A Perpetual Coming-of-Age: On Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü

March 22, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Irmak Ertuna Howison

Tezer Özlü will never be imprisoned in the traps of bourgeois norms and conventions.

Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely, Serpent’s Tail/Transit Books, 2023

Known as the melancholy princess of Turkish literature, Tezer Özlü is one of the most influential figures of women’s writing in Turkey. Inspiring generations of writers with both her life and distinct writing voice, Özlü has been a permanent fixture in country’s intellectual history; it’s surprising that such a beloved figure of Turkish literature is debuting in English only now. Fortunately for us, her glaring absence from international publishing has finally been remedied by Serpent’s Tail (UK) and Transit (USA), and English language readers can now discover the genius of a unique writer.

Despite being remembered as a leftist and feminist, Özlü was never a part of the revolutionary struggle like other famous Turkish authors recently translated into English. In Cold Nights of Childhood, she writes: “I was never a part of a revolutionary struggle. Not during the 12 March era, and not after it, either. All I ever wanted was to be free to think and act beyond the tedious limits set by the petit bourgeoisie”. She wasn’t imprisoned or tortured like Sevgi Soysal or involved in organized politics as her close friend Leyla Erbil. Even though she retained leftist sensibilities and occasionally wrote about class struggle, her revolt was more individual and existential. Accordingly, she wrote autobiographical novels which situate readers in the midst of her confrontation with different kinds of authority.

Cold Nights of Childhood is a compact example of her autofiction, and a perfect choice to introduce Özlü to new readers, encapsulating the themes and style that launched her as a tremendous force in the Turkish literary. In the afterward to the novel, translator Maureen Freely writes: “she was one of the very few who broke rules at sentence level, refusing continuity, and slashing narrative logic to evoke in words the things she truly felt and saw, that we all might see them”. Rejecting the linear narrative, she weaves together fragments of time; this experimentation with chronology enables her to reflect on her past while also imagine a way for a gratifying future. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Summer” by Cvetka Lipuš

March 21, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Tom Priestly

the simple happiness of holidays is worn / beneath it is tanned skin

This Translation Tuesday, Cvetka Lipuš places us lovingly amidst summers speculated, imagined, and half-remembered. It’s a delicious place to be, an infinity of summers in loose procession, their light and heat restorative, the best of them able to forestall the worst horrors. Because solar heat slows time and addles the brain, Lipuš asks her questions lollingly, sun-drunk, swaddled in the season’s “simple happiness”.

How many times was the sun at its zenith
how many summers went by
who keeps count of them
ears of corn are tallied
a column of grain rising to meet the universe
are only one’s own counted or also others
am I to begin with the dog days when Achilles
sets sail for Troy in the heat
he glistens with his brass
or with those when the smell of coltsfoot in the ravine
drowns the school at the bottom of hot timelessness
shall I compile a list of my favorites
are others also included
maybe the summer when the landscape
was changed they stopped bringing fear home
the war left behind its front
maybe the summer when time comes off its hinges
the simple happiness of holidays is worn
beneath it is tanned skin

Translated from the Slovenian by Tom Priestly

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A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

March 20, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Andriana Hamas, Areeb Ahmad, and Sofija Popovska

Put on your seatbelts: This month’s edition takes us to Egypt, Sudan, and Japan!

2023’s first installment of A Thousand Lives takes us back in time (as far back as 1966) to unearth gems from around the world that some of us may have overlooked. Tackling topics ranging from colonialism to women’s place in society, they are as relevant today as when they first saw light of publication. Join our editors-at-large as they open three fabulous time capsules!

