Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2021

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

Asymptote’s Fall 2021 issue is here, featuring new work from thirty countries and nineteen languages! To help guide you through the latest issue, our blog editors are offering their top recommendations. 

The Fall 2021 issue transcends the boundaries of culture and time through foreign encounters, explorations of personal and cultural memory, and novel ways of approaching the act of translation. One of the themes that emerges from this wide-ranging and deeply probing issue is the transformative potential of speech, song, and music. In the title story of Ham Chŏngim’s 2015 story collection, “After Dinner,” music, whether sung, played, or imagined, stirs memories of joy and loss for the central character, Sunnam, a blocked writer hosting a dinner party in Pusan with the death of her close mentor, P., on her mind. The piece is elegantly translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, who capture the author’s hushed yet lyrical tone, while eruditely rendering this piece’s many intertextual and cross-cultural references to Western authors and music. Like James Joyce’s The Dead, which is aptly referenced at its start, the symphonic piece interlaces multiple threads of memory like different strains of melody within Sunnam’s roving mind while she prepares for the dinner party. These threads are related through their transformative encounters with music, moments of intimate connection, and losses of beloved people from her life. Her meditations suggest the fickleness of memory—both the ways it disappears and the ways it lingers. The fleeting quality of memory is evoked when Sunnam reflects on the first time she used her candlesticks for a party: “The memory of that first time comes tantalizingly close and then poof, it’s gone. But finally it comes back . . .” Through the intricate paralleling of narrative threads, Chŏngim maps Sunnam’s vast interior world across time and place, conjuring a textured history of love and loss within just the few hours before her party. 

The transformative possibility of speech and song is also central to Caitlin Woolsey’s intimate account of translating spoken and sung poetry in “If my heart were a stone, it would drop down to meet you”: Bedouin Oral Poetry and Translation as Reciprocity, a featured piece in this issue’s edition of “Brave New World Literature.” Woolsey describes her experience translating and documenting Jordanian Bedouin oral traditions, while living with an extended family from the Zawaideh tribe in the village of Disah. The genre-bending piece combines memoir, critical analysis, and meditations on the practice of translation to form an illuminating inquiry into Bedouin oral traditions. Woolsey is perceptive yet culturally sensitive in her readings of these poems—noticing, for example, the poems’ practice of employing generalized descriptive language and recurring symbols and characters. She does not dismiss this practice as repetitive or uncreative, but links it to the communal function of the poems, which are recited and must therefore participate in certain descriptive traditions to be understood and retold by its listeners. In this manner, Woolsey performs important critical work by situating this historically overlooked literature within its people’s culture and history. One of the most moving aspects of this piece is the way that oral poetry functions not only as a means of personal creative expression, but as a vital repository for these tribes’ memory and history, a method of preservation for a “historical and cultural record” in the face of erasure by time and modernization. 

The cataloguing of sound, whether human-produced or created by the natural world, is likewise an essential feature in the artistic practice of Mexican interdisciplinary artist Tania Candiani. Eva Heisler richly explores the artist’s multimedia installations and sound machines in her interview, “Sonorous Objects and Speaking Machines.” In Ríos antiguos, ríos entubados, ríos muertos (Ancient rivers, piped rivers, dried rivers), Candiani maps a record of dried rivers that once flowed through Mexico City with a series of music boxes that “speak” the voices of these rivers by tracing their original lines as lines in the cylinders of the music boxes. Here, sound not only becomes a means of reviving a lost physical image, but also of composing a cultural archive in the fashion of the Bedouins’ oral poetry. The artist also plays with the concept of speech in another installation, Huipiles, which decomposes traditional garments worn by Mexican and Central American women, whose designs signified one’s identity and role in the community. In the work, Candiani erases key elements of these designs that “spoke” of the wearer’s identity to contest a colonial history of depersonalization. Candiani’s artistic practice expands not only the possibilities of sound and sensory experience but redefines translation, as she translates image into sound and sound into stories. As for Woolsey, translation for Candiani offers “the very seed of possibility . . . an exchange of meaning and ideas rather than a one-directional conversion.” 

