Language: Spanish

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

November 27, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, José García Escobar, and Kwan Ann Tan

The latest news from Central America, Palestine, and Malaysia!

This week, our writer’s bring you the latest news from Central America, Palestine, and Malaysia. Central America’s biggest book fair, FILGUA, has begun, whilst José Luis Perdomo Orellana received Guatemala’s most prestigious literary award; Palestine Writes Literature Festival has begun online, featuring over seventy writers and activists, including Angela Davis and Fady Joudah; and in Malaysia, readers have mourned the passing of prominent writer Salleh Ben Joned, whilst Georgetown Literary Festival has featured writers including Ho Sok Fong. Read on to find out more! 

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America

After many delays and obvious setbacks, Central America’s biggest book fair, FILGUA, started yesterday. As a virtual book fair, FILGUA will feature over 140 online activities, book presentations, and conversations among prominent authors, journalists, and activists, such as Daniel Krauze (Mexico), Olga Wornat (Argentina), Rigoberta Menchú (Guatemala), and Javier Castillo (Spain). They have also announced that next year’s FILGUA, as planned for this year’s, will be celebrated alongside Central America’s biggest literary festival, Centro América Cuenta.

In November, writer and journalist José Luis Perdomo Orellana received the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature—Guatemala’s most prestigious literary prize. José Luis is best known for La última y nos vamos, a collection of interviews with Gunther Grass, Nadine Gordimer, José Saramago, and others. Also in November, indie giants Catafixia Editorial announced they will reissue Eugenia Gallardo’s most famous novel No te apresures a llegar a la Torre de Londres, porque la Torre de Londres no es el Big Ben.

Finally, the famed Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon recently revealed the cover of his upcoming new book Canción, shortly after The New York Review shared an excerpt. Canción is out in January with Libros del Asteriode.

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

If you are still searching for a silver lining of the dark COVID-19 cloud, here’s one to consider: five days of virtual readings, talks, and performances celebrating Palestinian literature.

Palestine Writes Literature Festival, originally scheduled to take place in New York City in March 2020 (with the postponement announced due to the pandemic), will now take place virtually 2–6 December 2020. READ MORE…

Music, Midribs, and Mexicanisms: Christina MacSweeney on Translating Daniel Saldaña París’s Ramifications

November 26, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Josefina Massot

It’s hard to judge characters as a translator . . . because you’re living with them. They're part of your life.

Our first-ever live Q&A could have hardly gone better: award-winning translator Christina MacSweeney chatted with Blog Editor Josefina Massot for a solid hour, covering everything from voice, rhythm, and expletives in our exquisite October selection to her “unfixed migrant identity” and its effects on her craft. Read on for a taste of this riveting conversation, which Book Club members can request in full—hearty laughs, pensive pauses, and all!

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 USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Josefina Massot (JM): Ramifications is largely character-driven, and there are so many elements to the protagonist’s psyche and voice. I was wondering about your experience inhabiting that complexity: were there aspects of it that particularly resonated with you, or that you found especially challenging to tap into?

Christina MacSweeney (CM): One of the things that played into my experience is that I read the first fifty pages of the novel when they were still in the process of inception (Daniel will often send me work at early stages). As I read more—as he progressed and made subsequent changes—the character grew with me, with the reading. And he’s very complex, but what most came through to me was this sense of paralyzed masculinity, a sense of frustration that very much stayed with me. He’s somebody I want to root for in some way, for him to break through all the issues that are holding him back.

I often talk about translation as getting into a character’s shoes and walking around in them, feeling that I can wear them. Daniel’s writing is so beautiful and precise that it helps you get into it. When you’re translating, it’s usually months and months, and the characters’ voices are there with you all along: you wake up with them in the morning, you go to sleep with them at night, they talk to you while you’re washing the dishes. So I think it’s hard to judge characters as a translator; you can’t feel judgmental about them, because you’re living with them. They’re part of your life.

JM: You’ve lived with several of Daniel’s characters, too, since you’ve also translated his first novel, Among Strange Victims. There seem to be some commonalities between both books: the protagonist in Ramifications is in many ways passive, and at the same time, he’s trying to piece together clues about his mother’s disappearance; in Among Strange Victims, Rodrigo could be described as indolent, and Marcelo tries to retrace someone’s footsteps (not his mother’s this time, but an enigmatic boxer-poet’s). Could you point to other continuities? And might there be, in some sense, a “signature” Saldaña París book? I realize two novels are hardly enough to make such generalizations, and they’re also very different in tone, but perhaps you could point to certain tendencies.

CM: If we think about the two books, but also Daniel’s poetry and the non-fiction pieces that he writes, he is exploring masculinity. But in fact, in Among Strange Victims, the main character is Beatriz, the woman who is in Mexico with the boxer-poet at the beginning of the twentieth century. Rodrigo’s mother is also a very strong figure in his life. In that respect, the books are very different, because Among Strange Victims has a much clearer female presence. In Ramifications, you still have the mother figure (the absence of the mother) and the narrator’s sister, who is also an influence in his life. But they’re ultimately quite different. I don’t think Daniel is ever going to be the kind of writer of whom you can say, “This is a Saldaña París book,” because his writing is constantly changing—his point of focus changes, the angles from which he views things change. READ MORE…

From Two Solitudes to Quattro Books: An Interview with Bilal Hashmi

November 18, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Moses

Quattro will . . . shift the discussion so it’s no longer . . . English and French, but the multilingual nature of Canadian writing.

