Winter 2023: Highlights from the Team

February 1, 2023  |  in News  |  by Barbara Halla, Caridad Svich, Ellen Elias-Bursać, Georgina Fooks, Heather Green, Ian Ross Singleton, Janet Phillips, Marina Dora Martino, and Thuy Dinh

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

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

—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor

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

—Georgina Fooks, Director of Outreach

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

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Jhio Jan Navarro

January 31, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Eric Abalajon

we chew off fresh sugarcane and tell overblown stories

This Translation Tuesday, we feature three poems translated from the Hiligaynon – a language that Asymptote is proud to feature for the first time. The poems that addres are from Jhio Jan Navarro’s first chapbook Pinili nga Binaylaybay, Piling Tula (Selected Poems) released by the independent publisher Kasingkasing Press in 2022 that is made up of poems in both Filipino and Hiligaynon. Hear about the process of translating these poems from translator Eric Abalajon.

“Jhio Jan Navarro’s first chapbook tackles themes of intimacy in its many forms and documenting injustices especially in his home province of Negros Occidental. Navarro’s language manages to be both idiomatic and straightforward. What comes out is somewhat familiar to English readers, but now made ironic or imbibed with deeper meaning. In ‘The Bird in The City’, the popular expression ‘the early bird catches the worm’ is revised to illustrate urban cruelty and precarity. While in ‘Figure of Death’, the event of winged termites flocking to a light source during the rainy season might bring to mind the story of the Fall of Icarus. However, probably more recognizable to Filipino readers is its affinity to a story attributed to Jose Rizal, with moths attracted to a lamp instead. The allegory of naive ambition has been transposed to a rural setting, the insects signaling ruin to the household. Lastly, ‘Ortaliz’ tenderly recounts episodes from childhood, but pays careful attention to the landscape of sugar cane plantations and its persistent contradictions. Navarro’s poems are crafted with intricate imagery, and written with urgency and sensitivity to place and its history. I tried to convey this in my translations, where beauty and perseverance are inseparable from death and violence.”

—Eric Abalajon 

The Bird in The City

Perches
on branches
bearing red, flickering
light bulbs.

Hums
behind evening’s shade
since streets
are deafening
during the day.

Nests
in many building columns,
rafters, roofs yet
lays no eggs.

The bird in the city
flies straight into traps
and the one that remains
after others have gone
catches the most worms. READ MORE…

Announcing Our January Book Club Selection: The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel

January 30, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

The necessity of casting off shame and regret, of rejecting violence instead of our identities, are crucial messages in this book.

In Stênio Gardel’s The Words That Remain, everything hinges on the unfolding of a page. Through the Brazilian author’s vivid prose, a world unfurls between the covers: of unrequited love, of shame and survival, of rurality and history—all of it circulating a letter that its protagonist has never opened. Asymptote is proud to present this incredible debut work as our first Book Club selection of the year, a book that merges its triumphant celebration of language with the pivotal interrogation of marginalization, all along the long journey towards self-acceptance.

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. 

The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel, translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato, New Vessel Press, 2023

Much like the relationship that dominates it, The Words that Remain is just long enough to leave an indelible impression—but finishes in a flash. Stênio Gardel’s debut novel packs a literal and figurative punch, its brief pages flecked with contrasts: pleasure and pain, pride and shame, love and violence, peace and regret, strength and submission, what is spoken and what is kept silent. The storytelling moves fast, spanning half a century in its 150-odd pages, but Gardel’s sparse prose never creates a sense of freneticism. Through swirling reflections, the novel moves like a steady whirlwind, conveying inner turmoil and external inaction, punctuated by powerful, sometimes devastating change.

The Words that Remain tells the story of Raimundo Gaudêncio de Freitas, who paints his life as framed by two transformative events: learning to read and write at age seventy-one and falling in love at seventeen. Almost everything between the book’s covers oscillates between these two experiences, the chasm between them held taut by a letter—“half blessed, half cursed, wholly mysterious”—that he has never before been able to read. Penned by his past lover, the letter hangs over his life like a talisman, a burden, and a beacon of hope all in one.

