Announcing an Animal-themed Special Feature

January 12, 2023  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

“There is a different way of knowing here and I see all around me a constellation of animals.” —Linda Hogan

For our Spring 2023 Special Feature, we will be putting together an animal-themed feature that looks at wildlife in a new light. We seek fictional and nonfictional narratives that place such animals at the center, whether in natural or urban environments (the animal or animals in question must play a central role in the story’s plot; we also welcome stories where the narrator is an animal).

Of special interest are texts that illuminate what Linda Hogan has called a “different way of knowing” or imagine the coexistence of the animal in question with human beings. Hrant Matevossian’s “The Green Field” from the current issue, or Zsófia Bán’s “On the Eve of No Return” from the Summer 2014 edition are excellent examples of the kind of work we are looking for. The Feature is intended to be a showcase of the many nonhuman existences who share this planet with us.

For once, we’ll be accepting original English-language submissions (although translations will still be prioritized in our curation). Fees will be waived for the first submission to this Special Feature; in addition, contributors whose work is accepted will receive an honorarium of USD100 per article. Check out our full guidelines and send in your best work today!

Resisting Death, Inanimateness, Silence: Mohammed Sawaie on Palestinian Poetry

January 11, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Eric Calderwood

It is only natural, in my view, to introduce to English-speaking readers authentic voices representing Palestinians. . .

Earlier this year, Mohammed Sawaie, a professor of Arabic at the University of Virginia, published a new anthology of Palestinian poetry, The Tent Generations: Palestinian Poems (Banipal, 2022), including poems by sixteen Palestinian poets from diverse backgrounds. I recently had a chance to interview Sawaie over email about this work. Our correspondence ranged over several topics, including the inspiration behind this translation project, the criteria Sawaie used to select the poems in his anthology, the choices he faced in rendering different rhetorical devices into English, and the place of the anthologized poems in Palestinian literary history and in the Palestinian struggle.

Eric Calderwood (EC): Talk to me about the inspiration behind this project. Why did you think that now was a good time to publish a new anthology of Palestinian poetry?

Mohammed Sawaie (MS): The genesis of the project began with reading the poem “He is calm and so am I” (“Huwa hadiʾ wa-ana ka-dhalik”) by the renowned Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish with two of my assistants, while directing a University of Virginia language program at Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan in 2012. It occurred to me then to translate this poem—and the comments on the translation led to a Eureka moment! Following that summer, I started to think seriously about compiling a list of Palestinian poets and their poems to make their translation available to English readers, who, outside specialists, are generally not informed about Arabic literature, let alone Palestinian literary production—especially poetry.

As Palestinians continue to struggle for their home country and their own independent state, they are continually faced by a strong adversary that controls every aspect of their lives. In their struggle against Israeli occupation, the daily violent acts culminate in flareups, devastating wars, invasions of homes, killings, imprisonments, and so on. Such events often go unreported in the Western media, unless there is a large-scale war. Nevertheless, due to the wide use of social media, more and more people are becoming increasingly aware of the injustices experienced by Palestinians. It is only natural, in my view, to introduce to English-speaking readers authentic voices representing Palestinians—the female and male poets of varied generations—who are best qualified to tell their stories, their history, their suffering, their alienation in their diasporic places of residence, and their aspirations for a safe home to return to, to identify with, and to build, on par with other fellow human beings.

EC: In the anthology, there are Muslim and Christian poets, poets with varying levels of education, as well as poets born at different moments of the twentieth century and who lived through the major events of modern Palestinian history—from the period of the British Mandate in Palestine (1920–1948), to the Nakba of 1948, to the present. Could you discuss your selection process for this anthology?

MS: Readers may not be aware that Palestinians enjoy one of the highest levels of education in the Arab world despite their nakba, their expulsion from their indigenous homeland, and dispersal in the world. Poetry is often believed to rise and develop because of adverse situations; consequently, there are innumerous poets among the fifteen million or so Palestinians worldwide, poets of varying degrees of quality and recognition by readers in the Arab world.

