Posts by Filip Noubel

Tunnel of Forking Paths: On Can Xue’s Dystopian Moral Fable, Mystery Train

For the author, the deconstruction of language allows her to explore themes close to her oeuvre, but also to her personal experience.

Mystery Train by Can Xue, translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce, Sublunary Editions, 2022

To board Can Xue’s novella, Mystery Train, the reader must surrender entirely to a world plunged into eternal night, where characters give themselves up to be devoured by wolves and execute perfect needlework in pitch-black darkness, where fear and worship surround a power figure known only as the conductor, and where many are unable to make any sense of the cruelties perpetrated upon them. Can’s Matrix-style text offers little answers, opening up instead a multitude of unsettling questions about the body, induced guilt, and the illusion of choice.

In her introduction, Can (the pseudonym of Deng Xiaohua), is generous enough to provide a warning to the unsuspecting reader: “We might decide that the life the artist is describing belongs to someone else, and has nothing to do with us. But it does have to do with us—because, for us, the people of the new millennium, the body-soul contradiction is vitally important.” Indeed, Mystery Train can be read as a fable on the struggle between the presence and demands of the body—down to its most basic instincts such as sex or bowel movements—and the incessant inquiries of the soul, which demand explanation yet continually fail to culminate in satisfying answers. The author goes on to explicates the purpose of this work in the short introduction: “Mystery Train characters suffer, but never in vain. Hardship forces each one to grow, and mature, and to become tougher than they were before. Gradually, they form themselves into responsible, creative individuals. The veiled yet nevertheless intense longing for death that pervades the story is in fact a longing for performance—for a death-defying stunt played out on a clifftop.”

As promised, Can is not tender with her characters. The protagonist, Scratch, has been working on a poultry farm; the train is taking him on a business trip to a remote city in the north of China, bordering Russia. He soon discovers after boarding his train, however, that he has most likely been fired—but nothing is clear. He recalls a strange send-off by the farm’s boss: “At the bus stop, the manager grasped Scratch’s hand in his own callused one and said, with strange formality, ‘I’m sorry. I haven’t taken good enough care of you. Please forgive me.’ Not yet sixty and already going senile, thought Scratch. It made no sense. Why all the emotion? He was hardly being sent to his death.“ In such short, sharp sentences, Can builds an atmosphere of oppression—a sense of imminent danger in a forest of undecipherable symbols and signs.

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Abdulla Qahhor: A Master of the Uzbek Short Story

Qahhor endeavors to shock the reader through subtle yet evocative detail, rather than declaration and naming.

Though Soviet literature has been studied and discussed on a global scale, the texts of Uzbekistan during that heated, tumultuous era have rarely reached beyond its language. In a new translation by Christopher Fort, however, one of the titans of Soviet Uzbek letters is making his English-language debut. Abdulla Qahhor’s autobiography, Tales from the Past, reveals the particular history of Soviet power in his country, as well as the sometimes tenuous boundary between the self and the Party line. In the following essay, Filip Noubel dives into the times and works of Qahhor, speaking with Fort to elucidate how this classic author should be read today.

In the anglophone world, Central Asia remains somewhat of a terra incognita on the map of literary traditions; thus, whenever a translation from the region does appear in English, it is something to celebrate. Today, there is reason to do so thanks to the efforts of Christopher Fort, a scholar of Uzbek literature and an assistant professor of general education at the American University of Central Asia. Fort has just published a partial translation of Tales from the Past, the literary autobiography of Abdullah Qahhor (1907-1968), arguably the greatest master of the Uzbek short story from the Soviet period. While the full translation will come out later next year, a large excerpt—including the foreword and the first chapter—is available to read online, providing a rare insight into Qahhor’s world and his role as a key public intellectual, navigating the political minefield of the Stalinist period and its aftermath. His other works include two novels: Mirage and The Lanterns of Qo‘shchinor.

Uzbek literature is a rich field encompassing different languages, alphabets, and traditions—one of which is the Soviet Uzbek literature from the 1920s to the 1980s, mostly written in Cyrillic Uzbek and Russian. The beginning and the end of this period can be characterized as times of exciting diversity, unlike its heavily censured middle period. To understand the twenties, it is necessary to go back to the late nineteenth century, when an innovative generation of intellectuals—the Jadids, who took their name from the concept of “usul-i-jadid,” or “the new method”—revolutionized the literary landscape of what was then Tsarist Turkestan, one of Russia’s latest conquests in Central Asia. By the early 1920s, this generation had created a golden age of Uzbek literature, which produced the first novels ever written in Uzbek, experimenting with various form and themes. However, the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, targeting independent intellectuals across the entire Soviet Union, put a brutal end to this period, sending many prominent writers to jail, camps, and eventually to their death.