Raimundo is gay. He and his lover, Cicero, are able to embrace their sexuality and one another for two years, but always with the fear of rejection from their families and community persisting in the background. This is rural Brazil in the 60s and 70s, and life is hard. Prevented from going to school by his father at an early age because “writing was for people who don’t need to put food on the table”, Raimundo must instead do backbreaking work to help support his family through floods, poverty, and infant death. While he longs for an education and the freedom to live with Cicero, the harsh realities of working-class life and widespread bigotry are so pervasive as to be almost completely internalised: being together gives them “a good taste, but [one] that left something sour in the back of their minds”, and even when they fantasize about living together, it is only imaginable in a big city—where no one will know they are more than just roommates. Sadly, their fears prove to be well grounded; when their families find out about their relationship, they are forbidden from seeing one another, and Raimundo is beaten mercilessly by his father for days, until he is driven away by his mother. In the long aftermath of this rejection, Raimundo thinks of himself as fated to wandering in a shadowy husk, his sexuality locked away, his life and love suspended in Cicero’s impenetrable letter, completely opaque like Cicero’s own destiny. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

January 27, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, José García Escobar, and MARGENTO

Literary News from Palestine, Central America, Romania, and Spain!

Join us this week with a new batch of literary dispatches covering a new Palestinian literary and culture magazine, the 2023 PEN Open Book Award longlist, and more. From a Palestinian literary festival to the birthday celebration for the “national poet” of Romania, read on to learn more!

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

A first is always exciting, always an event; in fact, it’s called “a first” even if a second never comes. And when there is a second time, it’s an opportunity to celebrate and to remember the first.

This week the Palestinian literary community is anticipating both a first and a second.

The Palestinian literary scene is witnessing the birth of Fikra Magazine, an online Palestinian cultural and literary magazine – writing and art by and for Palestinians. According to partners and co-founders Aisha and Kevin, Fikra is dedicated to “high-quality content that doesn’t conform to stereotypes and old-fashioned ideas about Palestine. It’s original, it’s inspiring, it’s bold.” What is exciting about this new publication is that every piece is professionally translated from Arabic to English—or vice versa. Since “Palestinians in the Diaspora often don’t read Arabic as their mother tongue,” the creators say in their promotional materials, “we want our writers to become part and parcel of the international writing-guild as well.” In Fikra, the creators promise, “you’ll find Palestinian writers and artists from all corners of the word – from Gaza, the West-Bank, East-Jerusalem, 48, and the diaspora.”

READ MORE…

My Literature, My Voice: A Conversation with Max Lobe and Ros Schwartz

January 26, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Carol Khoury and Laurel Taylor

I’m always travelling, travelling, travelling, to preach the gospel of literature, of my literature, of my voice.

In our December Book Club selection, Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside?, Swiss writer Max Lobe paints a vivid psychic landscape of migration, queerness, and class. Centred around an incredibly intimate mother-son relationship that crosses from Cameroon to Switzerland, Lobe addresses the politics of a contemporary, itinerant existence with humour, wisdom, and frankness. In this following interview, Laurel Taylor speaks to Lobe and translator Ros Schwartz about the concept of a “national literature,” textual musicality, and what it means to belong somewhere, nowhere—or everywhere. 

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.  

Laurel Taylor (LT): Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? is a novel with an immigrant at its center, and the book has been described as a contemporary story of alienation, that feeling of belonging nowhere catalysed by migrancy. Max and Ros, how do you think the concept of belonging fits in this book? Where does the nature of belonging fit overall in books that speak of migration?

Max Lobe (ML): The fact of belonging nowhere is something that really speaks to me. I was born in Douala, [Cameroon,] and then I moved from Douala to Lugano, which is in the Italian part of Switzerland. Today, I live in Geneva, and most of the time I’m always travelling, travelling, travelling, to preach the gospel of literature, of my literature, of my voice.

In Cameroon, back in the day, I couldn’t feel at home because I didn’t fulfill the criteria of being a man. I was very girlish. And you see me with the red lipstick now because I’ve come to terms with who I am. Then, when I moved to Switzerland, there was another problem, because I discovered that I was black in our classroom at Università della Svizzera italiana, the Lugano university.

