Monthly Archives: February 2020

“Faithful to the imagination”: A Review of Silvina Ocampo’s Forgotten Journey

February 10, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Sarah Moore

Reading her short stories has the effect of seeing an enlarged eye behind a held-up magnifying glass.

Forgotten Journey by Silvina Ocampo, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan, City Lights Books, 2019

Silvina Ocampo (1903-93) was once called “the best-kept secret of Argentine letters.” Luckily for Anglophone readers, however, more of her work is being gradually revealed, most recently with two publications by City Lights Books: The Promise and Forgotten Journey. The Promise is a novella which Ocampo spent twenty-five years completing, whilst Forgotten Journey, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan, is her debut piece of fiction, a collection of twenty-eight short stories originally published in 1937 as Viaje olvidado.

Ocampo may be under-recognized outside of Argentina, but during her lifetime she was part of an elite literary and intellectual circle formed by Jorge Luis Borges. Along with Borges, and her eventual husband Adolfo Bioy Casares, she collaborated on a famous anthology of Fantastic Literature and formed friendships with authors such as Virginia Woolf, Paul Valéry, Lawrence of Arabia, Federico García Lorca, and Gabriela Mistral. She was also a visual artist, having trained in Paris under Fernand Léger and the surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico.

These surrealist influences are evident in her writing, and there is undoubtedly a fairytale quality to Ocampo’s stories: fairytale in the sense of its truest origins—innocence is flooded with the dark and the ominous, childhood confronts and battles adulthood. Throughout Ocampo’s tales, there is always a moment when death enters, knocking the innocent out. And these stories are dark: a horse is whipped to death, a servant murders the young son of her mistress, a woman’s pet is brutally killed by a jealous lover. The duality of dream and nightmare is always present, similar to writers such as Leonora Carrington, Angela Carter, and Clarice Lispector. In a 1982 interview with Noemí Ulla, Ocampo says that Lispector wanted to meet her in Buenos Aires, and Ocampo was devastated not to have done so before Lispector’s death in 1977. READ MORE…

Parasite Takes Best Picture!

February 10, 2020  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

In a post-‘Parasite’ world, the best-picture winner can come from anywhere.

Chances are that you’ve already heard of Bong Joon Ho’s history-making feat at the Oscars yesterday following our prediction in December, but did you know that it wasn’t so long ago that Bong was on a blacklist, along with some 10,000 filmmakers deemed to be critical of the South Korean administration, and those people were prevented from receiving arts funding? As the New York Times notes, Parasite is the first movie not in English in the Academy Award’s 92 years to take the top award; “in a post-‘Parasite’ world, the best-picture winner can come from anywhere.”

As we invite you to explore more of what South Korea offers to the world in our extensive archives (ranging from magical realist writing, experimental poetry, and the most inventive science fiction to surreal drama and playful Hangul text art—and including work by Burning director Lee Chang-dong), we hope you’ll also consider joining our mission to break down similar barriers in literature. By coincidence, we too do not receive arts funding, because the government of the country where we are incorporated does not consider our endeavor supportable. Take it from Eliot Weinberger, who has said, “Asymptote may be a small chisel and drill, but these things force cracks that, time and time again, have eventually brought the walls down.

Help us bring the walls down—become a sustaining or masthead member today.

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

February 7, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng and MARGENTO

This week's latest news from Hong Kong, Belgium, and Romania!

This week our editors bring you news of the effects of coronavirus on cultural events in Hong Kong, as well as news of the Romanian writers taking center stage at a Belgian arts festival, and new publications in Romania that address its troubled but intellectually rich past. Read on to find out more!  

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

As China’s coronavirus pneumonia epidemic shows no signs of slowing down, Hong Kong is now under the threat of the wide-spreading virus and the possibility of a community outbreak of the disease. While the Hong Kong government refuses to take decisive measures to close the border to ban visitors from the Mainland even in face of a strike from the medical workers, many art and cultural events have been cancelled due to the temporary closure of venues managed by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, including the programs at the Hong Kong Arts Festival and Art Basel.