After the thirties, a new generation of writers emerged in Uzbekistan, having pledged full loyalty to the demands of political correctness and socialist realism—the Moscow-imposed model of writing fiction. Abdulla Qahhor, G‘afur G‘ulom, and Oybek were among the most famous names. However, as Fort himself explains, this generation is more linked with its predecessors than it might appear: “These authors later demonstrate some regret over their participation in Stalin’s purges of their forefathers. While relatively quiet in the 1930s, Qahhor in particular became a major voice of opposition in the Soviet Uzbek literary establishment of the 1950s, advocating for less oversight from the Writers’ Union [the powerful institution that dictated the correct political line for writers in every Soviet Republic]. He also produced the only piece of Uzbek literature, of which I’m aware, written for the drawer. His Earthquake, written in the 1960s but first published in 1987, illustrates some of the terror of the purges and, depending on how one reads it, some guilt for his complicity in them.”   READ MORE…

Manaschi, A Modernist Novel Inspired by Central Asia’s Oldest Epic, the Manas

Manaschi is a powerful book that lies at the nexus between the individual and the culture they are born into.

Manaschi by Hamid Ismailov, translated from the Uzbek by Donald Rayfield, Tilted Axis, 2021

Despite being home to incredibly rich and ancient traditions of both spoken and written word, little of Central Asian literatures is known to English-language readers. Such is what is being spectacularly rectified in Hamid Ismailov’s latest novel to appear in English—Manaschi. The text, artfully translated from Uzbek to English by the meticulous Donald Rayfield, is an ode to the deeply rooted tradition of storytelling that crosses boundaries of ethnicity, gender, age, and time, taking truly epic proportions in Ismailov’s riveting prose.

A manaschi, in Kyrgyz tradition, is the person—usually a man, young or old—who performs the recitation of the epic poetry Manas, a body of narratives that contains up to 900,000 verses, and transmitted only orally before given a written form in the late nineteenth century. Reciting the Manas is an act of shamanism; it involves phenomenal memory, years of training, musical talent, and inspiration kin to a trance state. For some, the act even enables in the performer the ability to interpret dreams or foretell the future. Learning and performing the Manas embodies a lifetime’s dedication to one of the longest oral texts known to humanity, and the sacred practice prevails to this day, as new generations—now including women—continue to be trained.

The story takes place on the contemporary Kyrgyz-Tajik border in Chekbel, a mountainous village inhabited by mixed populations of nomadic Kyrgyz and sedentary Tajiks. Bekesh, the main character, is a radio journalist who lives in an urban part of Kyrgyzstan. Upon receiving the news that his uncle Baisal—a reputed manaschi—has died, he returns to his ancestral village to attend the funeral. This visit, initially conceived as a temporary break from his modern routine, turns into a life-changing experience, opening formidable questions regarding his familial and cultural duties, his unequivocal choices on identity, and his moral responsibilities to his call as a manaschi.

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What’s New in Translation: October 2021

New works in translation from Poland, Croatia, and the Netherlands!

This month, our selections of the best in world literature are unified by their writers’ undeniable strength of voice and masterful control of the narrative form. From the Netherlands, a collection of A.L. Snijder’s very short stories—a genre invented by their author—revels in the unreal natures of our reality. From Croatia, the dark humorist stylings of Robert Perišić masterfully delineate the unrealiable boundaries of nations and psychologies. And from Poland, reporter and writer Margo Rejmer brings us a rare and intimate glimpse at Communist Albania under the fractious rule of Enver Hoxha, from the people who lived through it. 

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Night Train by A.L. Snijders, translated from the Dutch by Lydia Davis, New Directions, 2021

Review by Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora

            “For more than fifty years I have cherished one wish: to travel. This wish is part of another wish: for reality without reality—stories that are indistinguishable from the truth.”

