Our Spring 2020 issue has arrived amidst a rising desire for unity and community. As we seek new sights from views made familiar by isolation, Asymptote is proud to have gathered some of the most vivid and singular works from literary talents from thirty countries, so that we may all benefit from the vitality of their distinct imaginings and realities. Here, our section editors share their favourites and guide you around this edition’s abundance of ideas and inventions.
From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction and Galician Poetry Feature Editor:
If you enjoyed watching Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant, you’ll probably love “Red Ivory” by Italian writer Matteo Meschiari from the new issue: like the film, it’s a survival tale set in the extreme cold (in the Siberian permafrost, to be specific), riveting in its depiction of the elements, narrated urgently with brilliant flashes of lyricism—including one electric moment of human contact collapsing 12,000 years. By the end, it’s also a möbius strip of a story posing big existential questions. (Don’t miss the edifying note by emerging translator Enrico Cioni, who did an amazing job rendering the story.) The omniscient narrator of Mirza Athar Baig‘s “Junkshop” transports us similarly through history—this time centering around the objects of a contemporary junkshop—infusing an everyday scene with wonder at just how much we don’t know. Many delights abound in the Galician Poetry Feature headlined by Manuel Rivas, Chus Pato, and Alba Cid (translated by Jacob Rogers, who also helped put together the Feature), but be sure to acquaint yourself with Luz Pozo Garza, one of Galicia’s literary greats, who passed away at age 97 less than a week after the release of the issue. In the selection that translator Kathleen March presented, she used cadences of the canticle and other musical forms to sing of an ecstatic yet bittersweet love for an evanescent world.
From Henry Ace Knight, Interviews Editor:
Kamila Hladíková’s conversation with Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser for the Spring issue’s interview section centers on the precariousness of Tibetan cultural memory and the poet’s resistance to its wholesale erasure. Citing Milan Kundera and Edward Said, Woeser suggests that the survival of marginalized collective identity is incumbent upon the insistence of individual eyewitness memory and testimony. “The history of a nation consists of the personal histories of its people,” she writes. “Descartes said, ‘I think, therefore I am’; but in Tibet, it should be, ‘I remember, therefore we are.’”
From Varun Nayar, Nonfiction Editor:
Following the footsteps of the great Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō, Durian Sukegawa writes about a journey he made in 2012, traversing a landscape reshaped by the earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster the year before. Alison Watts’s vivid translation of Sukegawa’s written account of this journey acquaints us with the personal and political stakes of living in post-Fukushima Japan. Part travelogue, part political meditation, Sukegawa’s writing pairs the beauty of the Japanese landscape with the ugliness of government negligence. At the heart of this piece is a desire to bear witness to the lives rendered invisible in the eyes of the mainstream media and the country’s disaster management apparatus. In its sober reflection of the human cost of events still fresh in Japan’s collective memory, Sukegawa’s piece also conjures an eerie relation to the current pandemic we’re living through.
From Eva Heisler, Visual Editor:
The multimedia project Polyphonic, curated by Simona Nastac, features animations of poems by nine Romanian poets of different ethnic backgrounds who all use two or more languages in their poems. The animations, created by artist Raluca Popa, resist the temptation to illustrate the poems. Rather, as the artist put it, Polyphonic, in its entirety, yields “a manifold number of exchanges, supplementations, substitutions among words and images, taking place inside the body of one single poem and, at the same time, circulating from one poem to another.” For this issue’s visual section, Romania editor-at-large MARGENTO interviewed Nastac and Popa about the project, originally conceived to commemorate the 2018 centennial of “Greater Romania,” and consisting of live performances as well as screenings of the video-poems. Nastac states, “Innovation happens at the intersection of ideas, disciplines, and cultures, and this was my primary aim as the curator of the project, together with the possibility of reaching new and diverse audiences for Romanian poetry and art.” The poets Michael Astner, Andrei Dósa, Robert Gabriel Elekes, Matei Hutopila, Henriette Kemenes, Aleksandar Stoicovici, Livia Ștefan, Mihok Tamas, and Victor Țvetov also perform a multilingual collective poem that they created during a workshop. As described by Nastac, the poem, centered on the sharing of food, “was a melting pot in more than one way, to which each poet brought something from his or her own ‘kitchen’: languages, sounds, traditions, memories.”
From Sam Carter, Criticism Editor:
In Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water, António Lobo Antunes has “created his most radical study of what happens when all that is left to us is language, and that language fails us, leaving silences in the middle of our conversations,” writes Joshua Craze at the very end of his review of Antunes’s latest novel. I begin with this last line because it demonstrates so much of what this review accomplishes: it not only situates this most recent work within the Portuguese writer’s career but also offers a series of subtle yet highly engaging reflections on what exactly literature and, even more broadly, language can achieve. And as Craze guides us through the intricacies of a novel that spans two continents and the echoes of a colonial conflict, he introduces Antunes to those who have never read him while providing a compelling new perspective on his writing to those who have.
Jenni Råback also offers us a new way to understand the work of a well-known figure: Tove Jansson. In her review of Letters from Tove, Råback reveals both the nuances and the politics of the languages at play in these missives from the creator of the Moomins. And, just as importantly, she conveys the intimacy that permeates the epistolary form and that can reshape our relationship to Jansson’s beloved characters.
From Garrett Phelps, Poetry Editor:
I spent most of March indoors and unemployed, but I did have more time than usual for magazine work and particularly for exhaustive readings of the spring lineup. This makes it hard to direct the spotlight; each contribution appears in my mind as if of equal magnitude. That said, Zuzanna Ginczanka’s poems do stand out because of the hours I spent reading, re-reading, editing, selecting and discussing them—an experience even more appreciable at a time like this, when hours are really all I have to spend. Ginczanka’s work is woefully unknown outside of Poland, one of many reasons being its high tally of linguistic idiosyncrasies (e.g. neologisms, a byzantine use of syntax), which are as complex as they are numerous. They’re often untranslatable, too, but rather than whitewash them in English, Alex Braslavsky has pushed Ginczanka’s style to the fore. The result is poetry where every maneuver is strange, prophetic, eloquent, fierce, and wounded.
*****
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