Perhaps this is an appropriate time to say a word about the style of Arabic poetics. Prior to the 1940s, Arab poets—Palestinians included—largely composed in the classical mode of composing poetry, which means adhering to one meter and the same rhyme throughout the poem (regardless of length). Around the mid to late 1940s, many Arab poets forsook this classical style and adopted a new mode of writing poetry, called al-shiʿr al-hurr, free verse, in which the monometer and monorhyme were abandoned.    READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Five Poems by George Sarantaris

January 10, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Pria Louka

about us hums / a mythical insect / a God

Part of the Generation of the 30s⁠—a group of Greek modernist writers and artists⁠—George Sarantaris has not received as much attention as the writers of that era, such as the Nobel laureate and poet Giorgos Seferis. This Translation Tuesday, translator Pria Louka brings five of Sarantaris’ poems into English. Read on and appreciate these imagistic, mist-like poems⁠—philosophical and sensual in their very reticence and brevity.

Philosophy

       For Kostas Despotopoulos

Conversation with the object
a lonesome thing,
deliberate silence
from an unknown listener
approaches us
and binds,
about us hums
a mythical insect
a God

The Mist

The mist teems
With anemones

Look at the branches
What a lake
What impatient heart
Peer into
The right drop
What drive
Takes the child
What languor
The woman

READ MORE…

Texts in Context: José Vergara on the Russian Afterlife of James Joyce

January 9, 2023  |  in Texts in Context  |  by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

[I]t made me slow down to appreciate how that convoluted language makes us understand life and experience anew.

This is the third edition of Texts in Context, a column in which Katarzyna Bartoszyńska seeks out academics who contribute to and elucidate the world of literary translation, revealing their deeper studies into texts both well-known and overlooked.  

Today, we trace the legacy of James Joyce to its significant resonance in Russian literature, which José Vergara examines in his cogent and deeply-researched text, All Future Plunges to the Past. By taking the work of five major Russian writers as example, Vergara illuminates the throughline of Joycean ideas and themes, both in their universality and their recontextualization and transformation amidst Soviet and Russian history. In this following interview, Vergara discusses how these writers used Joyce to make sense of their own realities, Russian-language literature in this present moment, and texts from within the prison.

Katarzyna Bartoszynska (KB): Tell me about All Future Plunges to the Past!  

José Vergara (JV): My book examines James Joyce’s impact on Russian literature from the mid-1920s, when the first Soviet translations started appearing, through 2020. Of course, that basically means I’m looking at his “influence”—but it goes beyond that. I’m more interested in how, on one hand, Joyce became emblematic of larger trends in Russian attitudes toward Modernism, intertextuality, generational conflicts, artistic identity, and other big issues; and, on the other hand, he took on various forms or manifestations based on how certain Russian writers read him—literally and figuratively. Previous scholars had examined the critical response to Joyce in the Soviet Union and émigré communities, but they paid much less attention to his place in Russian literature itself. So, in All Future Plunges to the Past, I present five case studies of major writers who addressed Joyce directly in their fiction: Yury Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin. The book explores how and why they were drawn to Joyce’s novels and ideas, interpreting them as an alternative path in world literature based on their respective biographical, historical, and cultural contexts. In this reading, Joyce becomes a prism through which to interrogate the question of cultural heritage in Russia, and a means for these writers to better understand themselves and their work. That’s at the core of the book: the question of literary lineages and how artists fashion their own histories through their writing.

KB: How artists fashion their own histories in their writing: could you say a little more about that?

JV: The central through line of my book is fathers and children, primarily sons. It struck me that the aforementioned writers were all, in one way or another, engaging with Joyce’s Shakespeare theory, which Stephen Dedalus explains in episode nine of Ulysses. Basically, he argues that creative artists, such as Shakespeare, become fathers to themselves by leaving behind their works, their lineage, a version of themselves for posterity to—hopefully—admire. At the same time, Stephen suggests that you have to select a literary forefather to supplant the biological. Each of the writers I feature consider this theory and respond to it in their idiosyncratic ways. For instance, Nabokov’s protagonist in The Gift pursues this path, but not to replace his biological father, who disappeared on a scientific expedition. Instead, like Nabokov, he wants to unite the cultural heritage that he lost as a result of the 1917 Revolution, and to bridge those gaps in emigration. All their readings of Joyce are operating on this metatextual level, as they come to terms with who they are in the history of Russian literature. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

January 6, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, Katarina Gadze, and Wambua Muindi

The latest from Sweden, Kenya, and Croatia!