In those three years, I thought to myself: “Where is my place?” I think that we, or I, can make anywhere our own place, but you need to want it. You need a willingness if you want to belong to a place—with courage, with humour, with lots of passion. Today, I think, “Everywhere I go can be my place.” That is what I wanted to communicate in this book.

Ros Schwartz (RS): I think this idea of belonging both in this book and in other books written by migrants, is that being granted citizenship does not automatically create a sense of belonging. Mwana, the narrator, is constantly reminded that he’s an outsider—through the Black Sheep anti-immigrant campaign. At first, he doesn’t even realize it’s directed against him, and then his lover—Ruedi—goes with his family to the famous Grütli Meadow, which the book describes as: “the very one where the Swiss Oath had been signed at the end of the thirteenth century, while we Bantus were still walking barefoot in the forest among the animals.” So, there is this continual reminder of being other.

I think in books that speak of migration, it’s a thread that runs through generations. The children of migrants are continually looking at both countries through a lens of otherness; they don’t feel completely at home in their parents’ country of origin, or they don’t feel completely at home in the adoptive country. People are expected to come down on one side or the other.

READ MORE…

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

January 25, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel

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

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

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

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

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

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “A True Story” by Natalia Timerman

January 24, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Meg Weeks

A man who writes. A man who writes in a notebook, seated next to me on a plane.

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you a work of metafiction from Brazilian writer Natalia Timerman’s collection, which was a finalist for the Jabuti Prize. In “A True Story,” a chance encounter with a man on the plane—her seat partner—leads to an intense connection mediated by the act of writing. Translated from the Portuguese by Meg Weeks, this story conveys the electric atmosphere of first meetings.

From the aisle of the plane I spotted row twenty-seven. I sat down in the middle seat. The seat by the window was already occupied by a young guy in a baseball cap, his attention focused on his phone. I was praying that no one would occupy the seat on my other side so I wouldn’t feel the need to make myself smaller, when a man, tall and blondish, his skin scarred by acne, approached.

He greeted me almost imperceptibly with his eyes and sat down on my left-hand side. Ok, patience. I took my book out of my bag, which I then placed below the seat in front of me, and opened it to the marked page, 174.

The man had large hands.

I tried to read but I couldn’t stop observing those hands moving to take a notebook and a pen out of a black backpack, also placed on the floor. 

I looked surreptitiously at the man’s face. From my brief glance, he struck me as interesting. His lips were red and thick, his eyelashes long and pale. Handsome, almost.

I returned to my book, but the movements of the pen executed by those large hands gripped my attention. A man who writes. A man who writes in a notebook, seated next to me on a plane.

I adjusted myself in my seat to achieve an angle that would allow me to both read my book and peer at his notebook as well. I was about to begin deciphering the handwritten words when the plane began to move.

I closed my book and my eyes and adjusted myself again in my seat, this time to face forward. I get sick to my stomach when planes take off. I took care, however, to leave the cover of the Bolaño I was reading face-up.

Once the plane had achieved its cruising altitude, I opened my book again. The man was still writing . . . delicate hands, I was able to make out while I pretended to stretch. He fidgeted a bit in his seat and in the same movement, rested his notebook on the armrest between our seats. Ah, now it was easy to read what he was writing—which he didn’t stop doing, even momentarily—all I had to do was tilt my body diagonally towards him. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2023

January 23, 2023  |  in News  |  by Bella Creel, Meghan Racklin, and Xiao Yue Shan

. . . di Giorgio, standing in front of the rosebush, flicks the switch on, invites us to see.

Asymptote’s Winter 2023 Edition is out, showcasing literature from thirty-four countries and fifteen languages! Marking our twelfth year in world literature, this issue is headlined by César Aira, Geetanjali Shree, and César Vallejo. Here, blog editors Xiao Yue Shan, Meghan Racklin, and Bella Creel introduce their highlights from the issue, from an explosive, violent garden, to a perverse love story and vengeful doll, to a piece of criticism that reads more as art than review. 

