Essays

Come, Sisters: In Memory of Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ

July 26, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Thuy Dinh

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…

When Woe Means No: Translating Women’s Survival as Resistance 

July 13, 2023  |  in Essays, Retellings  |  by Hilary Ilkay

Carson grants her Trojan women agency, even if it seems that hostile men and unfeeling gods control their lives.

In our new column, Retellings, Asymptote presents essays on the translations of myths, those enduring stories that continue to transform and reincarnate. Here, Hilary Ilkay considers the contemporary rendition of an ancient tragedy by Euripedes, as told by poet Anne Carson and artist Rosanno Bruno in the acclaimed The Trojan Women: A Comic.

Thanks to cinematic blockbusters like Troy and Emily Wilson’s bestselling translation of Homer’s Odyssey, the story of the Trojan War has established itself within the cultural mainstream. However, its continual revival is not just a contemporary phenomenon; as early as 5th century BCE, the mythical war had already taken on legendary status, and was ripe for adaptation and retelling.

Arguably the most tragic of the ancient Greek tragedians, Euripides’s plays are infamous for their bleak explorations of human hubris and divine cruelty. In his lifetime, as Athens was embroiled in the Peloponnesian War, a violent 27-year conflict with rival city-state Sparta, Euripides drew on the Trojan War specifically to reflect on the uncertainty of his time, making a connection between Athenian imperialism and the Greeks’ pretense of invading Troy for the sake of a single woman. Taking its cue from the ending of the Iliad, which features funeral laments from three women characters, Euripides’s play The Trojan Women casts a spotlight on the fates of the wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters of the male heroes—who typically occupied center stage in narratives of war. As a focused treatment of women’s suffering rarely seen in ancient Greek tragedy, the play is a brutal exploration of the commodification of women’s lives and bodies, as well as the ambivalence of “surviving” a tragedy when those remaining have lost all sense of meaning, stability, and security.

Given Euripides’ interest in the experience of women and the retelling of myths, it’s no surprise that his legacy continues through the work of poet and translator Anne Carson, who has received much acclaim for her rewritings of Greek classics. Carson constantly stretches the boundaries of translation in her work, dramatizing how every translation is necessarily its own “version” of the source material and not necessarily a “faithful” replica. In 2006, she published her loose translations of Euripides’s lesser known tragedies under the title Grief Lessons; in 2019, she adapted his infamously bizarre play, Helen, into Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, which interweaves the stories of Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe. READ MORE…

Extinction: Missing a Whole Other World

July 3, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Charlie Ng

. . . storytelling does not attempt to recover what has been lost, but creates another world that dreams of conservation. . .

In the second essay of a series considering ecological literature and writings on animal life, as collected in our Spring 2023 special feature, Charlie Ng examines the pressing issue of species extinction through Wu Ming-yi’s poignant story of grief and resurrection, “Cloudland”. By connecting an intimate loss to the broader losses caused by the Anthropocene, Wu equalises human relationships with the less visible connections between individuals and their landscape, illustrating vividly the consequences of absence to consider how storytelling and an return to indigenous knowledge can activate empathy and our impetus to preserve.

Earth is no stranger to mass extinction; the most recent, the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, was caused by a major asteroid collision, wiping out seventy-six percent of living species. In consideration of these great cycles of birth and death, it seems that lifeforms are destined to come and go—so why should we care about extinction?

Perhaps because we’re causing it. Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History has drawn public attention to the fact that the titular extinction we are currently experiencing is, unlike the previous five, attributable to human activities. As such, the sixth mass extinction has come to be referred to as the Anthropocene extinction, the consequences of which have been well-documented across the globe. One such case is Taiwan, which, despite being just roughly the size of twice that of Hawaii, has a remarkably diverse range of flora and fauna due to its forested mountains and oceanic surrounding. However, many of its native animal species have become endangered or extinct due to adverse impacts of human development such as deforestation, pollution, habitat loss, and overhunting.

“Cloudland,” Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-yi’s short story in the animal-themed feature of our Spring 2023 issue, has an extinct animal at its center: the clouded leopard. Despite occasional reported sightings of the animal, experts generally believe that the leopards have been gone for decades—and such is the case in “Cloudland”, where the animal is only present through its absence. The nonexistent leopard is simultaneously a denotation of the extinction’s sad reality and a literary symbol, acting as a mythical figure and a stand-in for the protagonist’s deceased wife. In tackling grief and loss, Wu tells the story of a man named Shutter as he searches for the already gone, trying to heal by reconnecting to nature and the indigenous wisdom of intimacy between people and their environment. READ MORE…

How Tove Ditlevsen Opened the Way for My Life as a Translator

June 26, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Tiina Nunnally

I worked hard on the translation, typing the manuscript three times on my electric typewriter.

