Posts by Thuy Dinh

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Dispatches from the Philippines, Bulgaria, and the Vietnamese Diaspora!

This week, our editors report on (attempts) at elucidation in the humanities and the cruelties of historic expatriation; the instating of Living National Treasures in the form of indigenous practitioners and their singular crafts; and a word that is meant to sum up a year. 

Thuy DinhEditor-at-Large, reporting on the Vietnamese Diaspora

The National Museum of Immigration History in Paris, France is currently offering a sobering exhibition on the history of Indochinese workers-soldiers, called les lính thợ or les công binh. As colonized subjects, twenty thousand men from Indochina—i.e., Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia—were brought to France at the onset of World War II to help with the war effort. Aside from a small percentage of educated volunteers who wished to escape the colony’s lack of social advancement, the majority, ranging from ages 18 to 30, was forcibly recruited from the poor peasantry to work in France’s defense industry.

Besides the exhibit, recollections by surviving workers have been compiled in recent years by various sources, such as the photographic essay “The Forced Oblivion” by Alejandra Arévalo, the graphic memoir “Les Lính Thợ: Immigrés de force, les travailleurs indochinois en France 1939-1952” (2017) by Pierre Daum and Clément Baloup, the film Công Binh, la longue nuit indochinoise (2013) by Lê Lâm, and the Vietnamese-French monograph, Những người lính thợ – Les travailleurs indochinois requis by Liêm Khê Luguern (2010).

When Germany invaded France in June 1940, the Indochinese workers were evacuated to the free zone in Southern France, where they worked in forestry and pioneered the rice-growing industry in the Camargue region. Both state-run and private companies employed these workers, but salaries were either paid to the French government, or distributed to the workers at rates significantly below those paid to locals. When Germany invaded the free zone in 1942, the workers were conscripted by German occupation troops to work in weapon factories. Besides harrowing working conditions, the men suffered physical and mental trauma due to prolonged exile and mistreatment by their superiors. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest in literary news from Guatemala, Costa Rica, and the Vietnamese diaspora!

This week in world literature, we hear from our Editors-at-Large reporting on the latest in literary developments! In Guatemala, we’re covering the literary community’s response to threats to the electoral process, as well as the country’s most recent award-winning authors. From the Vietnamese diaspora, we take a dive into two authors’ recent publications. Read on to learn more!

Rubén López, Editor-at-Large, Reporting on Guatemala

On August 31, sixty-two Guatemalan writers, editors, and artists signed a statement calling for the resignation of María Consuelo Porras, Head of the Public Prosecutor’s Office. Ms. Porras, who was included in the Engels List of 2023 for obstructing investigations against corrupt political allies, has been the main actor in the attempt to sabotage the Guatemalan electoral process of this year. 

On June 25, the progressive presidential ticket composed of Bernardo Arévalo and Karin Herrera surprisingly made it to the second round of the election. This started a series of legalistic arbitrariness from Ms. Porras in an effort to prevent the duly elected candidates from taking office democratically on January 14. 

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Between Seeing and Listening: Dias Novita Wuri on Birth Canal

For me, it was important to talk about everyone's story and experience with the term “motherhood”.

 In Birth Canal, Dias Novita Wuri masterfully braids disparate storylines of women across various countries and time periods to track the shifting contexts of sexuality, femininity, family, and gender roles. What results is an alternative face of history, from the violence of wartime and colonialism to the contemporary dynamics of sex work and objectification. As our September Book Club selection, this subversive and unflinching text defies generalisation and presumption to consider the many ways a body can be used—and freed. In this interview, Novita Wuri speaks on how the women in her life inspired the novel, sexuality and politics in Indonesia, and the mental anguish that surrounded the writing and reading of this powerful text.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Thuy Dinh (TD): Could you explain the meaning behind the title Birth Canal?

