Posts filed under 'desire'

Narrator as Narcissus: A Review of Hanna Johansson’s Antiquity

January 24, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Sofija Popovska

The textual body of the novel is a monument to the clash between the natural flow of life and its narrativized counterpart.

 Antiquity by Hanna Johansson, translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson, Catapult, 2024

“Where were they?” asks the nameless protagonist of Antiquity, Hanna Johansson’s gorgeous, lacerating debut novel, translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson. She is interrogating the lack of cemeteries in Ermoupoli, a luxurious Greek city where she spends her summer with Helena, a chic and volatile artist with whom the narrator is infatuated, and Helena’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Olga. In a city where “the dead should be more numerous than the living”, there seems to be no trace of “such monuments, not even a site for simple graves, no memorial grove in the little park in front of Saint Nicholas Church where the cats slept in the shade of the pine trees.” “Where are they?” she asks of both cemeteries and the dead, not realizing that it is she who haunts the suggestively-named Persefonis—“the short street where Helena’s house was wedged between an alley and a ruin”. Ever on the margins of life, of human relationships, the spectral narrator might touch other things and people, but she never leaves a trace. Throughout the novel, the wounded lament of this reluctant nomad begins to haunt us, too. And this is not only because she is undone by the very skill that enables her to tell a story—narrating—but because Johansson’s creation, in Josefsson’s translation, reminds us of our own tendency to narrativize life, to write ourselves out of the intimate joy of immediate experience by stepping back and fiddling with the details, fashioning an ideal self.

Antiquity feels destined to be a classic, as multifaceted, revealing, and transformative as works by Dostoyevsky, Mann, and Nabokov. Its power comes from its vulnerable, gorgeous prose, replete with lush images, and also from its structural sophistication—a complete convergence of shape and themes. The textual body of the novel is a monument to the clash between the natural flow of life and its narrativized counterpart, felt through the temporal textures of the story, its narratological conflict. In narratological terms, the novel’s fabula—its narrated structure—opens at the end of its syuzhet—its chronological timeline: the narrator, Helena, and Olga are leaving Ermoupoli, heading towards an inevitable separation. As they depart in a ferry, the narrator says: “I could hear my own voice narrating: the sun was so strong you always had to squint a little. I felt reality take its leave of me. I wasn’t there.” From the very start, it is clear that the novel’s tension will emerge from the ebb and flow between the lived truth and the narrator’s censorial customization of real experiences as a constructing of the self. This becomes especially palpable in the chafing of the chronological flow of events against the narrator’s private perception of time. Her narration moves backward and forward in time, then further backward still, only to reemerge somewhere after the middle and then proceed all the way to the end—that is, the beginning. The unpredictability of the temporal jumps precludes anticipation but heightens the sense of foreboding with which the beginning’s manifestly melancholy departure taints all subsequent pages; as in a Greek tragedy, the reader can sense the protagonist hurtling towards a bitter end. READ MORE…

Louisiana Literature Festival: Portraits of Language in the Flux of Loss

August 28, 2023  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

Just beyond the white backdrop of the stage, a multiplicity of silent, unspoken languages lingers.

From August 17 to 20, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Zealand, Denmark, hosted the twelfth edition of the annual Louisiana Literature Festival. Since 2010, on the lawns parenthesized between Louisiana’s wings and the Øresund Strait, authors from around the world—including Adonis, César Aira, Olga Tokarczuk, László Krasznahorkai, Mariana Enríquez, and Itō Hiromi—have participated in readings, interviews, and conversations. The festival has also regularly hosted the most exciting names in Danish literature, such as Naja Marie Aidt, Dorthe Nors, and Signe Gjessing. This year, Asymptote’s Assistant Editor Michelle Chan Schmidt was in attendance, and reports now on the festival’s fascinating intersections, discussions, and performances. 

The Louisiana Literature Festival has no theme, and as such, widely varying discussions of language and writing recur across the four days. In this year’s line-up of forty authors, sixteen write in languages other than Danish. Most of them are authors of English or Swedish, and thus there are only a few individuals representing other languages: Haruki Murakami in Japanese, Constance Debré in French, Claudia Durastanti in Italian, Eva Menasse in German, Camila Sosa Villada in Spanish, and Fríða Ísberg and Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir in Icelandic. Despite the limitations of this Euro-heavy selection, the festival’s vibrant dialogues present studies across language—including that of signs, of family, and of binaries in societies marked by syntaxes that divide rather than combine. In an interview, the Irish English-language writer Claire Keegan says that “narrative feeds on loss,” and this idea of loss feeds back across the festival’s symphony of languages in conversation.

