Monthly Archives: April 2014

From the Front Lines of AWP: A Dispatch

Managing editor Tara FitzGerald on meeting the Asymptote community at this year's AWP!

I’d been warned (in jest) about the rain, but the first day of AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) in Seattle dawned bright and clear, and the weather stayed that way throughout my stay. Not that it would have mattered anyway, because my home away from home was the Asymptote table at the AWP book fair, which was safely tucked away inside the Washington State Convention Center. Thousands of writers had gathered at this convention center to hobnob, talk craft, and attend panels during three days of intense book-related activities. From my vantage point at our table, I had the chance to meet around 250 AWP-ers—some of them Asymptote contributors, some editors from other journals, some already our fans, and others simply curious about the journal and what we do here. It was also exciting to hear that at least a handful of them found out about us because they had attended a panel where we were mentioned as the go-to place for international literature.

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Hebrew Poetry from Ron Dahan’s Collection “Youth”

Dahan's portrayals of war and daily life in Israel are stirring: precise yet deftly ambiguous, casual yet anguished

A soda machine burns outside a grocery store

and all the Pepsi and the Coke (diet, too) and the Sprite

Explode in all directions like grenades.

The village of Markabe is burnt and bombed like in a war movie.

And like in a war movie

there’s the guy who carries a heavy jerrycan on his back

and the guy with the cigarette between his teeth

and the guy called Nir

and the guy who’s going to die and doesn’t know it so he allows himself to reminisce about that time when

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In Review: Marek Hłasko’s Killing the Second Dog

First published in Polish in 1965, Tomasz Mirkowicz's translation of a crime novel set in Tel Aviv is a delight.

Killing the Dog by Marek Hłasko, translated from the Polish by Tomasz Mirkowicz, New Vessel Press, 2014

Marek Hłasko’s novel, Killing the Second Dog, is set in Tel Aviv, but it isn’t any Tel Aviv that I know. Not only the years that separate my Israel (I was born there in 1982) from the novel’s newly independent Israel of the early 1950s account for this lack of familiarity. Nor is it the fact that Killing the Second Dog is, essentially, a crime novel. Hłasko’s Tel Aviv is an identity-less city, where a multitude of languages is spoken and a variety of currencies is exchanged. Still overcoming British rule and catering to the many post-war tourists financing its new path, this Israel offers itself up for grabs, trying, in spite of the suffocating heat and the shoddy infrastructure, to constitute as small an interruption as possible.

The central feeling of estrangement, however, the gnawing discomfort I felt as I read this book, came from the fact that my Tel Aviv, and especially the beach, where the bulk of the novel is set, is nothing if not laid-back. Traffic jams, bad parking, sweltering heat—they all fade into the feeling of a constant vacation, of beers on rickety wooden tables and sooty flip-flop-clad feet.

Hłasko, on the other hand, presents readers with a Tel Aviv that is constructed from bricks of anxiety. In a town cursed by the dry desert wind, Hłasko’s protagonists, Jacob and Robert, are surrounded by lowlifes, criminals and lost souls. Their Israel is one of jail time, seedy hotels, dirty deals and sweaty beds. Jacob is constantly looking for something of his own, but everything he ever has—the dog, his room, a towel—must be shared with another.

The plot is simple. Two Eastern European nobodies are romance con artists. Robert, a former theatre director who believes plays were meant to be performed in real life rather than on stage, writes lines for Jacob, the good-looking one, and with the help of a charming dog (which must be replaced with each iteration of their scheme), they trick rich American tourists into falling in love with Jacob and paying his fictitious debts off so that he may join them in the United States. The money is pocketed, the relationship falls through, on to the next victim.

But the script Robert had come up with is so inventively ridiculous that it creates a circus of sorts on the beachfront: Jacob is to play an angry, miserable and belligerent man in order to win the love of kindly women. In a fit of rage, realizing that he would never be able to join his beloved in America and wanting to hurt her and himself, making him appear cruel and heartless in her eyes, he must shoot the dog, his only possession, and then attempt suicide by swallowing sleeping pills. This is no fraud—the dog is now dead, and on at least one occasion Jacob alludes to, the forged suicide attempt had almost culminated in very real death.