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Originally published in 1975 and first translated from the Arabic into English by Sherif Hetata in 1983, Woman at Point Zero, one of Nawal El Saadawi’s most well-known novels, sadly remains relevant as ever. In the preface, she writes that the book is based on a real woman, a true story seemingly down to the name Firdaus. The frame narrative is that of a journalist, a stand-in for Saadawi, who has been unsuccessfully trying to talk to Firdaus and is finally able to meet her the night before her slated execution. The framed narrative is Firdaus’s story: her traumatic childhood, how she became a prostitute, and why she is now on death row. While it’s certainly tied to a specific time and place for Arab women in Egyptian society, the novel is an indictment of patriarchy at large everywhere. The issues that Saadawi explores—the subjugation of women, women as goods, the hypocrisy of men, men as consumers, state and power, money—have not been resolved almost half a century after it first came out. There is a surprising immediacy, made all the more apparent by the pulsating prose. Here’s the portrait of a woman who has fatally unveiled society’s ugly truths. Buy a copy here.

–Areeb Ahmad, Editor-at-Large for India

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Tayeb Salih was a Sudanese author, cultural journalist, and key figure in the Sudanese literary scene. Published in 1966, his most famous novel—Season of Migration to the North—was translated from Arabic by Denys Johnson-Davies. In a distinctive style, oscillating between a trenchant and a dreamy timbre, Salih tells the story of a young Sudanese man returning to his home village to find the people he’d grown up with succumbing to the charms of a mysterious stranger. The secretive newcomer develops a kinship with the protagonist, having shared a similar past—both had left their native land to study in England—and reveals his troubling biography, adumbrated by a series of dangerous games of seduction and violence. The stranger’s presence in the village is all but benign: soon, events of unprecedented brutality begin to take place, leaving the protagonist to observe powerlessly as his homeland falls apart. Now translated into more than 30 languages, Season of Migration to the North explores themes of exoticism and authenticity, growth and revenge, as well as delving deep into the complicated interplay between colonizer and colonized, on the individual and collective scale. Buy a copy here.

—Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large for Macedonia READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 17, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Julia Sherwood, and Wambua Muindi

The latest in literary news from Slovakia, Czechia, Kenya, and Bulgaria!

This week, our editors are providing coverage of headlining events featuring intercultural dialogues, book launches of groundbreaking texts, and political corruption. In Slovakia and Czechia, the two countries discuss the ramifications of Czechoslovakia’s breakup on the two nations’ respective literatures. In Kenya, a collection featuring the stories of women hawkers—a burgeoning national economy—is released to the public. And in Bulgaria, a beloved theatre director takes aim at the National Theatre’s “moral degradation.” Read on to find out more!

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Slovakia

The thirtieth anniversary of the breakup of Czechoslovakia prompted reflections in both the Slovak and the Czech press on the legacy of the common state, and how the cultural links between the two nations have evolved since the countries went their separate ways. Summing up the literary developments in a recent episode of Knižná revue, an excellent podcast produced by the Slovak Literature Centre, the Czech literature scholar and translator of Slovak literature Lubomír Machala suggested that there are now more differences than parallels between the two literatures—although what has not changed is that the Czech reading public shows less interest in Slovak literature than vice versa. The Slovak literature scholar Magdalena Bystrzak also sees this relationship as asymmetrical, as does her colleague Radoslav Passia, who points out that the ties between the two literatures are, nevertheless, much stronger than those between either nation and any other literature, as reflected in numerous bilateral literary projects, such as a Czech/Slovak poetry competition, or the Month of Authors’ Readings.

The end of January marked the 105th birthday of Leopold Lahola (1918-1968): playwright, film director, screenwriter, poet, and essayist, whose short stories reflect his harrowing wartime experiences. Lahola’s promising postwar literary career was cut short when his plays were denounced as “existentialist” in 1948, upon which he emigrated to Israel, where he helped to launch the country’s burgeoning  film industry, before moving to Austria and Germany. Although he spent nearly half of his life in exile, Lahola never stopped writing in Slovak. In the late 1960s, Lahola began to visit his native country again but, sadly, died of a heart attack in January 1968, shortly before his fiftieth birthday. It is a pity that so far, only one of his short stories is available in English.