In a short eulogy for the brilliant, transportive Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda, Gabriel García Márquez recounts a brief visit he once paid her in Barcelona, around a decade before her death. Slightly taken aback by her impeccable resemblance to her characters, namely in what she had described as her “innocence,” the García Márquez intuited that Rodoreda, like the people she had raised to such stark emotional reality, had a penchant for growing flowers. “We spoke about [gardening], which I consider another form of writing,” he recounts, “and between our discussion of roses . . . I tried to talk to her about her books.”

The botanic, as both these great writers knew, is transportive. There is nothing so beguiling as the language of flowers—their ancient names, colour, perfume, their mystic properties and secret variety; we know this, because the writers before us had long known it, just as the writers before them had known it, and on and on backwards, ever since the first poets looked at the world in bloom, and saw in it an opening to the sublime. Over and over, we’ve harvested from the natural world to give our poems tint and fragrance, to purple our prose and frame our visions, and in the same way that soil can be exhausted, the power of this invocation has since waned through countless verses. The challenge to the text now, when evoking landscape, is what García Márquez knew: the writer cannot simply pick the flowers—she must grow them herself.

In Marosa di Giorgio’s excerpt from The Moth, the garden is explosive. Translated with a musical ear by Sarah María Medina, the prose poems luxuriate in their sheer volume of lush imagery, of ripe fruit and their rainbow palette, bacchanalian sweetness and insatiable appetite. Di Giorgio has always been an exceptionally visual writer, with her prodigious use of images inspiring comparison to the works of Bosch and Dalí—and here her painterly instincts are once again ravishing. In broad strokes a feast is spread before us, peaches and dates and syrup, as her image-language fills the lines with taste and spectacle. She once said that “only the poet knows what colour to give each word . . . In The Moth, I paint myself as a reciter who interprets in front of the rosebush.” 

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

January 20, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Areeb Ahmad

Literary news from Bulgaria, the Philippines, and India!

Join us this week with a new batch of literary dispatches covering newly released audiobooks by the unofficial “hero of the Philippines,” the passing of one of Bulgaria’s most notable political figures and literary critics, and an award-winning translator’s appearance in New Delhi. From a night of chilling literature in Sofia to a bookstagrammer’s compilation of all Indian books in translation from 2022, read on to learn more!

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria

Although usually uneventful, January has so far proved a surprise for everyone who has taken a keen interest in the Bulgarian cultural scene.

Earlier this month, the local community lost the literary critic Elka Konstantinova. Throughout her life, the scholar, who passed away at the age of ninety, managed to balance an innate passion for the written word with a desire to bring about broader societal change by being an active participant in the country’s political life. In a recent report, the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency described her as “one of the key figures in Bulgarian politics after the fall of communism in 1989.” Her research encompassed diverse topics from the relationship between the fantasy genre and the world of today to the general development of the short story during specific periods of the twentieth century.

In other news, by the time you are reading this dispatch, the French Cultural Institute in Sofia will have begun preparations for its first Reading Night (Nuit de la Lecture). The event, organized in collaboration with the National Book Centre, is set to start today, in the late afternoon, and will last well past midnight. This year, the theme is “Fear in Literature” with a focus on fairy tales, criminal investigations, fantasy, dystopian science fiction, chilling essays, and more. Younger readers and their parents will have the chance to participate in several literary workshops and specially designed games that aim to ignite the public’s enthusiasm for books and stories.

READ MORE…

The Winter 2023 Edition Has Landed

January 19, 2023  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Helping us celebrate our milestone 12th anniversary issue are César Aira, Geetanjali Shree, Alfred Döblin, and Choi Jeongrye in our Korean Feature!

Earthquake, war, disease, unrequited love, even a man-made hell conjured through scents—what haven’t the protagonists in our Winter 2023 edition been through? Tagged #TheReturn, this issue is not only a celebration of human resilience but also of our twelve years in world literature. Helping us mark this milestone are César Aira, one of the most beloved names in the canon, and Geetanjali Shree, 2022 International Booker Prizewinner—both give us exclusive wide-ranging interviews. Amid new work from 34 countries, we also have stunning short stories from Alfred Döblin and Dalih Sembiring, powerful drama by Anna Gmeyner, a brilliant review of past contributor Johannes Göransson’s latest publication, and a Special Feature sampling the best in contemporary letters from a world literature hotspot sponsored by LTI Korea. All of this is illustrated by our talented guest artist Weims.

