Monthly Archives: December 2019

A Blazoned Book of Language: Poems from the Edge of Extinction in Review

December 11, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Sarah Moore

The poets in this collection are intensely alert to their struggle, focusing on their work on the language's vulnerability and change.

I am beginning to write in our language,
but it is difficult.

Only the elders speak our words,
and they are forgetting.

So begins “C’etsesen” (“The Poet”), written in Ahtna, an indigenous language of Alaska, by John Elvis Smercer. In 1980, there were about one hundred and twenty speakers of Ahtna. At the time of this poem’s publication in 2011, there were about twenty. Today only about a dozen fluent speakers remain. Smercer’s lines reveal his urgent concern with the disappearance of his language and the weight of his task in preventing the language from slipping away. It is a race against time, between generations, for the young to learn the language before the old leave, taking the words with them.

Chris McCabe, editor of the anthology Poems From the Edge of Extinction, has equally set out on such a task: to collect, record, and preserve poems from multiple endangered languages. The anthology grew out of the Endangered Poetry Project, launched at the National Library, at London’s Southbank Centre, in 2017. The project seeks submissions from the public of any poem in an endangered language in order to build an archive and record of these poems for future generations. Of the world’s seven thousand spoken languages, over half are endangered. By the end of this century, experts estimate that these will have disappeared, with no living speakers remaining. Language activism has been growing since the early 2000s, and the United Nations declared 2019 the International Year of Indigenous Languages (IYIL 2019) to raise global awareness of the consequences of the endangerment of indigenous languages. McCabe’s anthology, published to coincide with IYIL 2019, contains fifty poems, each in a different endangered language (as identified by UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger), presented in the original alongside an English translation; the result is an urgent and illuminating collection encompassing linguistics, sociology, politics, criticism, and philosophy that, in its totality, represents a manifesto of resistance.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Perspective” by Maria Borio

December 10, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Julia Pelosi-Thorpe

that their borders invert onto one another as they age

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the work of Italian poet Maria Borio. This translation of Borio’s work is deft, bringing out the implausibly smooth staccato of the original Italian. The mix of rhythm and flow in the poem is incapsulated by the symbol of the train that cuts and blows as it glides. Here, the movement of images works to push the boundaries of the movement of thoughts: brackets set off points of views that read almost like cinematic direction, suggesting that the pure movement of the verse—and thought—are always conditioned by some perspectival imposition. Come aboard Maria Borio’s powerful train of thought.

Perspective

The horizon line seemed the border of the world
halted midst your pole and the sea. The sea curving since

the earth is a globe, suspended between nose and horizon hands
fist fight, thrusting images of inconsistency against
[the horizon.

READ MORE…

Personal Histories, Sexual Politics: An Interview with Ayu Utami

December 9, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Lara Norgaard

The way we control our bodies and the way we control our morality is political. The two cannot be separated.

Jakarta in the 1990s was bubbling with new ideas of freedom. During the third decade of Suharto’s military dictatorship in Indonesia, punks met on the streets that soldiers patrolled. Cafés and bars pulsed with the energy of youth movements. Quality journalism found ways to wriggle its way around censorship, both official and communal. And when writers couldn’t get past the strict barriers imposed by military rule, they still circulated their critical narratives by donning pen names or disguising fact as fiction.

Ayu Utami was one of the journalists blacklisted from publishing openly in the late 1990s. A member of the group of artists and intellectuals that established Komunitas Utan Kayu, Jakarta’s first space dedicated to art and free expression under military rule, she nevertheless continued to publish her reportage anonymously. Only weeks before participating in the student movement that would pull Suharto from power, she also released her first novel, Saman, which caused massive controversy—in part because of its serendipitous timing, but also because of its uninhibited treatment of taboo topics, both political and sexual.

The novel follows the personal experiences of three young Indonesian women, their relationships to their bodies, as well as the life story of a socially conscious priest violently persecuted during the mass killings of perceived communists in 1965. In a total break from the prose of most of her contemporaries, who either perceived bodily concerns as lesser than politics or who used female sexuality as a narrative tool, Ayu’s fireball novel was not only wildly popular, but also set a precedent for contemporary feminist literature in Indonesia. In 1998, Jakarta exploded—and the shrapnel was Ayu Utami’s books, flying off shelves. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

December 6, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Sarah Moore and Xiao Yue Shan

The weekly roundup from China and the United Kingdom!

This week our writers bring you the latest news from China and the United Kingdom. In China, hundreds of writers and critics have attended the Hubei International Literature Week and Poetry Festival whilst in the United Kingdom, the life and work of Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney was celebrated in a film. Read on to find out more! 