Dias Novita Wuri (DNW): Birth Canal actually doesn’t have as much significance in English as it does in Indonesian—which you wrote about very well in your review. The term in Indonesian is jalan lahir; jalan means a road, or a way—something one has to go through, and lahir here means birth. You can see it doesn’t really translate very well to English, and my editor and I decided to go with “birth canal”. I wanted a short, impactful title because my first book’s title, Makramé, was very simple. Of course, the birth canal is part of the reproductive system, and I wanted to use a bodily word to symbolise the feminine struggle related to procreation. It’s hard not to talk about birth because it’s a woman’s “duty” to give birth, and I think this term nicely represents the stories of all the women in my story.

TD: Your book doesn’t seem to think there is a necessary connection between fertility and motherhood—as some characters in the book can’t have children but yearn to be mothers. Can you expound on this theme?

DNW: I wanted to talk about a lot of the women that I know in my life, some of which can’t have children, or struggle to have children but want to have children, and others who don’t want children at all. For me, it was important to talk about everyone’s story and experience with the term “motherhood”. I also knew people who got pregnant as teenagers outside of marriage, and that’s why I opened the book by talking about abortion, because abortion is illegal here in Indonesia. It’s very frowned upon—which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

Actually, when I open up to the women that I talk to in Indonesia—my friends and acquaintances—sometimes they would tell me that they have had abortions. It’s a shame that it’s illegal and not talked about, because it’s something that women need. It’s a basic healthcare right. To have such shame and stigma surrounding abortion can only be detrimental to women’s lives in Indonesia. Some of them might be mothers already, but they can’t handle another child or can’t afford another child. Yet, they can’t have an abortion. READ MORE…

Announcing Our September Book Club Selection: Birth Canal by Dias Novita Wuri

To resist, the women in Birth Canal—as object of desire, porn actress, and sex worker—must stare back in their own fashion. . .

In an intricately woven novel of generational legacies, untold inheritances, and our multivalent history, Indonesian author Dias Novita Wuri navigates the matrixes of family and geography with a profound and powerful voice. Tracing a passage of interconnected lives across nations, regimes, territories, and spectacles, Birth Canal is a testament to both the visible and invisible impressions that our bodies make upon the world, a challenge to the archetypal presentations of sexuality that inflict their discreet violences, and a documentation of courage and perseverance.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Birth Canal by Dias Novita Wuri, translated from the Indonesian, Scribe, 2023

Birth Canal, Dias Novita Wuri’s provocatively-titled and self-translated debut novel, represents the Indonesian author’s mesmerizing endeavor to make visible both the female body and the structure of storytelling, deftly exposing the tensions between “legible” narrative and “shameful” history. Originally titled Jalan Lahir in its original Indonesian, the text carries multiple thematic and structural possibilities at its outset: jalan means pathway, road, approach, line, lineage, course, passage, while its etymological origins, borrowed from yalan in Ottoman Turkish, suggests deceit, fakery, lie; lahir, from the Arabic zahir, means “emergence / coming into existence” as noun, “to be born” as verb, and “outer,” “physical,” or “overt” as adjective.

Weaving this ambiguity throughout the narrative, Wuri explores the territory between linear storytelling and disputed, fragmented history by shifting gracefully between first-person, second person, and third-person omniscient viewpoints. As such, Birth Canal consists of four densely structured, cinematic chapters, crossing multiple timelines and cities in Indonesia and Japan to slowly reveal the links between its six female protagonists, Nastiti, Rukmini, Arini, Hanako, Dara, and Ayaka.

The novel opens in teeming, present-day Jakarta to trail after Nastiti, a young, sexually liberated office worker about to self-administer her abortion in secret; Indonesia—a Muslim-majority country—outlaws this procedure. The chapter is narrated from the perspective of an unnamed childhood friend who recounts his platonic, unrequited love for Nastiti up until the day after her abortion, upon which she disappears from his life. In his recollections, we see Nastiti refracted as a cypher—similar to how her image is captured on another occasion by a Western street photographer and subsequently enlarged for a gallery exhibition. The young man acknowledges that despite, or precisely due to Nastiti’s hypnotic allure, she is hard to read:

Sometimes Nastiti’s innocence could seem as bare as a peeled fruit, but that was only because she was allowing it. Other times she could close herself off completely.

