The Summer 2022 Issue is our forty-fifth edition, featuring work from thirty-one countries! From newly translated fiction by luminaries such as Elfriede Jelinek and Thomas Bernhard, to our special feature highlighting Swiss literature, and to probing essays that interrogate the adoption of new languages, these intricately linked writings feature characters who are thrown into abysses both personal and political but discover moments of solace, communion, and revelation. To introduce you to another rich, wide-ranging issue, our blog editors discuss their favorite pieces.
In Elisa Shua Dusapin’s 2021 National Book Award-winning novel, Winter in Sokcho, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins from the French, the unnamed narrator, a young French Korean woman living on the border between North and South Korea, experiences an ongoing crisis of identity due her inability to be seen, displacement, and strained relationships with her domineering mother and absent boyfriend. In the novel, the narrator seeks to recover a self that has been rendered invisible. One of Dusapin’s most fitting metaphors for this reassembling of the self is the narrator’s constant search for her reflection in the mirror of the guesthouse where she works. Similarly, the search for a true reflection emerges as a central theme in the introspective Summer 2022 issue. It is apt in these precarious times when the stability of the self is being shaken by forces of displacement and politics that this issue deeply reckons with fixing selves that have been lost, falsely performed, and fractured. The building of the self is literalized by Lu Liu’s playful yet melancholy cover art, in which two boys nervously construct a sand tower out of words, alluding to the Tower of Babel made personal in Jimin Kang’s moving essay, “My Mother and Me.”
The mirror is the object of Andrea Chapela’s kaleidoscopic, multidisciplinary self-inquiry, “The Visible Unseen,” elegantly rendered by Kelsi Vanada. It adopts the fragmentary form of a series of failed beginnings, in the manner of Janet Malcolm’s famous essay on David Salle, Forty-One False Starts. Chapela’s variation of the form represents the difficulty of locating the self in one’s reflection. By extension, Chapela argues that at a given time, the self can never be completely isolated; rather, it can only ever be seen through a particular type of mirror, at a certain angle, beneath a certain light, yielding a fragment of the whole. Just as Chapela scrutinizes the mirror through a variety of perspectives—scientific, literary, philosophical, memoiristic—so must we be as comprehensive yet fragmentary when we search for ourselves. As Chapela writes, “Little by little, I start to accept that each new beginning of the essay is just one piece of the full picture.”
The examination of a self that has been rendered foreign is also the focus of Hervé Guibert’s Two Stories, viscerally translated by Daniel Lupo. In the terrifying and intimate portrayal of an art critic, Guibert describes the process in which the violent forces of commercialism compel the critic to write pieces for money from journals as opposed to pleasurable pieces he desires to write. In his pieces, the unnamed art critic must perform a false self as an objective observer of photographs, rather than permitting the emergence of his natural writer’s persona—something closer to a memoirist speaking on his pain and sickness. Notably, towards the end of the story, during a bout of illness, the critic’s true self briefly breaks through his own attempts at suppression: “On rereading the published article a few days later, his fever having broken, he found in it all the terms of his illness and solitude, and realized that through these photos, which were nevertheless foreign to him, he had spoken only of himself.” Therefore, the story functions as a parable by commenting on the way that the violent forces of capitalism can suppress the artistic self.
The closing of distance produced by estrangement is likewise the subject of Jimin Kang’s self-translated, memoristic essay, “My Mother and Me.” Kang recalls the disorienting experience of reading Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote in an English translation, alongside her Korean mother reading it in Korean. Kang is disappointed by the vast differences in their appraisals of the knight—she finds him brave and idealistic, while her mother sees an egotistical and hurtful protagonist. The author meditates on the inevitable disparities between translations, conceding that there are no exact equivalents between words in different languages. This idea recalls Eugene Ostashevsky’s description of the translator as an “artist of separation, carrier of correspondence” in his “Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Translator.” Kang moves from this place of defeat to one of hopeful realization: her mother’s attempt to understand Don Quixote was a means to understand her daughter. Here, translation mediates the transformation of distant selves so that they can become closer to another. As Kang poignantly writes, “I want to believe in the fact that we can meet in the middle of this distance, one that I have never attempted to cross until now.” The piece, like many of the others in this issue, offers a mirror to the conflicted and estranged self for, if not resolution, then its recognition.
—Darren Huang
Readers who already know Elfriede Jelinek’s body of work will recognize a number of familiar elements in this issue’s excerpt from Envy, which she made freely available on her website in the original German after receiving the Nobel Prize. The female musician in a relationship with a male student, the controlling mother, and the element of voyeurism, for instance, all recall The Piano Teacher (Die Klavierspielerin), as though a single story has been taken and transposed to a different key. Immediately striking (and surely representing an enormous challenge to render well in English) about this excerpt is what translator Aaron Sayne calls the narrator’s “virtuosic, antic voice,” a distractibility that propels the focus from thing to thing as it takes in vast swathes of human experience, from the 2008 financial crisis to cell phone photography to burial rites, without ever dwelling on any of them for too long. Perhaps unnervingly fitting for an excerpt that at one point describes a gruesome incident of cannibalism, the way the narrator uses and reuses language in some sense comes to mimic the process of digestion. Phrases are chewed up and recombined to form new wholes–as in one scene in which a violin teacher is described as having “gone from the big top to the big bottom: in the one-ring circus of life, she is a one-woman seesaw, a no-man band.” The text’s numerous clichés and puns come to take on the feeling of pap: an insipid gruel of words spat up as a sort of protection against the narrator’s having to take anything too seriously, even as the scenes described to us touch upon acts of horrific violence.