Xiao Yue Shan, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting from China

“between the metaphors of intertwining language / is evidence that I live on this land / for poetry”

So go the lines of 谢克强 Xie Keqiang, one of the many renowned poets of Hubei, a central province settled in the basin of the Yangtze River. Wuhan, its capital, has long been located in the national body of literature as a poetic muse, one especially vital in Chinese literature which observes so closely the paradigms of space and narrations of home. From the ancient verses of Li Bai and Cui Hao to the contemporary lines of 张执浩 Zhang Zhihao, elements of this river-city resound in a lifeline that threads the Chinese poetic canon, same as the water threads the land.

From November 25 to December 1, Wuhan hosted the annual Hubei International Literature Week and Poetry Festival, an event that gathered hundreds of Chinese and international writers and critics to discuss and share the gifts of poetry made public. In a series of talks, readings, dialogues, and performances, poets took the stage to read their work and openly contemplate the urgent necessity for this work. READ MORE…

Your Perfect Holiday Gift: An Asymptote Book Club Subscription

December 5, 2019  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Lee Yew Leong

To celebrate two full years of the Asymptote Book Club, we're taking 10% off three-month subscriptions this holiday season!

We interrupt our regular blog programming with an announcement (and a bit of humble-bragging): The Asymptote Book Club has now entered its third year! To celebrate, we’re taking 10% off three-month subscriptions this holiday season—just sign up by December 12 at this link here (coupon pricing already applied).

We didn’t know what to expect when we first set up this Book Club, but adventurous readers (which fans of Asymptote tend to be) in the UK, the EU, and the US, have shown that there is strong demand for a curated service dedicated to world literature. 

Since the Book Club launched in December 2017, we’ve introduced compelling titles from all around the world. At our blog, we have interviewed both the authors and the translators of our book club picks, including Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and translator Jhumpa Lahiri among many others. One of our titles, Love by Hanne Orstavik (February 2018’s selection from Archipelago Books, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken) even won the 2019 PEN Translation Prize! We’re happy to live up to our promise of delivering contemporary classics and future critical hits to your door. On the occasion of the Book Club’s second anniversary, we’re revisiting a conversation with founder Lee Yew Leong (also our the magazine’s editor-in-chief) at the launch of the service two years ago.

Why a Book Club?

Well, in a nutshell: the idea was to take the important work we have done with our award-winning, free online journal and our Translation Tuesday showcases at the Guardian—that is to say, showcasing the best new writing from around the world, and giving it a physical presence outside of the virtual arena. We also wanted to celebrate (as well as support) the independent publishers who work hard behind the scenes to make world literature possible. READ MORE…

What We Owe to Our Ancestors: On Nino Haratischwili’s The Eighth Life

December 4, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla

I kept wondering if part of the reason we are so invested in the stories of our female ancestors is not to save them, but to save ourselves?

The Eighth Life, by Nino Haratischwili, translated from the German by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin, Scribe, 2019

Sometimes I wonder how many people harbor a secret desire to write a book about their family’s entire history. I have certainly met enough women in my life who have expressed this explicitly, especially the stories shared by their mothers and grandmothers—the implication being that we don’t get enough of these stories in literature or biographies. It is perhaps for this reason that reading Nino Haratischwili’s The Eighth Life, translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin, feels so familiar, almost like a wish fulfilled. Because with all its exciting intricacies and the moving depth, The Eighth Life is not just the story of the trials and tribulations of one Georgian family over the red century; it is first and foremost a tribute that Niza, the book’s narrator, pays to her matriarchal line and to her family’s youngest member, her niece Brilka.

The Eighth Life has deservedly been compared to Tolstoy’s War & Peace, most recently translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Just like its epic predecessor, The Eighth Life features a dizzying amount of main and secondary characters whose lives are explored in depth and trailed over several decades, from the early 1900s to our present. The story starts with Niza’s great-grandmother, Stasia, the daughter of a famed Georgian chocolate-maker, who almost impetuously betroths Simon Jashi, a military man. Throughout the book, we follow Stasia, her sister Christina, and their granddaughters as they shape and are shaped by one hundred years of Georgian and USSR history. Like Tolstoy, Haratischwili is not afraid to go into the details of the major historical events that signpost the twentieth century, providing a guideline even for those that are not well versed in Soviet history. And just like Tolstoy, through the voice of her perceptive narrator, she is ready to remind us of the hypocrisy and absurd repetitions that history often entails. READ MORE…

A Special Message from Our Editor-in-Chief

December 3, 2019  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

If this #GivingTuesday inspires you to donate to a cause, let it be Asymptote, the journal that rolls out the red carpet for world literature.

