Monthly Archives: July 2021

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 30, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Darren Huang, Nestor Gomez, and Thirangie Jayatilake

The latest literary news from Taiwan, El Salvador, and Sri Lanka.

This week, Asymptote team members report on a Taiwanese science-fiction novel that’s caught the attention of Japan’s literary establishment, a poetic commemoration of a 1975 tragedy in El Salvador, and a Sri Lankan press that promises to be the first of its kind. Discover the latest from around the world, then catch up on this week’s blog entries, including a review of Asymptote‘s July book club pick.

Darren Huang, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Taiwan

In July, Taiwanese novelist Li Kotomi (Li Qinfeng) was awarded one of Japan’s most prestigious literary prizes, the Akutagawa Prize, for her novel “Higanbana ga Saku Shima” (An Island Where Red Spider Lily Blooms). The novel, which incorporates elements of science fiction, concerns a girl narrator, Umi, who drifts to an imagined island between Taiwan and Japan. The island is governed by women who lead the religious ceremonies and political affairs, while men are excluded from government. The islanders speak a language called “nihon” and another called “female language,” which can only be learned by women over a certain age and is used to pass on the history of the island. Qinfeng has remarked that for thousands of years, patriarchal societies have written official history through the perspectives of men. In this novel, she reflects on the imbalance of history-making by imagining a community where women control the writing and inheritance of history. Qinfeng’s win is unique as she is the second writer whose native tongue is not Japanese to be awarded the prize. Her accomplishment was also well received in Taiwan, where she is considered one of the first Taiwanese writers to be recognized by the Japanese literary establishment. Previous winners of the award include Mieko Kawakami for Breasts and Eggs and Hiroko Oyamada for The Hole.

Despite the recent escalation of the pandemic in Taiwan, the cultural minister Lee Yung-te emphasized that the Taiwanese arts, especially in literature, illustration, and film, continue to flourish. Literature and art museums have continued their exhibitions with COVID precautions. Notably, the National Museum of Taiwan Literature is celebrating a century of progressive literature and thinking through its exhibition, “A Century of Heartfelt Sentiment,” which started on May 8. The show is organized into a series of love letters, or writings and works from authors, painters, and other artists, focusing on six essential intellectuals of the last century. The exhibition includes the manuscripts of the poet Lai Ho, the diary of the social activist Tsai Pei-huo, the artworks of the painter Tan Ting-pho, and works of music from the era of Japanese occupation.

READ MORE…

Asymptote Podcast: In Conversation with Kári Tulinius

July 29, 2021  |  in Podcast  |  by Steve Lehman

Writing poetry is part of what it means to be human

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Summer has arrived (in the northern hemisphere, anyway), and today we’re heading to Iceland! In this episode, Icelandic writer Kári Tulinius chats with podcast editor Steve Lehman about growing up in Iceland, the advantages of a tight-knit literary community, and how writing poetry is part of what it means to be human. Then, Kári reads one of his poems published in our just-released Summer issue, “Upon seeing Snæfellsjökull Glacier from an idling bus,” in both the original Icelandic and in Larissa Kyzer’s English translation. Listen to the podcast now!

Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: The Animal Days by Keila Vall de la Ville

July 29, 2021  |  in Book Club  |  by Allison Braden

Keila Vall de la Ville’s third work of fiction—and the first to be translated into English—invites readers into the climber’s rootless milieu.

Keila Vall de la Ville’s The Animal Days explores young adulthood at high altitude. The narrator pursues a passion for rock climbing as she struggles to navigate a similarly perilous life at home. But the world of climbing and her escape from civilization come with their own dangers, which close in as the narrative hurtles toward a suspenseful finale.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

The Animal Days by Keila Vall de la Ville, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers, Katakana Editores, 2021

Rock climbing invites glib metaphors. Inspirational posters—prolific in offices where the only vertical challenge is conquered at the touch of an elevator button—often use summits to symbolize widely held values like perseverance and determination, but the experience of serious climbers is anything but universal. Their insular world trades on levels of pain, risk, and anticipation foreign to the average individual. Enough time in that world can warp perceptions of the other world—the one where the rest of us live. “Thanks to the mountain, you’re able to make out the mechanisms that dictate daily life, life on land. You come back different,” explains Julia, the young narrator of The Animal Days. “Now that your battery has been recharged, now that you’ve obtained this ultraviolet vision, you carry on until you need to plug back into the mountain again. Until everything starts to lose its luster.”