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Come, Sisters: In Memory of Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ

In my memory, Mỹ Dạ’s speech takes on the resonance of wind chimes, softly rolling pebbles, and rustling waves.

In this essay, Thuy Dinh, one of the translators of Vietnamese poet Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ, remembers and reflects on the visual beauty, delicate music, and subtle dissonances of her work, in light of her recent passing.

On July 6, 2023, Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ, one of Vietnam’s major poets whose poetry was featured in Asymptote’s July 2013 issue, passed away in Saigon, Vietnam, due to complications from Alzheimer’s. She was 74.

An author of several acclaimed poetry collections and children’s stories, Mỹ Dạ attended the Nguyễn Du Writing School in Hà Nội in 1983 and Russia’s Maxim Gorky Institute of Advanced Studies in Literature in 1988. In 2007, she was awarded the National Prize in Literature and the Arts ⸺Vietnam’s highest literary honor ⸺ for her three poetry collections: Trái Tim Sinh Nở (The Blossoming Heart), Bài Thơ Không Năm Tháng (Poems Without Years), and Đề Tặng Một Giấc Mơ (Dedicated to a Dream). Her last two collections, Soul Brimming with Wild Chrysanthemums (Hồn Đầy Hoa Cúc Dại) and The Love Poems of Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ (Thơ Tình Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ) were also published in 2007. In the U.S., Green Rice, an anthology of Mỹ Dạ’s select poems, co-translated by poet Martha Collins and myself, represents her poetic legacy in translation.

I first met Mỹ Dạ in the summer of 2000 in Boston, Massachusetts, when she came to the William Joiner Institute as part of an invited four-member delegation of writers from Vietnam. I had come to the Institute that summer to attend workshops in translation and creative nonfiction; serendipitously, Martha, who taught the translation workshop, was looking for a Vietnamese co-translator to work with her on an anthology of Mỹ Dạ’s poetry. I happily embarked on this project, sensing that this collaboration—besides being my first major translation project⸺would also give me an immersive opportunity to study an important female poet from “the other side.” As a young writer whose family had been airlifted out of Saigon by U.S. military personnel near the end of the Vietnam War, I knew very little at the time about literature from the Communist perspective. We were still in the early years of the internet, and barely five years into the normalization of U.S-Vietnam relations.

Most of all, I was drawn to the prospect of translating Mỹ Dạ’s work by the voice of the poet herself—a voice that I have found, in person and through her writing, to be artlessly nuanced. I was born in the south, years after the 1954 separation of North and South Vietnam, but have remained deeply attuned to my family’s Hà Nội accent; as such, I had to learn to decode Mỹ Da’s voice. Her melodious Central Vietnamese cadence gradually revealed a mordant sense of humor that was not too different from my late maternal grandfather’s Northern brand of sarcasm. In my memory, Mỹ Dạ’s speech takes on the resonance of wind chimes, softly rolling pebbles, and rustling waves.  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Muscovy Ducks” by Tô Hoài

Mostly it’s the ducks’ recalcitrant nature that does not endear them to people.

The mores of domesticated Muscovy ducks are the focus of today’s Translation Tuesday. Tô Hoài documents the lives of these gnarled, delinquent, “sybaritic” birds (translated into English with verve and gusto by Thúy Đinh), seeking in vain a sort of understanding. His focus settles on their eyes and faces, but for all his careful watching, he can find nothing to reveal the inner lives of these particularly unaffectionate, unmaternal animals. It seems they live simply to eat.

The calamity that wiped out the chicken has not affected the Muscovy ducks—strong, stolid beasts, immune to ill winds.

Two large ducks now waddle in the poultry yard. There used to be a brood of ducklings, all gone now. If human lives seem to merge into the sea of time, epic and borderless, rolling on endlessly, for the animals, especially those whose lives are enmeshed with ours, there exist only small injuries and barely noticed deaths. Theirs are insignificant, inchoate lives. Harmless beings, they don’t take much of our space, even though they breathe the same air as us. To us they seem no more visible than earthworms or ants.