Join the Asymptote Editors-at-Large for the first weekly roundup of the year as they bring to you dispatches on literary prizes, book festivals, and more! From opposition to the proposed “cultural canon” in Sweden, the Kenyan launch of Taban Lo Liyong’s most recent poetry collection, and the expert- and child-elected best children’s book in Croatia, read on to learn more!

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

Just before the Christmas holidays, on December 22, the Swedish Writers’ Union along with eight other Swedish organizations published a statement against a Swedish “cultural canon.” The statement is a response to a proposed formalized “Swedish cultural canon,” initiated by the new Swedish government and its Minister for Culture, Parisa Liljestrand. According to the organizations, a formalized Swedish cultural canon that would define the central Swedish literary and artistic works is “a very simplified way of trying to define culture and that the effect is rather to limit the breadth, diversity and variation in cultural activities.” Neighboring country Denmark introduced a very similar kind of formalized canon in 2006, “Kulturkanonen,” which was wildly debated. The canon was published in book form and on a website—the latter of which, however, was closed down six years later. Today, the formalized Danish canon is mostly forgotten, but it still dictates what is taught in high schools and colleges. Out of the fourteen Danish writers listed in this canon, Karen Blixen is the only woman, and several important names in Danish literary history are not included because they were considered too complicated for high school students. Whether a Swedish version of such a canon will be formalized remains to be seen.

READ MORE…

Di Antara Akses dan Penolakan / In Between Access and Refusal: A Conversation with Khairani Barokka

January 5, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

. . . the more people are made to forget the names of our relatives who are flora, fauna, sea, earth, and sky.

Much has been said about Khairani Barokka’s wide-ranging, multidisciplinary body of work, spanning literature—spoken word poetry, dystopian fiction, scholarly texts—and media—textual, visual, performance. In the journal Research in Drama Education, she is an academic exploring “the limits of access and the framing of disabled performers from non-Western backgrounds in Western contexts.” According to the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, however, she is a poet of “ecocritical agenda advancing environment justice against deforestation, the loss of biodiversity, pollution, further revaluing indigeneity to the more-than-human.” 

In this interview, I asked Barokka about Modern Poetry in Translation, the London-based magazine where she serves as editor; her movement between genres; and translating from the languages of her homeland, Indonesia—including BISINDO or Indonesian Sign Language. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): In your Catapult essay “The Case Against Italicizing ‘Foreign’ Words,” you made a case for maintaining an “active ethos of not italicizing supposedly foreign words,” with the hope that those in the publishing industry would follow suit. Can you speak more on how publications in the North Atlantic, and even Anglophone ones within the Global South, perpetuate a myth of “cultural purity” through linguistic gatekeeping? 

Khairani Barokka (KB): It’s been really heartening to receive the kind responses people and publications have had to that article over the past two years, and it even caused Massachusetts Review to change their house style, which was very encouraging. It’s the best feeling when colleagues say that they’ve changed the minds of editors by sending them the piece, which I hope has saved the significant amount of time we writers can spend arguing these points. 

I think the perception of certain words or names as ‘foreign’ does have to do with some publications’ regulations of house style, in which the word ‘foreign’ is not put in quotation marks, i.e., ‘Be careful with foreign words.’ And there have been some people who respond positively to my article, but still don’t put ‘foreign’ in quotation marks, when those quotation marks say a lot about gatekeeping. The ‘Other’ is fixed in many imaginations, which is interesting when you work in a country like the United Kingdom—where names and words come from so many corners of the globe, yet foreignising them is still de rigueur in many minds. Someone can be part of British society, and their name can still be regarded as ‘foreign,’ even if they’re a British citizen or born here (and of course, we can get into the hierarchies of bureaucracy and migration status!).

This has much to do with a certain ‘mythical English reader,’ which is usually assumed to be white, middle class, and monoglot; colleagues like Anton Hur have really been pushing back against this. Why can’t we, as supposed outsiders, be the idealised English reader for translations? Why isn’t the responsibility of a translation tied back to the linguistic communities it’s translated from, many members of which shouldn’t be forced to make literature ‘understandable’ to a very narrow demographic? The more we recognise these dynamics, the more we can unpack and minimise colonial tendencies in the literary arts. God knows it was assumed we as Indonesian children knew all the references in translated Enid Blyton books, for instance. It’s about cultural dominance, and the assumptions that go with that. READ MORE…

In Spite Of It All: On Czech Comics with Pavel Kořínek and Michal Jareš

January 4, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Julia Sherwood

"Comics" . . . as a genre is something fluid, evasive, and ever-evolving.