In 2021, two publishing giants—Penguin and Farrar, Straus and Giroux—sent Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen’s collected memoirs, The Copenhagen Trilogy, out into the world. A huge hit upon release, readers praised Ditlevsen’s emotional power, her passionate dedication to the life of words, her wry humour, and her uncanny, incisive gift for description. Long celebrated in her home country, Ditlevsen had taken a long time to find the same audience in the English language—and it is largely thanks to the dedication and prowess of her translator, Tiina Nunnally, that we were finally able to meet this brilliant mind on the page. Now, in this essay, Nunnally tells the story of the discursive journey that the Trilogy took to its now-massive Anglophone audience, and how Ditlevsen opened up the way for her to change her life.

At the end of Youth, the second volume of her collected memoirs, The Copenhagen Trilogy, Danish author Tove Ditlevsen receives a copy of her first published book, a slim poetry collection titled Pigesind (Girl Soul). And for her, it’s a revelation:

My book! I take it in my hands and feel a solemn happiness, that isn’t like anything I’ve ever felt before. . . . It can’t be taken back anymore. It is irretrievable. . . . Maybe my book will be in the libraries. Maybe a child, who in all secrecy is fond of poetry, will someday find it there. And that odd child doesn’t know me at all. She won’t think that I’m a living young girl who works, eats, and sleeps like other people. . . .Tonight I want to be alone with it, because there’s no one who really understands what a miracle it is for me.

When I translated those words in 1984 and then, a year later, saw them in print for the first time, it was an equally momentous experience. My translations of Ditlevsen’s Childhood and Youth were issued by Seal Press in one volume under the title Early Spring. It was my first published book, and how it came to be published at all seemed to me a miracle. READ MORE…

Bilingual Books: A Personal History

June 8, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Ian Ross Singleton

The process of doubling, of language regenerating itself, overlaps the process of translation and the weaving of two versions together. . .

Though not yet standard practice, bilingual editions of translated works are becoming increasingly welcomed by readers, both as a method of language engagement and an embodiment of a text’s various appearances and lives. In this following essay, Ian Ross Singleton discusses the power of reading and learning from a bilingual text, as well as the many dialogues that can transpire from this meeting of reader, writer, translator, and the worlds they each bring along.

I have bilingual books to thank for access to much of my knowledge of each and every language I utter—specifically Russian and, most recently, Ukrainian. I began to learn Russian about seventeen years ago. I was delighted to be able to access the originals, alongside helpful translations, in books such as Russian Stories / Русские рассказы, edited by Gleb Struve, which introduced me to the work of writers such as Evgeny Zamyatin and Fyodor Sologub, among others. Penguin also published a bilingual anthology of Russian poetry that became the basis of my education in this language, from which I memorized poems by Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Aleksandr Blok.

There are bilingual books by individual poets as well; Pushkin Threefold, translated by Walter Arndt (Dutton Books), gives the original Russian texts of Pushkin alongside literal English translations and verse translations. The book shows how translators must scrutinize, interpret, and create texts that are nonetheless complemented by ready comparisons with the original. Nativity Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a collection of the exile Joseph Brodsky, includes work written during the end-of-the-year holidays or discussing the story of Christ’s birth, and provides both a way of reading Brodsky’s original Russian poetry as well as elegies by poets who admired his writing, such as Derek Walcott, Anthony Hecht, and Seamus Heaney. Even the American poet Carol V. Davis wrote It’s Time to Talk About… / Пора говорить о…, a bilingual book of poems written in Russian and English, published in Russia by Simposium in 1997.

A bilingual book lends itself to a dialogue between two languages, the kind of negotiation that take place in a bi- or multilingual mind. It also creates a space for the kind of lingering that a bi- or multilingual person does with their words—the space a translator navigates in their relationship with both the original and their own renderings. It signifies companionship: of the author and the reader, of the author and the translator, and, if the reader is a language learner, of a teacher and a student. A bilingual book also does much to demonstrate the intimacy between the translator and their source texts—a relationship that involves a close scrutiny of language and meaning—and thus it also fosters the relationship between the two texts. READ MORE…

The 2023 PEN/Heim Grantees Talk Translation: Part III

June 5, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Margaret Litvin, Noor Habib, Priyamvada Ramkumar, and Zara Khadeeja Majoka

. . .to rely not on formulaic logic but the magical leaping flame that brings to life static words on a page, that defamiliarizes. . .

In this three-part series, Asymptote has asked the 2023 PEN/Heim grantees to talk about their work in progress; their responses, brimming with excitement, conviction, and connection, are a testament to how much translators put themselves into their labor. Through the varied approaches and languages, they share the important commonality of surety: that the work they’ve been entrusted with has an immense potential to illuminate our reality, enlarge our world, and enrich our experiences of literature.