—A.L. Snijders, “Baalbek” from Night Train

The key to understanding A.L. Snijders’s very short stories (dubbed zkvzeer korte verhalen) lies inside “Baalbek,” where the Dutch author connects his desire to visit Lebanon’s ancient Roman outpost with creating stories that depict “reality without reality.” The Stone of the Pregnant Woman, a megalith found in Baalbek and enshrouded with otherworldly presence, represents the perfectly magnified symbol for Snijders’s miniature approach. His Night Train—a collection of ninety-one zkv translated by Lydia Davis—is a shapeshifting amalgam of fable, zen koan, commentary, lyrical essay, and autobiography. As an immersive foray into the unknown, the instability of Snijders’s narrative form produces a trompe-l’oeil effect “indistinguishable from the truth,” giving the reader a sensation of being at once disoriented and illuminated.

Born Peter Cornelis Müller in 1937 in Amsterdam, Snijders came from a large, bourgeois Catholic family. The dual forces of freedom and order constitute the main themes of his life and work. Artistic and cosmopolitan, Snijders nevertheless chose a stable career teaching at a police academy and led a placid life as a gentleman farmer in rural Achterhoek, Holland’s eastern region. Even after being awarded the Constantijn Huygens Prize in 2010—one of the three most prestigious literary honors in Holland—Snijders did not, for years, deviate from the low-key routine of reading his work on an early morning radio show and circulating his steady flow of zkv among an email list of loyal readers. Ever industrious, he passed away this past June while working on new material.

The commonplace in Snijders’s oeuvre is imbued with mystery. In “Minor Characters,” Snijders’s alter-ego wonders if his compressed fiction may actually be “unpsychological novel[s] for people who understand nothing about psychology.” If reality resembles an unseen but anarchic mole emerging each night to turn Snijders’s garden into a surrealist landscape (“Mole”), then the author’s aesthetic philosophy suggests holistic means to affirm “what can never be understood.” This notion of reality as unknowable, or “unpsychological,” represents the trademark of Snijders’s fiction, allowing his narrative—as both burrowing animal and spy—to elude conventional expectations and assume an enigmatic depth, despite its compact form. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2020

New work from Taiwan's Amang and Germany's Jenny Erpenbeck!

This month’s selected new translations from around the world cross more than geographic boundaries: the first combines deliciously feral Taiwanese poetry with exclusive, first-hand conversations on the process of writing and translating it; the second features a series of stylistically varied but equally poignant essays on an acclaimed German author’s personal and political journey. Both titles prompt us to peek into their subjects’ fascinating lives and work, and we’re all too happy to indulge.

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Raised by Wolves: Poems and Conversations by Amang, translated from the Chinese by Steve Bradbury, Deep Vellum, 2020

Review by Filip Noubel, Editor-at-Large for Uzbekistan

When I agreed to review Raised by Wolves, I thought I had signed up to read a translation of contemporary Taiwanese poetry. I very quickly realized my mistake: Raised by Wolves is much more than that; it is an invitation to partake in a feast of words that agree to disagree, that clash and dissolve to reemerge in another language. It is also an act of transgressive eavesdropping, as the poet and her translator let readers in on their intimate discussions about their craft (the book’s subtitle is “poems and conversations”).

Amang has published several collections, including On/Off: Selected Poems of Amang, 1995-2002 (2003), No Daddy (2008), Chariots of Women (2016), and As We Embrace Thousands Are Dying (2016). In addition, she is a filmmaker and blogger, and her eclectic interests are clearly reflected in this new translation of her work. A couple of themes, however, seem to be especially prevalent throughout.

First, as the poet discloses (incidentally explaining her collection’s English title), she was raised mostly by her grandmother, who “was quite a character. She was very powerful and courageous. A she-wolf. She would do or say whatever she wanted. None of th[at] Confucian nonsense for her.” In line with this almost feral sentiment, many poems include raw images celebrating nature or the vibrance of the human body. In one, for instance, Amang writes: “Thrusting your hand down a tiger’s throat / to tear out his heart  / so, too, I / cut from a book a sheet of / ice.” And elsewhere: “I can give you anything / . . . / except that puny little stick / they call a prick / and is that worth making a fuss about?” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

This week's latest news from Czech Republic, Moldova, and El Salvador!

The engines of global literature churn on amidst a summer full of suspensions, and our editors on the ground are here to bring you the latest in their developments. Though the Czech Republic and El Salvador mourn the losses of two literary heroes, their legacies are apparent in the multiple peregrinations of their works, continuing. Furthermore: an exciting new Moldovan translation and a resurfaced scandal implicating the widely-lauded Milan Kundera.