After decades of being dismissed as trash or a genre suitable only for children, comic books and graphic novels have begun to gain recognition in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, becoming the subject of serious scholarly interest and major retrospective exhibitions. Comic art now has an established infrastructure, with an annual prize, the Muriel Award, a Centre for Comics Studies (at the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at Palacký University, Olomouc), and an international comic art festival, Frame, in Prague. In the second of our interviews on comic art, Asymptote’s editor-at-large Julia Sherwood asked two of the Centre’s associates and noted experts Pavel Kořínek and Michal Jareš to introduce our readers to this art form and its leading Czech and Slovak proponents.

Julia Sherwood (JS): You and your colleagues have written widely on all aspects of comic art, from reviews to historical and theoretical articles and essays, including V panelech a bublinách (In Panels and Speech Balloons), published in 2015, the first detailed Czech work that summarizes the various theories and concepts around comic art, which you co-authored with Martin Foret. So to begin with, how would you define the genre? 

Pavel Kořínek (PK): The million-dollar question, and straight off, too. There are, of course, many definitions of comics, and new ones are being added all the time. We can revel in Scott McCloud’s definition of comic art as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer”; we can talk about sequentiality and the dominance of the sequential image primarily in the context of print media; we can reconcile ourselves to the fact that there is nothing that can be defined as being specific exclusively to comics; and we can talk about comics as whatever we (or, ideally, some higher institutional authority, by consensus) declare to be comics. After all, we all sort of subconsciously know “what a comic is” (we just don’t know if it’s actually a genre—and in what sense—a medium, a form, or what). It’s only when we look more closely that we begin to encounter more complicated cases: works that may be related to comics, for example, but don’t quite seamlessly fulfill our ideas of what comics are. In our book, we ended up approaching the question of definition as an open-ended challenge: we offered several influential approaches and tried to convey to the reader our conviction that “comics”—while being aware of all that has been said formally and functionally, socially and institutionally—as a genre is something fluid, evasive, and ever-evolving rather than a fixed category. Fortunately. Otherwise, it would have been a staggering bore.

JS: Your monumental Dějiny československého komiksu 20. století (History of Czechoslovak Comics in the 20th Century, co-authored with Martin Foret and Tomáš Prokůpek), published in 2014, details across almost one thousand lavishly illustrated pages on how the turbulent history of Europe over the past century has affected the development of the genre. Difficult as this task may be, could you outline the main stages and how they were shaped by the political events from the early days until World War; under the interwar Czechoslovak Republic, during World War II; under communism; and after its fall?

Michal Jareš (MJ): Talking about something that is new and still evolving, such as a “possible” history of Czechoslovak comics, we also have to bear in mind the history of Central Europe as a whole, particularly in our neck of the woods, from the time of Austria-Hungary to the foundation (and later dissolution) of Czechoslovakia. We also have to consider it within the context of the debates and trends that shaped all of twentieth-century art, including the avant-garde. We constantly encounter attempts to understand comics as well as attempts to forbid them, and attempts at innovation as well as attempts to stay within the educational form of comics. So, at the very beginning we can see a clear continuation of the tradition of Central European caricature and thus topics aimed at the adult reader as well. The development of magazines for children and youth spawned a variety of children’s comics featuring humorous animals (such as the children’s magazine Punťa).  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Cindy A. Velasquez

January 3, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas and Cindy A. Velasquez

But to birth new homelands, / the world has devised tremors

In the first Translation Tuesdays column of 2023, Cebuano poet Cindy A. Velasquez take us to sea as we find our bearings in the new year. With a sensuousness at once personal and geological, Velasquez’s poems look for a sense of connection in  water bodies, drifting continents and connecting islands. Start your year of reading voraciously—and widely—with us here every week!