Quattro Books was founded in 2006 by Allan Briesmaster, John Calabro, Beatriz Hausner, and Luciano Iacobelli, with the aim of publishing established and emerging authors who represent the linguistic and cultural diversity of literature in Toronto and across Canada. As such, from the start, Quattro Books has sought to bring out works originally written in English alongside those translated from the multilingual voices of Canadians who have arrived in the country as immigrants or refugees. The press’s recent acquisition by Bilal Hashmi, president of the Association des traducteurs et traductrices littéraires du Canada / Literary Translators’ Association of Canada (ATTLC-LTAC), and a translator himself—from French, Urdu, Persian, and Hindi—has led to a shift in focus that favours the latter. This is evidenced by Quattro Books’s first catalogue since Hashmi took over as Executive Director and Publisher. Due out in the fall of 2020, it will feature English translations of Canadian works spanning six languages. Asymptote’s co-Editor-at-Large for Argentina, Sarah Moses, met with Hashmi in Toronto to discuss Canadian literature as international literature, works in translation as partnerships, and how he’s shaping Quattro Books into a translation-focused press.

Sarah Moses (SM): I’d like to begin by asking you about your involvement with the ATTLC-LTAC. How has it led to Quattro becoming what you’ve described as a translation-focused press?

Bilal Hashmi (BH): Beatriz Hausner is central both to the ATTLC-LTAC and Quattro. She’s one of the founding members of Quattro and was the president of the ATTLC-LTAC in 2017, when I joined. I had the privilege of being mentored by her in translation and advocacy work, and the one thing we all sort of agreed on is that there should be more international works in translation available in Canada. So the movement from the ATTLC-LTAC to Quattro was, in a way, organic—the work at the former led to the idea: now we have an opportunity, let’s see what happens. That’s the way I thought of it. I started off as membership secretary in 2017 and I’ve been the president since June. We continue to work through some of the same issues that we’ve dealt with in the past: translator visibility, proper recognition, and so on—these remain our goals. But I think what Quattro will possibly do in the future is shift the discussion so it’s no longer necessarily the “two solitudes” of English and French, but the multilingual nature of Canadian writing that comes through.

SM: Is this primarily how you see Quattro Books fitting in among publishers of translation in Canada and internationally—as a press that moves beyond translations between English and French?

BH: In our first catalogue we have translations from French, Serbian, German, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, and then two titles that were written in English. We’re not going to do exclusively translation, but that’s the focus, which I think is unique in Canadian publishing. Whether or not that continues is something we’ll have to determine. We’re really hoping to find out if publishing majority translations is a viable activity.

Working with translation has involved a very international cast of characters, which is really what I find most exciting about Canadian literature as international literature. I think those who are very skeptical about translation’s profitability or potential for success kind of forget that you do have access potentially to other markets. Typically, Canadian books are marketed internally for Canadian consumption and the expectation is that Canadians will buy fellow Canadians. It doesn’t always work that way. My hope is that these books will be seen as Canadian literature, plus whatever other literature they’re referencing—let’s say the Portuguese-Angolan return novel, of which there’s now a sizable and critically acclaimed subgenre in Portuguese fiction. So the hope is that they’ll cross over into other markets, beginning in the US.

The catalogue started as kind of an exercise in fantasy, which I think I shared with you a couple of summers ago. It was an exercise in what works within the funding paradigm. Readers of Asymptote should know that in Canada the main translation activity is English-to-French, French-to-English, but the official requirement for funding from the Canada Council for the Arts is that the author be Canadian. There’s no limitation on the source language so long as the work is translated into French, English, or an indigenous language. I did a little bit of a research and I found a list of about twenty or so Canadian writers who brought in different literary histories with them. All of these works are technically eligible for Canada Council for the Arts grants, and we’re very lucky and grateful to the Canada Council for funding all six, which may be a first in Canadian publishing for one season, and probably unique in this part of the world. So that’s how it started. I think we have another half dozen languages already in the pipeline if not already under contract, also all Canadian authors. My hope is really to explore this lesser-known part of Canadian literary history, which tends not to see that much exposure in the current framework.

In the first couple of years, the focus will be on Canadian content, but we’re also starting to acquire from outside, including translations. That’s a challenge since I will insist that everyone gets paid at the Canadian rate, which is the determining factor. Because if it’s a five-hundred page novel and there’s no funding for it, then we’re probably not going to be able to pay the eighteen-cents-per-word rate—that’s the rate for prose. I believe the per-word rate remains at twenty cents for theatre and twenty-five cents for poetry. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Petroleum” by Héctor Tizón

November 17, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Alexandra Falek

"And we’ll be able to buy medicine so we don’t go around rotting like garbage. We’ll be rich. You get what it means to be rich?"