And the most ludicrous part is, by Jacob’s own testimony, the two don’t ever do much with the money they swindle out of the women. Most of it pays for the dog’s food, and the rest is spent on cheap movies and cigarettes. While Jacob laments not having been born rich, while he is plagued with guilt for his lowly way of life and refuses to talk about one of his victims, who, after being admitted to a mental health institution, had killed herself over his betrayal, he never attempts to change his situation. He mentions previous occupations, all leading him in some way or another to serve time in prison. He enjoys conning his own partner, and has no interest whatsoever in finding real love. He is an aspiring actor who hates acting and an aspiring writer who won’t write. He dreams of a room of his own to disappear into with his books. But he, and all the other characters in Killing the Second Dog, know only how to dream, incapable of making their dreams come true. Whenever he stumbles upon a chance for real emotion and true bravery, he makes sure to squash it as best he can. In the book’s touching final scene, Jacob makes a weak attempt to take over the role of director of his own life, but it’s just another meaningless scene in the fiction of his life. In many ways, he is the second dog that must be sacrificed for the show to go on.

Unkempt, unwashed, unpleasant and unethical, Jacob and Robert appear not as the Big Bad Wolves of Tel Aviv. Instead, they read like two empty shells conjuring up the remains of their strength, whatever was left of them after communism and World War II had its way with them back in the home country. We learn little of their personal histories, but enough to know they have been traumatized in ways that, left untreated, lead men to nothing but more violence, more hate. In their pathetic aggressiveness, they manage to overcome readers’ distaste for them and become almost sympathetic.

This feat is greatly thanks to Hłasko’s talent of blending the old with the new in practically imperceptible ways. Bringing up small anecdotes from his characters’ past (“I didn’t learn anything in school. I misbehaved so badly they used to make me stand in a corner with my face to the wall. That was my punishment. You have to admit that under those circumstances I didn’t stand a chance of learning anything. Even the gym teacher would throw me out the door,” “My real father was a good and gentle man who died when I was six”), he accentuates just how empty their present is—their future, most likely, nonexistent. His cool, staccato style is held back for moments when one of the characters lets slip a sentimental run-on statement, puncturing a reader’s seemingly already-made-up mind.

Tomasz Mirkowicz has created a translation simultaneously exotic and familiar, resulting in a sense of pleasant disorientation. Without explaining too much about the time and place, avoiding the temptation toward footnotes, he serves English readers the colloquial style of dialogue and narrative in an easy, palatable and familiar way, only to then surprise them with a punch of that delightful strangeness, which is often the most pleasurable part of reading translated work. This is a novel that will haunt me, like a dog.

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Yardenne Greenspan, Asymptote editor-at-large for Israel, has an MFA in Fiction and Translation from Columbia University. In 2011 she received the American Literary Translators’ Association Fellowship. Her translation of Some Day, by Shemi Zarhin, was chosen for World Literature Today’s 2013 list of notable translations. Yardenne’s translations include work by Rana Werbin, Gon Ben Ari, Nahum Werbin, Vered Schnabel, Kobi Ovadia, Yirmi Pinkus, Ron Dahan, Alex Epstein and Yaakov Shabtai. Her fiction, essays and translations have been published in Hot Metal Bridge, Two Lines, Words Without Borders, Necessary Fiction, Agave, World Literature Today, Shelf Unbound and Asymptote, among other publications. She is currently working on her first novel. 

Weekly News Roundup, 25th April 2014: Gabo and Shakira, Books and Roses

This week's literary highlights from across the world

Strong voices in poetry and protest, remembered: this week marked the unfortunate loss of two poetic voices in protest. Romanian poet Nina Cassian sought exile in the United States after her poems satirizing the Romanian regime stepped on too many toes. Doris Pilkington Garimara exposed systematic injustice toward the Aborigines in Australia most famously through her book, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence. It may have happened last week, but the literary world is still reeling from the death of Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani remembers García Márquez’s memory while Salman Rushdie asserts that Gabo was “the greatest of us all.” We might see more from him, still: an unpublished excerpt, En Agosto nos Vemos. Or step back in time and read the magical realist’s profile on fellow Colombian pop sensation, Shakira. READ MORE…

Pop Around the World: Rising Sun Blues

There is a house...

