Asymptote’s poetry editor Aditi Machado has curated across the gutter and five continents. In light of Asymptote’s July issue, I interviewed Aditi, and her responses run the gamut: what follows is an in-depth interview with insight into arranging an issue, poetry in translation, and embracing vulnerability when reading.
Many think that reading poetry requires a specific literacy—is the same true for reading translation, or poetry in translation?
Reading anything requires specific forms of literacy, even reading a newspaper. With poetry, I think we’re less aware of skills we may already have or of those that may be gained. Additionally, we’re extremely sensitive about our lack in these skills—or, if we feel we do have them, we might be able to articulate how we learned them and how much further we have to go. It’s a special privilege, being literate about one’s literacy. READ MORE…
Borges, the Quixote, and Two Street Markets
The author of "The Antiquarian" tackles Borges, contextual understanding… and the singular joys of book shopping
The first time I read “Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote,” I was seventeen and in my freshman year in college in Lima. As anyone who reads Borges for the first time, I was dazzled by the story of a fictional French writer who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, wants to write once again, without plagiarizing or recovering it from memory, Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The most memorable passage of the story comes when the narrator, a friend of Menard’s, and very likely a French fascist, analyzes one paragraph from the novel in two different ways. First, assuming that Cervantes is the author, he concludes that the paragraph is rhetorical and verbose, when written by a seventeenth-century Spaniard. Later, assuming the author is Pierre Menard, a contemporary right-wing surrealist poet, he finds that the same words are fantastically counterintuitive and herald a new form of understanding the world. Since the narrator is a fascist, one suspects that his interpretation is an overinterpretation, the grotesque imposition of ideas that were not there in the original text.
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Contributor:- Gustavo Faverón Patriau
; Writers: - Gustavo Faverón Patriau
, - Jorge Luis Borges
; Tags: - Antiquarian
, - borges
, - Cervantes
, - commentary
, - fascism
, - Grove Atlantic
, - Gustavo Faverón Patriau
, - Latin America
, - Peru
, - Pierre Menard
, - Quixote
, - The Library of Babel