For this final instalment, Margaret Litvin is moved by the living mind behind the words; Priyamvada Ramkumar renders a vivid polyphony of suffering and survival; and co-translators Noor Habib and Zara Khadeeja Majoka work together on poems that both gather and transcend meaning.

Margaret Litvin on Khalil Alrez:

At first it was the rhythm of his sentences: polished and wry, leisurely but not ornamented, like no Arabic prose style I had seen. Next it was the Russianisms: what were all these references to Chekhov, Turgenev, and Bondarchuk doing in contemporary Damascus, as if tailor-made for my research on the literary legacies of Arab-Soviet ties? Finally, it was the personality of Syrian novelist Khalil Alrez himself, glimpsed through every gleaming line. Who else could write such a lovable and quirky novel while escaping from bombed-out Damascus suburbs through Turkey and Greece, eventually completing it in a refugee shelter in Brussels? Who else, well aware of Russia’s role in the war, would set that novel in a fictional zoo run by a Russian former journalist named Victor Ivanitch, and furnish it with a wall newspaper, two wolves, three eagles, a hyena, an Afghan hound, and her friend the poodle Moustache? Khalil and I spoke over Zoom, and for a while I told myself I was just asking questions, not preparing to translate the book. But who was I kidding? The Russian Quarter had captivated me; I needed to share it.

Keeping the Syrian civil war in the background for most of the novel, The Russian Quarter reads nothing like a news dispatch. The action stays close to the unnamed narrator and his Russian-speaking girlfriend Nonna, who live in a rooftop room inside the zoo, next to rebel-held Ghouta. The book’s moral center is a giraffe. Time plays Proustian games, uncoiling spirals of memory. The virtuosic opening paragraph sets up the tension between the narrator’s mounting anxiety (his girlfriend is late in a war zone) and his cool descriptive eye:

On the roof of the zoo in the Russian Quarter, my 14-inch television, balanced on its table near the giraffe’s snout, was showing an archival soccer match between Spain and Uruguay. The rumble of nearby mortar fire had not stopped since early morning; my tea had gone cold waiting for the apple fritters baked by Denis Petrovitch, the clarinet teacher at the Higher Institute of Music, as I sprawled next to the giraffe watching tiny black-and-white goals filmed in Madrid fifty years ago. The artillery was shelling neighboring Ghouta from the orchards of the Russian Quarter. But my ears were trained on the long, still-empty staircase behind the couch on which I lay, expecting it to fill with the sound of Nonna’s elegant footsteps at any moment. She had gone to the cultural center in downtown Damascus to visit her dad. The full moon shone on me, and the screen’s silver light reflected brightly in the giraffe’s wide black eyes and flowed over her thick-fuzzed lips, which nearly touched the long-vanished players, the long-vanished spectators, and the long-vanished grass of the soccer pitch. READ MORE…

The 2023 PEN/Heim Grantees Talk Translation: Part II

May 29, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Joaquín Gavilano, Stine An, and Stoyan Tchaprazov

I still remember the joy and hope in learning new words and how that does expand, if not the world, a word.

In this three-part series, Asymptote has asked the 2023 PEN/Heim grantees to talk about their work in progress; their responses, brimming with excitement, conviction, and connection, are a testament to how much translators put themselves into their labor. Through the varied approaches and languages, they share the important commonality of surety: that the work they’ve been entrusted with has an immense potential to illuminate our reality, enlarge our world, and enrich our experiences of literature.

Here, Stine An grows the vocabulary of her world; Stoyan Tchaprazov wrestles with a complex, multilingual diction; and Joaquín Gavilano translates his way back home.   

Stine An on Yoo Heekyung:

I was initially drawn to Yoo Heekyung’s work because of both his poetic lineage and breadth of contributions as a cultural worker. Having studied poetry with Kim Hyesoon, Yoo is most known for his poetry; however, he also writes plays and essays and frequently collaborates with other poets and artists on video content, podcasts, and events. Additionally, he runs wit n cynical, a one-of-a-kind poetry bookstore and project space in Seoul. I started translating his poems back in 2019 for a literary translation workshop with Sawako Nakayasu during my final year of MFA studies at Brown University; there, she not only inspired me to explore literary translation as a meaningful way to connect with my Korean heritage as a poet, but also as an exciting and potentially life-changing activity. I take invitations to change my life seriously. I started writing poetry because I wanted to change my life, and it’s for the same reason that I continue my work as a translator. The possibility to change my life. How exciting is that? What does it mean to grow the vocabulary of your world?