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Czech Republic

Poet and essayist Petr Král, who died on June 17 at the age of seventy-eight, was not only an original poet continuing the surrealist tradition, but also a distinguished translator who moved freely between his native Czech and French, the language he adopted after emigrating to Paris in 1968, following the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. Král’s translations introduced key poets of the French avant-garde to Czech readers, and the three anthologies he translated and published also helped to put Czech poetry on the map in France. After 1989, he moved back to Prague, and in 2016 was honoured with the Czech State Prize for Literature, while in 2019 he was awarded the Grand Prix de la Francophonie by the Académie française. His loss is mourned equally in Prague and in Paris.

Just over ten years ago, another great Czech-born writer who has made Paris his home, Milan Kundera, was embroiled in a huge controversy after an article in the Czech weekly Respekt alleged that, as a student and an ardent communist, the future writer had denounced another young man to the secret police, resulting in the latter’s arrest and years spent in labour camps. These allegations, which Kundera has always strenuously denied, reared their ugly head again last month, when Czech-American writer Jan Novák published Kundera’s unauthorized biography. As the title suggests, Kundera. Český život a doba (Kundera. His Czech Life and Times) concentrates on the writer’s early life and career before his emigration to France and purports to lift the veil further on “the moral relativist’s” infatuation with communism. The book has caused quite a stir, with some critics hailing it as well-researched and highly readable, while others, including journalist Petr Fischer and author and former Asymptote contributor Radka Denemarková, regard it as little more than a hatchet job, questioning Novák’s use of secret police files as a reliable source of information. Milan Kundera has maintained silence.

On the other hand, underground writer and philosopher Egon Bondy (1930–2007), the enfant terrible of Czech literature and lyricist for the punk band Plastic People of the Universe, never denounced his left-wing beliefs and took revelations of his collaboration with the secret police on the chin. In protest against the splitting of Czechoslovakia, Bondy moved to the Slovak capital, Bratislava, where he devoted himself to the study and translation of Chinese philosophy. In 1997 he wrote his final book, inspired by the life of Lao Tzu. Dlouhé ucho (The Long Ear), which had long been considered lost, was finally published this May, thirteen years after Bondy’s death in a fire that broke out in his flat when he fell asleep with a burning cigarette. READ MORE…

Why Living Is Not the Same as Life: Yan Lianke’s Village Memoir

Perhaps the best way to describe Yan’s writing is that of brutal honesty.

Three Brothers by Yan Lianke, translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas, Grove Press, 2020

One of the most translated contemporary Chinese authors, Yan Lianke, has become quite the celebrity: he is featured in interviews in global media, invited to international literary festivals, and quoted on the coronavirus pandemic. Yet, despite this fame and international image, he remains fiercely loyal to his roots—the Chinese village where backbreaking hardship was the common lot until the 1990s. As he admits in his latest book to be translated into English: “I grew up in a household full of poverty and warmth.”

In this piece of non-fiction called 我与父辈 (first published in China in 2009) and rendered as Three Brothers in English through Carlos Rojas’ faithful and vivid translation, Yan pays tribute to the generation of his father, who survived an era of famine, political upheavals, social discrimination, and self-reliance in the 1960s and ’70s. By remaining faithful to their rock-solid values of decency, sacrifice, and stoic acceptance of life’s unfairness, this generation was able to provide better lives for their children. Yan, who belongs to the bridge generation, still remembers his early life of “吃苦” (chi ku, or literally, “eating bitterness”), whilst he has also directly experienced the benefits of China’s economic and social reforms that started in the 1980s but affected life in villages much later, around the late 1990s.

The book, which is subtitled Memories of My Family, describes the lives of three men: Yan’s father, Yan’s father’s second brother (called Second Uncle), and his cousin (called Fourth Uncle). All of them share similar characteristics: they are illiterate, extremely hard-working, and they all die as a result of the physical abuse that their bodies experienced in order to meet their most important obligations towards their families.

Perhaps the best way to describe Yan’s writing is that of brutal honesty. In this world of harsh masculinity—there are very few mentions of women in the book—life consists of the most important stations in life: giving birth, building houses, feeding and marrying off one’s many children (this was before China’s one-child policy started being implemented in 1979), providing education for the happy few, and ensuring a decent funeral. This is all accomplished through a philosophy that Yan describes as the difference between living in the village and in the city:

“ ‘Living’ suggests a process of enduring day after day, with each day being the same, and implies a kind of monotony, boredom, hopelessness, and idleness. ‘Life,’ on the other hand, conveys a sense of richness, of progress and the future. It has color and vitality and calls to mind the act of walking down a broad road illuminated by bright lights.”