“I first read Cindy A. Velasquez in Kabisdak: Cebuano Literary Lighthouse, edited by poet Michael U. Obenieta, and later on, in her first collection Lawas [Body]. Lawas was in so many ways antithetical from the poetry collections of Velasquez’s contemporaries within Binisayâ’s school of feminist poetics in particular, and the literary ‘Bisaya-sphere’ in general. The Oliverian lucidity is rich, far from being rife and banal, a contrast to the Instagram-Pinterest school of ‘poetry’ or the ‘hugot’ impulse that perpetually plagues the local spoken word and performance poetry scene. The islands and coastlines left and missed are seascapes we have never been to but have always known. And then, there is Dong, a recurring or haunting character almost always addressed like an apostrophe, whom the poetic I-persona, Day or Inday, perpetually yearns for.

Velasquez’s body of works is a lingering on bodies of women and water as well as a story of love, romantic, familial, platonic. Oceanic in topicality, her poems could be read through the lens of ‘sea-poetry’—a literary tradition from Homer, Shakespeare, Whitman, to the British Romanticists writing about the English channel and even Derek Walcott—very male, mostly white, very Western. Be that as it may, I find the act of reading Velasquez an evocation of the tender eroticism of Syria’s national poet Nizar Qabbani, the meditative ease of Brazilian neosymbolist Cecília Meireles, and the hydropoetic enigma of T’ang dynasty Taoist elegist Ts’ao T’ang. 

But she doesn’t try to be any of the above. Her writing is her own accord; she is a poet of her own island.”

—Alton Melvar M Dapanas

The Reason

Theory of continental drift: the continents were once one,
bound to each other, and we have been told that the origin
of one is also another’s. But to birth new homelands,
the world has devised tremors deep in its own core.

So fret not when now and again, as you hold onto
my hand, it would swiftly quiver until you let me go.

Why is it better to love only one

I.

You gazed at the dimmed skies, enraged once more
for the moonlight was found wanting

then I told you: “Would you be more pleased if this world
had two moons?  READ MORE…

Principle of Decision: Translation from Armenian

January 2, 2023  |  in Principle of Decision, Translations  |  by Kristina Tatarian, Lusine Kharatyan, Margarit Ordukhanyan, and Nazareth Seferian

[This] will, we hope, allow for a more direct look at the choices translators make—at the principle of decision they employ in their practice.

Each translation speaks with two voices; that of the author and that of the translator. Yet, it is often when they have done their work well that the voices of translators go unrecognized. Their names are left off of covers, and their efforts mentioned only as brief asides in reviews. 

This neglect fails to give translation its due. Walter Benjamin wrote: “Reading a translation as if it were an original work in the translation’s own language is not the highest form of praise;” it is, rather, a failure to fully considering a work in translation, with its two voices and two languages. In an essay for Astra, translator and writer Lily Meyer references Susan Sontag’s definition of style when discussing translation as an art, stating that “to make art without having or consulting your own stylistic preferences strikes me as impossible . . . [Sontag] defines style, more or less, as ‘the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of an artist’s will.’ Surely a translator’s will can also be found inside anything they translate, animating the text and powering it to full-fledged life.” 

This new column, Principle of Decision, is an effort to make the styles of translators more visible. In each installment, one translator will select a famous sentence or brief passage from the literature of a certain language, and several translators will then offer their own translations of it. The differences and similarities between the translations will, we hope, allow for a more direct look at the choices translators make—at the principle of decision they employ in their practice.

For our first edition, we are proud to feature a selection from the Armenian, chosen by Editor-at-Large Kristina Tatarian. Kristina’s word-for-word translation is accompanied by translations from three translators, whose work can also be found in the Fall 2022 issue’s Special Feature on Armenian literature. Kristina has also provided explanatory commentary on her selection, as well as on the translators’ choices.

—Meghan Racklin

 

One peaceful morning  was   one     sad      morning

Մի խաղաղ  առավոտ  էր  .  մի  տխուր  առավոտ :

Mi  haghah    aravot         er      mi   tehur  aravot
˘       ˘     ¯      ˘  ˘   ¯          ˘        ˘    ˘   ¯    ˘  ˘  ¯