Sawako introduced me to the poet and translator Don Mee Choi, who in turn introduced me to Yoo’s work. One of the earliest pieces of feedback I received from Don Mee and other early readers for my translations was that I had nailed the tone for Yoo’s work, so I took that as a sign to continue. During my ALTA translation mentorship with Joyelle McSweeney, she invited me to reflect on my relationship to tone, and I realized that tone was something I deeply cared about in my own work—both as a poet and a stand-up comedian. So, I’ve been prioritizing tone, mood, and voice when translating Yoo’s poems. For inspiration, I’ve been revisiting Joachim Neugroschel’s translations of Franz Kafka’s short stories and aphorisms; I remember being utterly bewildered and enchanted by Kafka’s words through those translations—the humor, grief and wonder.

READ MORE…

The 2023 PEN/Heim Grantees Talk Translation: Part I

May 22, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Caroline G. Froh, Mark Tardi, and Richard Prins

Doesn’t the magic of writing happen in those rare bursts where you manage to coax an extra voice out of your mind?

The PEN/Heim Translation Grant is one of the most reliable indicators as to which texts will come to be considered vital in the English-language literary landscape, with past grantees including George Szirtes translating the Hungarian giant of postmodernism, László Krasznahorkai; Daniel Borzutsky translating the Chilean revolutionary poet, Raúl Zurita, Jennifer Croft translating Polish Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk, and Anton Hur translating the celebrated South Korean genre-bender, Bora Chung. The aim of the grant is to support translators during their vital and difficult work of working on a text, and as a result, the texts that come to English-language readers by way of this gift are often exemplary examples of not only the writers’ intelligence, imagination, and effort—but equally importantly, the translator’s.  

In this three-part series, Asymptote has asked the 2023 PEN/Heim grantees to talk about their work in progress; their responses, brimming with excitement, conviction, and connection, are a testament to how much translators put themselves into their labor. Through the varied approaches and languages, they share the important commonality of surety: that the work they’ve been entrusted with has an immense potential to illuminate our reality, enlarge our world, and enrich our experiences of literature.

Here, Mark Tardi ruminates on the importance of discipline; Richard Prins talks about following instinct; and Caroline Froh opens up about the physical effect that reading has on us.  

Mark Tardi on Olga Hund:

In The Poethical Wager, Joan Retallack argues intelligently for the creative embrace of life’s unexpected swerves, the “unsettling transfiguration of once-familiar terrain [which tends] to produce disorientation, even estrangement, by radically altering geometries of attention.” Olga Hund’s remarkable and award-winning debut novel, Psy ras drobnych (Dogs of Smaller Breeds) was such a swerve for me, thanks to James Guerin and Klaudia Cierluk, editors at Berlin Quarterly, who commissioned me to translate an excerpt. Hund’s writing pulled me in immediately, and I felt sure that English-speaking readers would connect with the book much like I had.

Dogs of Smaller Breeds takes place in an in-patient women’s psychiatric ward in southern Poland and via the narrator—who may or may not be the pseudonymous Hund herself—we’re offered short vignettes, unabashed and unapologetic glimpses into the lives of women who would be otherwise largely invisible and neglected. In one poignant and heartbreaking segment, Hund’s narrator observes that:

If it weren’t for papers: documents from orphanages, correctional institutions and prisons, hospital records, blue cards and prescriptions; and if it weren’t for their various small objects: a spoon from the canteen, a prayer book, a photo of two Yorkies torn out of a newspaper, a cassette with the inscription “Mother” and the chaplet of Our Lady recorded on it, a tote bag washed and folded evenly—no one would remember that these women, who are here today, were alive at all.

Hund doesn’t attempt to construct a comprehensive picture, which would reveal some neatly packaged truth. This is one of the most compelling aspects of the book—the devastating intimacy and scaled back narratives propel the story forward, à la Fleur Jaeggy or Jenny Offill. For instance, in one scene, the narrator recounts how the women are not so crazy as to have forgotten the abuses they’ve suffered, most often from family and partners. Hund uses a neologism, “męże-węże,” which literally would be something like “husband-snakes,” but the term rhymes perfectly while simultaneously magnifying menace. I rendered this as “spouse-louse,” which loses some of the historical connotations of snakes and viperous dangers, but the parasitical qualities of lice—surviving on the blood of another—echoes other aspects in the novel. READ MORE…

Translating Whale-Song into Human Speech

May 18, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Charlie Ng

The light created by human beings symbolises reason and civilization . . . yet at the same time, we are living under a shadow of our own making.