The Animal Days, Keila Vall de la Ville’s third work of fiction and the first to be translated into English, invites readers into the climber’s rootless milieu. Julia’s journey is a world tour of precipices, as she balances her obligations to her dying mother against an escapism inherited from her absent father. Estranged from her everyday surroundings, she finds intimacy among her climbing friends, who provide a respite from her internalized abandonment, and who alone can understand the peaks and falls of a life on ropes. They shirk steady jobs and spend their time chasing both chemical and literal highs.

READ MORE…

The Full Spectrum of Phrases: An Interview with Annie McDermott

July 28, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Sophia Stewart

I like to jump around and work on different passages at random; it’s a way of coming at them fresh and seeing what stands out.

Annie McDermott is a London-based literary translator working from Spanish and Portuguese into English, bringing to readers the works of acclaimed Spanish-language authors like Mario Levrero, Ariana Harwicz, and Selva Almada. She now adds into her exceptional oeuvre Brenda Lozano’s Loop, a fragmented novel that takes the form of its protagonist’s personal notebook, kept while her boyfriend Jonás is away in Spain. A wonderfully wandering text that traces the myriad pathways of the mind, Loop is the English debut of one of Spanish-language literature’s rising stars and an immersive, innovative introduction to Lozano—who is already a widely influential writer in her native Mexico. I recently had the pleasure to correspond with McDermott over email, and quickly took to her; she is as excellent an epistler as she is a translator, her prose suffused with wit and poise. During our exchange, McDermott graciously shared with me her approach to dialectical difference, her fragmented method of translation, and her love of phrasal verbs. 

Sophia Stewart (SS): You translate fiction and poetry from Spanish and Portuguese. How did you come to pursue both of these languages? What’s your literary-translation origin story? Do you find you enter a different “zone” depending on which language you’re translating?

Annie McDermott (AM): I learnt Spanish by mistake and Portuguese on purpose—or maybe “by chance” is more accurate than “by mistake.” I moved to Mexico after finishing university, on a bit of a whim, and ended up staying for a year, teaching English and learning Spanish and living the sort of bilingual life that I’d always found both completely fascinating and completely distant from my monolingual upbringing in the south of England. I realised I loved spending time in the space between languages, and that was what led me to think about translation. I then moved to Brazil, to São Paulo, with the specific aim of learning Portuguese so I could translate Brazilian literature as well.

As for the zones: I think mostly the zone depends on the text rather than the language, but the zone does change from language to language as well. I learnt both Spanish and Portuguese as an adult, and when you learn languages as an adult you often vividly remember the circumstances in which you first encountered particular words, meaning that your existence within that language is strewn with all these different memories of people, places and situations. So in a sense, switching between languages means switching between different sets of memories.

SS: Allow me to geek out for a second, because I studied Spanish dialectology and sociolinguistics in undergrad. With so many regional differences in Spanish, how do you approach issues of dialect in your work? Translating, for instance, a Mexican author and an Argentine author would be totally different, from the conjugations to the slang. Did you learn a specific dialect of Spanish first, and then expand out to others from there? Do you feel most comfortable with a particular dialect?

AM: What a great thing to study! I’m jealous. Yes, there are so many regional varieties, and it’s one of the things that makes Spanish such a fascinating language. One of my favourite things is looking something up on the WordReference forum and finding an extensive thread full of people weighing in from different countries, and even different regions of different countries, each with a completely different idea of what the word means.

I learnt Spanish living in Mexico, and it’s definitely Mexican slang, rhythms, and speech patterns that I feel most comfortable with. When it comes to translating other varieties of Spanish, I think the important thing is remembering how little you know—it’s so easy to be tripped up. This is another reason why I’m in awe of people who translated before the internet; nowadays, you can watch films and videos, and read news articles, social media posts, etc. etc., from whichever region you happen to be working on, and get a feel for it that way as well. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Ra Heeduk

July 27, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Emily Bettencourt

What exactly was seditious about these days of love?

With nine books of poetry to her name, Ra Heeduk—winner of the Midang Literary Award in 2014—has worked with the genre to interrogate the personal and the political since the 1980s. Yet, in one of her more recent poems, her persona confesses: “Here, poetry grows to resemble hieroglyphics // Dirt, not language, rustles in my mouth.” It is as if, after decades of prolific output, poetry becomes a stranger, turns suddenly into an enigma. As translator Emily Bettencourt explains below, these poems—drawn from Ra’s 2018 collection, Codename Poetry—are urgent reflections on the role of the writer in shaping culture and politics at a time when this very figure is met with suspicion. For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we are proud to present three poems that resonate with what Brecht famously said about art in dark times, that “Yes, there will be singing. / About the dark times.” 

