This year’s events have made us all a little rusty in the art of travel, so hopping across our fortieth issue’s thirty-two countries may feel equal parts thrilling and daunting. Luckily, our section editors (including our Dutch Literature Special Feature curator, International Booker Prize co-winner Michele Hutchison) are happy to lay out a road map. Read on for literary duos on life and love in the Netherlands, a Norwegian’s popular fury, a Mexican novelist’s elusive but lasting influence, and a German author’s and Iranian poet’s exquisite study of silence.
From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction and Nonfiction Editor:
Not quite as stunningly “out there” as The Haunting of Bly Manor’s episode five, Paweł Sołtys’s deeply moving “The Kiev Sea” (translated with great aplomb by Eliza Marciniak) nevertheless reminded me of it: we are in such close third-person mode that even the reading material that the protagonist uses to while away time seems to be directly absorbed as consciousness while operating as pivotal mise en abyme. Memories and regret flit through this consciousness, “maintain(ing) the other me within the present me,” even as everything is “already slipping towards an invisible edge.” In truth—as we follow the protagonist down the rabbit hole of nostalgia—the slippage began much earlier: “it seemed that since he’d turned forty, he could only discard things. Friends, women, memories even.” What is the sum of life then? How much can we hold on to? On this fateful October day of reckoning, this fictional protagonist is reminded, via fiction, as we all are perhaps, of how removed and frightfully impersonal existence finally is: “It really happened, all of it, but it’s as if it were a story, told not to me but to someone nearby, in the noise of a bar or during a fight, a proper one, when the sound of the blows drowns out the wailing.”
From Michele Hutchison, Guest Editor of Dutch Literature Special Feature:
Good fortune would have it that I was working on the selection of Asymptote’s Dutch special when my translation of The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld was awarded the International Booker Prize. Perfect timing for sharing these stunning new Dutch voices with you, coinciding with the spike in interest in our national literature. (I wrote ‘our’ without thinking: I’m a defected Brit, resident in Amsterdam.)
To be honest, Dutch literature has long had plenty to offer, and there have been other recent successes. Think of Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin (translated by David Colmer) winning the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award ten years ago, and think of the great reception Gerard Reve’s classic The Evenings (translated by Sam Garrett) and Tonke Dragt’s The Letter for the King (translated by Laura Watkinson, recently a Netflix series) have had in English. We haven’t exactly been hiding our light under a bushel. Nevertheless, it was wonderful to put together this selection of Dutch talent to entice you to read further.
The eight writers in this issue can be considered in compare-and-contrast duos. Karin Amatmoekrim’s “Concrete, An Ode to the Bijlmer Flats” (translated by Sarah Timmer-Harvey) and Joost de Vries’s “A Seller’s Market” (translated by Laura Spencer) neatly align in transporting the reader to the Netherlands. They both take Dutch architecture and what it represents to a society as their leitmotif. This is how we live here. “Staying Isolde,” a short story by Nina Polak (translated by Emma Rault) and an extract from the novel Rooms, Anterooms by Niňa Weijers (translated by Hester Velmans) move behind closed doors to consider the turmoils of modern-day relationships in all their complexities. This is how we love.
Two extracts from newly-published memoirs, Sinan Çankaya’s My Innumerable Identities in Jane Hedley-Prole’s able translation and Vanishing Point by Wytske Versteeg (sensitively translated by David Doherty) examine trauma and discrimination. This is how we become aware. Last but not least, stunning poems by Radna Fabias and Mustafa Stitou (translated by David Colmer), offer a glimpse of the wealth of fresh talent that contemporary Dutch poetry has to offer. This is what we excel at. (OK, I’m an unashamed poetry fan, so perhaps slightly biased!)
As well as some fantastic writers, we also have some amazing translators working from Dutch into English right now. This feature includes established names like Hester Velmans, David Colmer, Jane Hedley-Prole and David Doherty but also introduces three emerging translators: Sarah Timmer-Harvey, Laura Spencer, and Emma Rault. I’m sure you’ll be reading more of their work soon too.
From Garrett Phelps, Poetry Editor:
Gunnar Wærness is part of that fine old tradition of poets who mercilessly rail at all forms of imposture. These four poems (in Gabriel Gudding‘s translation) are frequently indignant and damning and critique those literary institutions which—despite a veneer of good intentions — force marginal writers to the sidelines. But he’s also part of another tradition, just as old and honorable, in which poetry is a form of show business, which aims at catharsis for the widest possible crowd. Every line is memorable and loud enough to reach the back rows. There’s no navel-gazing, and definitely no graduate degree required at the door, because what matters most is the audience. This happens to be all of Norway and Wærness, like any good popular artist, performs for them in the idiom of their underclass.
From Ah-reum Han, Writers on Writers Editor:
One of my favorite essays this past issue is Lacey Pipkin’s spotlighting Josefina Vicens, one of Mexico’s most intriguing writers. Vicens had a brilliant, but slim, oeuvre—with just two works of fiction produced painstakingly over several decades. Both works left an indelible mark on Mexican literature, and while they can still be enjoyed in their original Spanish, they remain notoriously difficult to find as English translations today. Vicens was a true writer for writers, and one of the most exciting voices I’ve learned about recently. I hope you find her life and work as fascinating as I did, and that her works become more widely available for us all to enjoy.
From Sam Carter, Criticism Editor:
In her review of Sandra Hoffmann’s Paula, one of the first titles in a new imprint launched by translator Katy Derbyshire, Eleanor Updegraff guides us through this novel that is “a slow fragmentation of relationships; a splintering of truths previously believed inviolable; a series of separate yet connected scenes, thoughts, false starts, and new attempts that add up to one perfectly imperfect whole.” That might bring to mind descriptions of other works of autofiction, but Updegraff helps us understand this work’s singular exploration of the long-lasting echoes of silences of all kinds.
This question of what persists and the power it possesses also surfaces in Mandana Chaffa’s review of Garous Abdolmalekian’s Lean Against This Late Hour, translated by Ahmad Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey. Abdolmalekian, Chaffa writes, possesses a sparse style that “reflects the constriction and restriction of [his] generation’s public life” and “makes every word count, leaving significant white space on the page as an opening to possibility, to all that is unspoken.” As we move into the final months of a year unlike any other, this call to remain open to possibility rings particularly true.
*****
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