Icelandic:

During an interview with her Danish translator, Erik Skyum-Nielsen, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir states that her favorite childhood books were dictionaries. Each letter was a new chapter in a book of thirty-two chapters—a history of a language “in the margins” of global literature. Writers like Ólafsdóttir and Fríða Ísberg, as well as their translators across most European languages (with the addition of Arabic and Turkish in the case of Ísberg’s novel, The Mark), are instrumental in not only the continuance of Icelandic literature, but also in diversifying Icelandic modes of expression in a language anchored in the legacy of the sagas.

READ MORE…

Any Single Thing: On Dorothee Elmiger’s Out of the Sugar Factory

August 2, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

Instead, “love” seems to be closely associated with research; with storytelling and the (im)possibility of comprehensive communication.

Out of the Sugar Factory by Dorothee Elmiger, translated from the German by Megan Ewing, Two Lines Press, 2023

How do you write about a book that is itself concerned with what it is about; that covers a vast array of seemingly disparate but fundamentally deeply interconnected topics in a fragmentary, multi-genre, looping montage; that is both tentative and unashamedly demanding; that is hyper-meta yet written in language that is refreshingly unselfconscious; that is so preoccupied with form and origins that it defiantly eludes attempts at endings? What can you say a book that has already said so much about itself?

You could say that, fundamentally, Out of the Sugar Factory is about exactly what its title suggests: sugar and production. In thinking and trying to write about this book, though, such a statement seems entirely insufficient—for this text, with tales spanning from the 16th century to the present day, is equally about love, desire, slavery, capitalism, the art of writing, artifice, self-representation, subjection, the Haitian revolution, religion, anorexia and mania—and utterly exhaustive, since all these parenthetical topics are ultimately also symbolised by sugar and its production. In this kaleidoscope of ever separating and reconnecting topics, full of “objects [that seem] to enter into new relationships, new constellations with each other”, Dorothee Elmiger—or rather, the narrator she pens—is perhaps suggesting that any single thing, if examined both broadly and closely enough, can lead us to everything else (are we singing along with Lauryn Hill that ‘Everything is everything’?); or perhaps she is suggesting that, haunted as the early twenty-first century is by the spectre of colonialism and its aftermath, we are saturated in sugar (some things are more omnipresent than others). Then again, maybe she is implying both or neither of these things, or even that the search for a metanarrative is futile: as Elmiger writes, “I thought I had to somehow gather everything together . . . but now things are imposing themselves on me virtually—I see signs and connections everywhere, as if I had found a theory of everything, which is of course utter nonsense.” READ MORE…

A Place for Malice in Literature: On Izumi Suzuki’s Hit Parade of Tears

April 3, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Bella Creel

Women lead the stories in Hit Parade of Tears—with their desires, their passions, and their fears. . .

Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, and Helen O’Horan, Verso, 2023

In the moody, deliriously humorous worlds of Hit Parade of Tears, Izumi Suzuki’s protagonists embody searing emotions, from anguish to apathy, all felt at an apex that seems like a breaking point. Sharp and achingly present, these eleven short stories are transposed by writers Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, and Helen O’Horan, and present emotional and often unsettling glimpses into worlds both familiar and fantastical. Though each story stands on its own, there are elements that draw them together: the stream of Japanese rock from the 1960s and 70s playing in the background, a woman searching for her younger brother, a blurry line between mental illness and otherworldly abilities, and perhaps most consistently, a spotlight on some of the ugliest aspects of human nature—pettiness, cynicism, self-obsession, vitriol. We find these traits in her characters across the board, and those who veer from this standard are noted for their irregularity. Whether it’s a spunky teenage girl or an ungrateful husband, the dialogue in translation is natural and engaging, and each character reads with a distinct voice; descriptions are elevated by clever word choice, from a “galumphing figure” to “laparotomized remains,” and each paragraph is a newly vivid scene.

While the women of Hit Parade of Tears occupy the traditional feminine roles of wives, mothers, and sexual objects, they are not held to stereotypical ideals of femininity when it comes to their emotions and motivations, which makes this a thought-provoking and relevant read for feminists interested in non-Western perspectives. Women lead the stories in Hit Parade of Tears—with their desires, their passions, and their fears—and the men often read like props to the women’s narratives, whether that’s a self-obsessed husband, an ex-lover, a wannabe sugar daddy, a sacrifice, or a younger brother. Men’s bodies are constantly on display and under scrutiny—balding, thin, hot, or literally cut open from the stomach and hung like an ornament in a medical facility—and they rarely have any part in moving the plot forward.