—Darren Huang 

Patrizia Cavalli’s Dancing Shoes, translated by Gregory Mellen, is notable for its sheer energy and elation. The narrator’s outing to purchase a pair of shoes with her friend Mary prompts an exploration of desire, pleasure, and self-affirmation. Captivated by a pair of shoes (“lavender, Amalfi-lemon yellow, fresh rust, in wide, unequal stripes, like the folds in a painting by Pontormo”), the narrator considers how certain objects can express and enhance a lust for living, as opposed to objects held static (“Me, collect things?”). Cavalli concentrates on the physical joy that objects can bring about; significantly, these are not just shoes, but dancing shoes. Her imagery is bursting with colour, brightness, detail, and the description of the narrator’s body coming alive with desire is electric: 

I felt an aristocratic shudder, which started in my feet and rose along my legs; up and up it rose and reached my shoulders, and then, flitting across the back of my neck, it skimmed the circumference of my head, and then began to descend the front of my body, finally coming to rest radiantly in my heart.

The exhilaration of Cavalli’s prose is accompanied by deep psychological insight. Here, individual pleasure must contend with the calm, rational comportment expected in society: the “calm ceremony of possession.” The contrasting elation and depression that follows the narrator’s purchase—seeing the shoes boxed up—shows our tendency to regret or avoid such gluttonous instincts: “Why, why are we never ready for happiness when it manifests itself so clearly?” Cavalli (herself a translator, notably of Shakespeare and Molière), has achieved considerable success in Italy, and Dancing Shoes is a wonderful introduction to her work. 

The extract from Małgorzata Rejmer’s Mud Sweeter than Honey takes us to communist Albania under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. Rejmer’s work has been compared to Svetlana Alexievich’s for its oral histories centring upon political oppression, and Mud Sweeter than Honey follows this vein, tells the stories of Albanians during communism in their own words. In this passage, brilliantly translated by Zosia Krasodomska-Jones and Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Neim Pasha recounts his arrest and imprisonment under the regime. Based on interviews conducted by Rejmer, Neim Pasha’s story picks up on the theme of disappointment in the wake of communism’s collapse: “Communism was a beautiful edifice full of dark, decaying rooms.” He also paints a vivid picture of those around him: his family, with whom he had planned to escape over the border to Greece; his fellow inmates in prison; the prison interrogators; and his cousin, a Ministry of the Interior investigator eventually responsible for Neim’s release. A key strand running through the text is how one survives (physically and mentally) within the prison, but also whether one can ever truly escape, even after release. Many people were sent back to prison again, after only two or three months, due to familial rejection; “I was afraid of going back to prison, and I was afraid of coming out of it,” Neim says. For those who had grown up into adulthood within prison walls, nothing recognizable or welcoming awaited outside for them to return to. This extract, though bleakly honest, is a vivid and important testimony to those who have suffered, and continue to suffer, under a repressive state. 

Lastly, it is a treat to discover An Interview with Octavio Paz from late in his life, translated here into English by José Garcia Escobar. Paz’s answers are ever-illuminating and fascinating to read in hindsight now, as they are still so relevant to contemporary debates. Alongside personal anecdotes about his literary milieu and his vast knowledge of Spanish-language and international literature, Paz speaks so intelligently about modernity, democracy, and engaging with young writers. What rings out through all his answers is his absolute dedication to understanding and improving the world we live in, and there is much we can learn from his responses here. My favorite: when asked about what he wants to do with the future, he responds, “The future is untouchable, ungraspable. Our task is to make the present habitable.”  