The 2022 recipients of one of Slovakia’s major awards, the Tatra Banka Foundation’s Arts Prize, were announced at the end of January. The prize for a debut work of literature went to Nicol Hochholczerová for Táto izba sa nedá zjesť (This Room is Too Much to Swallow, as reported here) and the poet Mila Haugová added to her many previous accolades the main prize for literature, for her collection Z rastlinstva (From Flora). And although not strictly speaking a literary prize, it is  worth mentioning  the bank’s Special Prize, awarded to Gabriela Garlatyová for her monograph on the extraordinary visual Slovak artist Mária Bartuszová. Garlatyová was a consultant on a major exhibition of Bartuszová’s work at London’s Tate Modern, which has just been extended to June 25, and which I urge everyone to visit. READ MORE…

What Exists Where You Do Not See: On Andrés Neuman’s Bariloche

March 16, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Arabella Bosworth

Bariloche is bleakly luminous and fascinatingly fractured.

Bariloche by Andrés Neuman, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers, Open Letter, 2023

Andrés Neuman’s first novel, originally published in 1999, is his fourth to be translated into English—following Traveller of the Century, Talking to Ourselves, and Fracture. Any thoughts of difficulty or inadequacy suggested by this twenty-odd-year delay can be quickly dismissed: it is worth the wait. Finalist in the Herralde Prize, and described by Bolaño as containing something “that can be found only in great literature, the kind written by real poets,” this story of a trash collector living in Buenos Aires who obsessively compiles puzzles depicting the region of his childhood—the Bariloche of the title—is densely powerful.

The narrative follows Demetrio as he goes about his job collecting trash with his co-worker, El Negro. They work while the city (or most of it) sleeps, stopping only to breakfast on cafe con leche and medialunas, occasionally inviting a homeless person to join them. Their dialogue is simple, and El Negro talks far more than Demetrio, who is absorbed in thought—or in nothingness, El Negro can’t tell. After work, in the early afternoon, Demetrio returns home, where he collapses into bed, finding a kind of brief relief there:

He went to the bathroom, pissed with relish, took off his shoes, stroked his pillow, breathed between the sheets, the sheets were dissolving into something else becoming water, becoming waves.

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More Indestructible Than the Past: On Pascal Quignard’s The Fount of Time

March 15, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Quignard invites us into thinking alongside him, into an active engagement between two consciousnesses, writer and reader.

The Fount of Time by Pascal Quignard, translated from the French by Chris Turner, Seagull Books, 2022

You might not know it, but you’ve likely been affected by the work of Akiyoshi Kitaoka, a professor of psychology and specialist in visual perception. That is—if a static image has ever given you vertigo, if you’ve taken LSD at some point in your life, or if you happen to be a fan of experimental pop band Animal Collective, whose 2002 album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, is outfitted in one of the scientist’s undulating patterns. Carefully constructed to delude the eye, Kitaoka’s psychedelic, shifty images induce an anomalous motion illusion, wherein selective shadings and geometries, coupled with repetition, tricks neurons into thinking that a picture is moving when it’s not. What results is an extremely convincing array of stillnesses that nevertheless quiver, spin, and oscillate. It’s only a tiny, easily recognisable fissure in the reliability of perception, but just as such illusions hint towards the limits of seeing, the indisputable evidence of our deceptive and limiting physicality sends us outward, pushing us towards all that exists in the unseen—that which finds its way to us through the intuited at, the briefly sensed, the deeply felt.

Pascal Quignard is restless with the unseen. His immense body of work—comprising of over sixty titles—plunges into the lush fabric of invisible things. From loss, to silence, to love, Quignard introduces the solid infrastructures that seem to contain these wild and eternal subjects, only to then elaborate upon their perceptible dimensions with the secret experience of echoes, phantoms, and the vivid reality of the imagined. From novels that wrestle with the psychological tortured voyeur (Villa Amalia) to ekphrastic writings on sexual imagery, the author is famed for his ability to excavate the torrid undercurrents of our daily existence—the metaphors, symbols, and myths that enrich and multiply human experience.