One man’s quest for “black gold” arouses a village’s hopes and dreams in Héctor Tizón’s short story “Petroleum,” this week’s Translation Tuesday selection. Set in a poor rural village, its flawed protagonist Nicolas leads his community’s search for oil, promising everyone a fast path to a better life. Our narrator is a subtle voice among a colorful cast of characters, and offers an interesting approach to satirizing Nicolas’s quixotic mission: he both adopts the point of view of a “fly on the wall” and actively participates in the town’s naïve aspirations. Nicolas’s unwavering hope and determination lead to a painful truth about his story: under the seemingly mocking veneer of comedy, “Petroleum” hides a heart of tragedy. A poignant (and funny) tale about class, wealth, and the nature of belief in the face of reality.

A long shriek, a holler. It could be heard loud and clear from the viaduct to the municipal garbage dump and even further, interrupting the peaceful siestas throughout the shacks. We had been trying to catch cichlids since noon, carefully lifting the stones on the shore after clouding the water, and we heard it too. We listened closely and then heard it again:

“Hey! Julian, Segundo, Gertrudis, Gabino, Doña Trinidad! Come! Everybody come!”

We tried to figure out where the shouting was coming from and caught on right away. Nicolas was waving his arms and started yelling again, from the immense crown of a willow tree.

“Petroleum!” he shouted, “It’s petroleum!”

I really think that even though I’d heard the word at some point, I didn’t actually know what it meant. That’s probably why, despite all the shouting, Mouse and I didn’t pay much attention to it. For the time being, we were busy with the cichlids. Someone had offered to buy them at two for fifteen cents, and anyways, we liked putting our feet in the water. It was super. I think Mouse, or maybe it was me, I don’t really remember, said:

“Nicolas has lost it again.”

We shrugged our shoulders. The water was great and if we could catch about twenty more cichlids we’d have enough to buy something: the Boca Juniors jersey Mouse wanted and that donkey mask I liked. The one I had seen was a nice big mask with long soft ears and I think it even came with a whistle for Carnival.

And so we kept trying to catch as many cichlids as possible, downstream by the shoreline.

Every now and then a train raced by and we could feel the vibration of its motor and hear its piercing sound. Sometimes we didn’t even lift our heads to look, but when we did, we raised our hands to wave at the distant passengers who were staring out the windows. They seemed sad or distracted.

“Raul,” Mouse said to me from close by. “You know what petroleum is?”

I can’t deny that I regretted not knowing anything about petroleum. But I said:

“Yep.”

“Is it what they put in the engines?” he asked again.

“Yep.”

“What’s it do?”

“Who knows,” I said.

The sun had gone down a while ago. The water was cloudy and we could barely make out our own hands. READ MORE…

Announcing our October Book Club Selection: Ramifications by Daniel Saldaña París

November 9, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Josefina Massot

[A]n absorbing character study, driven not just by voice . . . but by a deeply original theme: (a)symmetry as a curb on growth.

It is perhaps fitting (though regrettable) that our October Book Club announcement has been somewhat delayed: Daniel Saldaña París’s Ramifications is all about holdups. Via Christina MacSweeney’s seamless translation, the acclaimed Bogotá39 writer gives us a counter-formative tale that is both masterfully constructed and poignantly penned. In it, he exposes existential and political conservatism without dealing cheap blows, and introduces readers everywhere to a profoundly relatable narrative voice.

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 USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Ramifications by Daniel Saldaña París, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, Coffee House Press, 2020

Ramifications opens with a brilliant gambit; within a handful of paragraphs, it both sets up and crushes the prospect of a bildungsroman. A grown narrator feeds us the near-requisite opening, the painful loss at a much-too-tender age: in 1994 his mother, Teresa, flees their home in Mexico City, leaving ten-year-old him and teenage sister Mariana in the care of an oblivious father. Just a few lines later, though, we get a sharp taste of his current predicament—far from being the seasoned, thriving type mandated by the genre after years of fruitful struggles, he defines himself as “an adult who never leaves his bed.” 

The rest of the novel artfully explores the tension between the classic formative tale and its antithesis. Parts one and two delve into Teresa’s disappearance and her young son’s attempts to make sense of it, culminating in what could have been an archetypal “journey of self-discovery”—he tries to follow her to Chiapas, where she’s run off to join the budding zapatista movement. Part three, by contrast, hones in on the trip’s bland aftermath, both instant and deferred. It’s not as tidy as that, of course (the narrator jumps back and forth in time), but there’s an overarchingly grim shift from promise to flop. It’s made all the starker by a series of deliciously clever winks from the author: the protagonist’s childhood neighborhood and school are literally called “Education” (“Educación” and “Paideia,” respectively), and he’s thirty-three at the time of writing—an age that, for culturally Catholic audiences at least, can’t help but trigger unfavorable comparisons.

A disclaimer, lest readers think I’ve spoiled the plot: the novel doesn’t ride on events. It is, at its core, an absorbing character study, driven not just by voice (more on that later) but by a deeply original theme: (a)symmetry as a curb on growth. READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Pedro Páramo

November 2, 2020  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Edwin Alanís-García and Xiao Yue Shan

The script writers seemed to juggle the fragmentary structure of the novel with the linear conventions of cinematic narratives.

Today, on Día de Muertos, Asymptote is resurrecting Asymptote at the Movies, our column on world literature and their cinematic adaptations. In a marvellously topical fusion, we’re returning with a discussion on Juan Rulfo’s beloved and widely acclaimed Pedro Páramo, and the film of the same name directed by Carlos Velo, who dared to take this complex and mystifying text to the screen. 

