The most striking piece in this issue was Abdelfattah Kilito’s “Borges and the Blind” (tr. Ghazouane Arslane) for informing me of Borges’ deep affiliation with Arabic literature (something I wasn’t aware of before)—it opened my eyes to another dimension of Borges’ works as well as highlighted the blind spot of critics and readers of translation who might not be privy to the multifaceted aspects of the text behind the text. Cao Kou’s “The Wall Builder” (tr. Chen Zeping and Karen Gernant) is a truly wonderful and chilling fable on the idea of border, i.e., a porous wall between insider and outsider, individual and the collective in a repressive society. Anna Felder’s “Unstill Life with Cat” (tr. Brian Robert Moore) is a lovely, fully immersive tale from a cat’s point-of-view. The translation is magical, wondrously immediate. I love Rose Bialer’s perceptive questions and the resulting interview with Maureen Freely for revealing how Turkey’s political situation might affect the relationship between an author and his translator, and how there are so many layers of “the other” in Turkish society.
—Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora
Kelsi Vanada’s translation is itself a reflection of Andrea Chapela’s long meditation on the meaning and mechanics of mirrors, with all the inevitable subtle distortions and complex reconfigurations that Chapela elaborates on. This extended reflection employs myriad angles of vision‚ philosophy, science, toys, personal narrative, literature, and history, from which to view the significance of mirrors, the act of looking at oneself, and the act of constructing a self-image, with and without the fragmented and inevitably distorted images that mirrors provide. Juan Calzadilla’s poems from Dictated by the Pack (tr. Katherine Hedeen and Olivia Lott) are virtuosic translations—the complexity of the diction and rhythms as well as the subtlety of how the language accretes are very challenging to carry over into English without disrupting the balance between sense-making and surprises in the language. The lines shift across the page, like waves lapping onto the shore, as if the rhythms of thought have been recorded faithfully in their syncopated arrivals, gaps, and runnings-over. Almog Behar’s long poem “First We’ll Speak Many Words About God” (tr. Shoshana Olidort) is a meditation on religion and god, but also an interrogation of our conception of god, an interrogation of the faithful as well as the faithless. It’s subversive and yet hopeful. Sa’eed Tavana’ee Marvi’s ”The Open Tome” (tr. Khashayar Kess Mohammadi) is set in a post-apocalyptic, interplanetary, post-Earth world. The voice of the poem shifts‚ from an unnamed speaker, to a television set, to an ”Oceandweller,” to an unnamed speaker again. The experimental formatting of the poem allows the reader to shift between these different lens ratios. As such, the reader experiences a telescoping which perhaps informs the experience alluded to in the poem‚ by a visionary which either documents the future, or foretells the otherworldliness of the present moment. I really enjoyed Rose Bialer’s interview with Maureen Freely, which touches on the craft of translation, the challenges and the advantages of translating through the prism of race, gender, sexuality, etc., and what it’s like to navigate a translator-author relationship that spans two very different cultures, especially when the author in question is famous, and at certain points even infamous.