The latest work to make its way to English, The Fount of Time, is part of Quignard’s Last Kingdom (Dernier Royaume) series, which today comprises of eleven titles perhaps most notable for their resistance to classification. At once novelistic, aphoristic, philosophical, and poetic, the books flow through the author’s intelligence and preoccupations, traversing the topography of his mind in the rhythm of thinking—which is to say, formlessly. The Fount of Time joins three other Last Kingdom books in the Anglosphere, all in the fastidious and graceful language of Chris Turner, including: The Silent Crossing in 2013, Abysses in 2015, The Roving Shadows (which won the 2002 Goncourt) in 2019—with Dying of Thinking due out in early 2024. All of the titles hold to the same mutable nature, composed of chapters of widely varying lengths (some a dozen pages long, some containing only a sentence). Of the sections, there are ones that sound like the beginnings of stories, and ones that sound like endings; the contents verge from the studious and cerebral, to the simplicity of oral lyricism. Subjects include the colour red, the spring, classifications of matter, civil war, seclusion, The Huainanzi, animality, orgasms, fairies, ancient Rome, and happiness. The prose is passionate, distant, and indelible. Certain lines are almost even funny. It makes sense that Quignard has now dedicated himself to this series; it is essentially to state that after a lifetime spent pursuing a craft bound by definitions, delineations, and elucidations, he has forsaken clarity for the infinitely more true nature of life’s complexity. The cage door of literature’s maniacal self-diagnosis is flung open; the words have been freed. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “23 Cents” by Appadurai Muttulingam

March 14, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Thila Varghese

May your day begin well! Let it turn out to be even better with the resolution of my 23 cents credit issue.

This Translation Tuesday, Sri Lankan author and Toronto resident Appadurai Muttulingam recounts one person’s mischief at the expense of the impassive Canadian bureaucracy. When the narrator, in search of a human connection and the money he is rightfully owed, is rebuffed by automated mails and call center robots, a solution presents itself in the form of voicemails: whimsical, garrulous ones sent directly into the heart of the system, intended to flush out human beings hidden behind the machinery. Will the issue be resolved? Read on to find out.

Canadian $0.23. Its currency value amounts to 15 Sri Lankan rupees, 8 Indian rupees, 333 Italian liras and 20 Japanese yen in their respective denominations. That is not what is important. The Canadian government owes me these 23 cents. For many years, the government has been confused about how to return this amount to me, and I also don’t know how to get it back. Canada, a member of the world’s important group of countries known as the G8, has been cheating me for 23 cents.

This is how the problem started. For cooking my food and running the furnace, the Canadian government’s natural gas company supplied the gas, which saved me from hunger and cold. I am grateful for that.

Every month, they would send me a statement of account. Along with it, other monthly bills would arrive as well. I would review the bills on a Saturday morning and write the cheques to settle the accounts. These cheques would then be placed in window envelopes and mailed with appropriate stamps pasted on them.

At one time, the natural gas company sent me a bill for the amount of $199.77. For the sake of convenience and also because the amount in my account was in zeros at the time, I sent them a cheque for $200.00, meaning that I had remitted 23 cents more.

That’s how the blunder I made started.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2023

March 13, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Ian Ross Singleton, and Rachel Landau

New translations from the Yiddish, Japanese, and Esperanto!

In this month’s round up of the latest releases, we’re thrilled to introduce three singular works from rulebreakers, free thinkers, and true originals. From Japan, an early novella from the nation’s renowned enfant terrible, Osamu Dazai, gives a telling look at the writer’s internal monologue. From the Nobel laureate Issac Bashevis Singer, a bilingual edition of the Yiddish author’s story—in multiple translations—opens up an inquest into the translator’s pivotal role. And from the Ukrainian émigré Vasili Eroshenko, a collection of the author’s fairy tales, translated from the Japanese and Esperanto, presents a well-rounded selection of the transnational author’s politically charged work. Read on to find out more!

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Simple Gimpl by Isaac Bashevis Singer, a definitive bilingual edition with translations from the Yiddish by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, and David Stromberg, and Illustrations by Liana Finck, Restless Books, 2023

Review by Rachel Landau, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

Whether you choose to know him as “Simple Gimpl” or “Gimpel the Fool,” the main character of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novella is a likable, rambling man who finds himself in an unfortunate situation. His wife, Elka, is frequently using their shared home for affairs with other men, and all of Gimpl’s attempts to come to terms with the situation are complicated by his deep love for her. Even when the pair are forbidden by the town rabbi from seeing each other, Gimpl works tirelessly to provide for the children and for Elka. He feels betrayed to learn, at the end of Elka’s life, that the children were not really his—and his reaction to this deception is a surprising one.