The men in the protagonists’ lives belittle them and take them for granted, but the stories paint them in all their egoistic ways. In the eponymous “Hit Parade of Tears,” we spend the majority of the story listening to the thoughts of a man born over 150 years prior, who hit his prime in the 1960s and 70s. He talks down on his wife and her job archiving that era: “She’s jealous of me, he thought. She’s seething because she couldn’t take part in my youth like someone from the same generation could.” Come to find out, she’s been alive just as long as he has—they even dated briefly a hundred years ago, but he, solipsistic and self-absorbed, forgot, and he can’t imagine her experiences living up to his. Suzuki’s fiction is explicit in its critique of men’s treatment of women—hypocritical, predatory, and strikingly uncool, Suzuki’s men believe they have the upper hand in their relationships. Behind this belief, Suzuki’s women pull the strings, using the hands they’ve been dealt (as housewives, as sexy schoolgirls, as the repressed desires of a depressed woman) to their benefit. READ MORE…

Everything is Permitted in Dreams: Corinne Hoex and Caitlin O’Neil on Gentlemen Callers

May 26, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

This book is more about feminine desire than erotic consummation, so it’s not pornographic at all.

Diving without abandon into the realms of sexual fantasy and desire, Corinne Hoex’s Gentlemen Callers is a series of vignettes that follows the erotic as it traverses into the pleasurable, the humorous, and the absurd. As our Book Club selection for the month of April, Laurel Taylor described Hoex’s text as “a truly astonishing outlier.” In the following interview, Taylor speaks to Hoex and her translator, Caitlin O’Neil, about the multi-layered operations of the epigraph, the difficult of translating wordplay and idioms, and writing with joy.

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.

Laurel Taylor (LT): The construction of Gentlemen Callers was really interesting—can you tell us a little bit about what your inspiration was for the novel?

Corinne Hoex (CH): Each time, it’s the situation—of the dreaming woman—that drives the inspiration. It always begins with the concrete, and from there on it’s a mixture of fantasy and reality; something comes from reality and introduces a rupture, an entry into dreams. Whenever the vignette was too realistic, or didn’t abandon reality through some kind of glitch or unexpected detour, I didn’t keep it.

There were texts with characters who were much too banal—a pizza delivery man, a doctor. . . There wasn’t that sparkle, that possible transformation, so I didn’t continue with those dreams. So even more than inspiration, it was an exercise in the material, in the writing process.

But a lot of the dreams, of course, correspond to anecdotes from my own life. For “The Astrologer,” for example, I had taken some astrology classes, and all of it—the books, the Ephemeris, all of those calculations—I found horrid, boring. I imagined this situation where she [the dreaming woman] is seated across from an astrologer, and this astrologer is trying to seduce her, but he’s tactless, he’s insufferable. He says: “My Mars is on your Venus,” and all that, but he isn’t pleasing her, so she waits and tries to find a way to escape. There have often been times in my life—at school, at conferences—when I would like to escape; in this fantasy, since we’re dealing with the stars, the comet comes in through the window and takes the woman away. It’s not the man who seduces the dreaming woman, but the comet.

Similarly, when the narrator’s with the geographer and he bores her, she sees a beautiful polar bear that’s much more pleasing to her. There are sometimes elements which are not human; everything is permitted in dreams. 

LT: Caitlin, how did you first encounter this text? And what made you want to translate it?

Caitlin O’Neil (CO): This is my debut book-length translation, so it was very much my own choice of what text to pursue. When I started, I got some very good advice, which was: for your first translation, make sure that it is a work that you love wholeheartedly. Because you’re going to be working more closely with this text than you have ever worked with any text before in your life, and you are going to work very hard for this text as well. There may be rejections, and you need to love this text so much that you are willing to work through all the rejections that come your way. When I first started, I was coming from an academic background, so this was really a chance for me to dive deep into the world of Francophone literature, and hunt down a book that wasn’t known in the US yet. READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash

December 9, 2021  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Edwin, Fairuza Hanun, and Lara Norgaard

If I were to visualize the novel’s plot, I would not draw a line, but instead a scatter plot of points [...] Shrapnel from an explosion. . .