—M. L. Martin, Assistant Editor (Poetry)
I have a distinct affinity for Mitteleuropa miserablism, and this edition contains two quintessential instances of this literary tendency: Elfriede Jelinek (tr. Aaron Sayne) and Thomas Bernhard (tr. Charlie N. Zaharoff). It does not get much more central European than Austria, and the Austrians seem to have an affinity for misanthropy, self-loathing, destruction, perversity, and psychosis, but all expressed in the most perfect prose, poetry, painting, and music. Part of my love for these two writers in particular, however, is their pushing, bending, and breaking of the formal rules of language. Perhaps this formalism is my own perversity, since, as a copy-editor, I should be forcing such language back into its grammatical and syntactical straightjacket; but as much as I know and can enforce such rules in a professional manner, I thrive and find a thrill in breaking them. Perhaps it is a certain return of the repressed, the combined forces of the pleasure principle and the death drive raging against the injunctions of the superego, to put it in suitably Austrian psychoanalytic terminology. It is perhaps not as evident in this particular Jelinek piece, but in a work like The Piano Teacher her very language takes on an almost cubist feeling, as if the very facade of syntax has shattered and crumbled. It is a difficult and alienating experience to read this sort of prose, but that is the point: everything is about discomfort and distance from the self (and of course we know that we are always alienated from our self, always at war with the fascism of the superego in the fractured abysses of the mind). Bernhard takes an almost opposite path, with his nested sentences spiraling out into evermore convoluted logics and precise obsessions, until the clauses build and build to an almost unsustainable mass. It is equally alienating and difficult, but that is where there is the perversity of enjoyment. Bernhard’s endless sentences always tempt the editor to splice all those commas and tidy up the prose, but we must resist. It is the form, the formalism, of the writing that holds its power, the power of rules and the power of their breaking. Two other writers in this issue who engage with the shadowy underworlds of both the mind and the text are the two Greek poets Takis Sinopoulos (tr. Konstantinos Doxiadis) and Tasos Leivaditis (tr. N. N. Trakakis). Their poems are full of darkness and underworlds, meeting with the dead and abused. In their dark and dusky worlds, full of decay and ruin, they both, in fact, remind me of another Austrian, the poet Georg Trakl. But they have a distinctively classical bent, drawing on the rich tradition of Greek poetry, which, under the influence of the muses and the oracles, was never that far away from its own dark underworld of the unconscious. It is interesting to note how both Sinopoulos and Leivaditis make use of parataxis, leaving their language itself slightly ruinous and somewhat incomplete, in the same way that memory is always incomplete, so that something in every thought is lost and imprecise. Again, it would be a tragedy for the editor to insert all of the conjunctions that grammar demands, instead of the melancholy of lost connections, lost reasoning, that seeps out of the page like its own miasma, its own darkness. A fifth piece that I enjoyed was the Hervé Guibert (tr. Daniel Lupo) with its own more bodily miserablism and the sickness of cultural production. The bodily is its own sort of unconsciousness, and perhaps that is what I like, the bodily response to the strictures and demands of cultural production, the point where everything leaks and seeps out through the cracks of the form. The vomit of grammarless text without which there would be no need to clean. But perhaps I am just enjoying my symptoms too much. And perhaps that is why my brief description of the reasons I like these pieces has become its own pile of vomit.
—Liam Sprod, Copy Editor
I am a fan of Hervé Guibert’s writing generally, but hadn’t encountered him in quite this mode (tr. Daniel Lupo) before; the sentences are shorter, the stories more barbed and direct. It was a pleasure to see this different gradation of his work and his commentary on artistic production, the labor of writing, and the market realities that surround the creation of art seem enormously relevant to the work of writing today. I loved the function of the house in Thomas Bernhard’s “The Loden Cape” (tr. Charlie N. Zaharoff) as a metaphor for aging, decline, and anger; Humer’s movement up in the house mirrors his aging and his growing distance from his son. I was also really impressed by the nested voices of the narrative, told as if second- or third-hand. Jimin Kang’s meditation on the mother-daughter relationship, in all its intimacy and distance, was so moving. I was compelled by the depiction of language, and translation, as enabling both closeness and distance, understanding and loss—ultimately mirroring the mother-daughter relationship itself. I thought it was so clever the way Catherine Safonoff’s “The Miner and the Canary” (tr. Rachel Farmer) was structured around therapy sessions; the relationship between the narrator and the therapist is interesting, of course, but I was more struck by the depiction of how therapy seeps into her daily life and vice versa—the narrator is questioning who she is and what she thinks in all the vignettes between therapy sessions, and other aspects of her life surface in her therapy sessions. The story seems to mimic the way therapy can make the mind feel porous and malleable.
—Meghan Racklin, Assistant Editor (Fiction)
I was thrilled to see Milena Marković’s Boat for Dolls (tr. Marina Lavoie)—she is the most provocative and engaging writer in Serbia right now. Berny Tan’s interview with Michael Lee is excellent for several reasons. First, Berny comes to Lee’s work after in-depth acquaintance, so the questions are provocative and engaging. Second, language is the superpower of translators, and though everything in Asymptote addresses this in one way or another, this visual article brings special focus to the power of language in a way that I found productive and exciting.