John Gavin, the American actor who portrayed Don Pedro in the film, likened Rulfo’s novel to Don Quixote, The Divine Comedy, or Goethe’s Faust. What those books are to Spain, Italy, and Germany, Pedro Páramo is to Mexico. It’s a declaration that would seem hyperbolic if it weren’t corroborated by so many other literary masters and critics. In her preface to Margaret Sayers Peden’s translation of the novel, Susan Sontag declared the novella “one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature.” Borges declared it one of the greatest texts ever written in any language. In the following conversation, Assistant Editor Edwin Alanís-García and Blog Editor Xiao Yue Shan dive into the myriad thrills that arise between this pivotal work, and its strange and brilliant cinematic counterpart.

Edwin Alanís-García (EAG): It’s a tradition to watch Pedro Páramo on Día de Muertos. I’m not sure how or when this tradition started, but I liken it to how airing It’s a Wonderful Life is a perennial custom at Christmas. To be clear, I don’t mean that Día de Muertos is simply another holiday. It might be unjust to even regard it as a holiday; perhaps ritual or ceremony is more apt. However we label it, it’s one of Mexico’s most sacred and revered traditions, perhaps even more so than Christmas or Independence Day. A defiant celebration (literally, it’s a party for the dead) of the ubiquity of death, Día de Muertos acts as a sobering reminder that the only guarantee in life is that it ends. At the same time, it’s a festival to remember and honor the dead, especially our ancestors and those we have loved and lost. On this day, it’s said that the spirits of the dead can travel to our world, hence the importance of ofrendas, ritual displays where gifts are offered to the dead to welcome them home.

In a very concrete way, these sentiments permeate Juan Rulfo’s novel and Carlos Velo’s film: the realm of the dead and the realm of the living are constantly woven together throughout the story. We start with Juan Preciado at his mother’s deathbed, vowing to fulfill her dying wish. His mother’s voice takes him to a literal ghost town in search of his father, Pedro Páramo. Through the testimonies of the living and the dead (and it’s sometimes difficult to tell the two apart) we’re treated to flashbacks of a once thriving town and the tyrannical legacy of our titular villain.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Cultural commemorations and reconciliations of death seem to be mirrored across the world. In China, during a day of early springtime (a varying date on the Chinese calendar), we observe the Qingming Festival—heading to the graves of our ancestors to sweep and tidy up the grounds, burn incense and paper money, pay tribute. It is—in the same vein as Day of the Dead—an acknowledgement of the steep and synchronous passage between the realms we experience, and all the others we are offered only brief glimpses at.

Something I thought about was that—when sorting through the wreckages of a national trauma, there tends to be a reprise of narratives that amalgamate death and spirituality with day-to-day life. Day of the Dead, and what it means to Mexico, bring to mind a section of Robert Bolaño’s vividly wandering long poem, “The Neochileans”:

To the Virgin Lands
Of Latin America:
A hinterland of specters
And ghosts.
Our home
Positioned within the geometry
Of impossible crimes.

“Holidays” of remembrance are communal methods for managing the irresolution of death; when the abrupt disappearances of lives become a ceaseless tide, acceptance of its pervasion does not equate to understanding. Reading and watching Pedro Páramo brought to mind firstly the human impulse to fight against and disprove the terrifying concept of permanence. Death, our only pedestrian encounter with the eternal, is something that feels instinctually wrong for both its ineradicability and inevitability—perhaps because we have nothing to measure it up against, no certain qualifiers or records, a complete void of comparability. The persistence of ghosts, and spirits, and their continual autonomy and humanity, then, is an automatic salve for the mystifying absolution of death, and Pedro Páramo is such a brilliant dissolution of permanence, an astonishing textual disprovement of linearity and the limits of our living experience. I often find that cultures that incorporate spirituality more seamlessly into their daily philosophies are also generations that have suffered formidable violence. Along this vein of thinking, there are some who say that writing this book was Juan Rulfo’s way of protesting the failed promises of the Mexican Revolution. What do you think?

Screen Shot 2022-10-06 at 12.52.29 AM READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Carmen Boullosa

October 27, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Lawrence Schimel

Earth is a ball in disjointed flight. / The illuminated celestial sphere / is a sudden shot. / The cosmos trembles, the planetary spins jerk.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday we bring you a selection of poems from Carmen Boullosa, one of the most dynamic and prolific writers in contemporary Mexican literature. The haiku-esque “Dry Rain” discovers a scene of natural beauty in Brooklyn, leading to a final image that is both concrete and abstract. In “Puy de Dôme,” our speaker addresses the seemingly ageless French volcano which has outlived its ancient temple—and perhaps even the temple’s gods. And in the elegiac “The Match,” our speaker witnesses the tragic death of Italian footballer Piermario Morosini, whose final moments on the field are recounted with profound sorrow and admiration. As with her novels, Boullosa’s poetry (here translated by acclaimed writer and translator Lawrence Schimel) spans an eclectic range of aesthetic styles and sociocultural themes, traversing national borders in pursuit of a shared humanity.

 

Dry Rain

Rain of flowers in Brooklyn.
Minute white petals fall
heralding
the spring,
bathing us
without water
in fresh                                                                                           hypothetical laughter. READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2020

October 26, 2020  |  in News  |  by Ah-reum Han, Garrett Phelps, Lee Yew Leong, Michele Hutchison, and Sam Carter

Our Section Editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2020 issue!