Arguably one of the most recognised Indonesian writers in world literature, Eka Kurniawan has earned a global audience—most notably for being the first Indonesian to earn a spot on the Man Booker International longlist with translator Annie Tucker for the sweeping novel, Beauty is A Wound. This August, acclaimed Indonesian director Edwin bagged the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival for his adaptation of Eka’s Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (reviewed here). The story follows the young Ajo Kawir, who tries to compensate for his sexual impotence by turning to fighting, subsequently falling in love with the bodyguard Iteung. In this special edition of Asymptote at the Movies, we are honoured to have Edwin discuss his adaptation of Eka’s work with assistant editor Fairuza Hanun and former-Editor-at-Large for Brazil Lara Norgaard in a wide-ranging conversation that considers the role of language in the multicultural archipelago, critiques of masculinity, and how Eka’s famed fragmentation on the page can hold up as it moves onto screen.

Note: the following piece includes discussion of sexual violence.

Fairuza Hanun (FH): Edwin, I’ve been fascinated by your works, especially Aruna & Lidahnya and Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly, which have explored numerous topical issues, ranging from—but not limited to—gender, race, sexuality, culture, and identity. However, compared to the gritty action-packed Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, your earlier films retained more “domestic” and bittersweet compositions with a main narrative thread. Eka Kurniawan’s literature is well-known for its meandering plots and fusion of socialist and magical realism, and although Vengeance is one of Kurniawan’s more straightforward works, it still possesses his love for multiple threads. This poses my first questions: what are your thoughts on the process of adapting Kurniawan’s braided narrative into a limited screen time? Were there any challenges in transposing his subtlety and explicitness when approaching the taboos of Indonesian society?

I know quite little about the technicalities of cinematography, but I found the film to be absolutely stunning, every scene evoking emotion—the simultaneous isolation and communalism in a village community—and remaining faithful to the descriptions in the book; the actors did a spectacular job at fleshing out the characters. I noticed that the book’s dry, witty humour remains present throughout the film, as well as some of the vocabulary from KheaKamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (KBBI) being maintained in the dialogue. This intrigued me, as the effects of dialogue in literature and cinema often differ; for instance, how it is made more “acceptable”, or how it can be ignored, if dialect—i.e. contractions, local diction, etc.—is “smoothed out” in writing, reconstructed into a formal, almost mathematically-structured, rendition. Yet, in film, an accurate depiction of the setting can make such a move jarring something out of place in a village with perhaps limited resources to literature, as it seems the people are still steeped in traditional, often superstitious, interpretations. Language should be an intercultural exchange, and Indonesia is a multicultural, multilingual country; mediums of expression which strive to preserve culture should not promote or normalise the process of lingual centrism. I feel that the widespread use of Indonesian and its normalisation or expectations pose an issue of the slow erasure of local languages which have been cultivated throughout generations, to be replaced by the “central” national language.

In regards to that, what are your thoughts on language in the arts, and the process of adapting a book to a film and vice versa? And what is your opinion or definition of a faithful adaptation?

vengeance a at the movies 2 READ MORE…

How the Light Hides Us: On Cuíer: Queer Brazil

October 4, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Alex Tan

Cuíer gives us pause and proclaims its own foreignness—only on its terms are we invited into its gambit.

Cuíer: Queer Brazil, translated from the Portuguese, Two Lines Press, 2021

Can we translate “queer”?

Cuíer: Queer Brazil—a brand-new anthology of queer/cuíer Brazilian poetry, fiction, and non-fiction translated from Portuguese into English—wants us to grapple with this conundrum. Uniting voices across generations, genders, and mediums, the latest offering from Two Lines Press’ chic Calico series is, like all its predecessors, expansively and thoughtfully curated.

A vibrant portrait by Igor Furtado graces the cover; in it, we glimpse a masc-identified person lying in prone position—one could say amphibiously—on what appears to be the earth of a river bank. His lime-green skin-tight top accentuates the exposure of his body’s lower half, boldly visible in the background through spangles of rippling water. The tattoo on his arm, the earring basking in shadow, the painted nails of his splayed fingers. His direct gaze at the camera mingles enticement and challenge in equal measure.

Like the photograph, Cuíer gives us pause and proclaims its own foreignness—only on its terms are we invited into its gambit. As the only Calico title so far with a non-English word as its name, “Cuíer” demands to be sounded, savoured on the tongue—it audibly carries the phonetic ghost of “queer,” but must be shaped differently in the mouth. The word ostensibly stems from Tatiana Nascimento’s avant-garde “cuíer paradiso,” a poem in Cuíer wherein parentheses, wordplay, and dialect wreath around a yearning for the simple pleasures of quotidian love. What unfolds is an enumeration of possible “less than”s: “less bureaucratic than / marriage equality regulated by the state,” “less surveilled than e-v-e-r-y-b-o-d-y / asking if it is (non-)exclusive,” “less of all that makes us listless.”