In Emmelie Prophète’s slow-burning fiction, “The Return” is a dramatic answering of prayers when a former Olympic athlete turns up unannounced before his mother a lifetime after his escape from Port-au-Prince. That same longed-for return is impossible for poet Fadi Azzam—“a Syrian / who had to flee his homeland / to countries that wish to flee from him.” In Juana Peñate Montejo’s poems of exile—our first work from the Mayan language of Ch’ol—on the other hand, it’s the self that requires summoning and remembering: “Bring the scent of amber, / return me to myself.” Re-membering, in the most literal sense, is foregrounded in Kim Cho Yeop’s macabre but fascinating story, one work in a sci-fi-tinged Korean Feature of startling breadth, wherein we are initiated into a community of amputees-by-choice, since “the body is hardly capacious enough to contain the human soul, which is so full of potential.” So full of potential, perhaps, that even a lover’s reincarnation on the 49th day of his death in the womb of a stranger seems possible in a transcendent story by the Mongolian writer Bayasgalan Batsuuri.

“Six months before his death in 1991, Menke Katz had a dream. In it, his long-dead mother admonished him to return to writing in his native language, Yiddish.” This dream resulted in the Oulipian poems that Jacob Romm has beautifully translated for this issue. Proving an exception to Shree’s claim that “the creative writer is instinctively drawn to her mother tongue,” Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine describes an opposite impulse in his essay: writing in French—a second language—is his deliberate choice, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. Anyway, isn’t the true writer one who is “always a stranger in the language he expresses himself in”? In any case, even if the process of writing is estranging, the outcome when a piece of writing finds its intended reader can be sublime. For Lynn Xu, “the act of reading is the act of making kin . . . For example, when I read [César] Vallejo, I recognize that he is my mother . . .” By utter coincidence or divine fate, César Vallejo is also featured in these very pages, translated by another César, the intrepid César Jumpa Sánchez, who is determined to project Vallejo’s breakthrough collection, Trilce, to, in his own words, “a network of planetary outreach.”

Just as “encyclopedism has been the permanent horizon of [César Aira’s] work,“ the asymptotic impulse to realize a world literature that truly reflects the world has been our north star from the get-go. If our very existence has connected you with your kindred authors, help us get to our big 5 0 (in issues, not years!), just around the corner. The best way to support us is to sign up as a sustaining or masthead member—the New Year brings new perks and we’ll even put together a care package (rabbit theme optional) for supporters at the USD500-a-year tier and above. Thank you for being with us all these years!

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Memory as Political: On Raja Shehadeh’s We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir

January 18, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Shehadeh treats this memoir as an evocative paean towards a landscape that can never be recovered.

We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir by Raja Shehadeh, Other Press, 2023

In Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East (2012), Norbert Bugeja defines the memoirist as operating “within that representational chasm . . . in which the memoirist’s chosen interpretation of a space or preferred schema of memory come to be reconfigured against the received facts of traditional ideological geographies and vice-versa.” In the harrowing We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir, Raja Shehadeh shows he is no exemption to this friction between fact and memory. A Ramallah-based human rights lawyer with several acclaimed memoirs (one received the 2008 Orwell Prize; another was adapted into a stage play) and scholarly essays (covering topics from international law to theatre criticism) to his name, Shehadeh is a cosmopolitan, peripatetic writer and addresses the topic of his personal history and homeland with wide-ranging expertise. According to Jonathan Cook in Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008), Shehadeh “is perhaps the most knowledgeable critic of Israel’s labyrinth of legislation in the occupied territories.” In addition to enacting activism through his writing, he also founded al-Haq in the 1970s—a Palestinian organization at the frontlines in peace negotiations and in providing legal aid to Palestinians.