Six ducklings there were—six tiny, charming heads, six pairs of round eyes, sparkling and innocent. They clustered and made yip-yip sounds around their mother’s coarse, webbed feet. Their mother is as coarse as her extremities. Obtuse and inscrutable, with a surprised expression etched permanently upon a swaying countenance, the mother duck looks like someone being robbed of her purse money on market day.

A witless bird, she accidentally killed one of her offspring.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest literary news from the United States, Vietnam and the Vietnamese Diaspora, and the Philippines!

This week’s roundup of literary news from around the world highlights exciting new publications and publishing trends! From a literary marriage in the United States to the return of a beloved author and history titles in the Philippines, read on to find out more!

Meghan Racklin, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting from the United States

Last week, at their annual awards ceremony—in person again for the first time since the onset of the pandemic—the National Book Critics Circle awarded the inaugural Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize to Grey Bees by Andrew Kurkov, translated by Boris Dralyuk. The new award brings attention to books translated into English and published in the United States, where only a small number of books in translation are published each year—Publishers Weekly’s translation database lists only 419 books in translation published in the United States in 2022.

Dralyuk, the award winner, is a poet and critic as well as a translator and until recently was the Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His translation was selected from a competitive group of finalists which, notably, also included the translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob by Jennifer Croft—Dralyuk’s wife. Prior to the announcement of the award winner, the two gave an interview to the L.A. Times about their relationship to translation and to each other. Croft said “Once we started dating, I would find Boris on my steps, where he would tell me about what he had just translated. He gets so emotionally invested. . . . He’s so careful about every word. It was very moving and, I think, a large part of how we came together.”

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The Wish as Transaction: On Deena Mohamed’s Shubeik Lubeik

All the linked stories . . . embrace the stalemate struggle between external, seemingly deterministic forces . . . and individual choice.

Shubeik Lubeik, written, illustrated, and translated by Deena Mohamed, Pantheon, 2023

Shubeik Lubeik, Deena Mohamed’s ingenious graphic novel⸺whose title in Arabic means “Your Wish is My Command” ⸺seamlessly synthesizes Egyptian culture and history into an epic-scale social commentary, invoking direct parallels to the act of translation. Taking place at a Cairo kiosk, with “[its] banners, red iceboxes; [and] brightly colored snacks,” the vivid setting embodies both global capitalist influence and quaint elements of old Egypt, establishing a quirky but believable fictional venue where, among other sundry goods, bottled wishes are sold.

Originally self-published in Arabic as a ninety-page comic book, Shubeik Lubeik won the Best Graphic Novel prize and the Grand Prize at the 2017 Cairo Comics Festival. Mohamed then translated her work into English and sent it to Anjali Singh⸺a literary agent and translator of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis⸺who promptly agreed to represent Mohamed. After undergoing extensive developments in subsequent Arabic and English versions, Shubeik Lubeik is now released by Pantheon in its current 518-page incarnation, a magnificent trilogy of connected stories spanning over six decades of Egyptian social history—from 1954 to the present day. Kiosk owner Shokry⸺the seller of three bottled first-class wishes inherited from his pious father⸺serves as the central link to three narratives: Aziza, an illiterate, impoverished widow who refuses to be cowed by Egypt’s corrupt bureaucracy; Nour, a privileged, non-binary college student beset with mental illness; and Shawqia, a plucky matriarch whose life is marked with migration and health issues.

Shubeik Lubeik comic page

In the first story, Aziza is stubbornly resisting the state’s attempts⸺with its latent bias couched in convoluted wish licensing regulations⸺to deprive her of the ownership of a first-class wish, purchased with hard-earned savings from years of labor. While Aziza initially bought the wish to achieve material comfort, her dogged refusal to give up her wish—which lands her in prison—becomes a moral struggle against the state’s unjust process.