This sentence is from the beginning of “Gikor” by Hovhaness Tumanian, one of the central figures in Armenian literature. Based on a real story that Tumanian had heard as a child, “Gikor” is a tale about the dreams and hardship of a twelve-year-old boy, the eponymous Gikor, as his father sends him away from his home in the village to “become a man” and earn a living in the big city. Unfortunately, the boy’s precocious aim to alleviate his family’s hardship eventually ends his life. This sentence marks the moment in the story when Gikor’s mother and siblings watch him leave; accompanied by his father, he moves further and further away from home. The story comes full circle as the father returns to the village—only this time, Gikor is not there anymore. The different translations of this sentence, which presages the early death of the young protagonist, highlight the theme of the Armenian Special Feature (half-lives) by presenting us the “half-life” of the protagonist, a life that prematurely ended. This poignant story may be seen as an emblem of cultural memory about the Armenian Genocide, as Tumanian himself was at the forefront of humanitarian efforts to save children. The contributing translators have each found their own way of translating this memorable sentence, which marks the day when this young and sensitive boy leaves his home, and never returns.

—Kristina Tatarian READ MORE…

Are you game for our New Year reading challenge?

January 1, 2023  |  in Book Club  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Discover the latest and greatest of world literature, curated by our award-winning team!

This New Year, pledge to read diversely by joining the only Book Club that partners with indie publishers on both sides of the Atlantic! To help you take the plunge, we’re taking 10% off all Book Club subscriptions from now till 2359hrs, January 5th. A steeper discount is available for group subscriptions—inquire via bookclub@asymptotejournal.com.

CLICK THROUGH FOR COUPON-APPLIED DISCOUNTED PRICING

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #1 A Ray of Light by Star Kim Su-on

December 31, 2022  |  in News  |  by Bridget Peak

The wonder of this piece is in how the eerie images burn in your mind long after the story ends.

And here is the moment you’ve all been waiting for! Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the attention that Korean literature has received all of this past year (LTI Korea reports that “Korean literature published overseas scored a total of four wins and nine nominations” in 2022), the top spot goes to a South Korean author: the 28 year-old Kim Su-on who made an appearance in our Winter 2022 issue via cotranslators Spencer Lee-Lenfield and Lizzie Buehler with her fittingly named short story “A Ray of Light.” 

As a ray of light will momentarily illuminate the objects in the dark it passes over, so too do the nameless figures in Kim’s story come to life via impressionistic brushstrokes such as these:

Light drifts over the faces of the people lying down, asleep, inside their houses. They shrug off the blankets draping their bodies and, one or two at a time, wake up. Though they strain to remember the previous night’s dreams, the more they try, the faster the dreams vanish. They start each day without any such memories. A certain sadness has become the foundation of their days. Each person’s sadness differs in scale, and so each person passes the days differently.

Through “writing [that]  fuses elegant, simple lyricism with startling, at times nightmarish visions,” a dystopian world is conjured with irrefutable logic. Plot is almost an afterthought: If there is a story at all, it centers on a nameless woman in a house that is surrounded by a forest littered with mute and directionless bodies, dead birds and animal carcasses. At the heart of this forest is a lake, which forms the backdrop to naked lovers who have never left the only place the light touches. Only the shadow of a man wrapped in a blanket remains in the darkness.

The wonder of this piece is in how the eerie images burn in your mind long after the story ends. “Once you read it,” add translators Lee-Lenfield and Buehler, who shared with us that they brought into English Kim Su-on’s “spooky irrealism” during the darkest days of the pandemic,“you can’t get it out of your eyes, your ears.” For this fact alone, ”A Ray of Light” is nothing short of a masterclass in worldbuilding.

That wraps up our end-of-year countdown! If you’ve enjoyed what we’ve brought you in 2022, please help us bring you more of what you love in 2023. In addition to these massive issues (only four remain to our big 5-0!), we’ll also keep bringing you weekly dispatches, fortnightly airmails, monthly book club selections, and quarterly educational guides—all of which we work so hard on behind the scenes on zero institutional support. Answer our commitment by becoming a sustaining or masthead member from as little as USD5 a month. Signing up only takes three minutes, but your support would mean the world to us, truly! See you on the other side of 2023!

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Announcing Our December Book Club Title: Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? by Max Lobe

December 30, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

To open up poverty is to open up migration is to open up blackness is to open up the love between two men.

