken, yet literature that thinks only of its utility is powerless—any potency can only result from a craft that knows equally of its form as it does its function.

In perusal of the Asymptote Summer 2020 issue, I returned to indulging in the pure pleasures of reading—linguistic play, secret collaborations of words, and the mysterious harmony of object, image, sound, and divinity that culminates in the sublimity of poetry. I took a particular joy in the Iranian lickos, an anonymous collection of the indigenous, oral poetic form. They are brief, curious, and contain both the wideness and aliveness of a language meant to be passed between two people. The couplets and tercets, translated brilliantly and cohesively by Mahdi Ganjavi, Amin Fatemi, and Mansour Alimoradi, possess a fluidity and attention that draw the beauty of simple conversation, and the immensity of a single day’s emotions, sharply into view. From petty humour to profound loss, their visual simplicity are an entryway into the profound origins of a poetics.

There is also a great vivacity in Sanja Mihajlovik-Kostadinovska’s “(In)Finite Models of the Short Story,” in which the concept of narrative itself is taken on a wild spin throughout its wanderings into people, places, things, feelings, and myths. Too often we are distracted by semantics, and Mihajlovik-Kostadinovska, along with translator Igor Popovski, bring the reader back into the exhilarating disarray of imagining, reorienting the story back into control of itself. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 17, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Eva Wissting, and Poupeh Missaghi

The latest literary news from Argentina, Sweden, and Iran!

This week, our writers bring you news from Argentina, Sweden, and Iran. In Argentina, book fairs have moved events online and well-known trans writer Camila Sosa Villada has spoken about the benefits of trans literature; in Sweden, newspapers have been publishing full-length novels as a daily series for Summer; and in Iran, a new book of letters by Abbas Kiarostami has faced publication rights controversy. Read on to find out more! 

Allison Braden, Co-Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina

This year, the 46th annual Buenos Aires Book Fair was postponed indefinitely. The spring gathering, predictably, had to adapt to limitations imposed by coronavirus, but the change of plans was nevertheless a huge loss to the booksellers and industry professionals who rely on the blockbuster event, which attracts upwards of 10,000 visitors over the course of the fair. However, Fundación El Libro, the organization that puts on the fair, opted to go a different route for its children’s book fair. That programming will be held virtually, beginning this coming Monday, July 20, and continuing through the end of the month. Organizers promise hundreds of digital activity opportunities for children and young adults, which may provide welcome relief to parents.

Even with the book fair on hold, other efforts to promote Argentine literature around the world continue. Programa Sur, one of the most robust programs of its kind in the Spanish-speaking world, was developed in 2016 to offer grants to incentivize small and medium publishers abroad to release Argentine books in translation. Since its inception, the program site boasts that “over 800 foreign publishers from 46 countries have applied for support in the translation of 1,060 works by more than 380 Argentine authors into 40 languages.” The program is accepting applications through September.

Those stuck at home in Argentina and abroad, looking to keep their finger on the pulse of literary news and views, may turn to news organization RED/ACCIÓN’s weekly newsletter, Sie7e Párrafos (“seven paragraphs”). The Tuesday newsletter features readings and commentary on literature and nonfiction books, as well as occasional updates on the publishing industry. One recent issue featured a short interview with trans literary star Camila Sosa Villada. Interviewer Javier Sinay asked what the opportunities are for trans literature and what trans literature can contribute to the world. She answers, in my translation, “What happens when writing runs counter to the established canon? A kind of rupture in the peace promised by the rules of good writing . . . Now, you have the opportunity to read something unexpected, about unknown worlds and knowledge you never imagined.” Her answer underscores why the postponed book fair is such a loss and why Programa Sur remains so important. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

May 15, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Poupeh Missaghi, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Our editors bring you the latest news from Japan, Iran, and the UK!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Japan, Iran, and the United Kingdom: in Japan, Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War has been adapted into a manga; in Iran, readers have been mourning the loss of renowned translator Najaf Daryabandari; and in the UK, Hay Festival has revealed its impressive digital programme. Read on to find out more! 

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting from Japan

There is a methodology in culture-specific product adoption that Japan has perfected in particular: a Starbucks in Kyoto’s Ninenzaka features traditional tatami flooring in an architecturally nostalgic teahouse; otherwise Italian pasta dishes are regularly indoctrinated with mentaiko (pollack roe); and well-regarded literature from other parts of the world are often adapted into the country’s most loved and widely emblematic artform—comics, or manga.