A role of literature has always been to draw a voice out of the unspoken; in our Spring 2023 issue, we acted on this mandate to collect a variety of texts that place the non-human at their centre. This consideration of our planetary cohabitants is not only a powerful expression of imagination, but also an exercise of ethical care, exemplified by these chosen writers as a way to not only instill wonder, but also to facilitate deeper consideration of our role in protecting and honouring these lifeforms. To further elucidate the educational power of this ecologically-oriented literature, we present a three-part series in which Charlie Ng, co-editor of the feature, discuss in depth the context and the activism innate in these texts.

“Song of the Whale-road”, one of the pieces in the animal-themed feature of Asymptote’s Spring 2023 issue, consists of excerpts taken from Yolanda González’s recent novel Oceánica. Mesmerising in its lyrical tone, the text reveals the primordial unity of the human and nature, which has eventually dissociated as mankind developed their own civilization, and life and death—originally stages of a natural cycle—came to be laden with anthropogenic threats and massacres. The novel opens with an epigraph that consists of three quotations: from the Genesis book of the Bible, Bruno Latour’s Facing Gaia, and Raúl Zurita’s poem “Las cataratas del Pacifico”, revealing the novel’s environmentalism immediately to the reader.

As was written in Genesis, God’s command of procreation and the passing over of Earth’s dominion to Man reminds us of our stewardship of nature—but the irony is that the multiplication of mankind has brought catastrophe to the other lifeforms sharing the planet with us. The whale, often regarded as an environmental symbol, embodies the image of endangered animals and the importance of protecting keystone species for the purposes of biodiversity and combating climate change. They also appeal to our imagination for both their massive size and their biological significance as mammals living in the depths of the ocean, making them all at once mysterious, fearful, and attractive. In Western culture, whales are sometimes known as “leviathans”, sea monsters mentioned in the Bible that represent the uncontrollable power of nature. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is arguably the most well-known work of oceanic literature that makes use of such a profound, epic, human-whale relationship, while in contemporary literature, cetacean narratives such as Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider and Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller play a crucial role in offering localised perspectives that contrast mainstream Western environmentalism.

READ MORE…

Tales of Contagion: A Comparative Reading of Goran Stefanovski’s Divo Meso

November 23, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Sofija Popovska

[T]he image of Western Europe as a cataclysmic pathogen becomes a motif, repeated unto the ages of ages.

The Macedonian playwright Goran Stefanovski, working against the background of ex-Yugoslavia, has long used the microcosm of the theatre to address shifting politics, disintegrating identities, and violence in both physical and spiritual levels. His most well-known work, which encapsulates this lifelong address, is perhaps Divo Meso, an intimate family drama that speaks to the overarching condition of the Macedonian nation, as it is subsumed by invasive forces. In this following essay, Sofija Popovska discusses how the play’s oft-overlooked pathogenic themes dialogue with other texts and narratives from across history, and how, seen along these lines, it speaks universally to the private tragedy of loss, as hidden within the greater global narrative of cultural collisions.

The horseman on the white horse was clad in a showy and barbarous attire. . . While his horse continued galloping, he was bending his bow in order to spread pestilence abroad. At his back swung the brass quiver filled with poisoned arrows, containing the germs of all diseases.

—Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

In Scene VIII of Goran Stefanovski’s 1979 theatrical piece, Divo Meso, a destitute Macedonian household is paid a visit by a German investor, who offers to buy their house in order to have it remodeled into a showroom. Upon his arrival, Maria, the mother of the family, plunges into reverie, ruminating about a mythical condition she’s certain she’s plagued by: the eponymous divo meso. It is, we are told, an “old wives’ tale”—flesh which forms around a hair inside the throat, and grows until its victim asphyxiates. Despite its superstitious roots, Maria’s fear sublimates the intuition of a condition more cataclysmic and widespread: the body of Macedonian society, weakened by discord and poverty, being infiltrated by foreign interests as if by a pathogen. Transformed into an eschatological growth, the will of their German visitor continues its indomitable conquest throughout the play, leading the family to a coda marked by desolation, surrender, and powerless rage.

Though indicated by the title, the element of illness in Divo Meso hasn’t been explored much, relegated to the background in favor of discussing the loss of tradition. Regardless, the pathogen metaphor is especially apt at describing imperialist intervention into cultures; rather than cultivating a mutualistic or commensalistic relationship between two consenting cultures, it introduces a drastically one-sided power dynamic, to the profit of one and the undoing of another. However, before we delve further into the specificities of Divo Meso, I would like to invite you to consider two episodes, one historical and one literary, that tell stories of cultural contagion. These will help unravel the pathogen-host relationship in its cultural, imperialist context, and illuminate individual processes that comprise it—such as the transformation of identity into a collision site of imposed, internalized, and inherent traits. Rather than the reductive (albeit also valid) reading of Divo Meso as a tragedy of familial and national scope, a simultaneous reading of the following tragic—and in many ways analogous—texts will allow for a richer understanding of the theatrical piece, one that includes transcultural motifs.