It’s hard to say just how your favorite songs become your favorite songs, but it shouldn’t be hard to understand that sometimes our favorites are also immensely popular. We are not unique snowflakes, at least not when it comes to pop music, and sometimes (as previous iterations of this column have tried to show) we aren’t even that different from people across borders, seas, and continents.

A good song travels at the speed of radio waves, taking up residence in ears wherever, whenever.  Folk songs have traveled best of all, passing from porch to porch or from prayer-bench to prayer-bench, until the likes of Alan Lomax and the Greenwich Village folkies recorded and spread these tales like acoustic wildfire. READ MORE…

Asymptote Editor and Contributor News, April Edition

Productive as ever, Asymptote's phenomenal editors and contributors continue to shake up the literary world

Contributor News

Dolan Morgan’s short story collection, That’s When the Knives Come Down, is now available for presale. Eric Nelson writes in Electric Literature that the “unparalleled voice of this debut is surely one that will be copied, but not replicated by future writers,” and other critics have called the work “devlishly clever” and “wry, seductive, and breathtaking.” Read the work’s synopsis, and watch its trailer for a preview of the work’s humor and surrealism.

Contributors to our very first issue Efe Murad and Sidney Wade have won the first annual Meral Divitci Award for their translation of The Selected Poems of Melih Cevdet Anday. Stay tuned: we hear that the book will be released next year.

Bitter Oleander Press also has a new release from Asymptote contributors John Taylor and José-Flore Tappy. Sheds/Hangars is a bilingual volume that collects all of José-Flore Tappy’s poetry to date for the first time in English translation. We can’t wait to read this work, which translator Taylor previously discussed in Asymptote’s January 2012 issue (as it turns out, Taylor’s essay became a substantial part of his introduction).

Italy’s MART (Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto) presents the work of Sherman Ong, guest artist for Asymptote’s July 2011 issue, in a new exhibition called Lost in Landscape,” dedicated to contemporary landscape and its many meanings. Ong is shown alongside Marina Abramović, Agnès Varda, and Michael Wolf in this important show—so don’t miss out!

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Marcel Schwob’s “Mimes” – Prologue, Mime I

Post one of Asymptote Blog's serial translation of a hallucinatory, undiscovered French work by a revered fin-de-siècle author

Read all the posts in Asymptote’s “Mimes” translation project here

“We rarely live our own life with pleasure. We almost always try to die of a death other than our own.” – Marcel Schwob, Spicilège

“Nous vivons rarement avec plaisir de notre vraie vie. Nous essayons presque toujours de mourir d’une autre mort que la nôtre.”

Marcel Schwob, a Jewish French writer beloved by Alfred Jarry, Jorge Luis Borges, and Michel Leiris, was born in 1867 and died at an early age in 1905. Scholar of ancient Greek and Latin literature, translator of Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas De Quincey into French, specialist in fifteenth-century French literature (especially the poetry of outlaw poet François Villon)—Schwob steeped himself in the literature of the past while defying countless literary and philosophical boundaries in his own works. From Le Livre de Monelle, recently translated into English by Kit Schluter, which so influenced Michel Leiris that Leiris called reading it a “capital event” and based an episode of Aurora around it (Oeuvres, 17), to Schwob’s inquiry into the nature of argot, Schwob’s works mark an unprecedented, important turn in the history of French literature.

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Reviewing “Red Monsoon,” Interviewing Eelum Dixit

"I think that Nepali cinema is at a point now where if people at the top work together, we can really create a proper industry. "

Red Monsoon, a Nepali-language feature film directed by young Nepali filmmaker Eelum Dixit, will open in Kathmandu multiplexes in May. A select crowd of Lalitpur intelligentsia, myself included (I say this with my tongue firmly in cheek!) were invited to preview the film last week in the more intimate atmosphere of the refurbished 1920s-era Yalamaya Kendra complex.

South Asian film is perhaps too often synonymous with Bollywood. The overwhelming image is of the colourful, sequined song-and-dance routine, melodrama, three-hour-plus duration, as well as big-budget, cartel-backed production.

But Red Monsoon contains only one of these characteristics. The low-budget film (starring several members of Eelum’s family) opens with footage of one of Kathmandu’s many crowd-pulling religious festivals, yet riot police are beating back revelers. In the next scene, a group of young men discuss migration to the Gulf. “Good luck with your new life in Dubai,” says one friend. READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 18th April 2014: Happy in translation land, Don’t call me a storyteller!