The latest text to receive this treatment is Svetlana Alexievich’s startling, emotive oral history of Soviet women who had experienced firsthand the barbarity and naked humanity of World War II. Written with the avidity of enthralled listening that has become inextricable from her literary style, in turns stoic and breaking, of both soft and difficult memory, it is a book that mends the distance between history and the body. It originally appeared in Japan as 戦争は女の顔をしていない in 2016 via the translation of 三浦 みどり Midori Miura (who had also translated works by Anatoly Pristavkin and Anna Politkovskaya), and can now also be found in the form of serialized comics, drawn and written by prolific manga artist 小梅 けいと Keito Koume, with editorial assistance from fellow comic and Soviet history specialist 速水螺旋人 Rasenjin Hayami. READ MORE…

Sa’di’s Golestan: Rezvani’s New Translation Withstands a Foregone Conclusion

May 4, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Siavash Saadlou

He is an exemplar of the intuitive translator—a translator whose wealth of experience allows him to sift through countless lexical choices . . .

In comparing various translations of the same text, one considers several factors—amongst them: accuracy, consistency, and the ease in which the secondary text reads in its newfound state. New translations of classic texts are further expected to provide knowledge and profundity that other extant translations missed. The writings of Persian poet Sa’di are intimately known and cherished in his original language, but its multiple iterations in English have each developed separate and, at times, misleading voices. In this following essay, writer and translator Siavash Saadlou discusses Mahmoud Rezvani’s new translation of Sa’di’s timeless Golestan, and how Rezvani’s insight into the book and his aptitude for translation have allowed his work to rise above its predecessors.

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Yet Sa’di loved the race of men,—
No churl, immured in cave or den
In bower and hall, he wants them all,
Nor can dispense
With Persia for his audience;
They must give ear,
Grow red with joy and white with fear;
But he has no companion;
Come ten, or come a million,
Good Sa’di dwells alone.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Mahmoud Rezvani’s new translation of Sa’di’s Golestan—a thirteenth-century literary lighthouse best known for its creative composition, moralistic maxims, and lush language—challenges the notion suggesting that fidelity and beauty are mutually exclusive in literary translation. When Rezvani, now in his mid-sixties, proposed the idea for the first time, the literati in Iran thought it “preposterous” and “impossible.” Their deeply held cynicism was derived in part from Golestan’s ornate Persian, mixed with bombastic Arabic and Qur’anic allusions, that render its prose and poetry extraordinarily labyrinthine. It also stemmed from Sa’di’s shrewd use of ambiguities and amphibologies as well as heteronyms and homographs throughout the work; and Sa’di’s rhymed prose (Saj’)—which can be divided into three categories: parallel, symmetrical, and lopsided—made the task ahead all the more formidable. Choosing le mot juste was yet another major hurdle to overcome. Sa’di was, after all, a writer best known for his impeccable, inimitable turn of phrase. His command over both Persian and Arabic was beyond compare; in fact, Sa’di was as recognized for his mastery of language as Hafiz was for his consummate ambiguity. The difficulty, therefore, lay in translating Sa’di’s wide palette of vocabularies as well as the supremely intriguing juxtaposition of images and ideas. Then there was the musicality which, though often ignored in Western translations, is the lifeblood of classical Persian literature. It is understandable, then, that it took Rezvani years to pluck up the courage to even consider translating Golestan and ten years to complete the endeavor. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

April 17, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Daljinder Johal, Eva Wissting, Poupeh Missaghi, and Sarah Moore

Bringing you the latest in literary news from Sweden, Iran, the UK, and Spain!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Sweden, Iran, and the UK. In Sweden, a new translation of Albert Camus’s The Plague is on its way, and the annual children’s book award ALMA has announced Baek Heena as its winner; in Iran, sales of The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree have surged after its nomination for The International Man Booker Prize, and readers have welcomed a Persian translation of Italian writer Paolo Giordano’s new non-fiction work about contagion; in the UK, authors and publishers are proving resourceful after the cancellation of key literary festivals; finally, people around the world have been mourning the death of best-selling Chilean author Luis Sepúlveda, who sadly passed away this week in Spain.  

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

Easter in Sweden is usually a time when people have a few days off and either go skiing or open up the country cottage after the winter. This year, however, like in a lot of other places around the world, people have had to alter their plans as traveling was discouraged, even within the country. Unlike most of its neighboring countries, Sweden still allows bookstores as well as most other stores to remain open. Nevertheless, changed habits in a time of social and economic uncertainty has led to a decrease in sales of physical books by 35%. Although sales of e-books have increased by over 10%, bookstores have started plans to lay off employees and renegotiate rent costs, in order to manage a possible prolonged decline in book sales.

One book that nonetheless sells like never before in Sweden at this time, is French Algerian author Albert Camus’s The Plague from 1947. Swedish readers have the book today in a translation by Elsa Thulin from 1948, but a new translation is on the way, by Jan Stolpe, and will be available in stores by the end of April. READ MORE…