In the absence of utopia, one can only imagine it in terms of what it is not (yet). Nascimento’s Afro-futurist linguistic experiments—near the book’s centerpiece—perhaps gesture to the impulse behind Cuíer’s formation: to know another “with no need for armor, / anticipating no answer, / no need to learn how to punch nor / map the space before entering.” A place of silence beyond translation. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2021

September 27, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel and Sarah Moore

New work this week from Mexico and Algeria!

This month, our editors dive into two powerful works that look into the dominating subjects of human life: sex and war. An erotically subversive collection of stories by award-winning author Mónica Lavín moves to the darkest and most questioning arenas of desire, and a memoir by Algerian Freedom fighter Mokhtar Mokhtefi stands as a cogent and compelling text of witness of his nation’s struggle against French colonialism.

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Meaty Pleasures by Mónica Lavín, translated from the Spanish by Dorothy Potter Snyder, Katakana Editores, 2021

Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

There is catharsis in transgression, and pleasure—especially the centering of one’s own pleasure—is all too often transgressive. The twelve short stories in Mónica Lavín’s collection, Meaty Pleasures, thoughtfully curated and translated by Dorothy Potter Snyder, capitalizes on this subversive desire, exploding the tranquil veneer of domestic life by compelling our complicity in the deeply uncomfortable and socially taboo.

It all begins and ends with the flesh. “Postprandial,” the decadent opening story, foregoes grounding details about setting and character in order to focalize an aphrodisiac tasting menu, offered from a hotel restaurant manager to a passerby, and the explicit sex that follows. It readies the reader for Lavín’s challenging approach to realism, intimacy, and power imbalance which pervades the rest of the collection. The final story, “Meaty Pleasures,” also emphasizes the sensual relationship between food and sex—but in a completely different way. Told from the perspective of an adult daughter who has watched her parents’ Saturday afternoon artisanal butchering hobby grow into an obsession that echoes over the course of their lives, the sex is left entirely to the implicit, straining in constant tension with the parental web of familial obligations. The daughter and her sister reflect: “Sometimes we’d ask each other, have you tried calling Papá and Mamá on Saturday afternoons? Because on that day of week, they never answered the phone to either one of us.”

In between, we meet many a troubled family. As is common in stories of nonconformity, various characters rebel against the numbing effect of matrimony, but their resistance does not lead them to any predictable conclusion—or perhaps any predictability is heightened to a manic extreme. In “What’s there to come back to,” a husband leaves his repentant wife on their doorstep for a whole winter’s night before he, begrudgingly, allows her back into their home. Snyder’s translation captures a certain languor and resentment in his stream of consciousness that induces anxiety when set against the excruciating awareness of her waiting, building a rawness that painfully and coldly leads to his reflection upon waking up in the morning: “Fried eggs again for breakfast, the TV news. I think she’s gone. Maybe she froze to death. Maybe we both froze to death.” In “You Never Know,” a son tires of the demons left to him by his mother’s abandonment. “Then, you kiss and hug them in the shadows of a movie theater, and you masturbate thinking about them, and when you start to want something more than their bodies, like their companionship and tenderness, you leave without saying goodbye.” Innocent—righteous, even—though his anger seems, his journey darkens with an incestual turn. “Roberto’s Mouth” finds a disgruntled housewife disappointed yet again when her own plans to leave her family are thwarted by her naughty-mouthed chat-room lover’s lazy approach to cuckholding. In such narratives that continually unpack and distort the concepts of familial intimacy, images of transgressively penetrated flesh dominate the collection, inviting the reader to reflect on the discomfort they inspire. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Small Crescendos” by Pirkko Saisio

August 3, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Mia Spangenberg

But all love strives towards that big crescendo.

From the Finlandia Prize-winning author who published the first Finnish-language lesbian novel, this week’s Translation Tuesday features a genre-defying work of autofiction from Pirkko Saisio. The eroticism of encountering a stranger—be it in a tram or a seminar room; in real life or one’s imagination—is what ties together this attempt to follow the ruminating mind. In relating the path of her own desire, our narrator asks: “Is this story actually going anywhere? And is this even a story?”—cognisant of the limits of narrative in pinning down unruly desire. In Mia Spangenberg’s translation, Siasio’s virtuosity and playfulness is on full display. “Small Crescendos” is a perfect addition to your reading list this Women in Translation Month. 