This week's literary highlights from across the world

The absolute happiest news of the week? Asymptote’s April issue is out, and it sure is star-studded: our most recent issue features the likes of Nobel laureate Herta Müller; writer, editor, and translator David Bellos; Spanish-language sensation Antonio Ungar, Prix-Goncourt prize carrier Jonathan Littell; up-and-coming Amanda Lee Koe (highlighted in our special Diaspora English-language fiction feature!); Robert Walser Prizewinner Marianne Fritz; and past Asymptote favorite Jonas Hassen Khemiri… among so, so many others—it’s a spectacular issue from top to bottom (we promise we aren’t biased!) and absolutely worth checking out. Blog co-editor extraordinaire Eva Richter tackled some of her personal favorites earlier this week: dive into the issue and discover your own! READ MORE…

Gatsby in Translationland, Part II: between Words and Films

"Jacek Dehnel’s translation of the The Great Gatsby reveals, above all, the impotence of words as characters try to take control of their lives."

Asymptote Blog is celebrating The Great Gatsby’s 89th anniversary with two essays dedicated to Gatsby, translated: What does a seminal work of 20th-century Americana look like outside the tight nexus of American lit? This essay, second in a two-part series, takes a look at four very different Gatsbys, in translation and onscreen. Read Part I here.

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“Alcoholism, insomnia, anxiety, depression”: this is the diagnosis that appears in the medical record of Nick Carraway, protagonist of Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film “The Great Gatsby.” Luhrmann’s is the fourth filmic Gatsby, published on April 10, 1925, and one of the first works tackling the mythic American Dream. READ MORE…

Asymptote Spring 2014 Issue – Out Now!

…and it's packed with the most exciting new literary translations, critical pieces, and more from around the world.

What are you waiting for? Highlights from Asymptote’s Spring 2014 issue include new work by Nobel laureate Herta MüllerDavid Bellos (author of “Is that a Fish in Your Ear?”), and Prix Goncourt-winner Jonathan Littell. Plus, our annual English-language fiction feature spotlights Diasporic literature from Bosnia, China, India, Japan, and Singapore.

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Interview with Alex Cigale: Part II

Featuring poetry by neo-futurist poets Serge Segay and Rea Nikonova!

In Part I of Asymptote blog’s interview with Alex Cigale, Cigale discussed the roots of Russian Futurism, its modern inheritors, and politics at play in Russian poetry. Now he discusses his poetry and translations of Russian neo-futurist poets Serge Segay and Rea Nikonova. Read on for new poems by Segay and Nikonova, and to find out about Cigale’s Kickstarter campaign to finish exoDICKERING: Compositions 1963-1985, translated poetry by Serge Segay.

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Cuban Literature, Translation, and Baseball with Leonardo Padura

"What I say here in Brooklyn is exactly what I say in Havana.”

As the diplomatic stand-off between the United States and Cuba reaches its fifty-fifth year, an anxious audience packed into 61 Local in Brooklyn, New York to hear from Cuban writer Leonard Padura and his translator, Anna Kushner.

Online translation journal Words Without Borders gathered Padura, Kushner, and writer-editor Jonathan Blitzer to discuss the recently released Padura novel The Man Who Loved Dogs (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux 2013), translated by Kushner. The evening included a reading by Padura in the original Spanish, followed by Kushner reading the same passage in English. READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 11th April 2014: Sade goes home, Prizes everywhere

This week's literary highlights from across the world

Good news always seems to come in threes—or fours, or fives… News of this week’s literary accolades struck with some seriously heavy hitters. The Dublin IMPAC Award has announced its finalists, which include five books in translation and a novel by Asymptote interviewee Tan Twan Eng. For this prize, especially, the stakes are quite high: the winning author receives a 100,000-Euro prize, or in the case of a translation, a 75,000-25,000-Euro writer-translator split! Karl Ove Knausgaard, contentious memoirist and nominated for the IMPAC, has been graced with double honors this week: he’s also been shortlisted for the International Foreign Fiction Prize, which historically includes two female Japanese writers as well (a first!): Yoko Ogawa and Hiromi Kawakami. It’s a good week for female writers in general: the prize formerly known as the Orange Prize the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction has announced its shortlist. READ MORE…