Mythology – Part Two
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In part two of our Mythology feature, we dig deeper into the rich and sometimes troubling relationship between legends of old and lives of present. Where do a nation’s myths come from? What does it mean to be both proud and critical of our cultural identity? How can art reconcile or challenge the way we relate to our heritage? We dive into these questions and more through a focus on two Western Asian countries: Israel and Georgia. Yardenne Greenspan, who grew up in Tel Aviv, examines her own difficulties with accepting the state-sanctioned version of history—she talks with fellow Israeli writers about the myths surrounding Israel’s public image. And Daniel Goulden and Rron Karahoda test out J.R.R. Tolkien’s theory as to why certain languages survive and others go extinct, through a celebration of Georgian music and folklore.
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Produced by: Daniel Goulden, Emma Jacobs, Florian Duijsens, Kate Nic Dhomhnaill, Mirza Puriç, Rron Karahoda, Tim Ellison and Yardenne Greenspan.
Special thanks to: Ari Lieberman, Deborah Harris, Gil Cohen, Gon Ben Ari, József Szabó, Lysander Jaffe, Matti Friedman and Lee Yew Leong.
Music: “Llaves” by Selva de Mar, “Silver” by Jahzzar, “Ananuri” by Anon, “Apareka” by the Trio Mandili and a chant by the Rustavi Choir. Creative Commons licenses can be found at http://freemusicarchive.org/. Some changes were made to these tracks.
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Ari Lieberman was born in Mexico and grew up in Israel. He is the author of Out of the Blue (Yediot Books, 2014) and editor of the collaborative storytelling project uprightdown.com. He teaches Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia.
Daniel Goulden is an assistant editor at Asymptote and a recent graduate of Brandeis University where he majored in Russian Studies. He enjoys thinking about translation as an instrument for social change and watching cartoons.
Emma Jacobs is an assistant editor at Asymptote, and also edits for Zero Books and 3:AM Magazine. She recently completed a degree in Literature at the University of Warwick and UC Berkeley. She’s currently based in London but will be heading to the U.S. at the start of 2015, somewhere or other on the West Coast.
Gon Ben Ari published his first novel when he was twenty-one years old. His second novel, The Sequoia Children, is currently being translated into English. He has worked as a culture writer for Yediot Ahronot for many years, and is now living in Brooklyn and writing for The Jewish Daily Forward. Gon has written the screenplay for a Yiddish western, Der Mensch, as well as a non-fiction project called Ma Kara Po (What Happened Here) in collaboration with Professor Samuel Bacharach. They are currently working on the sequel to this project. In addition to writing, Gon is a comic artist and has a one-man-band called The Savage Detective.
Matti Friedman’s work as a reporter has taken him from Lebanon to Morocco, Cairo, Moscow and Washington, D.C., and to conflicts in Israel and the Caucasus. He has been a correspondent for the Associated Press, where he specialized in religion and archaeology in Israel and the Palestinian territories, as well as for the Jerusalem Report and the Times of Israel. He is the author of the prize-winning book The Aleppo Codex. He grew up in Toronto and lives in Jerusalem.
Rron Karahoda graduated from Bard College under Kyle Gann in 2013. He is a composer, critic, and most importantly an intern at a music hall. He is penning his own opera, as well as music for two webseries.
Yardenne Greenspan is a writer and translator working in Ithaca, NY. She has an MFA in Fiction and Translation from Columbia University. In 2011 Yardenne 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 serves as Asymptote‘s editor-at-large for Israeli literature. Her translations from Hebrew include work by Gon Ben Ari, Etgar Keret, Yochi Brandes, Amir Guttfreund, Yirmi Pinkus, Alex Epstein and Yaakov Shabtai. Her fiction, essays and translations have been published in The New Yorker, Haaretz, Words Without Borders, Drunken Boat, World Literature Today, Hot Metal Bridge, Two Lines, and Asymptote, among other publications. She is currently working on a novel about fatherhood and the American-Israeli dream.