“As a reader and translator, I’m enchanted by the lightness of Saisio’s prose and its rhythm and pacing, but it also poses a challenge, since Finnish is an agglutinative language and more concise than English. During revision, I focused on reading the translation out loud, as if it were a spoken word piece. Finnish can exhibit a gender fluidity that does not exist in English (there are no gendered pronouns as “hän” refers to both he and she), which may seem radical but is simply a tolerance for knowing less about people’s gender in writing. However, when Saisio writes about her love affair with an actor, I ultimately chose the word “actress” because it is otherwise easy to assume that Saisio is describing a heterosexual relationship when she is in fact not. This would be clear to most Finnish readers as Saisio came out publicly as a lesbian in the 1990s and has long advocated for LGBTQ+ rights in Finland.”

— Mia Spangenberg

When a wave crashes against a rocky shore, it sprays
glistening pearls of water into the air. Like small crescendos.

A gaze. One is at the bottom of the stairs, and another is descending
the stairs.
There’s a gaze, and the beginning and ending of a relationship are in that
   gaze, with a slight
acceleration in the middle, an accelerando.

A hand grips a pole on the tram. It’s a man’s
hand, slender and beautiful, meant for some instrument, maybe
a cello or viola.
I place my hand beneath his and squeeze the pole.
And yes!
The cellist’s hand slides down the pole and covers my own. Oh those long,
thrilling seconds between stops!

And that gaze again. READ MORE…

Writing in Organic Formation: Federico Falco and Jennifer Croft on A Perfect Cemetery

May 20, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Shawn Hoo

I always thought about what else a short story could be beyond the usual. What would happen if I mixed short stories and poetry?

In our Book Club selection for the month of April, A Perfect Cemetery, Federico Falco’s writings do not tell so much as unfold, gently and masterfully, to elucidate the relationships between the human, the non-human, and the spaces in which such meetings take place. In precise and rich evocations, Falco plumbs the rich vocabularies and intrigues of landscape to lend delicacy, sensuality, and vividity to his prose, bringing his protagonists to life with a knowing rootedness. In the following interview, transcribed from a live Q&A hosted by Assistant Editor Shawn Hoo, Falco and translator Jennifer Croft share their thoughts on the cinematic aspects of A Perfect Cemetery, the relationships between the body and the land, and the pervading theme of isolation.

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 Q&As with the author and/or the translator of each title!

Shawn Hoo (SH): I thought we could begin with the question of place. I read this book in Singapore, a dense city, and noted how A Perfect Cemetery has a distinct sense of place; Federico, you conjure a landscape of sierras, rivers, and forests across disparate short stories that belong to this very single novelistic world. In an interview with The Paris Review, Jennifer, you emphasize the importance of translators visiting the country they are translating from. How does your sense of place affect your approach to these stories?

Federico Falco (FF): Landscape transforms us and makes us different people; the people who live in big cities have one kind of experience of life and the people who live in different landscapes have another. There is an Argentinian writer, Juan José Saer—one of my favorites—who says that the poor who live in cities near the ocean, they have a heaviness; they become used to strange, different people arriving and leaving all the time. And the people who live in the mountains always think that there’s another place beyond the mountains. They can change their point of view because they can see things from a different point of view. The people who live in the plains here in Argentina, the Pampas, they see the same landscape all the time. They can walk ten kilometers, and the whole scene shifts ten kilometers.

So when I write, I try to think about where the character lives, where they grew up, what they need, where they differ, what was new for them—if they grew up in the plains and now live in the mountains. I used to live in the city, now I’m living in the mountains, and there are some things that you can feel in the body. Your body starts to change. The air is different. The muscles change because you’re climbing all the time. The way you relate to people in the city is really different from the way you relate to people here in the mountains. If I meet a stranger here in the street, I say hello, which I never do in the city.

Jennifer Croft (JC): I really loved listening to Fede talk about place. Obviously, translating these stories influenced me as well, and I have been thinking a lot about place in fiction. Right now, I’m working on a book of creative nonfiction called Notes on Postcards, and part of the question of this text is: why does it matter where we are when we’re communicating with someone? Or why does it matter where we are in general? I started thinking about this question in 2020, when all of my travel plans were cancelled. I felt really cut off from all of the places that I care about—first and foremost among those is Buenos Aires. I feel very panicked that I’m not allowed to enter Argentina right now because of my US passport. I’m currently in upstate New York at a writing residency called Yaddo, and I’ve had a hard time working on my project, but thanks to these conversations with Fede over the last week or so, I’ve been relaxing into it.