In We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I, his eleventh book of non-fiction, Shehadeh foregrounds the Nakba—the catastrophic aftermath of the 1948 Palestinian war. But a better appreciation of his works necessarily invites a discussion on the milieu of where he is writing from—both ethnopolitically and aesthetically. Ethnopolitically, the memoir centres the land dispossession, drone warfare, and strategic erasure of Palestinians perpetrated by the Israeli military government—as well as the treacheries committed by Palestine’s former coloniser, the Ingleez, Britain, and even neighbouring nations like Jordan and the League of Arab States. Aesthetically, on the other hand, the writing evokes other articles of “resistance literature,” such as those concerning Partition or occupation, as well as the larger body of Arab political essays and political memoirs that permeates Shehadeh’s œuvre: his powerful storytelling emanates from the kind of clearsighted prose afforded by forthright reportage.

Conor McCarthy favourably compared Shehadeh to Edward Said as being “more directly political,” evidently a departure from show don’t tell (a hackneyed chestnut propagated by workshop cultism because there should be, in descriptive writing, room to explain, to tell). Shehadeh takes advantage of the power in exposition even as he plays with form; the narration and the way the chapters are organised as somewhat non-linear and non-chronological, jumping from one particular time and place to another, but remain always guided by both reminiscence and research. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Grigori Dashevsky

January 17, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Ainsley Morse and Timmy Straw

break, or blunt at least / this needle of mine

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you two poems by Russian literary critic and poet Grigori Dashevsky. In translating Dashevsky’s singular style, translator Timmy Straw writes: “Dashevsky’s poems are difficult to translate, for several reasons: their extreme compression and economy; their knotted, almost secretive syntax; their aslant musicality; the often-outright weirdness of their “aboutness”; and the span of their references, from the familiar (Homer, the Bible) to the less-so (Russian folklore, Orthodoxy, the bodily knowledge of Russian/Soviet apartment blocks). And some of the passages that land in Russian—lines that salt their revelation with sobriety, or ground it in the pleasures of sound, or both—just vibrate at too high a pitch in English.”

Not Self Nor People 

Not self nor people
are here, and never are.
The commandment illuminates
thistle, burdock, mosquito.

A feeble singing whines,
a no-see-um saw:
as if some evil sawed away
and an innocent suffered,
gone paler than white.

But the law without people
in unpeopled spaces shines:
no evil, no forbearance,
no face here—only the flickering
winglet of a mosquito.

Neskuchnyi Garden (3)

1
Let’s go out for some air,
talk a little there.
Air, like another’s heart
you can’t be seen
and til the grave are true.
It pleases you, in any case,
to warm yourself
with my voice. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: January 2023

January 16, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Irmak Ertuna Howison, and Matthew Redman

The latest reads from Hungary, Sweden, and Kurdistan!

2023 is already setting up to be one of the most wide-ranging and bounteous years for literary purveyors of the world, with an abundance of exciting works slated for publication. This month, we’re presenting three texts that enrapture the imaginative prospects of a world in translation: László Krasznahorkai subverts every expectation for the travelogue, Bachtyar Ali braids storytelling and truth-seeking, and Maria Adolfsson reasserts feminist presence in the male-dominated mystery genre. 

krasznahorkai

A Mountain to the North, A Lake to The South, Paths to the West, A River to the East by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet, New Directions/Serpent’s Tail, 2023

Review by Matthew Redman, Digital Editor

László Krasznahorkai is among Hungary’s most feted writers in the Anglophone world. His works, characterised by inordinately long, slow sentences which chart the depths of obsession and madness, have earned him a cult of devoted readers and international acclaim, while his translators—Georges Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet—are lauded writers in their own right. However, his most recent novel to be translated into English, A Mountain to the North, A Lake to The South, Paths to the West, A River to the East, is an intriguing departure from the works that have made his name. The vast sentences he is known for are intact, but they are used in service of a radically different tonal palette. Where his other novels use length to induce futility and despair, A Mountain to the North explores the beatific, languorous, and even beautiful possibilities of extreme syntax.