“Codename Poetry was published at the end of 2018, but to fully understand the context of the collection, it’s better to go back to April 16, 2014, when the Sewol Ferry sank off the western coast of Korea. What followed was a dark period during which many poets and writers felt they were incapable of creating meaningful work in the wake of such a disaster—what could they possibly write that would even begin to touch their cultural grief? In the following years, former president Park enacted a cultural blacklist where creatives who criticized her government were stripped of funding and publishers who touched their work were shut down. Even the poets who felt like they could create meaningful and critical work following the disaster feared being blacklisted. In March 2017, Park was impeached and the blacklist ended. In this context, Codename Poetry contains an incisive commentary on the Sewol Ferry disaster itself, even as it reflects on other tragedies and the universality of grief. In the author’s note to the collection, Ra writes that because her life has been ravaged by teeth and claws, the words inside her have grown claws as well; this collection is her attempt to set them free. To me, this collection is an urgent reflection on the role of poetry and art in politics and society, as well as on the bonds formed by shared suffering—a reflection that is just as necessary today as it was three years ago.” 

— Emily Bettencourt

Codename Poetry1

They trapped him inside a file called “Poetry”
because they believed even lyric poems to be seditious

The file likely contained the following:

A handful of hair
A few pieces of fingernail
A hand towel with a frayed corner
A plaid jacket
An old leather bag and a few books
A spoon and a fork
A bundle of edited manuscripts
A pair of silver-rimmed glasses in a green case
A bottle of silence
A few leaves from the forest floor

His body odor left on bandages was bottled in glass
and everything that comprised him
likely went into the file called “Poetry”

Along with his poems, of course
They would have recorded even these things:

What bulbs he planted in his flowerbed
How many letters he received from abroad
What he talked about with a thrush in the forest
How he looked at the moth asleep on the hem of his shirt
How many buckets of water he drew per day
With whom he drank jasmine tea
Which books he borrowed from the library
What he talked about with his students in class
Why he stopped on the path as he walked home at sunset
What expression he wore as he crossed the border

What exactly was seditious about these days of love?

What they feared
was that he carried words that could open minds,
that he lived attending to the roots of the heart,
and that even as he labored as a locksmith
he never stopped writing poetry

Poems released from Codename “Poetry”
now glitter quietly in the sunlight

Out from between the sentences that endured his life,
someone is walking, barefoot, wearing no shadow READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2021

July 26, 2021  |  in News  |  by Bassam Sidiki, Caridad Svich, and Lee Yew Leong

Our Section Editors pick their favorite pieces from the Summer 2021 issue!

The brand-new Summer 2021 edition of Asymptote is barely ten days old and we are still enjoying the diverse offerings from thirty-five countries gathered therein. Last week, blog editors Xiao Yue Shan, Allison Braden, and Shawn Hoo shared their favorites. Today, section editors Lee Yew Leong, Bassam Sidiki, and Caridad Svich distill their highlights for us:

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction, Poetry, Special Features, and Interview Editor:

Why do so few men read fiction by women? lamented MA Sieghart as recently as seventeen days ago in The Guardian. With female authors taking five out of six slots, the Summer fiction lineup, published just in time for #WomeninTranslation month, offers parochial-minded readers a taste of what they are missing out on. These stories are also deeply centered on the female experience: Gabriel Payares and Maša Kolanović deliver unsettling takes on pregnancy and new motherhood, while the aging protagonists of Kathrin Schmidt’s and Can Xue’s stories go on mushroom-fueled head trips that seem to set the universe right again. A third set explores the corrosive effects of work on identity (in particular, Joanna Chen’s superb translation of mechanical engineer Tehila Hakimi’s Company recalled for me Amelie Nothomb’s masterpiece Fear and Trembling).

When you don’t go by a Judeo-Christian name, the constant bracing against mispronunciation can result in estrangement from your own identity, as Xiao Yue Shan explored in her recent essay on linguistic exile. I can relate. That’s why I found the ending of Abdushukur Muhammet’s “My Name” deeply moving. Translator Munawwar Abdulla not only does an excellent job nailing Muhammet’s melancholic voice, but also provides much needed contextualization in her translator’s note that imbues the poem with a sharp political layer. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 23, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, José García Escobar, and Suhasini Patni

This week, we bring to you literary news from Palestine, India, and Central America!