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Our editors report on the most exciting developments in literature from Slovakia, Argentina, and Uzbekistan!

This week, our writers around the globe are celebrating the ever-growing interest in literature from countries that have been underrepresented in translation. In Slovakia, our Editor-at-Large looks back over the best works of the last thirty years, as well as the biggest literary prize-winners of 2019. In Argentina, acclaimed singer Adrián (Dárgelos) Rodríguez releases his debut poetry collection, and a new program in narrative journalism is launched in Buenos Aires. In Uzbekistan, we review two new English translations of major Uzbek classics. Read on to find out more!  

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Slovakia

As 2019 drew to a close, the customary best-of lists in Slovakia were topped by Čepiec (The Bonnet), a difficult-to-classify blend of ethnographic and historical exploration, social criticism, and autobiographical psychological probe—the first foray into prose by the acclaimed poet Katarína Kucbelová. 

The anniversary of the Velvet Revolution of November 1989 prompted a number of searches for the best literary works produced over the past thirty years. The most comprehensive survey, on PLAV.sk (Platform for Literature and Research), invited one hundred and thirty scholars, critics, writers, translators, and publishers to pick the best book of poetry, fiction, literary nonfiction, and criticism. Štefan Strážay’s collection Interiér (1992, The Interior) garnered the highest number of votes in the poetry category, with past Asymptote contributor Peter Macsovszky’s 1994 collection Strach z utópie (Fear of Utopia) coming a close second. The fiction list was dominated by Peter Pišťanek’s prescient dystopian satire Rivers of Babylon (1991, trans. Peter Petro, 2007), followed by his Mladý Dônč (Dônč Junior, yet to be translated into English) and cult author Rudolf Sloboda’s novel Krv (1991, Blood). As for “best writer,” the top four—Pavel Vilikovský, Balla, Ivana Dobrakovová, and Peter Pišťanek—all luckily have books available in English. More information on Slovak literature is available on the portal SlovakLiterature.com (full disclosure: I launched this website with Magdalena Mullek in September 2019 to promote Slovak literature in English). READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2019

Our selected works of translation this month touch on the eternal themes of narrative, identity, and the poet's voice.

It has been a wonderful year of covering, dear reader, the most fascinating translated works of world literature. Today, we are back with three more varied and exceptional books. Below, find reviews of a discursive and genre-bending Korean work, a powerful Uzbek novel that traverses existential questions of migration and hybridity, and the intimately potent lines of a young Argentine poetess. 

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Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River by Jung Young Moon, translated from the Korean by Yewon Jung, Deep Vellum Publishing, 2019

Review by Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large for Hong Kong

To Jung Young Moon, the author of Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River, meaninglessness is a more accurate portrayal of reality than contrived narratives. Continuing the fascination of Vaseline Buddha, one of his earlier novels which delves into the mind of an insomniac writer, Moon experiments with how the novel as a genre may go beyond the typical constituents of character, plot, and structure, and whether or not readers are able to find enjoyment in navigating largely banal thoughts and experiences. 

Set in Texas, where Moon did a residency in 2017 (specifically, in Corsicana, which he refers to as “C, a small town near Dallas”), Seven Samurai culminated from his desire to write about the state. But Moon does not know much about Texas, nor does he pretend to do so. Meandering through a list of stereotypes, from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to cowboys to the disdain for adding beans to chilli, Moon does not so much feature Texas as a place of interest, but rather as a springboard for his endless ruminations that find beginnings in almost anything, but that ultimately lead nowhere. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

On Terezín, censorship in Iran, thrilling new Uzbek titles, and the long-awaited Nobel Prize for Literature announcement.

This week is an exciting one in the world of literature, and our editors are bringing you dispatches from the ground. Xiao Yue Shan discusses the winners of the 2018 and 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature. Julia Sherwood reports on a march from Prague to Terezín, a concentration camp established by the Nazis during their occupation of the Czech Republic. Poupeh Missaghi gives an account of literary podcasts in Iran, as well as the government’s role in quality control and censorship. Filip Noubel brings us an introduction of several new titles from the established authors of Uzbekistan. 