—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor
Anna Kushner’s “How Altın Gün Saved My Life” is a deeply personal text about loss (of a mother), but also about gain (of a new language, a new version of the world, new set of survival skills). By sharing her troubling experiences from the last couple of years, the author exposes in one go both her vulnerabilities and her strengths. I always feel inspired by such leaps of faith.
—Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large for Bulgaria
Poetry has this wonderful ability to merge emotional devastation and catharsis. “Your voice does not die out if it knows how to exist.” Yaryna Chornohuz’s Cycle of Wartime Poems (tr. Ostap Kin and Kate Tsurkan) is raw, emotional, and timely. With all the news going on about the war, it’s sometimes hard to pinpoint the emotional aspects it has on those serving on the front lines or how they are affected by the events around them. On the flip side, it’s important for the world to understand these inner thoughts and feelings as well because they provide another layer of depth and insight to the crisis at hand. How often can you compare your compatriots to cheese and get away with it, as one of Anaïs Meier’s two stories from About Mountains, Humans, and Especially Mountain Snails (tr. Genia Blum) does? The entire piece has charm, elegance, and a splash of humor. It should age well. There are some fantastic lines in Brigitte Gyr’s dossier (tr. E.C. Belli), e.g. “Time is your nomadic flower.” Suffused with fragility, these poems balance a philo-poetic foundation with ethereal lyricism and sensitivity.
—Daniel Naman, Business Developer
I grew up with the mysticism of Habib Tengour’s titular Ayah and Tengour’s prose (tr. Bryan Flavin) on it is so wonderful. The naivete and the postcolonial rigor of the children, the fixation on talismans and their origin are all great. Jimin Kang’s essay was such a whirlwind of emotions. The way Jimin’s relationship with her mother plays out through the prism of translation was uncanny. I loved how they both read different versions of Don Quixote—an experience we’re all too familiar with. And I enjoyed the lessons translation taught her about her relationship with her aging mother. Harrowing, beautiful, and relevant are the words I would use to describe Tasos Leivaditis’s poems (tr. N. N. Trakakis). I feel grateful to have discovered at a time when his writing rings so true. Eugene Ostashevsy’s “Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Translator” is experimentation at its best. This reads as a humorous and audacious ode to the translator and I like Ostashevsky constructed as an almost amorphous persona. Yulia Tupikina’s “Inhale-Exhale” (tr. John J. Hanlon) is such an authentic and funny take on content creators and the online industry, especially out of remote towns we usually don’t have the time and bandwidth to imagine. I loved the destruction of touristic imagination and marketing through the creator revealing the ugly part of the town (the voice was really strong and inflected with a teenage angst).
—M.K. Harb, Editor-at-Large for Lebanon
The first of two startling plays that grace this issue’s Drama section is Inhale-Exhale by Yulia Tupikina (tr. John J. Hanlon, a frequent contributor to the journal). Tupikina is part of the “After In-Yer-Face” theatre scene in Russia. She is a playwright and screenwriter originally from Siberia. Inhale-Exhale explores the life of a teenage girl that is considered an outcast in society. By turns tender and fierce, searching and humane, Hanlon’s translation captures Tupikina’s distinctive voice. The second piece in the section is Milena Markovic’s Boat for Dolls (tr. Marina Lavoie). The play premiered in 2006 and won Serbia’s Sterija Award for Best National Contemporary Play. It looks at the fractured legacy of fairy tales and Disney’s version of them on contemporary society. In this excerpt, Snow White and Goldilocks and Thumbelina and others are trapped in a self-reflexive world of images where they cannot be freed, or can they? Both Tupikina and Markovic’s plays are examinations of captive societies and cultures where characters yearn to be truly themselves.
—Caridad Svich, Drama Editor
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