Want to find out what’s happening in the literary world? This week, our Editors-at-Large bring you news from Palestine, where a landmark issue of World Literature Today features nearly two dozen of the most eminent Palestinian writers; India, where lockdown is slowly being lifted, and bookstores begin to bustle; and Central America, where writers from Guatemala to Costa Rica are releasing new books. Curious about this wide-ranging itinerary? Read on to find out more! 

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

“While most writers offer their writing to the masses, Palestinian writers offer their very souls,” writes the Guest Editor Yousef Khanfar in his introduction to “Palestine Voices,” the Summer 2021 issue of World Literature Today (released earlier this month). Throughout its ninety-five-year publishing history, World Literature Today  (published at Oklahoma University), has never devoted a cover feature—let alone a dossier—exclusively to the literature, art, and culture of Palestine. Even when WLT dedicated an issue in 1986 to “Literatures of the Middle East: A Fertile Crescent,” Palestinian writers were conspicuously absent from the lineup, reveals Editor Daniel Simon. Indeed, in Mona Mikhail’s essay introducing the 1986 issue, one of the most pivotal events during the modern era of the Middle East—the Palestinian Nakba that led to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948—isn’t even mentioned.

With less attachment to the Nakba but more freedom for exploration and imagination, the expanded issue, at 128 pages, “represents a long-overdue—and especially timely—attempt to remedy this deficit” writes Simon. “As with other recent dossiers dedicated to so-called “stateless” literatures, WLT’s Summer 2021 issue recognizes an autonomous literary tradition that dates back centuries and now, in the diaspora, is one of the most cosmopolitan literatures in the world.” The voices gathered in “Palestine Voices,” according to Khanfar, “speak a universal language: one of life filled with human dignity that celebrates a rich cultural heritage and vibrant present along with aspirations for freedom, justice, and hope for a better future.”

Nearly two dozen of the most eminent Palestinian writers and poets are gathered in WLT’s Summer 2021 issue, along with the work of twenty renowned artists and photographers. Since a number of the pieces are web exclusive, it is all worth it to explore the issue online, and to appreciate the well-chosen art works that compliment the texts. As “colonization slowly dehumanizes Palestine and the Palestinians,” according to Khanfar, Simon believes that the work by the writers featured in this WLT issue “rehumanizes a people who have much to offer the world.” At any rate, trust them when they say “these voices are designed to captivate and not to convince.” READ MORE…

Constructing Unity From the Fragments of Living: Magda Cârneci and Sean Cotter on FEM

July 22, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Andreea Iulia Scridon

Poetry, as I use it, is a mystical way to attain certain states of mind and soul.

Magda Cârneci is a luminary. Writing in the vein of what Beauvoir called the artist’s need to “will freedom in [themselves] and universally,” her novel FEM is a feat of feminine imagination, at once within and beyond the body. Structured in a fluid prose but intricate with poetry’s capacities to manifest the numinous, the resulting text is an immensely powerful excursion within the mysteries of the mind as it meets the mysteries of the universe. We are proud to feature FEM as our Book Club selection for the month of June, and also to speak to Cârneci alongside translater Sean Cotter in a live interview held for members. The conversation, transcribed below, touches on the intricacies of contemporary Romanian literature, the legacy of French feminism, and the transcendental experiences of everyday life.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive Book Club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom Q&As with the author or the translator of each title!

Andreea Iulia Scridon (AIS): Magda—you’re probably best known as a poet, but could you tell us about your history of writing fiction—or should I say prose? Did this represent a transition; were there anxieties about this process, or did it come naturally to you?

Magda Cârneci (MC): I used to write poetry, but at a certain moment, I realized that poetry is less read than prose, and the audience, unfortunately, is less numerous than it is for fiction. And as I had a message to transmit and some obsessions to confess, I felt the need to use fiction—the narrative as a tool, as a literary tool. It’s true that the prose form gives you possibilities which do not exist in poetry: describing and analysing feelings, or perceptions, or sensations in a minute way. So from this point of view, prose writing was a marvelous discovery for me. But I have to say that I mingle prose and poetry; I use poetry a lot in my writing, because I think it is a way of charging words with an intensity and with an aura of feelings. That does not exist in normal prose writing. So this is a kind of poetic prose or visionary prose, what I do in FEM.

AIS: Sean wrote a very interesting study called Literary Translation and the Idea of a Minor Romania, which I recommend to anybody interested in comparative literature, actually. So Sean, I was wondering if you could tell us what you think Romanian literature in particular is defined by, insomuch as it as possible to define a literature briefly, and what it brings to the corpus of world literature or global literature in particular.