Xiao Yue Shan, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting on the Nobel Prize for Literature

The long-awaited Nobel Prize in Literature announcement of 2019 was prefaced by the usual barrage of news and predictionssome cynical, some vaguely hopeful, and most of which hedged their bets on women writers and/or authors who did not write predominantly in English. After the controversy of last year’s award (or the lack thereof), it followed a natural trajectory that our current politics lead us to search for brilliant literary representation that breaches the limits of our accepted canon of well-celebrated white men, and the Swedish Academy had seemed eager to prove themselves to be advocates for social progress, as they once again took on the role of alighting the flames of literary luminaries that will forever be enshrined as embodiments of success in the world of letters.

In a case of half-fulfillment, the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature went to Asymptote contributor Olga Tokarczuk, and the 2019 Prize was awarded to the prolific Austrian writer Peter Handke. The latter aroused quite the maelstrom of negative responses, even with most still acknowledging his significant contributions and his fearlessly bold oeuvre, while the former is being hailed as a well-deserving, original, feminist voice, standing in the exact spot of where the spotlight should be shone.

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The Multiple Worlds of the Writer: In Conversation with Margo Rejmer

I feel that I live longer than I do in reality, because I have three parallel lives . . .

Margo Rejmer’s spare, exacting prose and illustrious methods have earned her widespread praise for both her meticulous reportage and her discerningly detailed narratives. From recollections garnered from the survivors of Communist Albania, to the stories collected from the varied and elaborate landscape of Bucharest, to the grappling of relationships in certain toxic fictional characters in Warsaw, the worlds depicted are all at once worn with secrecy, curious with hope, and bold with the human instinct for survival. In this following interview, Asymptote’s Filip Noubel speaks to Rejmer on subjects of writerly process, choice under totalitarianism, and individual freedoms.

Filip Noubel (FN): You have written two books on the experience and the consequences of dictatorial Communism in Ceauşescu’s Romania and Hoxha’s Albania. What drew you to those countries that, even within the context of then Communist Central Europe, have been generally perceived as economically underdeveloped, politically very conservative, and unattractive as destinations?

Margo Rejmer (MR): Both of the books, Bukareszt. Kurz i krew (Bucharest. Dust and Blood, 2013) and Błoto Słodsze Niż Miód. Głosy Komunistycznej Albanii (Mud Sweeter than Honey: Voices of Communist Albania, 2018) deal with problems of power, strategies of survival in the authoritarian system, and searching for spaces of freedom. Although, when I started working on them, I didn’t know where they would lead me, as it turns out, everyone has their own inner path that leads to the same point. My book about Albania was supposed to simply be a guide to the Albanian mentality for the Polish reader. In the end though, it turned out to be a story about an isolated Orwellian-Kafkaesque space where people are controlled and punished, yet try to look for happiness and for a substitute for freedom, at least internally.

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Recovering What Is Missing: In Conversation with C.J. Anderson-Wu

The collective denial of victimhood is the reason why dictatorship lasts, the far-right exists, and inequality prevails.

Chieh-Jane Anderson-Wu (吳介禎) is a Taiwanese author, translator, and publisher of Taiwanese literature in translation. She is partly inspired by the white spots of Taiwan’s recent history, namely the White Terror, a forty-year period of martial law which began in 1949 and witnessed systematic repression within the nation, particularly targeting intellectuals. Pervasive censorship during the White Terror affected literature, but also the lives of many families at a time when secrecy and denial turned into a survival strategy for many. Anderson-Wu has written several works, including the story collection Impossible to Swallow and “Life Looked at From A Single Window,” and is currently working on a new novel.

Filip Noubel (FN): Today Taiwan is one of the freest societies in Asia, yet martial law only ended in 1987, almost forty years after it was first imposed. This period, known as the White Terror, witnessed tremendous political violence: over one hundred and fifty thousand people, including many intellectuals, were arrested, and several thousands were executed. It is also the theme of your collection of short stories called Impossible to Swallow. What has led you to find inspiration in this particular period of Taiwan’s history?

C.J. Anderson-Wu (C.J. A-W): There are several causes, but one of them is my sense of guilt. I did not understand it until I had written several stories. After the Formorsa Incident in 1979, posters of the so-called rebels were everywhere. I was a kid and really believed that they were bad people, that they should be arrested and put in jail. Years went by and as more historical materials were released after the abolishment of martial law, I gradually realized what lies we had lived in. I feel so grateful to those who never backed down and sacrificed so much for the freedom we are enjoying today, and resent my gullibility.

