I felt that the Spring Asymptote was an incredibly timely and unsettling issue and I hope that broader readers can use it as a lens to think about ongoing dynamics of imperialism, capitalism, and more. I was drawn immediately to Kim Hyesoon’s poems from The Hell of That Star (tr. Cindy Juyoung Ok), with its overwhelming and abundant female presence that kept mutating. In Signe Gjessing’s poems from Tractatus (tr. Denise Newman), I really enjoyed the tension between the abstract and the material—for example, the fact that shampoo is able to exist alongside transcendence. The voice of Nina Yargekov’s “The Obedient Little Girl” (tr. Charles Lee) was immediately disarming! I was delighted by the emphasis on disobedience at the end. Last but not least, I enjoyed reading Agnieszka Taborska’s The World Has Gone Mad: A Surrealist Handbook How to Survive (tr. Soren Gauger). Leonora Carrington is my favorite artist and writer (I actually have a tattoo of one of her paintings); it was exciting to see her mentioned at the conclusion. I also enjoyed the automatic writing components. This is a text I do need to spend more time with and I am so glad that it was included in this issue.
—AM Ringwalt, Educational Arm Assistant
I have a love for Nordic literature in general, there is something about its directness and its simplicity, and yet at the same time its ability to confront existential issues through the details of the everyday. As I live in Sweden and yet am not Swedish, I see literature as a way into understanding the place and society where I am. I was struck by how so many of the pieces in the Swedish special feature confronted the deep hypocrisy that is there in Sweden’s self-presentation as a tolerant, progressive, consensual, and equal society: The uncovering of misogyny and violence against women in the Kristina Lugn (tr. Zach Maher), Lina Hagelbäck (tr. Freke Räihä) and Hanna Nordenhök (tr. Saskia Vogel) (there is a reason that the original Swedish title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was Män som hatar kvinnor [Men Who Hate Women]); or history of institutionalized homophobia in the Jonas Gardell (tr. Elizabeth Clark Wessel); and racism in the Majgull Axelsson (tr. Kathy Saranpa). These all show that there is something deeply troubling in the supposedly comfortable Swedish society that people here live in. And yet, for all this social awareness, these texts are not themselves sanctimonious or worthy. There is a distinct existential edge in each of them, they show how these social issues penetrate deep down into the world of the characters affected by them. Oppression is not an accident or mistake that can be simply rectified or remedied, it is a constitutive fact of the world as it exists and is revealed and experienced: violence, oppression, and torment penetrate and persist right through the world, into each blade of grass, bunch of flowers, childhood memory, or everyday action, and all this writing captures something of that pain and its penetration. This is the world. And it needs to be shown and seen again, recognized for what it is, as it is in this writing; and through the seeing again that this writing provides, it can also be recreated as other than it is.
—Liam Sprod, Copy Editor
Andrii Krasnyashchikh’s As Bombs Fall (tr. Matthew Hyde) made me cry. This account of daily life in Kharkiv made me think of my grandmother living in Rome under Nazi occupation—the immediacy of daily life while the world crumbles around you. Accounts such as this allow us a window into the individual human impact of war that newspaper reportage does not. Johannes Lilleøre’s My Sick Friend (tr. Sharon E. Rhodes) read like prose poetry. I love the way it plays with time: we move through a life, and then once illness strikes, time slows down. The taut, matter-of-fact sentences, with their seemingly throwaway observations and details, evoke not just the immediacy created by bodily illness and suffering, but also convey the pain and helplessness of the narrator. Kate Tsurkan’s interview with Zenia Tompkins discusses so many vital questions, for example: what responsibility do we children of the diaspora have to our homelands? How much is our image of homeland shaped by the trauma of our parents and grandparents?
—Amaryllis Gacioppo, Newsletter Editor
Edogawa Ranpo’s “The Hundred Faced Actor” (tr. Lin King) was so bizarre, unique, and fascinating. Robert Kirkbride’s “The Reading Chamber” was a challenging piece and it reminded me, naturally, of Borges, with its surreal, dizzying prose. My favorite line from the entire issue comes from Dick Cluster’s translation of Pedro de Jesús’s “Art of the Hunt”: “ignoble spirits who dishonor / the venerable practice of the hunt / emptied / his quiver / of arrows.” I’m impressed by Cluster’s more agile telling; the Spanish original I found a bit too solemn, but I did love both. The poem has a hypnotic rhythm to it.
—José Garcia Escobar, Editor-at-Large for Central America
I found the excerpts from Agnieszka Taborska’s The World has Gone Mad: A Surrealist Handbook How to Survive (tr. Soren Gauger) especially timely, given the recent events that have shaken the whole world. I have close Ukrainian friends who were either forced to flee or had to remain and fight for the protection of their country, so I found this surrealist take on the ways to withstand life’s bitterest offerings of reality very refreshing and insightful. From the poetry offerings, I especially liked Anna Gréki’s “With Rage in My Heart” as it speaks of being young and angry but also full of love, which is a state I so often find myself in these days. Robert Kirkbride’s “The Reading Chamber” was a delightful read and a beautiful reflection on a thing (or a concept?) I hadn’t really thought about before. It also reminded me in a way of Borges’s writings and that enchanting moment when you first encounter his texts, when the magic of books and reading is revealed to you in a single sentence. In this case, this sentence was the opening line itself: ”Long ago I overheard, or was told—it is no longer exactly clear to me—of a cylindrical room containing the sum of human knowledge.” Finally, as a student of Arabic who has spent a fair share of her time trying to decipher the mysterious Muallaqat, I was pleasantly surprised by Moneera Al-Ghadeer’s brief introduction to the meaning and significance of pre-Islamic poetry on the occasion of the release of a new anthology The Muʿallaqāt for Millennials: Pre-Islamic Arabic Golden Odes. She articulates an increasingly bothersome problem: how to interest newer generations in the literary traditions of people who ceased to exist centuries ago.
—Andriana Hamas, Editor-at Large for Bulgaria
The theme for this issue’s nonfiction lineup is, loosely, humans and their place in the environment and the world at large. The pieces here examine this theme in different registers: how humans destroy our world and each other through outright war (as in the fragments on Ukraine in Andrii Krasnyashchikh’s As Bombs Fall), by threatening beloved nonhuman species (like the wolves in Theis Ørntoft’s Our Days in Paradise are Over), or by transforming our beautiful landscapes into desolate wastelands (as in Fabio Pusterla’s First Landscape). I encourage readers to make connections among these and also with the other fantastic essays in this lineup that reflect on human life (and even death via suicide) in modernity, capitalism, and diaspora.
—Bassam Sidiki, Nonfiction Editor
In this issue’s drama section, two ancient Greek tragedies find themselves re-translated: Rebekah Curry gives us a new version of Euripides’s Alkestis, and Cristina Perez-Diaz presents a free adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigona by the Peruvian author Jose Watanabe. Both are eloquent and elegant verse translations that remind readers of the original power and beauty of the stories dramatized by Euripides and Sophocles.
—Caridad Svich, Drama Editor
What are your top three or four highlights from the Spring Asymptote? If you are so moved, write us at editors@asymptotejournal.com with the subject header READER HIGHLIGHTS. Should your letter be picked for publication, we’ll gift you a copy of our June Book Club title!
*****
Read more from the Asymptote blog: