Posts featuring David Colmer

Asymptote Podcast: Michele Hutchison on Curating Our Dutch Literature Special Feature

Our podcast returns helmed by our new podcast editor Steve Lehman!

In tandem with the release of our milestone 40th issue, new podcast host Steve Lehman speaks with the Booker International Prize-winning translator Michele Hutchison about her work on Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening, curating this issue’s Special Feature on Dutch literature, and more. Plus, a poetry reading by contributor Mustafa Stitou in the original Dutch, followed by a reading in English by the translator David Colmer. You can find Mustafa and David’s work, and that of many other authors, poets, and translators from around the world, in our glorious Fall 2020 issue here.

Section Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2020

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…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2020

Our blog editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2020 issue!

Asymptote’s momentous fortieth issue features brand new work from thirty-two countries, a Dutch Literature Special Feature curated by 2020 International Booker Prize co-winner Michele Hutchison, and a literary roster spanning classics like Tagore, heavy hitters like Harwicz, and rising stars like Fabias. Dizzy yet? We’re here to help.

In the Chinese language, we never use the abstract noun of beauty. Instead, beauty is always a quality, a trait something possesses. There is, for example, no real way to express the notion that “beauty is all around us”; instead, one would say, “everything here is beautiful.” I find something wondrous in this distinct nature of what beauty is. It is a wandering state, a constantly mutating definition, a metamorphosing form that adapts to whatever subject it is applied to—never fixed, never permanent. Something is beautiful not for its appeal to the pure nature of beauty, but for its unique addition to the myriad of beauty’s appearances.

I was once again reminded of this definition while reading through the Fall 2020 issue, in which the writings from thirty-two countries have compiled and allowed the contours of literary beauty to vacillate and transmit. The various Englishes that evolve via translation do not subscribe necessarily to the English that certain texts are born to, instead bringing the colours and geometries of their own language, imparting a distinct and knowing pleasure. In Stella N’Djoku’s poems, the brief lines are vehicles for a cyclical musicality, emphasized by the rhyming Italian but also vivid in the tender translation of Julia Pelosi-Thorpe, sensitive in their lineation. The verses are potent with grief, but positions it within the great immeasurability of the world—creating a familiar dwelling for grace amidst pain, and the poem as our path towards that space.

As if yesterday today tomorrow
were not places
and were here now
in centuries.

In the two poems of Kashimiri poet Nādim, one is also reminded of the singular iterations of his the poet’s original language. As translator Sonam Kachru informs us in his translator’s note, “[Nādim] is thinking of [Kashmir’s] history—a history revealed, in part, through the history of its poetry.” There is then, an impression that we are not privy to when reading in translation, yet the poem still transmits the meditative, majestic quality of scanning the poetic horizons for something that reverberates from the past into the present, and back again. The stoic power of lines like:

I will not sing—
I will sing today no song of Nishat or Shalimar, no annealed song of waters
engraving terraced gardens, no bower songs of bedded flowers;
No soft songs flush or sweetly fresh, not green dew songs
nor songs gentle and growing—

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation? April 2017

We review three new books available in English, from Hebrew poetry to haunting fairy tales.

milk of dreams

The Milk of Dreams, by Leonora Carrington, tr. by the author, New York Review Books

Reviewed by Beau Lowenstein, Editor-at-Large for Australia

Leonora Carrington grew up listening to folktales told by her Irish nanny in Crookhey Hall. She spent most of her life in Mexico City and became renowned as a Surrealist painter, artist and novelist. Her children recount how they used to sit in a large room on whose walls their mother’s fantastical stories were brought to life. There were deranged creatures and wild forests, and mystical persons standing amid steep, clouded mountains. Carrington’s breath as a storyteller was as broad as her genius for painting and imagery, and the paring of the two resulted in a small notebook she called The Milk of Dreams (New York Review Books, 2017) – perhaps the only surviving relic of that enchanting time where, each day for her children, she opened the door to a realm of fantasy and wonder.

We are introduced to Headless John on the first page, which immediately sets the tone:

The boy had wings instead of ears.

He looked strange.

“Look at my ears,” he said.
The people were afraid.

Her stories, which are often not much more than a few lines in length, give a sense of whimsical creativity; the kind that is not just rare in literature but exceedingly so in children’s stories. Meet George, who enjoys eating walls and eventually grows his head into a house; Don Crecencio the butcher and his goat’s meat roses; and the monster Chavela Ortiz, who has six legs, a golden jewel, pearls, and a portrait of Don Angel Vidrio Gonzalez, the head of the Sanitary Department. There is a freedom in Carrington’s tales that is both outrageous and unpredictable, and yet underlying is the realness of raw experience. These are not watered-down shadows of a story like so much of fantasy writing seen today – they delve into genuine emotions, which are often dark and complex.

And yet Carrington imbeds a wicked humour in her stories, too. In “The Horrible Story of the Little Meats,” an old and ugly woman is nicknamed Lolita by her friends and captures three children, imprisoning them and cutting off their heads. They are saved by a Green Indian who, in his ignorance, reattaches their heads to their hands and feet and buttocks, though, “the children were happy in spite of having their heads stuck on such funny places.”

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation? February 2016

So many new translations this month!—Here's what you've got to know, from Asymptote's own.

Mario Bellatin, The Large Glass (Eyewear Publishing, February 2016, United Kingdom and Phoneme Media, January 2016, United States). Translated by David Shook—review by Alice Inggs, Editor-at-large, South Africa

Cover_Bellatin_april20

Can a life be expressed in a single narrative, or a single form; can it be confined to a single genre? Mario Bellatin’s experimental autobiography (or is it autobiographies?), The Large Glass, employs three different ways of writing a life, challenging the accepted idea of what constitutes biography, and therefore self-expression.

This is not the first time Bellatin has engaged with the genre. His 2013 novel, Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction, is a satirical biography of a fictional Japanese author, which includes excerpts, photographs and a bibliography. As critic Diana Palaversich explains, “With Bellatin you are never on solid ground”.

The Large Glass is non-linear, and at times almost nonsensical, rendering memory as character. Bellatin’s style has been described as hewing closer to that of avant-garde filmmakers—Lynch, Cronenberg —than anything literary. This brand of inscrutability or opacity—inherent in all three sections of The Large Glass—means that to distil meaning from Bellatin’s work it is necessary to rely on aspects of the author’s “objective” biography. This has something of a Lazarus Effect on Barthes’s dead author. But to what end?

The Large Glass magnifies those fundamental philosophical questions: Are we the same person throughout our lives? How do experiences and the manner in which we experience them and remember experiencing them shape our understanding of ourselves? How do these memories fit into the narrative of a life? Does a life have a single narrative? Bellatin seems determined to “reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs,’ and not ‘me.’” READ MORE…