The second story, while also affirming individual choice, takes a different approach. Nour, steeped in material comfort but plagued by chronic depression, cannot decide if they deserve happiness. As a wish studies scholar, Nour is vexed by the gap of knowledge between the wish and its fulfillment. Since a disparity can exist between a wish⸺formed by exigent circumstances⸺and the irrevocable effects of its realization, Nour fears that their wish for happiness won’t alleviate, but perpetuate their exile in an emotional zombie land. READ MORE…

Winter 2023: Highlights from the Team

Dip your toe into our milestone Winter 2023 issue with these recommendations from our global team!

I found, as I sat down to read this issue, that what I was hungry for was urgency, vitality, wit and I found pieces that gave me what I was looking for. “There’s No Cure for the Dead” by Nazli Karabiyikoglu (tr. Ralph Hubbell) weaves a breathtakingly complex tapestry, rife with competing rhythms and energies. Selim Özdoğan’s “Seven Difficulties and One Ever-Narrowing Path” (tr. Katy Derbyshire) brought exactly the acerbic, incisive voice I needed. The Alfred Döblin story “The Woman Who Walked In Her Sleep” (tr. Joachim Redner) was filled with great verbs, gestures, colors, sounds, taking the reader on a dizzying trajectory, a plummet, really, from the character swanning about Berlin, showing off his colorful fashion ensemble, to a murderous rag doll come to life. Menke Katz’s poems with their structural challenges around diminishing or growing numbers of syllables and the love of Yiddish had me re-reading them and admiring the translation. And Aco Šopov’s deep, painful poems (tr. Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer) after the devastation of the 1963 Skopje earthquake show how despair communicates across decades and has much to say to us about loss and survival now, sixty years later.

—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor

This issue I was particularly blown away by the quality of the interviews published. The César Aira interview conducted by Michal Zechariah is truthfully hilarious, and the line of questioning really allows his trademark wit and absurdism to shine through. I found Geetanjali Shree’s interview with Rose Bialer to be incredibly generous and thoughtful, fascinating and sharp. In both cases, I thought a really strong sense of their writing came through thanks to the interviewers. The visual section brought together two incredible artists—I’m researching the interplay of poetic text and space at the moment, so Lynn Xu’s thinking (teased out by Laura Copelin) really spoke to me, and I appreciated the climate focus of Bahia Shehab’s work, and her interview with Heather Green. Last but certainly not least, I loved Jared Joseph’s review of Johannes Göransson’s Summer. As a researcher, Göransson’s thinking on poetry translation has been incredibly insightful, and I enjoyed the same insights applied to his work, really engaging in depth with poetry as a genre and mode of being. As a bonus, I thought the criticism section was pleasantly varied in terms of geographies and genres!

—Georgina Fooks, Director of Outreach

All the fiction pieces in this issue are truly marvelous, as if they’re in conversation with one another! For example, Kim Cho Yeop’s “Laura” (tr. Sukyoung Sukie Kim) and Dalih Sembiring’s “Floccinaucinihilipilificatius” (tr. Avram Maurits) can be seen as companion pieces, as both stories deal with corporeal limitations and spiritual transcendence. Laura’s sci-fi context, on various conditions related to body dysmorphia, eloquently evokes the plight of non-binary and transgender groups, while Floccinaucinihilipilificatius represents a metaphorical lotus—its trajectory from pain and putrefaction toward the light of maternal love. There’s a sense of metaphysical wonder to both stories—even though one is inspired by science and the other by magical realism. READ MORE…

The Possible Transformations Between Covers: On Storybook ND

The series’ humor, experimental spirit, and eye-catching design serve as the literary equivalent of an invigorating rollercoaster ride.

Storybook ND, by various authors and translators, New Directions, 2022

In autumn, literary publishers New Directions released a new compilation, corralled under a dreamy concept: Storybook ND offers fiction “to be seen and read for an hour or two . . . [Books] to fall into for a spell, in the space of an afternoon, or early evening, or on waking.” Curated by writer and translator Gini Alhadeff, the series introduces six “long stories or short novels” that can be read as parables, travelogues, or auto-fiction. While startlingly diverse in narrative approach, the common thread among these works seems to be the writer’s classic zeal to bridge a gulf—between life and art, flawed reality and transcendent fiction.