Sean Cotter (SC): I don’t think that there’s an essence that would unite all Romanian literature in a useful way; what I would recommend is a difference in perspective when it comes to reading Romanian literature or understanding its history as a whole. This is something I addressed in the book—that in contrast to our usual ways of looking at national literatures (especially literature in the United States), I think we have to pay much more attention, when reading Romanian literature, to its interactions with other literatures. I think it’s much easier to misunderstand what is happening and why things changed, or why new things develop within Romanian literature, if we don’t attempt to document such interactions—and I think that FEM is a great example of this. READ MORE…

Tapestry of Coincidence: An Interview with Fate Author Jorge Consiglio

July 21, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Allison Braden

If you look at the quotidian under a microscope, the most mundane things become unrecognizable.

Jorge Consiglio’s novel Fate (Charco Press, 2021) charts a tangle of crossroads, both literal and figurative. A taxidermist, an oboist, and a meteorologist do their best to direct their destinies against the background of Buenos Aires’s frenetic streets. Their worlds tilt and collide, and the sum of their experiences poses an eternal question about whether our everyday lives—and the incidents that jolt us out of them—are the work of fate or chance. Here, Asymptote Assistant Blog Editor Allison Braden talks with Consiglio about how a befuddled immigrant, a surfeit of street names, and a relentless colony of ants propel the plot, and why English—and Charco Press—was the perfect home away from home for the Argentinian author’s fifth award-winning novel. This interview, translated from Spanish, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Allison Braden (AB): You begin Fate with an author’s note that explains your central question: “fate or chance?” What was it about this novel that inspired you to include the preface? How do you think the note shapes readers’ experience of the story?

Jorge Consiglio (JC): I included the preface at the suggestion of Charco Press. The introduction is part of the collection’s design, and I was delighted at the suggestion. In Argentina, there used to be excellent publisher called Centro Editor de América Latina which had a collection that used the same idea. I remember I used to buy the CEAL books and always enjoyed reading the author’s reflections. They were useful for situating myself within the context in which the work had been produced, and it offered a window into the author’s aesthetics and point of view. It felt like I was allowed to attend the rehearsals before seeing a play. I think in this case, in addition to that, Charco Press takes care to allow the authors to introduce themselves in their own words in countries where readers probably have never heard of them. That’s a big plus.

AB: Philosophers have grappled with the question of fate versus chance for millennia, and they’ve proposed various approaches for dealing with the vicissitudes of an unpredictable life. (The Stoics’ recommendation to face everyday frustrations and furies with grace and patience certainly would have benefited a couple of the short-tempered characters in Fate.) How did philosophy shape your approach to the novel’s central theme?

JC: When I was struck with the idea to write Fate, I didn’t think about philosophy or anything like it. What came to me first was a scene in which two characters whose destinies had been tapping on each other missed the chance to exchange a glance of recognition only by a few seconds. That was the trigger for the text, but as I made progress in the writing, I suspect because of the evolution of the plot, I was presented with the question of fate versus chance. I’m not the first to arrive at this question, of course. There were—and are—many writers who create their fiction out of this counterpoint. I guess it’s inevitable that, by dint of our ephemeral nature, we’ll stumble into these existential issues at some point. It’s true that philosophy seeks to reflect on the vicissitudes of the unpredictable. Religion and magical thinking, too. The characters in Fate aren’t thinking about these questions. They act without much reflection, but the plot development, like a poor imitation of life, embodies these questions that will never be resolved.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “It Was Then That I Lost That Child” by Carla Bessa

July 20, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Elton Uliana

And so then, I had: my children, I had: seven children, I mean: six

The fate of a working class mother who loses her child is the focus of this week’s Translation Tuesday, which features an unforgettable experiment with the short story form. Devised through a verbatim technique, Carla Bessa—actress, director, and winner of Brazil’s most prestigious literary award, the Jabuti Prize—mines the genre for its dramatic possibilities. Bessa’s moving story switches deftly between a confessional monologue with eclectic punctuation that lends the mother’s voice a searing, staccato quality and, on the other hand, a set of intricate stage movements revolving around a domestic scene. The effect is a casual meeting of tragedy and mundanity. Indeed, for translator Elton Uliana, this story conveys “a reality of marginality and crime which is becoming increasingly prevalent in Brazil, particularly with the rise of far-right politics, its contempt for and disenfranchising of the lower classes.” This social commentary is achieved with great formal and emotional intensity in “It Was Then That I Lost That Child.” 