For our final Book Club selection of the year, Asymptote is proud to present a work emblematic of how writing can transform, subvert, and negate borders. In Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside?, Swiss author Max Lobe traces how the complex factors of race, class, sexuality, and migration can cohere in a single life, and how nationhood can be refracted and reinterpreted by those who refuse to be defined by the standard. Speaking in the extraordinarily vivid voice of his protagonist, Mwana, Lobe balances tragedy with joy, freedom with entrapment, and home with home.

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.  

Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? by Max Lobe, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, Hope Road Publishing, 2022

As in love, mystery, and metamorphosis, the name of country draws a long throughline in our world of stories. Add to it a possessive—my country, your country—and the resulting narratives are instantly elaborated with the ontological intersections, demarcations, and dialogues that enmesh our landscape. Through this simple addition, a life is juxtaposed with a society, a single act comes to emblematise a culture, and an experience constitutes an identity—not necessarily out of any active political consciousness, but simply from having left, at some point, that arbitrary and mutable shape of one’s birthplace. Paul Gilroy, in conceptualising diaspora, described it as positing “important tensions between here and there, then and now, between seed in the bag, the packet or the pocket and seed in the ground, the fruit or the body.” To move across our jigsaw world is to know the fluid weight of difference and sameness—that they can be at once interchangeable and oppositional. These shifts from strangeness to familiarity do not begin with the boarding of a plane or a boat, but occur in minute swatches of conversation, in the passing from one minute to the next, between two people looking out at the same scene, not knowing what the other sees.

In Max Lobe’s Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside?, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, country is introduced by the most immediate and intimate of desires—food. Our narrator, Mwana, is lugging “two huge sugar-cane bags” across Switzerland, with all the provisions and gifts of another nation inside: “Fumbwa, saka-saka, makayabu, okra and dried impwa.” The list goes on, rich with sugars and starches and svelte oils. Wrapped meticulously by his mother, the treasured packages have been carried by his sister Kosambela, across the continental divide from what Mwana calls Bantuland, to the nation where they both now reside: Switzerland of the Grütli Meadow and the Rütli Oath, of white-out peaks and lakeshore villas.

A recent graduate of the University of Geneva and a settled Swiss resident, Mwana is black, queer, and unemployed; it is this lattermost factor that rules his life, his daily preoccupations, and his physical and mental wanderings. With repeated trips to the unemployment office, small yellow coins dug out of household crevices, kindly deceptive calls to his mother—this scarcity is the precipice that Mwana dangles from, and as such it is the swinging, breakneck angle by which he interprets everything. The two bags he drags onto the bus from Lugano to Geneva contain emblems of home, of care, and of a beautiful eradication of distance, but most importantly, they are an antidote to hunger. Amidst Lobe’s warm, loquacious prose, we first see the dissipation of difference into sameness, the shift from displacement in country to immediacy in the body. In all the discursive paths the mind takes to arrive at a single place, we see the need to live. READ MORE…

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #2 Borges and the Blind by Abdelfattah Kilito

December 29, 2022  |  in News  |  by Matthew Redman

Borges learned Arabic and died or, and perhaps more precisely, he learned Arabic and thus died.

Our second most-read piece of the year is Abdelfattah Kilito’s Borges and the Blind, expertly translated from the Arabic by Ghazouane Arslane (who was also interviewed about this article on the blog by Senior Assistant Editor Alex Tan). A lithe and subtle essay on Borges’ famous short story Averroës’ Search, it glides with a rather un-essayistic lightness that belies how profuse it is with ideas. We’ll limit ourselves to pulling on one of its threads: Borges writes at the threshold between European and Arabic literatures; he is a bridger, and—why not, though Kilito never says so explicitly—a translator of sorts bringing the literature of Arabic to the West. The essay never prescribes and Kilito consciously forswears snobbery; nevertheless, as he unpacks allusions only Arabists could know and Europeans would not deign to scrutinise we find suggestions on how to read Borges’ work—and indeed any work at all rooted in an unfamiliar culture. Dismiss those foreign words and names at your peril. With Borges as with the best translations, a trove of knowledge is resting literally under your nose, if only you think to look for it. It’s a thrilling notion, and there are other ideas that spark similar thoughts throughout Borges and the Blind. Like so many articles in this year’s top ten, it very much bears rereading.