This year’s events have made us all a little rusty in the art of travel, so hopping across our fortieth issue’s thirty-two countries may feel equal parts thrilling and daunting. Luckily, our section editors (including our Dutch Literature Special Feature curator, International Booker Prize co-winner Michele Hutchison) are happy to lay out a road map. Read on for literary duos on life and love in the Netherlands, a Norwegian’s popular fury, a Mexican novelist’s elusive but lasting influence, and a German author’s and Iranian poet’s exquisite study of silence.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction and Nonfiction Editor:

Not quite as stunningly “out there” as The Haunting of Bly Manor’s episode five, Paweł Sołtys’s deeply moving “The Kiev Sea” (translated with great aplomb by Eliza Marciniak) nevertheless reminded me of it: we are in such close third-person mode that even the reading material that the protagonist uses to while away time seems to be directly absorbed as consciousness while operating as pivotal mise en abyme. Memories and regret flit through this consciousness, “maintain(ing) the other me within the present me,” even as everything is “already slipping towards an invisible edge.” In truth—as we follow the protagonist down the rabbit hole of nostalgia—the slippage began much earlier: “it seemed that since he’d turned forty, he could only discard things. Friends, women, memories even.” What is the sum of life then? How much can we hold on to? On this fateful October day of reckoning, this fictional protagonist is reminded, via fiction, as we all are perhaps, of how removed and frightfully impersonal existence finally is: “It really happened, all of it, but it’s as if it were a story, told not to me but to someone nearby, in the noise of a bar or during a fight, a proper one, when the sound of the blows drowns out the wailing.”

From Michele Hutchison, Guest Editor of Dutch Literature Special Feature:

Good fortune would have it that I was working on the selection of Asymptote’s Dutch special when my translation of The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld was awarded the International Booker Prize. Perfect timing for sharing these stunning new Dutch voices with you, coinciding with the spike in interest in our national literature. (I wrote ‘our’ without thinking: I’m a defected Brit, resident in Amsterdam.)

To be honest, Dutch literature has long had plenty to offer, and there have been other recent successes. Think of Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin (translated by David Colmer) winning the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award ten years ago, and think of the great reception Gerard Reve’s classic The Evenings (translated by Sam Garrett) and Tonke Dragt’s The Letter for the King (translated by Laura Watkinson, recently a Netflix series) have had in English. We haven’t exactly been hiding our light under a bushel. Nevertheless, it was wonderful to put together this selection of Dutch talent to entice you to read further. READ MORE…

Narrating State Violence in Chile and Iran: For Raúl Zurita, with Gratitude

October 21, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Poupeh Missaghi

Finding one’s literary lineage is strange . . . You don’t necessarily find the voices that speak to you among your own people or your own language.

Last month, Chilean poet Raúl Zurita won the prestigious Reina Sofia Prize for Ibero-American Poetry. He is esteemed as one of the most talented Chilean poets of the twentieth century, alongside Pablo Neruda and Vicente Huidobro. María de los Llanos Castellanos, the President of National Heritage, said that Zurita had been awarded the prize in recognition of “his work, his poetic example of overcoming pain, with verses, with words committed to life, freedom, and nature.” Having lived through Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–1990) and, like many other Chileans, having been arrested and tortured under Pinochet’s regime, Zurita’s work addresses the violence committed against the Chilean people. His books in English translation include Anteparadise (translated by Jack Schmitt), Purgatory (translated by Anna Deeny), INRI (translated by William Rowe), and Song for His Disappeared Love (translated by Daniel Borzutsky). 

For a year now, since October 2019, Chile has been gripped in fresh political protests, sparked by a rise in subway fares. These have been the biggest protests in Chile since the end of the dictatorship and violent clashes between protestors and police have resulted in deaths, injuries, and arrests. In this essay, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Iran, Poupeh Missaghi, reflects upon Zurita’s response to state violence in his work. She draws a comparison with her native Iran, which similarly faced a US-backed coup (1953) and has recently experienced mass protests in response to economic injustice. By exploring Zurita’s ability to express the history and suffering of his country, as well as her own relationship to his body of work, Missaghi considers the importance of finding one’s literary heritage.  

The first time I saw Raúl Zurita read was in 2016 at the University of Denver. My skin felt raw, not just in the presence of his words (some of which I had read before), but also in proximity to his voice—deep and powerful yet carrying its fragility on its every note, accompanied by the trembling in his hands and torso. Trembling that wasn’t hidden or performed, but simply part of the way he carried, had to carry, his body and his voice as they carried with and in them the bodies, voices, and memories of others.

In a foreword to Purgatory, C. D. Wright says, “Instead of speaking for others, Zurita channels their voices.” There is an important difference here: the poet is not sitting on the sidelines and observing, but rather entering the purgatory himself. Whether through the intentional acts of hurting himself in his younger days (“branding his face and burning his eyes with ammonia”) or through the unasked-for Parkinson’s disease in his later years, Zurita literally embraces the pains he and his people have lived through. About his disease, Zurita notes,

I feel potent in my pains, in my curved spine, in the increasing difficulty of holding the pages when I read in public . . . I might have a bizarre sense of beauty, but my disease feels beautiful to me. It feels powerful.