On June 23, 1763, trader and land speculator William Trent recorded in his diary that two Native American diplomats had arrived at Fort Pitt in order to persuade the British to abandon the location. After negotiations failed, the British offered the Delaware emissaries a parting gift. “Out of our regard to them we gave them two Blankets and a Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect,” wrote Trent. It remains unknown whether this instance of biological warfare succeeded, though the Native American population around Fort Pitt was “struck hard” by smallpox in the spring and summer of 1763. This wasn’t the first, nor last tale of contamination to be found in the imperialist trajectories of Western Europeans. Engraved upon traditions, echoing through languages, and rising scar-like from the surface of collective memory, the image of Western Europe as a cataclysmic pathogen becomes a motif, repeated unto the ages of ages. READ MORE…

Hate Makes Us Weak

November 19, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Vladimir Vertlib

We should never forget that this war is about defending freedom, democracy and truth against dictatorship, chauvinism and lies.

As Europeans try to make sense of the war on their doorstep, boycotts targeting Russia have reached past the country’s oil exports to its poets, painters and tennis players. The invasion of Ukraine earlier this year set off the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II; it also, according to past contributor Vladimir Vertlib (tr. Julie Winter), inspired a wave of “outright hostility” against Russian literature. This thoughtful essay by the Vienna-based Jewish Russian writer is an argument about the baby and the bathwater—Pushkin and Putin—and a strident call for nuance in wartime.

When I was a child, other people always knew who I was better than I did. One day my parents told me that I was Jewish. But I wanted to be a Leningradian because I was born in Leningrad, known today as St. Petersburg. My parents laughed. They said that you could be a Jew and someone from Leningrad, that was no problem, even if you lived in Vienna. I didn’t feel Austrian or Viennese at that time, although I was undoubtedly at home in our neighborhood Brigittenau. To this day, parts of this Viennese district, as well as the adjoining Leopoldstadt, have remained the only place in the world where I feel I belong.

This ambivalent identity confusion was soon as much a part of my being as was my accent-free German and everyone’s mispronunciation of my first name, which I accepted and eventually even adopted myself. For my Austrian classmates and teachers, however, the matter was perfectly clear: I was a typical Russian. Why I was “typical” was a mystery to me because whenever my classmates or teachers described something as “typically Russian,” they immediately said that they “of course” didn’t mean me.

Brigittenau, where I went to elementary school and later to high school, had belonged to the Soviet occupied zone in Vienna after the war; the memory of that time was still fresh almost fifty years ago when I started school. The “Russians” were said to be brutal and uncultured. They drank water from toilet bowls, screwed light bulbs into sockets that were disconnected from any source of power and then wondered why they didn’t light up, raped women en masse, stole, robbed, murdered and destroyed senselessly, simply out of anger and revenge. Russians are emotional, it was said. Sometimes they’re like children—warm, naive and helpful—but they could suddenly become brutal and unpredictable like wild animals. They were, after all, a soulful people, in both negative and positive respects. The latter was attributed to me. If my essays or speeches were emotional, it was said to be due to my “Russian soul,” and people thought they were paying me a compliment. I, on the other hand, was always unpleasantly affected by these attributions, because I knew, even in elementary school, that Jews and Russians were not the same thing. No Russian, my parents explained to me, would ever accept me as his equal. In the former Soviet Union, ethnic groups, which included Jews, were clearly distinct. So my supposed “Russian soul” was not only embarrassing, it was also presumptuous. I was assigned something that I was not at all entitled to, based on my ethnicity. READ MORE…

The Redemption of the Collective Past in the Infinite Present: Annie Ernaux’s The Years

October 13, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Katarina Gadze

With her narrative having already begun, she must live, and in doing so continuing this act of physical telling.

The Nobel committee’s decision to award Annie Ernaux with the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature communicated a certain message: of writing‘s pivotal responsibility to situate the individual life amidst the ever-elaborating stream of history, and that personal experience—no matter how specific or inward-looking—speaks to the greater picture of a landscape, a culture, and a time. In this following essay, Katarina Gadze takes a close look at Ernaux’s 2008 memoir, The Years, an emblematic work of her masterful collapse of private and public time, of her mind’s stabilizing force as it moves through a constantly shifting world.