Meanwhile, local poetry publication Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine is calling for submissions for its special issue on “Virus,” which is going to address the recent virus panic from a poetic perspective. The deadline for submission is March 15, 2020. The magazine accepts both Chinese and English works. Moreover, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal is going to host a session on “Poetic Women in Translation” to explore how female sensibility is reflected in poetry and its translation. The event will feature translator Jennifer Feeley, Hong Kong poet Ng Mei-kwan, and Cha’s founder and editor Tammy Ho. READ MORE…

Other Worlds: Engaging Rajko Grlić (Part II)

February 6, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Ellen Elias-Bursać

At the airport, Honorio confesses to his wife that he has neither the strength nor the enthusiasm for new revolutions.

This week, the Asymptote blog is excited to share a special two-part engagement with Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić. Yesterday in Part I, we featured an interview between Grlić and Ellen Elias-Bursać, who, in addition to being an Asymptote contributing editor, is also the editor of the first English translation of Grlić’s memoirs. Today, in Part II, we bring you an exclusive excerpt from that memoir, from a section called “Festival Selector.”

Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić organizes the material of his memoir, Long Story Short, like a lexicon of filmmaking terminology. Under each heading and definition, he includes a story from his life: his filmmaking; his struggles against nationalism in Croatia during the war of the 1990s; and his years of teaching at NYU, UCLA, and Ohio University. Grlić was known as one of the leading Yugoslav filmmakers in 1980s Croatia, celebrated for such box-office successes as You Love Only Once (1981); In the Jaws of Life (1984), which was based on a Dubravka Ugrešić novel; and That Summer of White Roses (1989). He left Croatia in the 1990s during its war for independence and has since gone on to make several more notable films, including The Border Post (2006) and The Constitution (2016). He collected stories during his many years of making movies and moving through the world, aware that he’d never have the opportunity to make every story he had to tell into a film, but refusing to lose them to oblivion.

Grlić’s memoir was translated by Vesna Radovanović and edited by Asymptote contributing editor Ellen Elias-Bursać. Elias-Bursać spoke recently to Grlić about the life that led to Long Story Short, an interview that was published yesterday as Part I of this series. In the excerpt that follows, “Festival Selector,” Grlić tells of his decades-long friendship with Honorio Rancaño, the selector for movies shown at Mostra, a film festival that was held for many years in Valencia, Spain.

Festival Selector: the person who chooses the films, conceptualizes and shapes the festival creatively.

Cannes, 1981

In the hall of Palais des Festivals in Cannes, someone taps me on the shoulder and, before I have a chance to turn, starts talking about my movie You Love Only Once, in a jumble of Czech, Russian, and Spanish.

“Honorio Rancaño, selector for the Valencia Film Festival,” the man finally introduces himself, unshaven and chewing on a long, wet cigar. READ MORE…

Other Worlds: Engaging Rajko Grlić (Part I)

February 5, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Ellen Elias-Bursać

I was on a blacklist of cultural enemies said to be destabilizing the state through their work . . . but this was something survivable.

This week, the Asymptote blog is excited to share a special two-part engagement with Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić. Today in Part I, we bring you an interview between Grlić and Ellen Elias-Bursać, who, in addition to being an Asymptote contributing editor, is also the editor of the first English translation of Grlić’s memoirs.

Don’t forget to check back for Part II tomorrow, when Asymptote will have an exclusive excerpt from Rajko Grlić’s memoir!

Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić organizes the material of his memoir, Long Story Short, like a lexicon of filmmaking terminology. Under each heading and definition, he includes a story from his life: his filmmaking; his struggles against nationalism in Croatia during the war of the 1990s; and his years of teaching at NYU, UCLA, and Ohio University. Grlić was known as one of the leading Yugoslav filmmakers in 1980s Croatia, celebrated for such box-office successes as You Love Only Once (1981); In the Jaws of Life (1984), which was based on a Dubravka Ugrešić novel; and That Summer of White Roses (1989). He left Croatia in the 1990s during its war for independence and has since gone on to make several more notable films, including The Border Post (2006) and The Constitution (2016). He collected stories during his many years of making movies and moving through the world, aware that he’d never have the opportunity to make every story he had to tell into a film, but refusing to lose them to oblivion.