With each book ranging anywhere from sixty to ninety-six pages, Storybook ND currently features one original English-language story—Helen DeWitt’s The English Understand Wool—and five translated works: The Woman Who Killed The Fish by Clarice Lispector, translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser; Three Streets by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani; Early Light by Osamu Dazai, translated from the Japanese by Ralph McCarthy and Donald Keene; Spadework for a Palace by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by John Batki; and The Famous Magician by César Aira, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. While DeWitt’s The English Understand Wool is not a translated work, it can be read as a virtuosic reflection on aesthetic representation and translation; specifically, DeWitt illustrates how both fiction and translation, in transforming reality or a foreign context into something intelligible, can also reflect the writer/translator’s inherent bias and their latent wish to control content.   READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary news from New York, Vietnam, and Sweden!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on Spanish poetry readings in New York, new Vietnamese translations of classic Japanese novels, and the Gothenberg Book Fair in Sweden. Read on to find out more!

 Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from New York

Though I usually report from Mexico City, I recently moved to New Haven to begin a PhD program at Yale. However, relocating has not prevented me from engaging with Hispanophone literary communities, particularly in New York City, a creative hub that connects people from all over the world, and where literary readings in Spanish are common.

The first event I attended was a multilingual poetry open mic at the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan. Hosted by Spanish poet Marcos de la Fuente, the soirée “Se Buscan Poetas / Poets Wanted” takes place every last Wednesday of the month. It brings together poets from New York and beyond, who sign up to share their work to the Bowery’s attentive audience. I went on Wednesday, August 31, and participated both as spectator and reader among other emerging Spanish- and English-speaking poets. The event opened with a performance by De la Fuente and actress Clara Francesca. They set the mood for the night with a dramatic interpretation of the bilingual poem “Solstice,” published in the anthology Poetryfighters (Ultramarina Editorial, 2022), assembled by De la Fuente himself. The reading was both exhilarating and engaging. Beyond simply voicing words from the book, De la Fuente and Francesca modulated their expressions and walked around the stage in synchrony with the content and rhythm of the text, creating moments of emotional and aural tension that excited the audience, more like a concert or play than a traditional poetry reading. In addition to hosting the monthly open mic, De la Fuente also directs the New York City part of the Kerouac Festival, an international poetry, music, and performance celebration that takes place in Vigo, New York, and Mexico City. Earlier this year, the festival featured the Chilean writer and Asymptote contributor Arelis Uribe.

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Asymptote at the Movies: Blow-Up

Ultimately, both Antonioni’s cinematic approach and Cortázar’s literary vision are simply two sides of the same coin.

Michelangelo Antonioni and Julio Cortázar form our double feature for this latest edition of Asymptote at the Movies—a perfect pairing in their own idiosyncratic way, as two auteurs who both formidably challenged the responsibilities and capacities of their mediums. Cortázar’s “Les babas del diablo” was published in 1959, and a short six years later, Antonioni’s Blow-Up hit the theatres. Both works have at their centre a photographer: Cortázar’s narrator, Michel; and Antonioni’s protagonist, Thomas. Both also see their leading men stumble across something sinister, which drastically—and perhaps irreversibly—alter their engagement with their respective realities. Cortázar and Antonioni have both declaimed any other significant crossover between their works, and indeed they seem to have little more in common besides an overarching narrative catalyst. . . but isn’t there always more to be found when two intelligences are in dialogue? In the following roundtable, Chris Tănăsescu, Thuy Dinh, Xiao Yue Shan, and Rubén López discuss these two masterpieces, their phenomenology, and how the mode of translation works between them.