Dear friends,

This giving season, consider throwing in your support for the journal that none other than Dubravka Ugrešić (pictured above) recently called “the global literary miracle.”

In 2019, we brought you never-before-published writing from 70 countries and 44 languages—more than any other Anglophone magazine has unearthed. Though it may seem a miracle on the outside—a journal that puts so many underrepresented voices in conversation with established names like Dubravka Ugrešić and Viet Thanh Nguyen—it takes hard work behind the scenes to uphold both the diversity and the rigor of our content.

Why do we strive to include outsiders? Because we know what it’s like to be an outsider. 

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Gemma Gorga

December 3, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Sharon Dolin

Like sad eyes / gestures are also inherited

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the poetry of Gemma Gorga. The poems revolve around themes of domestic labor and consumption; but they are not what they appear on the surface. Fastidious consideration of fish-flesh or mercury or cautionary affects inherited by one’s grandmother hint at a nuanced understanding of the traces of events left on the body and the mind. “Still the smell does not want to leave them, / as if tiny bags of memory remained,” Gorga writes, indicating the complex and grotesque traces that always remain after affects. Visceral, but not overly descriptive, the style weaves potent materials with potent concepts in metaphoric embraces. These poems show that whole lives, whole beings, can be explained and articulated by the smallest things: an anchovy’s spine, a pellet of mercury, a poem.

Poetics of the Fragment

When you return from the market
you must clean the anchovies,
which means ripping off the head and tail,
removing the thin strips still sticky
with life, the central spine
that detaches with a slight zip,
afterwards washing them,
purifying them under tap water
(even death requires baptism),
making sure no tiny eye remains
trapped in the moist blindness of your fingers,
finally soaking them in vinegar,
waiting until the flesh whitens
cured in acid, cured all the way through.
They have lain for hours beneath the planetary
light of oil and pepper.
Still the smell does not want to leave them,
as if tiny bags of memory remained
hidden in the folds forming matter and air.
Making sure no one sees me,
I smell the backs of my hands
(for the sea trace from fish bellies)
and I know they are yours. READ MORE…

Epic Reasons to Love Greek: An Interview with Andrea Marcolongo

December 2, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Timmer Harvey

The study of a language that challenges us the way that Greek does teaches us the trade of living . . .

Andrea Marcolongo’s motivation for writing The Ingenious Language is refreshingly straightforward: the Italian writer, translator, and classical scholar wants everyone to fall in love with ancient Greek. Casting aside the rigid pedagogical practices and elitism traditionally associated with classical studies, Marcolongo focuses on the personal, exploring the “extraordinary” challenges, ecstasies, and opportunities ancient Greek offers to all who engage with it. Written for “those who have never studied it and are curious, those who have studied Greek and forgotten it, those who have studied it and hated it, and those who are studying Greek literature in school today,” The Ingenious Language is a bestseller in Italy and, in translation, has been embraced by readers around the world. Masterfully translated from the Italian by Will Schutt and published by Europa Editions, Andrea Marcolongo’s love letter to ancient Greek is now finally available in North America. To celebrate, Asymptote spoke with Marcolongo about falling in love with an ancient language, the “strange” appeal of studying Greek, the myth of Greek color blindness, and the need for a common utopia.

—Sarah Timmer Harvey

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): In the introduction to The Ingenious Language, you mention “falling in love” with ancient Greek as a young girl. Can you tell me why Greek was so appealing to you, why you fell in love?

Andrea Marcolongo (AM): I always say that the love story with Greek is the longest of my life. However, it wasn’t love at first sight: I don’t believe in that. Instead, it was a path of knowledge. I remember myself as a young girl waiting for the yellow bus to go to high school with a big Greek dictionary in my hands. It was a challenge, first of all, to learn an alphabet that I didn’t know, and then a challenge to myself, my openness to the world.

Obviously, every language is “ingenious” in its own way because it expresses thinking of those who use it every day. The adjective “ingenious” which gives the title to my book derives from three different languages: the Greek, where it comes from the verb root “to create” and means, as in Aristophanes, “creative mind,” the Latin, in which it refers to the “genium” which, according to mythology, is a small being that accompanied man throughout the course of life to make him happy, and then the French, in which “génial” means fun, or beautiful. I played with these same words in three different languages as a way of explaining why I, Andrea, a thirty-year-old woman, love Greek. I love it because it is a free and human language. Free, because its quirks—maybe even those that drove us crazy at school—were not made obligatory by grammar, but left to the free choice of those who used Greek daily to speak and write. It is, therefore, a human language because it leaves people the responsibility of choosing not only what to say, but also how to say it. And in doing so, Greek also allows the speaker the freedom to express who they are. READ MORE…