Grlić’s memoir was translated by Vesna Radovanović and edited by Ellen Elias-Bursać, who spoke recently to Grlić about the life that led to Long Story Short. In the excerpt, “Festival Selector,” which will be published tomorrow as Part II of this series, Grlić tells of his decades-long friendship with Honorio Rancaño, the selector for movies shown at Mostra, a film festival that was held for many years in Valencia, Spain.

Ellen Elias-Bursać (EEB): In this entry from your memoir, you describe your involvement as a filmmaker in film festivals in Cannes (where the story begins), Spain (Mostra), Japan (Tokyo), Croatia (Pula), and your friendship with Honorio Rancaño, who was born in Spain but went on to live in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, France, and, ultimately, Spain. What does “place” as such mean to you now? Where have you situated your movies, both in terms of storyline and the locations where they were filmed?

Rajko Grlić (RG): The story about Honorio is a tale of a different world, a world now long gone. About a man who was born in a utopian age, who, after those hopes were shattered, spent his life seeking for something new to hope for. Like any search, his tangled path through space and time touched many places and continents. This is one of the reasons why I believed that his life story, so scattered in bits and pieces all over the world, needed to be told. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from “A Cold Season” by Jin Yucheng

February 4, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Cleo Qian

The drizzle fell steadily, and in the night, the shallow bridge, the village houses, all faded in the distance, so I could see nothing clearly.

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, novelist Jin Yucheng captures memories of Suzhou in this haunting excerpt from “A Cold Season.” Jin’s Proustian narrator evokes scenes which portend his sense of misplacement: buildings are ragged shades of decay; pedestrians roam silently like spirits; a young man appears pallid and skeletal as he laments his lost love, whose beauty is described as “bleak.” The only breaks in the town’s somber quiet are the omnipresent folksongs which seem to follow the narrator. Jin is a virtuoso of temporality and consciousness; here he slows down and speeds up the narrative via exquisite sensory detail. “Back then,” the narrator begins, though the recalled images of gloom are obfuscated by time and the town’s cold rain.

Back then, I could still sit by the bank all day, watching boats, looking at the town’s bridges. There were shops on both banks, the narrow streets boarded on top with awnings to protect them from the rain and sun. During the rainy season the buildings were ragged and gloomy, the color of mildew and decay. Pedestrians passed each other in a breathless, soundless silence, as intangible as spirits. It was a mournful scene. If you pushed open the window casements, inlaid with shell, you could hear the plaintive sound of girls singing folktales alongside the pluck of silken strings, filling the town with their poetry. Only in the pitch dark nights, by the lights from between the green plastered walls, could you see the fishing lights far off on the lake. READ MORE…

“Poesía es mundial. Mundial y local”: Ernesto Cardenal at Ninety-Five in Mexico City

February 3, 2020  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by Whitney DeVos

For Cardenal, literature has always marked a utopian site in which the existing boundaries of a nation could be negotiated and transgressed.

The largesse of Latin American poet Ernesto Cardenal’s political and literary accomplishments is the result of a prolific lifetime of honouring and devoting himself to the humanity of writing. A living legend of Spanish literature, Cardenal turned ninety-five years old earlier this month, and as admirers from all over the world paid tribute, Asymptote’s assistant poetry editor Whitney DeVos was privileged to have attended an event held in the poet’s honour in Mexico City. Below, find her dispatch from the occasion, as well as an overview of his immense accomplishments as a writer, a leader, and a revolutionary.

We at Asymptote would like to wish a happy belated birthday to Nicaraguan-born poet, Roman Catholic priest, liberation theologist, and revolutionary Ernesto Cardenal, one of Latin America’s greatest living writers and likely the most widely-read poet working in the Spanish language today—his literary works have been translated into over twenty languages. Winner of the 2012 Premio de Reina Sofía de Poesía Iberoamericana, Cardenal—known among his admirers simply as el maestro—turned ninety-five on Monday, January 20. Still, he hasn’t slowed down at all in recent years, continuing to make public appearances and releasing three books in 2019 alone: in Spain, Hijo de las estrellas and the single-volume, one thousand-plus page Poesía Completa appeared with Trotta de Madrid, and Canto a México with the Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE) in Mexico. READ MORE…