If the narrative voice of Jelinek’s Envy is characterized by a tendency to move from subject to grand subject without taking any single one too seriously, the figures who appear in Thomas Bernhard’s “The Loden Cape” (appearing here in excerpted form) are ruled by the opposite compulsion: monomaniacal obsessions with matters of idiotic unimportance. In contrast to Envy’s winking, punning narrator, one gets the sense, somehow, that Bernhard’s characters aren’t in on the joke as they froth at the mouth over this or that perceived slight. “No one can deprive me of my love for the business!” a character bellows at one point, apropos of nothing (Bernhard sets the quote off in arch italics for good measure.) While the lambasting of Austrian bourgeois society’s various neuroses is certainly of a piece with Bernhard’s broader œuvre, a note from translator Charlie N. Zaharoff helpfully points up what is unusual about this piece: the “untidiness” as he puts it, of Bernhard’s long, looping sentences, which “confuses both the thought-speech boundary and the boundary between the characters’ perspectives.” Here, as in the Jelinek, it seems that the German translators in this issue had their work cut out for them.
Abdelfattah Kilito’s essay “Borges and the Blind” (translated from the Arabic by Ghazouane Arslane) treats an interest diagnosed not by constant mention but by strange absence, taking as its point of departure the fact that Borges, despite being well versed in the history of Arabic literature, never once mentions the major Syrian author al-Maʿarri in all his writing on the subject. This is despite the fact that, as Kilito lays out, the two had much in common—above all else blindness, which Borges developed in his later years due to cataracts and al-Maʿarri got as a result of a childhood case of smallpox. Kilito’s investigation forms quite the contrast with Bernhard’s unrelenting characters: obsession as manifest by an inability to discuss rather than an inability to keep from discussing. Kilito rather coyly avoids giving a clear answer to the mystery of Borges’s silence—though perhaps, in the end, there is no need. To repeat the citation from Pascal with which Kilito begins his essay, “You would not seek me if you had not found me.”
—Erica Eisen
We live in a sea of our own scattered self. Never have our lives been so scrupulously documented as in the digital era: the shifting features of our faces in age tracked by incessant photographs, stray thoughts and memories surging back in well-timed algorithms, and our movements mirrored in that serenely blue dot on the map—our twinned dimensions. It has become, then, more difficult than ever, as Almog Behar puts it in “First We’ll Speak Many Words About God,” to “disavow existence / and give it another chance.” Amidst the fragmented mirror-shards that force us to hold ourselves at a judging distance, we are made to survey the endless, multifarious by-products of our days, travelling in that shrinking passage between past and present, god-like. In this omniscience, where our previous existences must constantly answer to the authoritarian regime of our right-now selves, one almost longs for that incantatory “has not yet” pounding through Behar’s verse, hypnotically translated from the Hebrew by Shoshana Olidort, which disavows knowledge and thereby disavows regret. Taking us to the transcendental unknowingness of not-yet, “First We’ll Speak” plays a left-hand harmony to the right hand’s canonised myths and legends, grasping at the thread of history to pull us backwards and through the ravaged history of our becoming. The power of knowing what has happened before, in Behar’s commanding verse, is the power to tell it again. Tell it differently.
we move, are moved, and make move
are merciful and compassionate
begrudging and vengeful
whispering prayers and listening
remembering and forgetting
replenishing human beings and killing.
Treading along the same growing vines of lore, Takis Sinopoulos’ “Elpenor,” translated elegantly by Konstantinos Doxiadis, holds to that same power of language to be both object and that which illuminates the object. The titular character is one who meets Odysseus in Hades, begging for a proper burial. Yet, calling to mind the Poundian dramatics of The Cantos, Sinopoulo conjures the brutal, visceral image of a dead man, blurred for a moment into living space, struggling to return to the afterlife. Building upon the willful tragedies of theatres past to culminate with the recent horrors witnessed by the author during the first World War, “Elpenor” is a devastating readdress of the human limits of mourning, the impassable realms between us and those that have passed, and the painful consequence of imagination—the forced reconciliation with reality.
As the interiorities of women came to be addressed in their fully uncontainable and undefinable qualities, the form of a specific sense began to carve itself newly: fear. Although ultimately raw and bracing in all its iterations, there is a particular fear that women harbour—one that takes a male pronoun and conjures the fantasy of violence. In Mona Kareem’s “Abracadabra,” translated by Sara Elkamel, this fear, though not distinctly feminine, inhabits the feminine body with a sense of making itself at home, forcing the host to counteract with its practiced methodology of imaginary safety, imaginary power. The three poems of Kareem in this issue are all intimately psychological—the setting is a construct built by the mind, not by the world—and all address, in various ways, physiological effects of thinking, dreaming, and meditating. From the doomed metamorphosis of Lot’s wife, to the language that removes its writer’s hearts with hands, Kareem creates chambers and tunnels by which symptoms suffered by the mind are given equality with those suffered by the body, a defiant ontology that centres and expands the experience of being with the experience of having a body—a radical dream of wholeness.
—Xiao Yue Shan
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