Chris Tănăsescu (CT): I read Cortázar’s story only after watching the movie—actually, after watching Blow-Up multiple times over the years. But I believe this is far from being the only reason why, when I did finally read the Cortázar text, it seemed to me that the story had been written after the movie, and not the movie that was based on—or rather, “inspired by”—the story . . . The story struck me as a piece I would have expected Antonioni to write himself. “This is Antonioni,” I thought to myself . . . His cinematic poetics, the style and language (of characters in various movies of his, quite a number of them writers or artists), even his obsessive motifs (such as composition versus/and/as the machine) were all there. What’s more, Cortázar’s speaker’s moody, stylistic, grammatical, translational, topographical, and voyeuristic flaneuring seemed like the perfect illustration [and at times even (re)wording] of some of Antonioni’s most well-known statements about the art of modern filmmaking; particularly the ones in which he ponders over the director’s mission to capture a never-static flux-like reality by continuously staying in motion and incessantly gravitating towards, and away from, moments of potential crystallization. The “arriving and moving on, as a new perception.”

Thuy Dinh (TD): I prefer to think that each work—whether the film or the story—exists independently of each other, with its own unique language and attributes, yet can converse with or sustain the other like a dance, a collaboration, or an equitable marriage: where no one has, or wishes, to have the upper hand. This idea of conversation seems more inclusive, and helps us to gain a more holistic view of what we call “reality,” don’t you think—especially since both Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Cortázar’s “Las babas del diablo” squarely address the limitations of subjectivity and/or the inherent instability of any narrative approach, and in so doing invite the audience/reader to accept the fluidity of all human experiences?

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): This concept of dialogic resonance operating inside the small words “inspired by” is so discombobulating and vast, it’s a shame that we only have the linear conceit of before and after to refer to it—but before and after it is. Chris, even though as you so precisely pointed out, the film is rife with Antonioni and his inquiries (that of the despair innate in sexual elation, that “memory offers no guarantees,” and that hallucinogenic quality of modern opulence), I think at the centre of his Blow-Up is this idea that life is always interrupted with seeing, and seeing always interrupted with life, and this is, I believe, a direct carry-over from Cortázar’s mesmerising, illusive tale of what it means when the gift of sight is led through the twisted chambers of seeing. Which is to say, I agree with both of you, that at the confluence of these two works lie a similar attention to fluidity. READ MORE…

Summer 2022: Highlights from the Team

Don’t know where to begin with our latest issue? We’re here to help!

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. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest in world literature from Sweden, India, and Vietnam!

This week, our editors report on literary news from around the world as summer gets under way, from threats to dissident writers in Sweden to censorship in India to the anniversary of a pioneering author’s death in Vietnam. Read on to find out more!

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

As Sweden’s application to NATO proceeds, the Turkish government has used the opportunity to raise demands on the country to extradite certain individuals. One such person is Ragip Zarakolu, a publisher, journalist, and human rights activist who has lived in Sweden since 2012 as part of an asylum program for threatened writers and publishers. Last week, the International Publishers Association voiced their concern regarding the situation and encouraged Sweden to safeguard Zarakolu’s freedom. Since then, the Frankfurter Buchmesse and the German publishers’ association Börsenverein have followed suit. In 1977, Zarakolu founded the publishing house Belge together with his wife, Ayse Nur, and they published books in Turkey for over thirty years. He was the 2008 IPA Prix Voltaire laureate and is the former chair of IPA’s Freedom to Publish Committee, as well as an honorary member of the Swedish branch of the international PEN organization.

Another writer who has taken up exile in Sweden is poet and Swedish Academy member Jila Mossaed, who last week was awarded the Prix Max Jacob for her poetry collection Det åttonde landet (The Eighth Country), translated into French as Le huitième pays by Vénus Khoury-Ghata. Mossaed was born in 1948 in Tehran, Iran, where she had her literary debut at age seventeen when her poetry was published in the literary journal Khoshe; she later worked as a playwright for Iranian radio and television. In 1986, she fled to Sweden for political asylum. Initially writing exclusively in her native Persian, since 1997 she has also written in Swedish. Recurring themes in her poetry include exile, injustice, and censorship. About writing in her second language, she has said: “To write in the language of exile is to create a small room in that country’s memory. It is a great triumph to become a part of the literary history of a foreign country.”

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