In attempting to decipher the uses of autobiographical writing, Sébastien Hubier, in his Littératures intimes, speaks of what he calls reflexivity: “the phenomenon by which discourse refers to its own enunciative activity rather than merely speaking about the world.” Autobiography is then defined by “the narrative of one’s life . . . infused with the critical discourse of the one who writes it.” As a “heuristic project,” it stands for all personal writing that makes, by fact of its production, “a mode of resolution for the conflicts associated with profound shifts in social space.” Objectification of an identity, recourse to writing and the distancing it entails, lends itself to all the symbolic manipulations—reconstructions and redefinitions—of that identity. Such was the mechanism of Annie Ernaux’s writing in The Years, and her lifelong experiments with the autobiographical genre, as well as her construction of temporalities—in relation to both herself and society at large. When the Swedish Academy awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize to Ernaux, they praised her “courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory,” perfectly summarizing her work. Indeed, by penning these paradoxically impersonal texts, she inevitably moves away from traditional autobiography and spares us the usual novelistic practices in The Years; the resulting memoir is less a traditional recollection and more an existential examination of Ernaux’s sixty years, told in the third person. The years meander along in the order of her life events, though chronology comes second to Ernaux, whose goal is to expose the illusion (or delusion) of time. She moves through time in leaps and bounds, talking about what it means to live not just as one person in the present, but as one person (and an entire generation) that exists across centuries.

Autobiography as reconstruction places the past in chronological order, which, as Hubier points out, is illusive. Despite the “temporal linearity inherent in an organized retrospection” that probes collective memory, to write truly of the constant scrambling that is our general experience of time interferes with the reader’s ability to feel any dynamic flow—which treads backwards into the past, the opposite direction that the narrator claims. Ernaux interrogates this literary device by highlighting the intertwining of its present, past, and future dimensions, as well as its inevitable divide into two distinct temporalities: personal identification and cultural identity:

Then, in a state of profound, almost dazzling satisfaction, she finds something that the image from personal memory doesn’t give her on its own: a kind of vast collective sensation that takes her consciousness, her entire being, into itself. She has the same feeling, alone in the car on the highway, of being taken into the indefinable whole of the world of now, from the closest to the most remote of things.

READ MORE…

Finding Fernando A. Buyser: The Poet-as-Archival, the Archive-as-Poetic

October 5, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

But central to my impetus of rendering Buyser into English is the joy of translating from the archives. . .

What does it mean to translate from the archive, especially when it is temporally and linguistically removed from the present? In the golden age of Philippine Binisayâ poetry from the 1900s to the 1940s, the virtuosic poet, critic, and priest Fernando A Buyser cemented his place in the canon of Philippine literature for both his nationalistic, romantic poems and his curating of indigenous oral poetry. In this intimate essay, Editor-at-Large Alton Melvar M Dapanas considers the sociohistorical, linguistic, and personal complexities of excavating the archive for the works of Buyser and rendering his poetry into English. Dapanas meditates over Buyser’s legacy in Philippine literature, as well as the joyous yet fraught process of unearthing texts from the antiquity.

The stories that comprise us have left us both wanting more, wishing we had access to a fuller narrative frame. I call this wishing-wanting desire “the ghost archive.” Everything we need to know but cannot know as we keep circling and sniffing around the edges. Everything that keeps affecting us and affecting others through us. Everything that remains right there, but just out of reach.

 —Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You

Scouring through the Stanford University Libraries’ press archives of early twentieth-century Philippines in the midst of the Delta variant surge brought me to Fernando Buyser y Aquino and the years between 1905 and 1937. I suppose, based on these archives, that Bishop Fernando A. Buyser was a typical Filipino priest: he officiated baptisms, headed processions during important religious holidays, performed administrative functions at the council of bishops, held committee membership for fundraisers, went to a lawyer for the church’s legal documents to be notarised, among other duties. Of the Aglipayan Church or the Philippine Independent Catholic Church, later renamed as Iglesia Filipina Independiente (IFI)—a religion that half of my family still practice to this day and the same church that baptised me (though I no longer identify as Christian)—Bishop Buyser preached to areas outside his diocese. In a 1934 gacetilla, or newsletter, published in the bilingual La revolucion [The Revolution], he held what seemed like religious missions to Iloilo and Negros Oriental and Occidental provinces, and the neighbouring Antique, Romblon, and Capiz, his diocese comprising Cebu, Bohol, Samar, and Leyte. In his early pre-bishop years as an ordained priest, he wasn’t spared from criticism. Drawing flak, a satirical piece and an editorial were published, calling him out in separate issues of the Catholic-owned periodical Ang camatuoran [The Truth]. What caused this, apparently, was Buyser’s Lutherian critique against the ways of the Roman Catholic clergy. Given the 1902 schism of the IFI from Rome, tensions were bound to arise.