Here’s an excerpt:

One is curious, in this context, about Borges’s relationship with languages, and namely with the Arabic language. He knew, of course, Spanish and English (his grandmother was English) and was proficient in French and German. He lived in four languages, but what about Arabic? In one of his poems, a rare and equivocal verse attracted my attention: “What language / am I doomed to die in?!” This could mean in what language will death strike me, or in what language am I to die, what is the language in which it is my duty to die? Borges partly made up his mind when, wondering, he added: “The Spanish my ancestors used / to call for the charge, or to play truco / The English of the Bible / my grandmother read from / at the edges of the desert?” He mentioned the two languages closest to his heart. What is rather strange, however, is that he would die in neither of them, let alone in French or German. He would die in a fifth language he had not expected or intuited to die in, a new language he was indeed able to acquire. Which language? The Arabic language, which he had started to learn during the last year of his life. Borges learned Arabic and died or, and perhaps more precisely, he learned Arabic and thus died.

If this piece has sparked an interest in Abdelfattah Kilito’s literary criticism, your next stop has to be his Dream of a Baghdad Night, translated from the French by former team member Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernberg for our Spring 2019 issue. If all this talk of bridge-building inspires you to join us behind the scenes, on the other hand, take note that we’re already advertising our first recruitment call of 2023. From Editor-at-Large to Assistant Blog Editor, check out the newly available positions here and send in your application today!

REVISIT OUR SECOND MOST-READ ARTICLE OF 2022 READ MORE…

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #3 An Interview with Georges Szirtes

December 28, 2022  |  in News  |  by Bridget Peak

In her brilliant interview, Rose Bialer reveals Szirtes to be a poet grappling with and exploring constraints—of memory, borders, mortality.

“Pulling narratives together is an act of blind construction, an exploration of the valid. Constructions suggest artificiality. And it is true, in legal prose terms, that poems, as constructions, are artificial and therefore unreliable. But poets should not be afraid of construction: construction is the poem’s natural way of witnessing.” 

Acclaimed poet and translator from the Hungarian Georges Szirtes comes in at Number 3 in our countdown of the most-read articles of the year, via his interview in the Winter 2022 issue. Renowned for both his poetry as well as for his translations, Szirtes writes prolifically and without pretense in print and on social media. As a translator, Szirtes is perhaps best known for his work on Hungarian phenom László Krasznahorkai (his translation of Satantango won the Best Translated Book Award in 2013; while you’re here, why not also read our interview with László Krasznahorkai?).

In her brilliant interview, our very own Rose Bialer reveals Szirtes to be a poet grappling with and exploring constraints—of memory, borders, mortality. Szirtes offers intimate insights on the lasting impact of his experience of migration in childhood and the memories—“small fragments of coloured glass that may—with a lot of luck—add up to a stained glass window of sorts”—that he has pieced together from the family photographs that he carried on the journey from Hungary to England. These memories drove Szirtes to reclaim the Hungarian language twenty-eight years after it “went to sleep.” Visualizations of what might have been permeate Szirtes’ poetry; taken as a whole, his collections reconstruct the story of his life, with glimpses of reality that appear as if frozen in film.

For example, of his latest work Waking in the Yellow Room, Szirtes says:

These are exercises of the imagination based on my experience of him [my father] and on my own sense of what Jewishness entailed for him then and what it entails for me now . . . The yellow room is the house of the soon-to-be dead. I see him as the child squatting in the corner. 

In this experiment, Szirtes rewrites the constraints of memory, suggesting a new reality in which his father didn’t eschew Judaism for Atheism in the traumatic aftermath of the Holocaust. In addition, “there are increasing reminders of mortality as one grows older; in my case the death of friends, the pandemic, my own state of health . . . my mother’s early death . . . I have been sure from the start that the apprehension of mortality is what drives the whole artistic project.” 

This is not the first time Szirtes has been featured in Asymptote, his poem The Swan’s Reflection: two sides of a postcard headlined our English Poetry Feature as far back as in our Fall 2011 issue, alongside Lydia Davis’s very first translations from the Dutch, new translations of Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, and a survey of Croatian novelists by Dubravka Ugrešić. Find contributing editor Sim Yee Chiang’s behind-the-scenes look at this issue from our #30issues#30days showcase. If you’re inspired to submit your own work after dipping into our twelve-year-old archive, check out our submission guidelines here and send in your best work today! 

CLICK HERE FOR OUR THIRD MOST-READ ARTICLE OF 2022

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