(She takes the chicken out of the freezer and puts it in the microwave. She rinses the thermos with boiling water, she puts the filter holder over the mouth of the flask, she places the paper filter in the holder and fills it with coffee powder, five level soup spoons.)

And so then, I had: my children, I had: seven children, I mean: six. Because: the one who got killed, I never really got to raise him. I couldn’t. I only: I only had him for the first month, then his father: stole my child from me, yes, it was his father: he kidnapped my boy.

(She pours the hot water carefully over the coffee until the filter is full. She stops, and waits for the water to seep through. The microwave beeps. With the kettle in one hand she goes to the microwave, presses the button that opens the door to remove the chicken. She realises that she has only one hand free and pauses.)

He beat me up. I’ve got the scars here on my face, see, ruined: it was him. That’s why I’ve got a face like this, all: destroyed, have a look. 

(She pours more water on the coffee, she stops and waits.)

He stole my son, and: I reported him. And so: it was his mother that had to look after my son. He and his mother raised my son, but: they never let me visit him. Then: I took them to court again: and I won: I won the right to see my own son. A right that was already mine. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2021

July 19, 2021  |  in News  |  by Allison Braden, Shawn Hoo, and Xiao Yue Shan

Our blog editors pick their favourite pieces from the Summer 2021 issue!

As Asymptote celebrates the first issue of our second decade in world literature, we bring to you new work from thirty-five countries and twenty-four languages in our Summer 2021 issue! Drawing from the theme of our Special Feature, “Age of Division,” these varied writings speak to a moment of mounting borders, fractious politics, and heightened suspicion towards the other—but so too do they hint at the possibility of unexpected solidarities, strange encounters, and new geographies of affinity. Not sure where to begin with this bountiful issue? Let our blog editors take you through some of their favourite pieces to reveal a world that is, in the words of Lêdo Ivo, “sweet, full, pungent, and luminous.” 

In the spring of 2004, an intifada singer in Ramallah said to his interviewer, “What I do on stage and what martyrs do on the streets are one and the same, just with different instruments.” Were resistance embodied in genre, the shape would undoubtedly be that of music. The art which “all art constantly aspires towards” for its certain coherence of form and content, this singular quality also speaks to its ability to move people passionately, crucially, to action. For music is a verb; it must be performed and enacted. It embodies, within its very idea, its eventual actualisation.  

In the excerpt from Olivia Elias’s forthcoming poetry collection Your Name, Palestine, she makes a graceful address: “Musicians, a few minutes more.” Moving on to materialise the scene in sensual, wondering lines, she makes gentle work of speaking the terrible wreckage done to the country where she was born. Born in Haifa and living now in France, she is said to occupy a privileged space within the Palestinian diaspora as one of the few poets in French. In these poems, translated masterfully by Sarah Riggs and Jérémy Robert, she creates in her adopted language the continuation of the Palestinian nation, transcending geographical realities to rhyme with the poetics of Palestinian agency, with both singing and the witness of singing.

Musicians, I am speaking to you of a country
engulfed in a fault of history
of a people chosen to pay the price
of another sacrifice
of a story more than a hundred years old
full of sound and fury and blood

Intended for voices set to instruments, Elias’s work speaks to the intifada singers, the debke performances that conceptualise art from the violences of occupation, and the traditional melodies evoking the dignity of liberation. But without violence and ideology, the measured cadences of her lines are patient with painterly instinct. These poems draw their necessity from their stoic dreams of clarity. Palestine, untorn, in concert, singing.

In Mulugeta Alebachew’s “Heaven Without Prickly Pears,” writing similarly seeks physical qualities—the savoury texture of the language, the kinetic scan of the eye as it seeks and takes in. The topography of the Ethiopian town, Geneté, is overlaid with the infinite dimensions of the mind. Familiarities, kinships, intimacies run through in capillaries of psychogeography, drawing further on its composite, ramified history: “her mosaicked gum-tattoos of more than a dozen languages and myriad cultures.” With co-translator Bethlehem Attfield, Alebachew has done a wonderful job of rendering the original Amharic text, lush with dialect, into a fluent poetry that nevertheless beholds the precision of references outside of the English language.

This town bears my fondest memories, life vividly lived, and lessons well learned . . . my yesterdays, todays, and predictable tomorrows lay on its streets. . . My home includes the highway. My home does not exclude the other homes. 