Being in his presence over the years, I cannot help reading his Parkinson’s as another layer of his life-long labor of memory—his nerves being affected, being burdened, and his whole body becoming a witness who speaks even when he is not using verbal language.

***

The first work of Zurita I read was Song for His Disappeared Love, which for some reason I always remember as Song for His Disappeared Self, which is perhaps just a ghost of the same title. I read the book in a documentary poetics class taught by Eleni Sikelianos, and that was the beginning of my fascination with Zurita’s work, as well as with that of the translator Daniel Borzutzky. In Song for His Disappeared Love, Zurita narrates the pains of different countries of the Americas. Toward the end of the poem there are two drawings that resemble maps of some imaginary terrain. The niches in the first map are empty, filled with a void. The ones in the second include names of countries. Looking at them, the preceding pages of text begin to seem like another map, of partitioned city blocks or a cemetery with tombstones made of words. The last stanza of the poem before the drawings reads,

30. Is the tomb of the country’s love calling? Did you call out of pain? Out of pure pain? Was it out of pain that your love cried so hard? . . . are they calling me? Are you calling me?

This is one of the recurring themes in Zurita’s work: the psychological traces of political history on both the people and the landscape, and how one responds to being called by the voice of one’s pained country coming from the depths of darkness, long after the sources of that pain and the bodies emitting that voice are gone. This voice carried through in Zurita’s poems and the embodied, circular manner with which he approaches the topic have become, since those first encounters, a signpost on my path to addressing the pains of my own country, Iran, miles away from his. Because, of course, history repeats itself; even if this repetition is not in the details—though it can be—but more so in the psychological effects and fissures it leaves in our souls. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2020

October 19, 2020  |  in News  |  by Josefina Massot, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Our blog editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2020 issue!

Asymptote’s momentous fortieth issue features brand new work from thirty-two countries, a Dutch Literature Special Feature curated by 2020 International Booker Prize co-winner Michele Hutchison, and a literary roster spanning classics like Tagore, heavy hitters like Harwicz, and rising stars like Fabias. Dizzy yet? We’re here to help.

In the Chinese language, we never use the abstract noun of beauty. Instead, beauty is always a quality, a trait something possesses. There is, for example, no real way to express the notion that “beauty is all around us”; instead, one would say, “everything here is beautiful.” I find something wondrous in this distinct nature of what beauty is. It is a wandering state, a constantly mutating definition, a metamorphosing form that adapts to whatever subject it is applied to—never fixed, never permanent. Something is beautiful not for its appeal to the pure nature of beauty, but for its unique addition to the myriad of beauty’s appearances.

I was once again reminded of this definition while reading through the Fall 2020 issue, in which the writings from thirty-two countries have compiled and allowed the contours of literary beauty to vacillate and transmit. The various Englishes that evolve via translation do not subscribe necessarily to the English that certain texts are born to, instead bringing the colours and geometries of their own language, imparting a distinct and knowing pleasure. In Stella N’Djoku’s poems, the brief lines are vehicles for a cyclical musicality, emphasized by the rhyming Italian but also vivid in the tender translation of Julia Pelosi-Thorpe, sensitive in their lineation. The verses are potent with grief, but positions it within the great immeasurability of the world—creating a familiar dwelling for grace amidst pain, and the poem as our path towards that space.

As if yesterday today tomorrow
were not places
and were here now
in centuries.

In the two poems of Kashimiri poet Nādim, one is also reminded of the singular iterations of his the poet’s original language. As translator Sonam Kachru informs us in his translator’s note, “[Nādim] is thinking of [Kashmir’s] history—a history revealed, in part, through the history of its poetry.” There is then, an impression that we are not privy to when reading in translation, yet the poem still transmits the meditative, majestic quality of scanning the poetic horizons for something that reverberates from the past into the present, and back again. The stoic power of lines like:

I will not sing—
I will sing today no song of Nishat or Shalimar, no annealed song of waters
engraving terraced gardens, no bower songs of bedded flowers;
No soft songs flush or sweetly fresh, not green dew songs
nor songs gentle and growing—

READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

October 16, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Chamini Kulathunga, David Boyd, José García Escobar, and Julia Sherwood

The latest literary news from Japan, Slovakia, Sri Lanka, and Central America!

This week, our writer’s bring you the latest news from Japan, Slovakia, Sri Lanka, and Central America. In Japan, renowned writer and symbol of the #MeToo movement Shiori Ito is poised to reach a wider international audience with the forthcoming translation of her memoir, Black Box , and was named one of the “100 Most Influential People of 2020” by Time Magazine. In Slovakia, three prominent Slovak writers feature in a new interactive map made by University College London and Eva Luka was named as winner of the national poetry award. In Sri Lanka, October’s National Reading Month has begun, with winners of the recently announced literary awards selling fast. And in Central America, Guatemalan poet Giovany Emanuel Coxolcá Tohom won the Premio de Poesía Editorial Praxis, whilst José Luis Perdomo Orellana took home Guatemala’s most prestigious literary prize, the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature. Read on to find out more!  

David Boyd, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Japan

In September, Time Magazine named Shiori Ito one of the “100 Most Influential People of 2020.” Ito is a journalist, activist, and renowned symbol of Japan’s #MeToo movement, who—in the words of sociologist Chizuko Ueno—“has forever changed life for Japanese women with her brave accusation of sexual violence against her harasser.” Ito’s account of her experiences, Black Box, which was first published in Japanese in 2017 by Bungei Shunju, is due to be published next year in an English translation by Allison Markin Powell, whose previous translations include The Ten Loves of Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami and The Boy in the Earth by Fuminori Nakamura. Powell’s translation of Ito’s work will be published by Tilted Axis Press in the United Kingdom and Feminist Press in the United States.

Since the book’s publication in 2017, Powell says, “Ito’s message seems only to have grown more important, more urgent. Black Box is not a rape memoir. It’s a manifesto to tear down the system. Ito methodically maps out the ways in which institutions failed her, and how almost everyone attempted to gaslight her at each stage. Her perseverance is an inspiration.”

On her own experience working to bring Black Box into English, Powell says, “I’ve had to develop strategies so as not to take on too much of the trauma myself.”

In August, Ito sued LDP member Mio Sugita, “claiming that [Sugita’s] repeated ‘likes’ of tweets abusing her character constituted defamation,” as reported in The Mainichi. Sugita, who is known for having called the LGBT community “unproductive” in the past, has this month courted controversy once again, by admitting that she said “women lie” about sexual assault, after initially denying having made such a remark. As noted in The Japan Times, Sugita’s party was “slow and lukewarm” in their response. The lawmaker has not faced any penalties. READ MORE…

Our Fall 2020 Issue Is Here!

October 15, 2020  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Feat. Andrés Neuman, Ariana Harwicz, and Rabindranath Tagore amid new work from 32 countries, including a Dutch Special Feature

We are proud to present the Fall 2020 issue of Asymptote, debuting new work from 32 countries:.  

This cornucopia of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, reviews, and more includes such treats as a sparkling new translation of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s century-old fiction, an exclusive interview with rising star Andrés Neuman, and Elisabeth S. Clark’s polyphonic book concertos. 

Perfectly timed to coincide with Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and Michele Hutchison winning the 2020 International Booker Prize, our Dutch Literature Feature, guest curated by Hutchison, zooms in on the emerging and established voices of a small but mighty country. Here you can sample the English debuts of Curaçao-born Radna Fabias, whose first collection swept up an unprecedented number of major poetry prizes, and of Sinan Çankaya, whose best-selling memoir My Innumerable Identities recounts his efforts to combat racism in the Dutch police from the inside—only to be othered for his Turkish origins. 

Elsewhere, Ali Lateef’s bittersweet “The Belle and Gazelle Statue” uses a public monument to illustrate the changing face of Tripoli after the 2011 Libyan Civil War. The unease of our current moment is captured in Ariana Harwicz’s “Longevity,” a cathartic tale about the effects of a pandemic-caused lockdown on a small rural community in France. Somewhere between nature writing and memoir stands Itō Hiromi’s essay on migratory plants and how the concept of “the Other” manifests in different cultures. The lure of the foreign propels both Vadim Muratkhanov’s dispatch from Tashkent’s labyrinthine Tezikova market and Hungarian essayist Noémi Kiss’s travel into the remote wonders of Azerbaijan.

Wherever we are, we find comfort in the global literary voices of our time, for even when they reveal harsh truths about our world, they give us hope, inspire mutual understanding and heal divisions. Please help us spread the word about Asymptote’s latest issue by downloading and distributing our Fall 2020 flyer/postcard, or by posting about it on Facebook or Twitter. 

To promote this brand-new issue, we’re holding another giveaway contest: Share any of our #Fall2020 posts on social media to stand a chance of winning an Asymptote Book Club subscription. Every retweet or share will be counted, and there’s no limit to the number of entries you can enter. We’ll announce the lucky winner on Monday, November 2!

What’s New in Translation: October 2020

October 12, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla, George MacBeth, Georgina Fooks, and Jacqueline Leung

The best new writing from Norway, Argentina, Japan, and Colombia!

In the shorter brightnesses of autumn, we bring you four sublime new translations from around the world to fill your days with their generous offerings of fantasy, mysticism, intrigue, depth, and good old excellent writing. From a radical, genre-defying text that blends the textual and the cinematic, to an Argentine novel that expertly wields dream logic, to lauded Japanese writer Hiroko Oyamada’s latest release, to the first ever volume of poetry from a Colombian woman to be published in English, we’ve got the expert guide to your next literary excursions.

girls

Girls Against God by Jenny Hval, translated from the Norwegian by Marjam Idriss, Verso, 2020

Review by George MacBeth, Copy Editor

Unlike musicians, who often hear the same refrains sung back to them in crowds from Norway to Nizhny-Novgorod to Nottingham, writers can become disconnected from their corpus through the process of translation, often finding new markets and new readers for their early novels well into the mature phase of their authorship. Sometimes these multiple lives run in parallel, but more often than not, they’re discontinuous. Translated authors therefore begin to live out-of-sync with their work, jet-lagged as their oeuvre moves in transit across borders and between languages. This much is true of Jenny Hval, whose celebrated debut novella Paradise Rot was translated into English by Marjam Idriss in 2018, nine years after it was originally published in Norway. Now comes its highly anticipated successor Girls Without God, again translated from the Norwegian by Idriss.