Set in Japan, the novel takes the form of a travelogue—albeit with the sheer mass of textual detail slowing the journey to an ooze. Strip this away and you find comparatively simple structural bones: a train deposits us at a deserted platform somewhere in Kyoto, we leave the station and wander half-lost through empty streets until we arrive at our destination, a Buddhist monastery in which we remain for most of the novel, touring the grounds and slowly penetrating the interiors. It is a balmy late afternoon, there are beautiful gardens all around, the monastery is silent and exquisite. This part of Kyoto is almost entirely bereft of inhabitants, but the emptiness is one of the rare details that Krasznahorkai chooses not to linger on. In fact, the absence is fortuitous, because the novel is uninterested in people; what consumes the author instead is the immutable, near indescribable beauty of things wrought in accordance with Japanese tradition. With the streets and monastery empty, the prose is freely devoted to the description of his sublime surroundings. Plants in their carefully tended gardens; the shrine’s architecture—their calculations and materials, the minutiae of their construction; the nigh-divinely sagacious prescriptions according to which every detail within the monastery was planned, planted, and built; the commitment at every turn to the tireless refinement of perfection; and above all the feel of all of this beauty—the texture and the grain, and the effect on the soul.

Each chapter houses a single enormous sentence that describes and extols a single beautiful object (a gate, a shrine, a statue) or craft (carpentry, gardening), and ends only when Krasznahorkai deems the subject exhausted. As demanding and unconventional as this novel is, it is not difficult in the way that experimental fiction is often thought to be.  For all its density, there is a deceptive simplicity, even a solicitousness to Krasznahorkai’s prose. His sentences are slow enumerations in service of a simple message that never changes: the monastery and everything within it are perfect, and it could only ever have been so, for it is all the product of patient, genius craftsmen adhering immaculately to faultless prescriptions. The long succession of accounts of perfect things has an incantatory quality, the meticulousness neither torturous nor bewildering, but rather intended to soothe. Krasznahorkai wants to leave you tranquil:

[…] it was something like a labyrinth, of course, but at the same time the chaos causing the oscillation of the layout of these streets wasn’t frightening and even less so futile, but playful, and just as there were finely wrought fences, the grated rolling gates protected by their small eaves, above, leaning out from both sides here and there, were the fresh green of bamboo or the ethereal, silver foliage of a Himalayan pine with its firework-like leaves unfolding; they bent closely over the passerby as if in a mirror, as if they were protecting him, guarding him and receiving him as a guest within these tightly closed fences and gates, these bamboo branches and the Himalayan pine foliage; namely, they quickly gave notice to the one arriving that he had been placed in safety […]

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

January 13, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Jiaoyang Li, and Sofija Popovska

Literary news from Macedonia, Palestine, and China!

This week, our editors report on controversial novels from the Macedonian, testaments from Palestine, and a pop-star-turned-writer from China. From a subversive eroticism to details on the lives of migrant workers, these writers are defying standarisations to illuminate the truth of their realities. Read on to find out more!

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Macedonia

The last days of 2022 saw a controversial sensation return to the Macedonian literary scene; the publishing house Mi-An released an anniversary edition of Jovan Pavlovski’s provocative novel, Sok od Prostata (Prostate Juice).

As an author of almost fifty works, a member of the Macedonian Writers’ Association and PEN Center Macedonia, an editor of the prominent Macedonian newspaper Nova Makedonija, and the editor and publisher of the first Macedonian encyclopedia, Pavlovski (born in 1937 in Tetovo) has contributed a diverse body of work to Macedonian culture. Reaching beyond its confines, his work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Politically dissident and candidly sexual, Sok od Prostata, originally published in 1991, is one of Pavlovski’s best known oeuvres, and has received the title of Most Read Book in Serbia.

Telling the story of a young man desperate for love, Sok od Prostata is described by Mi-An as “not only an erotic novel, but also a deep lyrical story about loneliness and culture shock, passion and love…” Despite its lyricism, rebellion and irreverence remain at the core of the work: “(Sok od Prostata) strives to break through elitist, hardened attitudes about the decent/indecent, and to deconstruct the hypocrisy of ‘high literature’”. READ MORE…