In this beautiful passage which eclipses the cautious private/public boundary, Alebachew speaks to the growing of the world. Just as in the acts of reading and writing, the dialectic division of outside and inside loses its binds, and one bleeds into the other. By bringing us into his Geneté, the subtle resentment of possessive being is defied; we are given interior knowing without it being our interior. In this world there is no space indifferent or vacant. It is all compounded in an infinite geometry of living; to inhabit a text that so generously navigates a place, it is an astonishing gift. 

—Xiao Yue Shan

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 16, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Charlie Ng, and Eva Wissting

Find out what’s been happing in the literary scenes of Bulgaria, Sweden, and Hong Kong!

“Lazy to shake the white fan, nude in green woods . . .” The languorous summer words of Li Bai are perhaps demonstrative of these mild months, but even a writer too lethargic to fan himself is still scrawling poems. The pen never rests, as proved by a bounty of literary news from Bulgaria, Sweden, and Hong Kong this week, as our editors report on book fairs, awards, and festivals. Read on to find out more!

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria

It is a truth universally acknowledged that books—with their magical power to still the world and inspire us in previously unimaginable ways—can transform the course of human lives for good, and this seems especially obvious when it comes down to interpersonal relationships, especially the queen of them all—love. The recently organized Bulgarian literary festival Пловдив чете (Plovdiv reads) demonstrated that by uniting fiction and the deep appreciation of others, resulting in a happy collaboration.

On the last day of the tightly packed program, which included an afternoon poetry reading under the blooming linden trees by the up-and-coming authors Aleksandar Gabrovski, Dimitar Ganev, Gabriela Manova, and Liliya Yovnova, a rather nervous young man from the public stood up and, under everyone’s curious gaze, asked his speechless girlfriend for her hand in marriage. Once it was established that a “happily ever after” was soon to follow, the audience was assured that the world would continue to spin—possibly in patterns that, more often than not, rhyme.

Hosts of this particular occasion were one of the country’s best-renowned writers Georgi Gospodinov (whose verse is available in Asymptote’s pages!) and the talented poet, essayist, and screenwriter Ivan Landzhev. Both shared their fascinating insights into the qualities required of a helpful editor, the art of mentoring gifted adolescents without erasing their unique personalities, as well as the importance of authors reading each other. Another point that was touched upon was the ability to trace foreign influences in one’s works.

Alas, for even more thrilling discussions of this sort, we’ll have to wait until the 2022 edition. Until then, however, let us enjoy the rest of what global literature has to offer!

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

This month, Swedish writers Elin Anna Labba and Alma Thörn have been awarded the Norrlands litteraturpris—a literary prize of northern Sweden. The prize has been given annually since 1973 by a literary association of the region, Norrländska litteratursällskapet, along with the region’s writers’ organization, Författarcentrum Norr. Since 2014, there have been two categories: adult literature and children’s literature. For this year’s edition of the adult category, Swedish Sámi journalist and writer Elin Anna Labba was awarded for her nonfiction book Herrarna satte oss hit: Om tvångsförflyttningarna i Sverige (Sirdolaččat: The Deportation of the Northern Sámi). The jury’s statement pointed to how Labba has woven a literary fabric—oral testimonies, archived documents, yoiks, maps, and photographs that highlight the state abuse and colonial exercise of authority previously made invisible in Nordic history, and calls her book a hybrid that reveals the possibilities of literature. In the children’s book category, Alma Thörn is awarded for the graphic novel Alltid hejdå (Always Goodbye). Thörn’s book is about divorce from a child’s perspective, which the jury deemed “a visually and emotionally strong story.”

Another recent book that calls attention to serious issues is Dansa med corona (Dance with Corona) by the staff of the care home Östergård 2 in Kristianstad. Last year, media frequently wrote about the place, which was one of the first care homes in southern Sweden to be struck by COVID-19. Now, the staff are sharing their own experiences through the recent publication: “Your children beg you to stay home from work because they believe you will die if you go there. Media depict you as the executioner and your friends flee when they see you. At the same time, the elderly need you at work to survive.” The book gives precious insight into the life of the caretakers during extreme times, with guilt and fear as only a couple of the challenges they have had to manage.