Another thing is that we never had transitional justice. We never had a Nuremberg Trial-type that conducted thorough investigation on what had really happened, why it happened, and who should be responsible. Thus we don’t know how we can prevent it from happening again. Today the past dictators are still worshipped, the days under authoritarian rules are still commemorated, and lies are still believed. I was shocked, in despair, and infuriated. How can people stay ignorant when all the evidence is presented in front of their eyes? How can people feel okay sacrificing the rights that were earned by blood, tears, and sweat?

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Xi Xi, Bianca Bellová, and Osamu Dazai. Have we got your attention? Read on.

The days are opening wide this season, like the pages of a new book: for most of us growing longer and fuller. It’s a good thing, because we’ve got a lot to catch you up on. This week, we’re bringing a full dosage of global literature news with achievements from Hong Kong, rolling publications by Czech talent, and literary commemorations gliding through the literal end of an era in Japan.

Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

This spring has been a series of firsts for Hong Kong literature. Continuing from my previous dispatch in March on Xi Xi winning the Newman Prize for Chinese literature, historically awarded to writers from mainland China and Taiwan, World Literature Today is dedicating its first annual city issue to writing from Hong Kong. Sourcing contributions from writers, translators, and academics at the forefront of Hong Kong literature, the issue includes poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction with a focus on food and languages as well as a selection of recommended reading about the city. Xi Xi and Bei Dao are among the list of writers featured in the magazine, as is Wawa—recently showcased in Asymptote’s Winter 2019 issue in an interview with Poupeh Missaghi, our editor-at-large in Iran—and Chris Song, one of the winners of the Fifth Hai Zi Poetry Prize which announced its results a few weeks prior.

To celebrate the launch of the issue, Cha, Hong Kong’s resident online literary journal, is organizing an event on April 27 at Bleak House Books, where eight contributors will be reciting and discussing their works. Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, founding co-editor of Cha and the guest editor of World Literature Today’s Hong Kong feature, will also speak about the conception of the special edition.

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Small Streams That Grow into the Main Flow of the Novel: An Interview with Radka Denemarková

I just want to speak the truth because I cannot stay silent about the pain affecting others.

Radka Denemarková is a unique phenomenon on the Czech literary scene. A true polymath, she has written plays, scenarios, short and long novels, a double novel that can be read from both ends, translations, and essays. On April 7, she was awarded the Book of the Year award at the Magnesia Litera ceremony, making her the only four-time winner of the most prestigious literary award in the Czech Republic. Her most noticeable works include Money from Hitler (2006), which tells the story of a Holocaust survivor who returns to her home village in Czechoslovakia only to be denied existence; Sleeping Disorders, a humorous play featuring Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Ivana Trump; and A Contribution to the History of Joy (2014)—of which Asymptote published a partial translation—a reflection on violence disguised as part essay, part crime novel. Finally, her most recent novel is Lead Hours, a major work expanding over 700 pages, spanning China and Europe, and exploring the fate of a series of characters witnessing the crumbling of their value system as they face life crises. Denemarková was also featured in Asymptote as a translator, and is now translated into over fifteen languages, including Chinese. She is currently working on her next novel.

Filip Noubel (FN): Your latest novel, Hodiny z olova, which can be translated as Lead Hours, just came out in January. What does the title refer to, and why is China such a prominent theme in this 700 page-long major work? 

Radna Denemarková (RD): The reason for China being the center stage of my novel comes out of a series of trips I made to that country, the first in 2013. I was literally shocked by what I experienced there: the breaking down of a socio-political system combined with the consequences of globalization, and how all of this affects us in the most intimate way. Initially, I had a very idealized notion of China, shaped by the little knowledge I had about its poetry, calligraphy, and philosophy. What I hadn’t expected at all was the brutality of daily life.

The main issue in China we face concerns how economic pragmatism changes the human soul, and how we can bring back the notion of humanism in our daily language. While the world seems to embrace new forms of totalitarian ideologies, we need a new language. People are afraid to speak openly. People report on each other even within the family circle. In Beijing, in the case of a car accident, people accepted as normal the fact that the male driver of an expensive car hit a woman because she was poor and uneducated and had no business ‘getting in the way.’

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