—Sarah Moore

The meaning of form, in poetry, lies in its distinction of separation—the assertive partition of poetry from daily language, the grace inherited from music, the essential constraints that indicate towards the poem as craft, as exaltation. In contemporary writing practices, however, the operation of poetic forms has evolved a further dialectic of freedom in constraints, of boundlessness as dreamed in confinement. That is, writing in form morphed, before our very eyes, from an expectation into an asseveration. In Robert Hass’ A Little Book on Form, he culminated the nature of the formal imagination in “the way the poem embodies the energy of the gesture of its making.” The shape on a page, the rhythm of a line—all this is speaking to the circumstances of a poem’s creation, to the only way that a poem can be held together as whole, which is that it is nothing else.

In translation, form poses perhaps the greatest risk, incites the greatest apprehensions. If it is the most solid thing in its original language, it becomes the flimsiest, the most delicate in the act of transposition. It does not hold because it does not conceive of anything other than itself. This, perhaps, is where most translators are forced to resign to Aquinas’ idea—that the soul is indistinguishable from the body, unrecognizable without its physicality.

Yet, we defy this. We recognize. In poems which are utter commitments to their language, we still perceive the enchantments and potentials of our own. The dynamic of the original does not disappear but are elaborated upon. In the loss of form, we gain movement; where the original sings, the translation dances. This thought came to me often as I read through Wolfgang Cordan’s poems, brilliantly and boundingly translated by Klein Voorhees. In their translator’s note, Voorhees spoke to the necessity of preserving Cordan’s formal poetics as an act of queer expression, containment within the parameters of established literariness for the puposes of mapping out the self’s immeasurable excursions. Where the subversion and rejection of tradition has often been an essentialism of artists who work under subjugation and erasure, this embracing of form is not only, as Voorhees mentions, one of survival, but also evokes towards a different way of living and feeling in the world, within the world as it is. As we see in these poems, such visionary materialisms are not only possible, but also result in jaw-dropping lines of sheer beauty: “I stood before a future kiss and quivered.”

Where discontinuity, drift, and paradox are common experiences of negation, within the page they can be transformed into freedoms and certainties. In the excerpt from Mariella Nigro’s  Memory Rewrittenthe author courses across the landscape with equal parts wonder and confidence. Here, land and letter is made one and interchangeably traversable, as pages are made into roads and the roads in turn run deep with writings:

My thought will go far away
And I’ll be there without you knowing

and I’ll be here
little by little, sporadically
following the line from the brooding hive

The movement of these poems, planar and striated with sensation, intimations, and textuality, insist on the individual writing as inseparable from the legacy of all writing—whether if one writes a question that is eventually carried away and never seen again, or writes an answer to a question asked by someone who shall never hear of it. In Nigro’s writings, radiantly translated by Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas, there is a tremendous ecstasy of a quiet and untraceable voyage between her and everyone that has written before her, that “the first source is the last boundary / and the final drop has already flowed at the beginning.” Within this assuredness of circuity Nigro both allows a break from tradition—”an indelible mark on your map”—and the subsumption of it under her own regard—”on what white of what page do you write to me?”

In writing, it is always the impossible trying to give birth to itself. As Adorno said: “Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.” The lie of being truth, a perhaps more poetic iteration of what he states later on, that the only art of responsible practice in the face of despair is what can be imagined in the light of redemption. In Sara Stridsberg’s “Forgiveness,” she states unflinchingly this difficulty: “When I try to think about the unforgivable, I fall helplessly into forgiveness.” The essay is lucid in its confrontation of the unthinkable, probing the mind’s outermost limits in an attempt to answer the question of where forgiveness is made possible. Ranging from the aftermath of apartheid to the state execution of Karla Faye Tucker, Stridsberg asks what it means to reflect both in the objective substance of horror, and to move irrationally beyond it. It calls forgiveness as beyond the simplicity of courage—an utter impossibility that is nevertheless possible. Truth as indivisible from illusion. A mind that imagines its own non-existence. When I think about the world we face, where so much feels unredeemable, I feel an immense power emanating from her words.

—Xiao Yue Shan

*****

Read more on the Asymptote blog: