Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

November 10, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, Ibrahim Sayed Fawzy Elsayed, and MARGENTO

News from Ireland, Bulgaria, the Philippines, and Egypt!

This week, our editors report around the world on the widely varied achievements and explored potentialities of literature. From book fairs in the UAE to Filipino songs, from Bulgarian “Enlighteners” to Dublin’s Book Festival, read on to find out more!

Ibrahim Sayed Fawzy Elsayed, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Egypt 

Amidst the chaos and confusion engulfing the world lately, it’s been hard to tear one’s eyes away from the news. We’re deeply saddened by the heartbreaking photos coming from Gaza, which remains under attack. One can only hope that the violence is ceased immediately and light and peace prevail soon. In this dispatch, I’ll share a glimmer of hope from across the Arab World.

Egyptian literature continues to shine both in the East and the West; Ashraf El-Ashmawi’s الجمعية السرية للمواطنين (The Secret Society of Citizens), published by Al-Dar Al-Masriah Al-Lubnaniah, and Rasha Adly’s أنت تشرق، أنت تضيء (You Shine, You Light Up), published by Dar El-Shorouk, have won the ninth edition of the Katara Prize for Arabic Novels.

Meanwhile, Rania Bedda’s  حلق مريم (Maryam’s Earring), illustrated by Aya Khamis and published by Nahdet Misr Group, won the Etisalat Award for Arabic Children’s Literature in the Young Adult category. The story takes readers on a transformative journey with Maryam as she seeks identity and purpose through the art of Nubian jewelry design. Also, sixteen titles from eleven languages have been longlisted for the prestigious Warwick Prize for Women in Translation; among them is author-translator Deena Mohamed’s debut graphic novel, Your Wish is My Command, published by Granta. READ MORE…

Uncertainty, Improbability, and Hope: An Interview with Ariel Dorfman

November 9, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

. . . how can we tell the truth about the terrors and oppression we are witnessing, and not become agents of despair?

In September, Argentine-Chilean novelist Ariel Dorfman released his latest novel, The Suicide Museum (Other Press)—one that has been fifty years in the making. In the narrative, we follow the author’s eponymous alter ego, who is sent by a man named Joseph Hortha to uncover the truth behind the death of socialist president Salvador Allende. Was it murder or suicide?

Fifty years ago, on September 11, 1973, the Chilean Armed Forces, led by Augusto Pinochet and with the support of Richard Nixon, the US government, and the CIA, launched a military coup against the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. The coup targeted Palacio La Moneda, resulting in the death of President Allende and the dawn of a military dictatorship led by Pinochet, which lasted until 1990; during Pinochet’s rule, approximately three thousand people were killed, and one thousand more are still missing. Dorfman offers a unique perspective to these events; in 1973, he (and “Ariel”) served as cultural advisor to Allende. He was supposed to be with Allende in La Moneda on September 11, 1973, but switched places with a colleague at the last minute. So, the author survived—unlike many of his friends and colleagues.

Set in 1990, “Ariel’s” search occurs twenty-one years before Allende’s body was exhumed a second time, and a judge “with impeccable credentials,” according to Dorfman, finally determined his cause of death. Juxtaposed by this reality, The Suicide Museum is a political thriller, a historical fiction novel, and a murder mystery.

In the fallout of this turmoil, Dorfman has spent most of his life living in exile. Even after democracy returned to Chile, he’s remained abroad, returning only occasionally. We see and feel that distance and familiarity in The Suicide Museum; we feel “Ariel’s” nostalgia and survivor’s guilt, his shame and regrets, his courage and his dreams, and through that emotional journey, we also see Allende’s first exhumation, we feel the effects of the dictatorship, we see the end of that dictatorship, we get a glimpse of “Ariel’s” creative process, and we see how life rapidly changed for Chileans after the coup, through flashbacks.

“Ariel” and Joseph Hortha ruminate on life, death, suicide, socialism, capitalism, climate change, Latin America. Like a pair of boxers, these two friends, allies, adversaries, confidants, challenge each other, interject each other, insult, comfort, and—sometimes—agree. After claiming that Allende saved his life, Hortha now wants to know if Allende committed suicide. “Ariel,” then, must go to New York, London, Chile.  He must talk to the people, to Allende’s gravedigger, to rivals and sympathizers. He must talk to Patricio Guijón, Allende’s doctor, who was next door at the time of Allende’s death. He must talk to Adrián Balmaceda, Allende’s bodyguard, and the last person to see him alive, to determine the presidente’s cause of death.

Ariel Dorfman remains a towering figure in Latin American and World literature. He’s the author of books such as How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, Death and The Maiden, and Heading South, Looking North. In this interview, we talked about his latest novel, but also about autofiction, inspiration, survivor’s guilt, his relationship with English and Spanish, living in exile, how Latin America is brothered through exile, the future of Chile, and what he remembers of that September 11, fifty years ago.  

José García Escobar (JGE): I wanted to talk first about the blend between fact and fiction in The Suicide Museum. In Michael Chabon’s Moonglow, we can find a type of disclaimer at the beginning of the novel: “In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it.” The book is marketed as a “novel,” and that word appears on the cover, but much like Chabon, the characters in this “novel”—particularly Ariel—call it a “memoir.” How did you handle this distinction?

Ariel Dorfman (AD): When I first realized that the only way—at least for me—to narrate this quest (the search for the truth about Salvador Allende’s death on September 11, 1973), was to send my own self—really, an alter ego—to Chile, I did so with both joy and trepidation. Trepidation, because it was risky to use my own life, sticking to as many details of that life as possible (my wife, my children, my friends, my return to my country in 1990), and to simultaneously treat all of it fictionally and invent many scenes and characters (including how I present myself) within the straitjacket of a pre-existent chronological order. And joy because I was able to explode the limits of the genre, particularly what is called “autofiction.”

READ MORE…

Visual Spotlight: Mekhitar Garabedian on Linguistic Identity

November 8, 2023  |  in Visual Art  |  by Mekhitar Garabedian

I'm interested in the dynamics between comprehension and incomprehension.

As Mekhitar Garabedian told Eva Heisler, Asymptote’s former Visual Editor, “[b]ecause of the contemporary political, economic, and cultural situation of Lebanon and Syria, and of the Middle East in general, these places (and their histories) are meaningful, significant, and vital presences in my daily life. Diaspora means experiencing a disseminated, shattered, divided self.” This statement suggests that diasporic identity is both a geographic and historical condition and that it is marked by both continuous felt presence and continuous literal absence. It is, in this way, a condition of both the shattering Garabedian names and one of possibility, as demonstrated in the art that comes from so many diasporas, including Garabedian’s own. In this edition of our recurring series highlighting visual work from our archives, we revisit Garabedian’s feature from our July 2015 issue.

Without even leaving, we are already no longer there, 2010–2011, video installation, DVD, 3 screens, dimensions variable, 3 x 30min. Detail. With Nora Karaguezian and Laurice Karaguezian. Cinematography by Céline Butaye and Mekhitar Garabedian.

Without even leaving, we are already no longer there, 2010–2011, video installation, DVD, 3 screens, dimensions variable, 3 x 30min. Detail. With Nora Karaguezian and Laurice Karaguezian.
Cinematography by Céline Butaye and Mekhitar Garabedian.

In my research, I contemplate the conceptual possibilities of the work of art. I often use modes of repetition that reference literature, philosophy, cinema, pop culture, and the works of other visual artists—citing, replicating, and distorting references, exemplary modes, and works from art history and from my own history. I employ references as structures or elements upon which I can build, adding different layers, or contaminating them with altogether different contexts.

My interest in citation developed instinctively, probably through the experience of growing up with two languages, which engendered the feeling of always speaking with the words of others, perhaps also by encountering the early films, full of citations, of Jean-Luc Godard, at a young age, and through growing up in the nineties with the art of sampling as practiced in hip hop culture.

My use of citations or references also comes from my interest in the idea that identity is always a borrowed identity. One can never pretend to be someone out of the chain of the past. One is always speaking with the words of others. Talking with the words of others requires a library (and a dictionary) of the words of others. In my work, I use talking with the words of others and the construction of a (personal) library as a conceptual artistic strategy. My use of modes of repetition also relates to the Catastrophe; after a disaster, only thinking in ruins, in fragments, cut-outs or debris, remains possible. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: from “My Father’s Cité: An Adolescence in Social Housing” by Mehdi Charef

November 7, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Clayton McKee

My mom, my sister, my brother, and I have waited in France for ten years to get this privilege.

This Translation Tuesday, Mehdi Charef recounts his father’s teenage experiences in a newly-built Parisian banlieue. Social housing holds undreamed of comforts for his migrant family, and apprehension quickly turns to delight. Comfort! Safety! Privacy! Hot water! A new, fuller life beckons in the projects, and it involves quantities of rock ‘n’ roll, girlfriends and Carson McCullers.

It’s the Chinese building manager who told us that we had to move.  The immigrant families who had lived in shacks—think shipping containers turned ruins with wear and tear over the past eight years—in the cité de transit, or transitional social housing, on Rue de Valenciennes in Nanterre would now need to pack their bags. Two feelings arise with the announcement of the news: anxiety and melancholy. This move represents a separation. We know where we came from but not where they are taking us. They didn’t ask us about anything, and they aren’t telling us about anything. We are leaving our most recent safe place.

In the bidonville, I had learned that there were Algerians outside of the ones in the village where I was born. In the cité de transit, I had learned Berber and African expressions as well as all the Portuguese curse words.

It isn’t the shacks that I liked but the people who lived in them. In front of them, I kept my head held high because I was like them. It’s only in front of my French classmates that I was ashamed…

Our housing project is going to be demolished. The construction of a large industrial park is set to take its place:  la Défense.

Our new apartment is in Cité Rouge. The neighborhood is named that because of the brick façades of the buildings. It’s in the city Gennevilliers surrounded by small, old houses. We are no longer the isolated immigrant population. People walk down our alleys, underneath our windows. We are no longer the shame of those who were kind to us. We became visible before we were heard… READ MORE…

The Infinite Potentials Between Korean and the World: A Conversation With Nicole Hur, Editor-in-Chief of the Hanok Review

November 6, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

I consider a solely ethical aim in translation to be unattainable, and one that mistakenly assumes a culturally void image of the translator.

The Hanok Review is a rising journal of Korean literature, publishing Korean-to-English translations, interviews, and original creative writing by authors identifying with Korean culture. At the intersection of contemporary, global letters and the Korean diaspora, the Hanok Review cultivates its unique voice by managing each translation internally, curating Korean-language poetry submissions that speak to a multilingual world of pan-Korean identity, with each editor contributing to the journal’s harmonious chorus of translations. In this interview, I spoke to the founder and editor-in-chief, Nicole Hur, about the philosophy of translation and Korean literature, as the Hanok Review launches their second issue.

Michelle Chan Schmidt (MCS): Nicole, in addition to founding and editing the Hanok Review, you also wear the hats of poet and translator. I’d love to hear your opinion on a wonderful essay by Nicole Wong published in our Summer 2023 issue, “The Terroir of a Single Work: Redefining Scope in Approaches to Translation.” It dissects the techniques of translation with metaphorical heft and eloquent clarity and asks the same question you do: “What is home?” How do you understand Wong’s words on foreignization and domestication in relation to the Hanok Review’s translations?

Nicole Hur (NH): Perhaps because I was a poet before a translator, I naturally came to the process of translation with the textual cues and self-awareness enabled by poetic depth. I see this in what Wong articulates as “foreignization with an appropriate scope,” in which the receptor language takes on a “foreign” or non-standard form in an effort to resemble the particular authorial manipulation of the source language; that is, translation as an act of transferring the various stylistic elements in which an author articulates their world from the bounds of one language to another. I believe this intimate approach to translation yields a natural sensitivity to—or at least awareness of—the source text’s socio-cultural context. This sensitivity enables resisting unfounded projections of foreignization or domestication.

Translation can never be perfect, in the sense that the Korean “eomma” can never fully equate to the English “mother,” even in its literal glory. I often think back to Ocean Vuong’s quotation: “even if I were to write the word ‘the’… that is still an Asian-American ‘the.’ I can’t escape it, so if I can’t escape it, I should tend to my curiosities beyond the identity. Because the identity is already there, it’s embedded into everything.”

I want to emphasize the notion of traversing “beyond the identity.” As Wong asserts that the “translator is not a transparent vessel for the foreign author,” I consider a solely ethical aim in translation (at least in regard to foreignization and domestication) to be unattainable, and one that mistakenly assumes a culturally void image of the translator. Translation can never fully be ethical, nor should it aim to be, so how, then, can we reconcile these innate cultural differences—the difference between a Korean “the” and an English “the”? I propose the medium of poeticism. Through careful and deliberate poetic choices, translators have the opportunity to reimbue texts with their socio-cultural nuances beyond the inextricable murkiness of cultural identities and into the workable scope of literary identity—which is in itself a kind of cultural identity. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

November 3, 2023  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Wambua Muindi, and Zohra Salih

The latest literary news from Hong Kong, India, and Kenya!

This week, our Editors-at-Large report on documentaries about poetry, award-winning short stories, and exciting translation fellowships. From novels shortlisted for big prizes to upcoming movie screenings, read on to find out more!

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

Taiwan’s 60th annual Golden Horse Awards will be held on November 25 and Hong Kong film director Ann Hui’s most recent documentary Elegies is nominated for the Best Documentary Feature. Elegies was already selected as the opening film for the Hong Kong International Film Festival earlier this year, which was a rare occasion as poetry—the subject of the documentary—used to be a niche literary interest in the city. The first part of Elegies presents a sketching of contemporary Hong Kong poetry through interviews of Hong Kong poets and archival materials of Xi Xi and Leung Ping-kwan. The second and third part of the documentary are dedicated to two Hong Kong poets, Huang Canran and Liu Wai-tong, respectively, who both have deep cultural roots with Hong Kong but choose to live elsewhere. Hui studied literature at university, and poetry had long been a subject matter that the director wished to explore through the medium of the moving picture. The film is her way of paying homage to local poetry and the city, as well as an elegy for a bygone era.

To celebrate the nomination and achievement of Elegies, M+ Museum has organised a few screening sessions of the documentary in November. The November 18 screening includes a post-screening dialogue with the director and the featured poets, moderated by M+ film curator Li Cheuk-to. Ann Hui will discuss her ideas about poetry and the implications of poetry for her film productions. The three artists will engage in conversations on the essence of poetry, as well as their own stories of poetry writing. READ MORE…

Language Is the Horse: On Rebecca Suzuki’s When My Mother Is Most Beautiful

November 2, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Jay Boss Rubin

More surprising than Suzuki’s work as a translator is the presence, in her book, of a translation’s ghost.

When My Mother Is Most Beautiful by Rebecca Suzuki, Hanging Loose Press, December 2023

Technically classified as a book of poetry, Rebecca Suzuki’s debut collection, When My Mother Is Most Beautiful, contains verse, prose, drama, and haibun, a form that combines prose and haiku. Across the delightful hybridity, the author achieves thematic cohesion through her enthusiastic embrace of multilingualism. From the first entry to the last, Suzuki demonstrates multilingualism’s ability to make more resonant questions of identity that, trapped within a single tongue, remain stifling. “When I was 産まれた,” reads the book’s opening line, followed by a footnote that states, simply, “born.” For Suzuki, who immigrated to Bayside, Queens, from Nagoya, Japan, when she was 9, being born was an event that took place—and takes place for the author still—in a combination of English and Japanese. By comparison, Suzuki’s description of New York pizza (“cheese oozing off the side with hot orange oil pooling at the top”) is decidedly monolingual. Meanwhile, the dialogue in that same entry—between the author-speaker, her mother, and her sister—appears in Japanese. What the three family members say amongst themselves is translated in footnotes.

For a reader who does not know Japanese, the entry, titled “early days,” presents a kind of inverse experience of Suzuki’s initial weeks in New York, which involved navigating a new cultural environment, plus the logistical challenges of trips to the welfare office and the Herculean task of finding an apartment. The pizza, despite its mouthwatering description, feels public facing and familiar; what’s said between family members, on the street and in the restaurant, feels private. In a painful but poignant possible coincidence, the pizzeria in which the mother and sisters land for their respite may have once belonged to Suzuki’s Jewish-American father. The family’s move to the United States follows his death—an event, no doubt tragic, that the author addresses mostly obliquely. With much more directness, Suzuki confronts her preoccupations with the well-being of her ancestors at large. In an entry titled “eggplant,” she lays her fear bare: “My biggest worry has come true. How do my ancestors get home?”

The titular eggplant, which is also depicted in evocative original artwork on the book’s cover, is also a horse. Suzuki introduces the eggplant horse, her most striking metaphor, in an early entry about Obon, Japan’s festival of the dead:

my aunt makes a horse out of a thin cucumber or eggplant by sticking disposable chopsticks into them as legs. We all walk to the beach with the horse. When we get there, we light incense and let the eggplant horse float away in the water. That is how the spirits travel back to heaven.

Note the absence of simile: the creature isn’t like a horse or intended to represent one. It is alive, moving, capable of transporting others. The eggplant horse doesn’t only cross between the world of the living and the world of the dead. It traverses borders between the United States and Japan, English and Japanese, meaning and word, word and image. Suzuki’s horse reminded me viscerally of a moment in The Magical Language of Others, by E.J. Koh. In that hybrid-genre, multilingual, translation-obsessed text, Koh, who longs for a pet parakeet and flight from loneliness and isolation, fashions a bird out of a plastic bag tied to a string. The make-shift kite soars: “So little labor could bring so great a reward,” she writes. READ MORE…

Translating the Caribbean

November 1, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Aaron Coleman, C. Francis Fisher, Kaiama Glover, and Urayoán Noel

The translations lead to thinking about what translation makes possible in a critical sense and in a differently shaped and understood archive.

The following conversation took place after a reading as part of “Colloquy: Translators in Conversation,” a series based in New York City and sponsored by World Poetry Books. In April 2023, the Clemente in Manhattan hosted the fifth installment of Colloquy, “Translating the Caribbean” with Aaron Coleman, Urayoán Noel, and Kaiama Glover. After the reading, the curator of the series, C. Francis Fisher, engaged the translators in the following conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length.

C. Francis Fisher (CF): I want to start by asking about the title of this event. I named this evening “Translating the Caribbean” and I’m wondering whether that idea of translating the Caribbean is helpful in terms of the work that you do or whether it glosses over important differences between the cultures, languages, and realities of different islands in the Caribbean. 

Aaron Coleman (AC): I’m glad that you opened with this question because for me “the Caribbean” is just one of the many frames that we can have in mind when translating. I’ll say for me, there are various frames that I try to hold in my mind at the same time. One would obviously be the national, but even within the national, we see the way that blackness sometimes complicates national identities. So, there’s the national and then there’s frames within the national, but then there’s also a regional frame to the Caribbean.

For me, the frame that I’m always searching for and curious about is beyond the national at a diasporic scale. So, we could call this translating the Caribbean, but I was also thinking about translating the African diaspora.

Kaiama Glover (KG): I’m glad you spoke first. I had a hot take. I still have the same take, but now I’ve sat with it for a second [laugh]. I have no problem with that grouping that in some ways elides the borders between the various nation states of the Caribbean because the Balkinization of the islands was based on legacies of colonialism that are still intact and have left us with language that makes it difficult for people who are of the same broad history and related culture to communicate. First, there was the initial break of community, the kidnapping of the middle passage, and then there is the persistence of that breaking through the nation language borders of the Caribbean. So, I love translating the Caribbean outward toward the diaspora. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Olivia Elias

October 31, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Jérémy Victor Robert

tongue like ground/ riddled with holes/ words unwilling to take/ shape

Today is Halloween, so here is a Halloween-related story: eleven years ago, after launching our Halloween-themed Fall 2012 issue, we heard that the cover (by guest artist June Glasson) hadn’t gone over well in some corners of the Internet. Despite their clearly (or so I thought!) childlike proportions, its ghoulish trick-or-treaters reminded some readers of the Ku Klux Klan. We learnt a valuable lesson about spelling out editorial intentions, especially when a lot is at stake. This Translation Tuesday, as we present two heartbreaking poems by past contributor Olivia Elias in Jérémy Victor Robert’s lucid translation—poems that were written before the October 7th attack, but which nevertheless speak to the ongoing humanitarian crisis—I want to make clear that we stand against Hamas’s brutality as well as with innocent civilian Gazans who are now being drawn into the war. We call for a ceasefire—which the U.N. overwhelmingly voted for three days ago—to be enacted immediately. We also chose to publish these poems against the backdrop of Palestinian voices being silenced—such as when the Frankfurt Book Fair recently canceled its prize presentation ceremony honoring Adania Shibli for Minor Detail—incidentally, our May 2020 Book Club pick. It is especially during such fraught times that we should listen to and read one another. 

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief, Asymptote

floating everywhere, the white shadows

often pain wakes them
in their severed limbxxxa brain area
lights upxxxneurologists say

phantom limb pain (named)

/
likewise on the world map
& in the cortexxxxthe indelible print

as if it could be enough to replace
with a pen stroke plus a few
statements/vetoesxxxa country’s name
to erase it

isn’t there always in our homes
at our tablesxxxa place for ghosts

floating everywhere, the white shadows

Tongue like Ground

tongue like ground
riddled with holes
words unwilling to take
shape
keep escaping through
holes

all I do is repeatxxxrepeat
xxxmy Name
xxxxis not
xxxNo One
xxxxfrom
xxxthe Land
xxxxof
xxxNo One

against burying under screedxxxrepeat
mantra
xxxxam fully alive made of silt & clay from this Mount

overlooking the same seaxxxupon which shines the same sun
as in the early stages

Translated from the French by Jérémy Victor Robert

A poet of the Palestinian diaspora, born in Haifa in 1944, Olivia Elias writes in French. She lived until the age of 16 in Lebanon, where her family took refuge in 1948, then in Montréal, Canada, before moving to France. Characterized by terse language and strong rhythms, her poetry shows a deep sensitivity to the Palestinian cause, the plight of refugees, and human suffering. Her work, translated into English, Arabic, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, appeared in anthologies and numerous journals, including Arablit, Asymptote Journal, Plume Poetry, Poetry Daily, Poetry London, The Barcelona Review, Circulo de Poesía, Nayagua, Arablit, Al Araby-Al- Jedeed and, in France, Apulée, Poezibao, Poésie première, and Phoenix. With Chaos, Crossing, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, she made her English-language debut, probing deeply into the upheavals of the 20th and 21st centuries. Published in November 2022 by World Poetry, the collection was reviewed by Poetry Foundation and figures among World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translations of 2022 and onWords Without Borders’ November Watchlist. In September 2023 appeared, in a limited illustrated edition, Your Name, Palestine, a chapbook translated by Sarah Riggs and Jérémy Victor Robert (World Poetry Books).

Jérémy Robert is a translator between English and French who works and lives in his native Réunion Island. He published French translations of Sarah Riggs’ Murmurations (APIC, 2021, with Marie Borel), Donna Stonecipher’s Model City (joca seria, 2020), and Etel Adnan’s Sea & Fog (L’Attente, 2015). He recently translated Chibuihe Obi Achimba’s poem, “a sonnet: a slaughter field,” which was published on Poezibao’s website, and Michael Palmer’s Little Elegies for Sister Satan, excerpts of which were posted online by Revue Catastrophes. Together with Sarah Riggs, he translated Olivia Elias’ Your Name, Palestine (World Poetry Books, 2023).

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Read more from Translation Tuesdays on the Asymptote blog:

 

Announcing Our October Book Club Selection: A Shining by Jon Fosse

October 30, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Georgina Fooks

Fosse understands that this experience he recounts is beyond rational belief; it resists all efforts to restrain it into language.

The Nobel announcement this year came with particular delight to us at Asymptote, as it perfectly coincided with our Book Club partnership with Transit Books to bring you Jon Fosse’s latest offering in English, the surreal and contemplative A Shining. Written in the Norwegian author’s singular blend of contemplation and poetic prowess, the novella is a metaphysical tale of mystery given physicality, a masterful portrayal of what we’re wandering in—and what we’re wandering towards.

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

A Shining by Jon Fosse, translated from the Norwegian, Transit, 2023

On October 5, 2023, the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, with the committee lauding ‘his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable’. This preoccupation with the unsayable is ever present in Fosse’s work, and in A Shining, the latest title by the author to appear in Damion Searls’ translation, it takes the form of an entity, a shimmering outline of a being, appearing to the novella’s narrator in the forest. This spiritual encounter pulses at the bounds of language, at the threshold of the divine. Recounted in Fosse’s characteristic style—rhythmic, cyclical, flowing like a cascade—the slender volume offers an introduction to its author at the height of his powers.

Long before becoming a Nobel laureate, to speak of Fosse was (and perhaps still is) to speak in hushed and reverent tones. In a piece on the ‘incantatory power’ of Fosse’s work for The Atlantic, Damion Searls shares that, after encountering a German translation, he began learning Norwegian just so that he could translate the author’s Norwegian Nynorsk—in Fosse’s words a ‘rare language’, spoken in the west of the country by roughly a tenth of the population. In a similar note of awe, literary critic Merve Emre has described Fosse’s Septology, a seven-volume, three-tome masterwork written in one long sentence, as ‘the only novel I have read that has made me believe in the reality of the divine’. But for readers who may shy away from Septology’s many pages, A Shining is perhaps a welcome alternative, as a novella that reveals a glimpse of Fosse’s singular mystery—in condensed form. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

October 27, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar, Rubén López, and Thuy Dinh

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

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

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

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

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

READ MORE…

Second Lives: On the Literary Turns of Ingmar Bergman and Werner Herzog

October 26, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Iona Tait

. . . the turn to writing illustrates a filmmaker’s search for further exploration of their ideas—a way to keep them alive.

One is used to seeing adaptations from the page to the screen, yet there is a less common phenomenon that seems to operate in the opposite direction: film directors who later go on to explore the realm of letters. In this essay, Iona Tait looks at the works of two notable filmmakers and their written works, tracing the discernible ideas that flow from image to text.

After a life of working with the screen, a particular type of filmmaker has historically turned to writing fiction. Last year, at the age of seventy-nine, Michael Mann published his first novel: a prequel and sequel based on his 1995 film, Heat. Quentin Tarantino announced in 2009 that he would retire from cinema once he had made ten features, to “write novels and write cinema literature, and stuff like that.” Ingmar Bergman wrote an autobiography and three novels in quick succession after he had ostensibly bid farewell to cinema with his 1982 film, Fanny and Alexander. And in 2021, the debut novel of then-seventy-nine-year-old Werner Herzog was published in German—with its English translation following one year later. While some filmmakers have forayed into novelistic ventures earlier in life, a pattern nonetheless seems to emerge, and the latecomers’ attempts are often viewed with suspicion. Similar to Bergman’s confession that he wants to “go down with flag flying high,” Tarantino has been lambasted for displaying the narcissistic urge to not have a “late career”—and this seemingly selfish desire has been set against the more generous, total embrace of cinema endorsed by Martin Scorsese, who had admitted before the release of his twenty-seventh feature that he “want[s] to tell stories, and there’s no more time.” Since writing a book grants the creative agent more autonomy, such endeavors by famed directors might appear at first as nothing but an alternative expression of megalomania. 

The theory of the director as a controlling agent harkens back to the auteur theory. Established by the film theorist André Bazin in 1951, the concept of the auteur filmmaker likened the filmmaker to the author, describing both as being completely in charge of the creative process; in doing so, the theory upheld a hierarchy of the arts in which the written word triumphed. Whilst critics have challenged whether the auteur theory is convincing in light of the creative roles played by cinematographers, producers, editors, and actors, many filmmakers have indeed been characterized, by others as well as themselves, as controlling agents. In a 1983 interview, Bergman admitted he was “authoritarian by nature,” adding that his “democratic qualities aren’t that well developed, due in large part to my profession.” Herzog’s unrelenting vision, often to the detriment of his crew and actors, has been recorded most notoriously in Les Blank’s documentary, Burden of Dreams, on the making of Fitzcarraldo. In addition to dominion, the theory also postulates that the filmmaker can resemble the author in other ways, such as in maintaining a coherent style and theme across their body of work. 

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I Was Young: On Mutsuo Takahashi’s Only Yesterday

October 25, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

[Takahashi] folds time’s unforgiving continuum in one motion, collapsing it into that narrow, white space between one line and the next . . .

Only Yesterday by Mutsuo Takahashi, translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles, Canarium Books, 2023

Classicists are not known for pared-back prose, but in the June 1936 edition of The Classical Journal, Hanako Hoshino Yamagiwa penned a candid, simple piece on the multiple, “surprising” similarities between Ancient Greece and the Japan of her time—a comparison drawn not through extensive research, but the “things which I actually saw, heard, or read from my childhood”. Published for its novelty more than its expertise, this quiet, strange essay touches on a myriad of surface resemblances: agricultural practices, the affinity of Athena and Amaterasu, the lack of romance in marital matters, the habit of passing things from left to right. Together, these daily observations hint towards a woman who, while reading about a nation that could not be further away, had seen a vision of her own life. And so, what emerges is not a convincing portrait of how these island countries may mirror one another between their spatial and temporal distances, but testimony for a vaster pattern: the travelling body hunting the ontological material of geography to retell history, to excavate an expression of the self from the mired cliffs and centuries. It is the story of a body curious, remembering, and in motion. Its muddied tracks.

In Mutsuo Takahashi’s Only Yesterday, Greece is the poet’s material, base, and centre. Through over one hundred and fifty short poems, each translated with much care and expertise by Jeffrey Angles, the poet casts upon shores and mountains, daybreaks and cicada-filled treelines, portioning out a lifelong fascination with the archipelago and all that links it to the world. An extensive corpus has already attested to the depth of Takahashi’s affinity for the Hellenic—from translations of Euripedes and Sophocles to a repertoire of essays and interpretations—but this collection, largely written in his seventy-ninth year, is the first to be entirely dedicated to Greece. And perhaps it is because of this timing, in the winter of the poet’s life, that the view presented in these brief lines is not one of raw precision, of wandering or travelogue, but of Greece dissolving, slowly, into the liquid called reflection.

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Translation Tuesday: From “MetaXa” by László Garaczi

October 24, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Csilla Toldy

you cannot discriminate between the noises, you are waiting for Marina and salt blisters grow on your skin

An excerpt from MetaXa translated by Csilla Toldy channels the celebrated voice of contemporary Hungarian writer László Garaczi. Witty and provocative, this Translation Tuesday, we view the mundane with intense feeling through Asztrik’s eyes, jumping from erratic observation to probing thought on the love of a woman. Read on for an uncommon foray into another’s sensory world – feverish in its vibrance.   

a spacious lonely month awaits me, pinned to it the remainder of my life at home, light trembling under the skin—I have to meet the middleman from Hamburg, we have to clarify the details of the mission; I don’t talk to anyone for days, I stagger around in the July heat, I slowly begin to understand that I cannot do anything with this city, sharp menacing hot unevenness, it does not let me come closer to itself no matter how sly or flattering I am, I cannot smuggle myself into its good graces and my patience is running out—it is hard to imagine that I will have to sun dry in the heat for another two weeks—a blind fire flares up from under the earth—even your shadow scorches—you jerk back from the flame that flashes at you from the dying waves on the shore or the white stones, the cars are colourful leeches on the steaming asphalt—you hover weightlessly without an outline and choke, and then, when you are ready to give up there is the miracle, a new era—you throw the red plastic camera into an armchair, fall asleep—wake—sleep, forget even the forgetting—you carry on with the mantra even when awake—the air conditioning monster crunches its iron teeth, a picture on the wall, the air vibrates with the colours as if humming—you wriggle around on the bed, the picture on the wall doesn’t let you sleep, it’s a salmon with a glory,

you go down to reception—name tag Saulius—he rants on an exhale: how-are-you-thanks- fine, he holds a lit cigarette between his ring and little finger—you ask for the key to the net room, the air conditioning is not working, the window opens to a filthy alleyway and a neon sign in the gap between the fire walls: Moon Palace—you visit a few hacker sites, they are selling stone samples brought from the moon in apollo 13, stolen from NASA with photos and prices; with your usual name: Asztrik, you enter a Hungarian language US-room, there are about ten of them around not excited to see you, a closed group and they have no time for you—they are busy bankrupting Cat Canada at the moment; Maximillia is the demon of the chat room—she dominates the territory, knows no mercy, brutal, real—are you rebelling slaves—she leaves and knows that they will talk about her—a few of them follow her straight away—and then there is only Little Strawberry left—silence—you’re waiting for her to say something; Detko enters and starts chatting: she is holidaying in New York, she gives you her number privately, call her and have a drink together—Little Strawberry remains silent all along; before you leave, you take a look at the Gellert Mountain on the web camera and the light chain of the Elizabeth Bridge, you twitch under the feelings flooding you—go up to your room, it is cooler now, but the air conditioner is screeching—you imagine Maximillia, the demon in Budapest and Detko, the giggling teenager in New York—you are lying alone in a ran-down room in Brooklyn, the dread pumps adrenaline into your brain, even though tomorrow will be summer, too, and a bank holiday—the skyscrapers are sparkling, two spinning numbers show how many people are living on the planet and how much they owe to the banks—the sun is beating down in the park, rock musicians wearing white on a podium, spinning dancers on skates, a guitar-shaped boxplant, toilet basin, skull, another bush shaped like a finger-biscuit, forget, forget, oblivion—the Chinese girl who taught you the word oblivion after a concert—you cannot remember her name—forgetting the problem is the solution; you wake up at noon, sweltering heat—you are sitting on a bench on the promenade near the bridge in the shade, on the other side of the water the houses are trembling in the rising steam, the smell of chips iodine dead fish rubber acetone—cities smell more in summer—little balls of different smells bang your nose, the last miserable smoker stubs out his last miserable cigarette in Manhattan; at night I’m again in the net room—the mouse lies exactly in the same angle on the mousepad showing the airplanes approaching the WTC towers; in one of the common areas at least forty of them are fighting, Maximillia amongst them—you don’t even check the name list when your private window appears—you are alone with the demon—what’s up, hi, Maximillia—you did not call Detko, upsy-daisy—she disappears, you search around: nothing, she left—you call Detko on an impulse—it is ringing, you have to concentrate to breathe—in and out;

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