All these seem typical given his stature and the times, and in many ways, at least based on the archives, he may have been. Except that he was also a poet and wrote short stories, plays, novelettes, pre-modern forms of ars poetica on both theoria and praxis, as well as literary and cultural criticism. In another periodical, Ang suga [The Light], a writer working under a penname, most likely a contemporary, would dedicate a poem to Buyser. A Philippine Magazine article, concerning a survey of ancient allegorical fables, published May 1936, cited him for expert opinion. Both are evidence that his peers looked up to him, offering a glimpse of the happenings inside the literary circles back in the day. In these same papers, he was congratulated for his prolific output, notably his works titled Ang Ulay sa mga Kasakit [The Virgin of Sorrows] and Ang Arka sa Kaluwasan [The Arc of Salvation]. (It was in his collection Ang Rueda ug ang Oraculo [The Wheel and the Oracle] where Buyser advertised his PO box, the very address of the IFI cathedral which still stands today in Mabini street of Cebu.) The last mention of him in the same archive was in 1937 from La revolucion, about his pre-retirement designation down south as parish priest of Mainit, Surigaw, now Surigao del Norte, in Mindanao where he died a few years later. A government-run school in Mainit’s adjacent municipality, Tubod, named after him (F. Buyser Elementary School) was built in 1961 and still runs today.

Craft-wise, what positioned him further in the canon is his anthologising and curating of oral poetry indigenous to the Cebuano Binisayâ-speaking Filipinos in the two volumes of Mga Awit sa Kabukiran [Mountain Songs], first published by Liberty Press in 1911 and republished as a second edition in 1924. Dedicated to his “yutang-natawohan” (Motherland), Mountain Songs collated various poetic forms such as balitaw (a song and dance love debate between a man and a woman), harito (shaman’s prayers), kulilisi (improvised recited verse, sometimes spelled as kolilisi), awit and saluma (poetic songs), garay (informal poetry), and balak (formal poetry). The act of collating oral Binisayâ poetic forms, something rarely done at the time (unless you’re a white anthropologist-missionary who married a Filipino woman), was a “pioneering work [that] proved to be the best grounding in the poetic tradition in the Visayas,” in the words of poet and translator Marjorie Evasco. Even American ethnologist Donn V. Hart tried to locate Buyser’s collection of 360 riddles, Usa Ka Gabiing Pilipinhon [A Filipino Night], for his critical study on folktales although to no avail.

READ MORE…

Our Crisis in Democracy: A View from Japan

October 1, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Fuminori Nakamura

It’s frightening to think of history repeating itself.

An ultranationalist religious cult with adherents at the highest levels of the Japanese state; the details are “straight out of a manga”. Yet the shooting of Shinzo Abe in July, by a man who lost his family to the cult-like practices of the Unification Church, has shone a light on the worrying ease with which fringe religion can infiltrate mainstream politics—and not only in Japan, argues Fuminori Nakamura, but in embattled democracies across the world. With Abe’s state funeral held earlier this week, this essay—the first in a new series of translated opinion pieces we are hosting in our Saturday column—sounds the alarm at an important time.

The relationship between politics and religion in Japan is deeply rooted.  When considering the current iteration of the Unification Church’s connections with Japanese politics, it brings to mind the era in the 1930s when Japan was progressively listing toward war with the United States.  Before getting into that, however, first allow for a brief review of the attack on Japan’s former prime minister, Shinzo Abe.

On July 8, 2022, Mr. Abe was shot and killed while giving an endorsement speech ahead of the national election. The suspect who fired the gun is a forty-one-year-old man, Tetsuya Yamagami. His family was destroyed by cumulative donations his mother had made as a member of the Unification Church. Allegedly his intention had been to target the current leader of the church, Hak Ja Han Moon, the widow of the founder of the Unification movement, but he targeted Mr. Abe instead because he was, to use Yamagami’s own words, “the most influential person who was sympathetic to the Unification Church.” (Author’s note:  Though in Japan it is still referred to as “the former Unification Church,” the church changed its name to the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, but to avoid confusion I will use its previous designation.)

Since the incident, the depth of the Unification Church’s relationship with, in particular, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is increasingly clear. In Japan, the Unification Church is considered a cult: among their practices, the church tells followers that their ancestors are suffering in the next world and compel them to buy exorbitantly priced jars called “tsubo” (for several million yen) and scriptures called “seihon” (for ¥30,000,000, which is about 50,000 times the cost of a paperback edition of one of my novels in Japan). They also conduct mass weddings where members marry someone chosen for them by the church. Ostensibly, they advocate rather strongly for conservative and right-wing causes. In their desire to rewrite Japan’s pacifist constitution that includes a renunciation of war in order to empower the military as well as their refusal to acknowledge the rights of LGBTQ people, the church bears a strong affinity with the LDP. This has enabled a cult to infiltrate the center of Japan’s politics. Reports about the church’s ties with high-ranking officials within Japan’s National Police Agency as well as the chairman of the Public Safety Commission depict a world straight out of a manga. READ MORE…