Though mainly known for her eponymous musical output, comprising five studio albums and multiple collaborations (all in English), Jenny Hval originally studied creative writing in Melbourne and then in the Midwest, an experience of deracination (she originally hails from a small town in the south of Norway) that became the template for Paradise Rot. This book was a compost heap of bildungsroman, fantasy, horror, and queer love story—a peculiar, taut dreamwork that left residual stains in this reader’s memory. Its success lay in its distillation of a very particular ambience, the same oneiric mood conjured up by Hval’s music at its best (as on 2015’s Apocalypse, Girl): a dank warehouse filled with rotting fruit, sprouting mushrooms, and trashy novels; the estrangement of the Anglosphere’s soft food; the paradisical claustrophobia of a sudden and intense intimacy.

As Hval expressed in a discussion with Laura Snapes at the LRB bookshop in London, writing (rather than lyricism, or music) was her original aspiration—not so much because she felt she had any particular aptitude for it, but that, unlike the technological or instrumental expertise demanded by music, “it was unskilled. I could just do it.” This DIY ethos clearly informs the ambitious Girls Against God (whose title is itself drawn from a CocoRosie zine), which works over its themes in the same transgressive, intermedial groove as authors like Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, and, more recently, Jarett Kobek’s invective “bad novel” I Hate the Internet. For this reason, the novel deliberately resists a simple synopsis. An unnamed narrator, who in many respects resembles Hval, is back in Oslo after a spell abroad, working on a film treatment that will channel the provincial hatred of her rebellious adolescence, the legacy of early Black Metal’s irruption against Norwegian petit-bourgeois society, and the desire of “Girls Against God” to sustain their rebellion against the heteronormative “Scandinavian reproduction blueprint” even when “our corpse paint has long since run from our cheeks.” Whilst working on her filmscript, she documents the formation of a sort-of witches’ coven with her bandmates, co-conspirators, and weird sisters Venke and Terese, with whom she engages in esoteric rituals and discussions about art, gender, and magic.  READ MORE…

The Visceraless State: An Interview With Cristina Rivera Garza

October 8, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

[W]riting is a community-making practice . . . intimately, necessarily connected to the communities in which we live and which, ideally, we serve.

Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza is a foremost voice in contemporary Mexican literature. Known for her frequently dark subject matter and hybrid styles, her work focuses on marginalized people, challenging us to reconsider our preconceptions about boundaries and transgression. She has won major literary awards and is the only author to have twice won the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award (in 2011 and 2009). Her latest work to be translated into English, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, has just been published by Feminist Press and is a hybrid collection of journalism, crónicas, and essays, that explore systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the US-Mexico border. To coincide with its much-anticipated release, Asymptote’s Assistant Managing Editor Lindsay Semel spoke with Cristina Rivera Garza about the ideas behind this compelling work.   

“Let me just bring some tea, and I’ll be right back!” Cristina Rivera Garza dashed out of her Zoom screen briefly before settling back into her chair and adjusting her glasses with a warm smile, her air of familiarity challenging the oppressiveness of the geographical and technological distance to which we’ve lately become accustomed. In the following interview, we discuss Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, the striking latest collaboration between Garza and translator Sarah Booker. She reflects upon the demands that she makes of syntax, the enigmatic character of reality, the importance of solidarity and imagination, and how she and Booker coined the term “The Visceraless State.” Very much of the borderland between Mexico and the United States, her work meets the global, contemporary moment not despite its specificity, but because of it.

 —Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

Lindsay Semel (LS): You’ve stated in interviews, and it’s apparent in your work, that you intentionally test the limits between what language normally does and what it can do in order to discover new experiential possibilities between writer, text, and reader. I wonder if you could point to places in the text where you tested and stretched the limits of Spanish but were not able to do so the same way in English and vice versa. How do Spanish and English need to be challenged differently?

Cristina Rivera Garza (CRG): Every single project has to challenge language in specific ways. It always depends on the materials that I’m exploring, affecting, and letting myself be affected by, and there are specific ways that you can do that both in English and in Spanish. I tend to write longer sentences in Spanish and more fragmentarily in English, for example. When I am getting too long-winded in Spanish, I try to convey that thought with the directness and economy I associate with my relationship with English. At times, I try to use the semicolon in English, just because it is more common in Spanish and I want to see what happens to both sentence and sense. Constantly borrowing from English and borrowing from Spanish and taking traces and echoes from one language into the other, trying to honor and replicate the tension and friction that maintains them together where I live and how I think, has been almost a natural way of continuing to challenge both.

Sarah [Booker, translator of Grieving] is such a deft translator and we now know each other quite well. She’s been translating my work for a number of years and we have a very open, fluid conversation as she goes into the translation process: less a process of moving language from one context to a another, and more a search for similar effects based on the affective capacities of host and receiving languages. I work closely with syntax, especially if I’m exploring issues such as violence and suffering. Pause, breathlessness, all those aspects of a body going through tremendous pressure or pain inflicted—in terms of keeping both form and content responding to the same challenges, it is important that syntax and semantics are somehow reflecting and embodying that experience. That’s when writing occurs.

I think of translation as a creative process too. I see Sarah as my co-author and her work as a way through which I receive my book back anew. I think she’s a poet at heart. I don’t know if she knows that, but all those experiments with language, that’s something she’s very deft at. READ MORE…