I like comparing my obsession with places to Fede’s, because mine is less about landscape and more about cities and cultures. Even though culture is such an extremely fluid thing, it is much more about how one feels in the context of other human beings. I’m more of a flaneur kind of writer, and it’s great for me to be able to incorporate these landscapes into my thinking too. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Fragrance” by S. Vijayalakshmi

February 9, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Thila Varghese

the desire to share everything/stimulated the conversation/while the voice inside cautioned to wait

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, the promises of a domestic paradise belie a need for defendable boundaries in S. Vijayalakshmi’s poem “Fragrance.” We’re guided through a surreal mosaic of images that juxtapose lofty abstraction with quotidian concreteness: the soul leans against the door of a domestic threshold, time (itself concretized in clock hands) peeks and laughs, paradise beckons like a salesperson, and possible lives are stars that bloom corporeally with fragrance. The speaker’s interlocutor, described as having the disarming veneer of a wise man, evokes a sense of risk and relatability—his very speech is depicted as unusually cloying (honey drops with sweeteners) and performative (“courtesy words,” “mask having sloughed off”). Yet the speaker’s trepidation is expressed by dramatic, even violent metaphors: a circus ring of fire, a standoff requiring bullet-proof vests. Through its ironically “delicate” title, S. Vijayalakshmi’s poem confronts the ungentle truths of relationships, vulnerability, and possibility.

Fragrance

The conversation proceeded very smoothly.
In the voice that was preaching to me
like a profoundly wise man,
honey drops were mixed with sweeteners.
The figure hiding behind the rough voice
smiled, the mask having sloughed off.
The night breeze gathered up
the courtesy words and left.
As the desire to share everything
stimulated the conversation
while the voice inside cautioned to wait,
the clock hand peeked out
to check whether everything was going well
and laughed.
Within the boundaries of the conversation,
a thousand bouquets
extended their welcome.
A paradise opened and invited me,
like a sales agent, to come in.
Leaning against the door,
my soul struggled with the weight
of the boundary line’s bouquets,
unable to bear the load.
Even as I contemplated on
which foot to put forward first
to step into the door of the paradise,
an oracle declared,
“Enough with your cautionary instinct and analysis;
just discard them and come in.”
What to do with all the fragrances
from the countless stars
that bloomed within me?
Again, I draw a line.
The flames are burning
like those on the line of a circus ring of fire.
You seem to appear the same as I do,
and both of us are wearing bulletproof vests.
The bullets are waiting
in the tidal wave of conflicts. READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Lolita, Double Feature

May 14, 2020  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Sarah Moore and Xiao Yue Shan

This week, we discuss Nabokov's most famed novel, adapted by Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne.

Of Lolita, that startling, monumental novel that—by Vladimir Nabokov’s own words—”completely eclipsed [his] other works,” of a story that continues to enthral, shock, and conjure up long-winding debates since its 1955 publication, of this classic that stunned the world . . . 

Though Lolita was originally written in English, Nabokov himself was, as Alfred Kazin said, “a man who turned statelessness into absolute strength.” In addition to being a well-respected translator of Russian poetry, he was also the one who took on the laborious task of translating Lolita back to his native language (albeit in bootleg copies, as it was banned in the Soviet Union until 1989). Though most authors would be reluctant at the thought of translating their own work, difficulties on Nabokov’s part was perhaps mediated by his translation philosophy, which was centred around the existence of a greater metaphysical language, of which all the various iterations of the same text—including the original—are fragments. 

In consideration of this greater language, of which the spirit of a text surges and infuses its renditions, we must also think of Lolita as study of an immense mind as it navigates the English language anew, amidst a collision of intercultural practices, literary traditions, and theories. In choosing this subject for the latest Asymptote at the Movies, our blog editors consider not only Lolita‘s textuality, but also the “collision of interpretations” that led to its varied existences. The films, directed by Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne, are supreme examples of the intertextuality, as defined by Brian McFarlane, that adopts the original novel as a resource, as opposed to the source. They are celebrations of translation as a wholly original art.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): It’s hard to think of an author less befitting of cinematic adaptation than Vladimir Nabokov—that indisputable master of runaway language, his generous verbosity that creates multifarious, dramatic textures . . . It defies the instantaneous appreciation for images. That is not to say that Nabokov isn’t a distinctly vivid writer (what is more lucid than that single configuration: “four feet ten in one sock”?), but that his work is the embodiment of that singular textual quality of transformation and reference—one word simultaneously impresses on the next while calling back towards the previous, a line denoting memory is startled by its knowledge of the present. The writer, in impeccable craft, moves from the tactile to the figurative to the emotional to the sensual. 

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Rawness and Taboo: Kono Taeko’s Toddler Hunting and Other Stories in Review

March 7, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Clayton McKee

There’s a rawness in these stories that leaves the reader feeling bare, visible, and reflective.