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

Having been suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the Hong Kong Book Fair returns this year with the theme “Inspirational and Motivational Reading,” running from June 14 to 20 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai. Besides collaborating with numerous publishers to showcase new books in Chinese and English, the organizer also invited famous local and international writers to participate in talks and workshops, including Neil Gaiman and Julia Lovell. However, with the introduction of the national security law, Hong Kong’s publishing sector is overcast by the anxiety over tightened freedom of speech and expression. As reported by the Hong Kong Free Press, the Hong Kong Trade Development Council announced that police would be notified should they receive complaints on exhibits that breach the national security law. This warning is among a series of censoring actions taken against oppositional voices, including the forced closure of the Apple Daily newspaper and the removal of some political books from public libraries.

Despite the tense political situation in Hong Kong, Hong Kong literature is varied enough to represent Hong Kong in different ways. In a recent interview published by Words without Borders, Louise Law, the director of Spicy Fish Cultural Production Limited and publisher of the local literary magazine Fleurs des Lettres, speaks to translator Jennifer Feeley on Hong Kong’s literary scene and the translation of Hong Kong literature. Feeley is a major translator of the works of Xi Xi, and her translation, Not Written Words: Selected Poetry of Xi Xi, was a prizewinning collection. Zolima CityMag’s recent Hong Kong’s Great Writers series also highlights Xi Xi as their second feature. The article introduces Xi Xi’s literary life and explores the playfulness in her characters as well as her literary style.

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Read more on the Asymptote blog:

Announcing our Summer 2021 Issue Featuring Hoda Barakat, Can Xue, and Bruno Latour

July 15, 2021  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Did you miss us? After a hiatus, we’re back with a blockbuster Summer edition, brimming with new work from 35 countries!

It’s here! The first issue of Asymptote’s second decade, featuring Hoda Barakat, Can Xue, Bruno Latour, and Lêdo Ivo, alongside new work from 35 countries, confirming “we all live in a beautifully round world.” More than any other issue in recent memory, “Age of Division,” our Summer 2021 edition, also speaks to the current divisiveness of our times.

In Ethiopian writer Mulugeta Alebachew’s short story, childhood memories are betrayed when the narrator returns home after a long time away only to find his friends “intently drawing family trees and working out ethnic background of people as if they worked for the cartography agency, and it was their task to draw boundaries.” Meanwhile, at a “time of infinite sadness,” diasporic Palestinian poet Olivia Elias speaks to us of “a life in the eye of the hurricane” and of “a country / engulfed in a fault of history.”
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Our Word Against Kafka’s

July 14, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Samuel Kahler

Kafka floats, shapeshifts, appears in many places at once; he is not a fixed subject.

Franz Kafka’s gigantic presence in the world of letters is undeniable, yet looking back along the labyrinthine volutes of history, one perceives distinctly the figure of a man who would likely be horrified at the depth and breadth by which we known his work. Having famously insisted that his texts be burned after his death, a betrayal by a close friend led to the remarkable corpus we freely access today. Since then, Kafka’s writings have undergone a dramatic escalade of ownerships, resulting most recently in its comprehensive release by the National Library of Israel. In the following essay, Samuel Kahler traces the events that led to Kafka’s legacy, delineating a writer’s intentions as they come up against the voracious appetites of the world.

 “I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”

—Franz Kafka

Part of the appeal of reading Kafka (or the madness, depending on who you ask) stems from the durability of the stories, parables, and novellas—their infinite resistance to decisive analysis enduring even after multiple readings. The texts evoke the quotidian anxieties of the modern age, achieving their incomparable effect by leaning into varied traditions of folklore, parable, horror, and the absurd, paradoxically balancing the polarities of universal relatability and a resistance against fixed interpretations. Can a body of work so ripe—so bursting with potential meanings—possibly be pigeonholed with a singular definition? To attempt a conclusive, complete answer—something like a grand unified theory of Kafka—would be the errand of a well-meaning but misguided fool.

Inseparable from the question, and equally difficult to answer, is another problem: namely, that of deciding which works belong in his official catalog and which do not. Mostly, we owe this state of affairs to a complex series of events that began with the discovery of Kafka’s will and continued onward through the next nine decades, through the many publications of his works and, later, the battles over his archival materials and the significance of the contents contained therein.

When the National Library of Israel released its newly digitized Franz Kafka collection this spring, it signified the end of a prolonged conflict over its acquisition. Yet, the collection’s publication does not portend a satisfying resolution for any facet of Kafka’s legacy; rather, it throws the spotlight on academia and the public at large, exposing our continued desire to make something concrete out of Kafka, despite his enigmatic condition.

Kafka’s posthumous drama—call it a tragedy, a passion play, a farce, or what you will—remains an unresolved mess, even after the curtain has supposedly come down. READ MORE…