With our Summer 2020 issue, Asymptote has brought together new work from thirty-one countries drawn under “This Strange Stillness,” acknowledging all the fearful, sorrowful, and newly arriving things that are in great need of language. It is a timely collection, though we also hope that it is a lasting one, as the texts of this issue remains full of beauty, grace, craft, as well as a knowledge of these unnerving times. If you are in need of a place to start, let our blog editors be your guide.
In these varying todays that blend into one another, I am thinking of Audre Lorde: “seeking a now that can breed / futures.” With the daily cycles of news, statistics, and corresponding tides of political turbulence, the act of reading is accompanied by the weight of scrutiny into factual truths, and the attempts to form a set of principles out of them. All this in the hope that the formidable now will be rescued into a manageable, comprehensible future. As readers and thinkers, we find ourselves in the position of insisting on the importance that literature has always taken, yet literature that thinks only of its utility is powerless—any potency can only result from a craft that knows equally of its form as it does its function.
In perusal of the Asymptote Summer 2020 issue, I returned to indulging in the pure pleasures of reading—linguistic play, secret collaborations of words, and the mysterious harmony of object, image, sound, and divinity that culminates in the sublimity of poetry. I took a particular joy in the Iranian lickos, an anonymous collection of the indigenous, oral poetic form. They are brief, curious, and contain both the wideness and aliveness of a language meant to be passed between two people. The couplets and tercets, translated brilliantly and cohesively by Mahdi Ganjavi, Amin Fatemi, and Mansour Alimoradi, possess a fluidity and attention that draw the beauty of simple conversation, and the immensity of a single day’s emotions, sharply into view. From petty humour to profound loss, their visual simplicity are an entryway into the profound origins of a poetics.
There is also a great vivacity in Sanja Mihajlovik-Kostadinovska’s “(In)Finite Models of the Short Story,” in which the concept of narrative itself is taken on a wild spin throughout its wanderings into people, places, things, feelings, and myths. Too often we are distracted by semantics, and Mihajlovik-Kostadinovska, along with translator Igor Popovski, bring the reader back into the exhilarating disarray of imagining, reorienting the story back into control of itself.
—Xiao Yue Shan
A real highlight for me from Asymptote‘s Summer 2020 issue is Yang Lian‘s poem “Dead Sea.” One of the founders of the influential Chinese poetry group The Misty Poets, Yang was exiled in 1989 after the Tiananmen Square protests. This particular poem hits the senses everywhere: smell, sound, and sharpened, detailed images. The contrast that he creates between beauty and filth, nature and manufacturing, what is profound and what is base, work to striking effect and demonstrate the complexity of his thought. Brian Holton‘s deft translation shows the close bond that they have built over so many years working together. Gonçalo M. Tavares‘s Plague Diary, three entries of which were published for Asymptote‘s “In This Together” column, is also not to be missed. One of Portugal’s most preeminent writers, Tavares responds to the COVID-19 situation with a unique insight and subtlety. All of the entries weave together for a cumulative effect, forming a remarkable record of this time. I also loved Judith Schalansky‘s extract from An Inventory of Losses, translated from the German by Jackie Smith. It’s a beautiful and diverse meditation on disappearance, ranging from ancestors to buildings, objects, and ways of life. Interlacing personal narrative and memory with wider history, this piece is multifaceted and absolutely enchanting.
—Sarah Moore
Surreal and absurd—two adjectives that aptly summarize the ways I process the world right now. It’s fitting that my highlights from the Summer 2020 issue revolve around these sentiments-turned-genres. My first pick is Shuang Xuetao’s “White Bird,” a piece so strongly-voiced (thanks to Kevin Wang’s extraordinary treatment of the tragicomic narrator) that I found myself reading other stories with the same tone stuck in my head. There’s a pervasive sadness smuggled within the frantic and bizarre humour, scenes of tragedy and loss delivered with a benumbed, almost exasperated energy. Picture the speaker sighing, shrugging, weeping, and chuckling—all at once. The laughter is so disarming that we forget to put our defences up during those gut-punching final lines in each segment.
Another enlightening read is Dan Shirley’s review of Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov’s Soviet Texts (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020; poems from Soviet Texts are featured in Asymptote’s Winter 2020 Issue). Shirley’s review examines the importance of samizdat-circulated poets like Prigov in deploying irony, humour, and conceptual poetics as ways of critiquing authoritarian regimes. Drawing connections to recent political crises in Russia and the U.S., Shirley demonstrates the importance of literary criticism as a medium for sociopolitical commentary.
What really captures the current moment for me is the excerpt from André Breton and Philippe Soupault’s The Magnetic Fields. Fans of Surrealism will note and appreciate the importance of this selection, here brilliantly translated by Charlotte Mandell, whose treatment of these dreamlike (yet visceral) images and narrative non sequiturs is nothing short of virtuosic (Mandell’s complete translation is slated for publication this October from NYRB Poetry). With this excerpt, we witness literary history unfold as it marks the first work of literary Surrealism and automatic writing. I immediately see hints of the British Apocalyptic poets in this selection, despite the Apocalyptics’ rejection of automatic writing as a technique. But the aesthetic and political legacy is unmistakable: both the Surrealists and their Apocalyptic heirs were responding not just to literary realism, but to a world that made little sense after the horrors of war. In a time of global pandemic and resurgent totalitarian sentiments, The Magnetic Fields seems as apt now as it was a century ago.
—Edwin Alanís-García
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