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Toddler Hunting and Other Stories, collection written by Kono Taeko, translated from the Japanese by Lucy North and Lucy Lower, New Directions, 2018

Reviewed by Clayton McKee, Copy Editor

Interior and exterior, public and private, Kono Taeko explores constructed façades in social situations and crashes them down in intimate settings. Each of the narratives in Toddler Hunting and Other Stories delves into the feminine psyche and investigates themes of motherhood and family. Shifts from exterior persona to interior desire rupture Kono’s cold prose, shocking the reader out of socially normative interactions and thrusting them into the taboos lurking deep inside, followed by a quick return to her straight-faced writing. This keeps readers on their toes, not knowing when the next rupture will occur. Contrasting the interior with the exterior and social expectations with personal desires has the effect of enrapturing, sometimes shocking the reader, plunging them into the depths of her/his own imaginary and propelling each story forward.

Kono Taeko is considered amongst the most influential Japanese women writers that first made an appearance in the 1960s. Her impressive portfolio includes over a dozen works in Japanese, all centered on unexplored aspects of human character—female characters in particular, further pushing the envelope not only on these unexplored aspects but also on a gender that was underexplored in Japanese literature at the time. Kono comes to the English-speaking world in this translated collection published by New Directions, which includes a lot of her short fiction written during the sixties. Not only was she the first woman to be on the committee for the Akutagawa Literary Prize, but she also received that prize in 1963, followed by the Yomiuri Prize in 1969 and the Tanizaki Prize in 1980. Before dying in 2015, she was also awarded a Bunka Kunshō, or Order of Culture, which is presented by the Emperor.

The titular story, “Toddler Hunting,” delves deep into the psyche of Akiko, a character with a strong distaste for little girls and a strange attraction to little boys. Her disgust for female children led her to not desire kids at all, and knowing that her “fear” is not logical, she hides behind a façade of disgust for all children. This disgust is contradicted, however, as she impulsively buys lavish clothing for young boys, only to gift them to her acquaintances’ boys in hopes to watch them “crossing [their] chubby arms over [their] chest, concentrating with all [their] might . . .”  just to take the shirt off by themselves. Akiko describes such things as an “intensely pleasurable.” READ MORE…

Desire and Rebirth: Armonía Somers’ The Naked Woman in Review

November 15, 2018  |  in Reviews  |  by Sophie Stevens

Somers’ carefully-crafted novel reveals the effects that living in a society in which women are repressed has on both women and men.

The Naked Woman by Armonía Somers, translated from the Spanish by Kit Maude, Feminist Press, 2018.

What could freedom from the pressures and expectations of society mean for a woman in Uruguay in the 1950s, and what might the impact of this freedom be on others? These questions are explored by Uruguayan author, scholar, and feminist Armonía Somers in The Naked Woman. Written in 1950, this is the first of Somers’ books to be translated into English. The novel tells an energetic and enthralling story through which Somers articulates a pressing need in society for people to find ways to escape prescribed roles, express desire, and renew one’s sense of self. The narrative focuses on the experience of the female protagonist, Rebeca Linke, and sheds light on the repressive context of 1950s Uruguay when, according to scholar Maria Olivera-Williams, “middle-class social mores proved particularly suffocating to women.” Somers explores the effects of these constraints on women and creates a subversive protagonist who creatively and successfully challenges these expectations by allowing herself to release her natural instincts and understand new forms of intimacy. Whilst the female experience is the focus of the book, Somers’ carefully-crafted novel reveals the effects that living in a society in which women are repressed has on both women and men. She achieves this by depicting male violence against women and the harmful effects of a lack of freedom of choice.

The Naked Woman begins with Rebeca Linke’s revelation of the failed hopes that she had pinned on her thirtieth birthday. This sense of disillusionment is the driving force behind her decision to abandon her everyday existence and move to the countryside: she is desperate to break the daily monotony of her life, to embrace freedom and to live in the present. She takes a train to a small cottage in a remote part of the Uruguayan countryside where she casts off her one remaining item of clothing, her coat, having abandoned everything else. As a result, her break with the past and her commitment to the here and now becomes urgent: “[s]he was beholden to the present, like water held in the palm of a hand.” When she ventures out into the night, she is immersed in a natural environment that she has never before experienced so intimately. This then extends to her own body: she discovers its uniqueness by touching it and she remarks upon changes that she had not previously noted. It is Somers’ focus on the present, the protagonist’s physical experience of each moment, and the centrality of the female body that make the book so compelling, exciting and enticing for readers today.

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