The narrative in Simple Gimpl is slow-moving, reflective, and witty. It is an undeniable pleasure to read—and certainly not difficult to read multiple times in a row, as this edition of the book incites the reader to do. This “definitive bilingual edition,” released by Restless Books, includes back-to-back translations of the Yiddish work; first is Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Simple Gimpl,” which is followed immediately by Saul Bellow’s “Gimpel the Fool,” and this compendium of translations is decidedly about translation itself. Over the course of more than one hundred pages, one must realize that this is not a book about Gimpl, and not even about the differences between Saul Bellow’s Gimpel and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Gimpl. It is about the role of the translator; it is about the strange impossibility of rendering a story. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 10, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Eva Wissting, and José García Escobar

Dispatches from Central America, Sweden, and Hong Kong!

This week at Asymptote, our Editors at Large report on the use of artificial intelligence in publishing, the return of in-person events in Hong Kong’s literary scene, and exciting award announcements! From a new book of poetry to multi-disiplinary festivals, read on to learn more!

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

In February, Guatemalan poet Eduardo Villalobos published his latest book of poems entitled Ixtab (Catafixia Editorial), which draws inspiration from the Mesoamerican deity of suicide. Ixtab is Eduardo’s fourth book of poems, and he remains one of Guatemala’s most celebrated poets today. He has been invited to renowned festivals in Guatemala and around the world, such as the Copenhagen Literature Festival and the Festival Internacional de Poesía de Quetzaltenango.

Also in February, Slash and Burn by El Salvadorean writer Claudia Hernández and translated by Julia Sanches, was announced as the runner-up of the Premio Valle Iclán, awarded each year by the UK’s The Society of Authors. Hernández is the author of four novels and several short story collections and in 2004, she earned the prestigious Anna Seghers Prize. Slash and Burn was also shortlisted for the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize.

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Visual Spotlight: Guga Szabzon on keeping the world safe between pages

March 9, 2023  |  in Visual Art  |  by Nicolás Llano Linares and Gustavo Nóbrega

Every single thing, when taken seriously, is transformed and becomes eternal.

After a two-year hiatus during the COVID-19 pandemic, Carnaval do Brasil was poised to return in all its colorful pageantry across the country this past February. Yet, flooding across Brazil’s Sao Paulo state forced many cities to cancel their scheduled festivities as hundreds flee their homes. In a month that has witnessed devastation on a large scale stemming from catastrophic natural disasters, from the deadly quakes in Turkey and Syria to forest fires in Chile, it can feel like an unrelenting onslaught of uncontrollable circumstances. Enter the work of Guga Szabzon, a visual artist and educator from São Paulo, Brazil, whose works speak to the impossibility of naming experience even as they offer a way to keep the world “safe between . . . pages.” In the first installment of a new series spotlighting the stunning visual content from our archives, we revisit our interview with the artist from the Fall 2018 issue.

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The lines in a notebook, in general, have a clear utility: to organize the text, to make the text comprehensible with a clear and sequential reading. I’ve never really followed that rule, but I always opted for notebooks with ruled pages. I discovered after some time that what attracted me to this choice was not having a blank page waiting for me. The lines were already a design. As time went by, I realized that the organizational forms of the world interest me. And I realized that there was a similarity between ruled lines and the coordinates of a map. Both have latitude and longitude. One organizes a text and the other organizes space.

The sensation that I had with this project was the same that I had with my notebooks. My own world kept safe between the pages. Everything I had lived. How many stories fit inside a notebook? How many stories can be written on the blank pages? An entire world awaiting the next word.

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Celebrate International Women’s Day with Women’s Writing!

March 8, 2023  |  in News  |  by The Blog Team

Join us as we highlight the vital contributions of women to literature and translation.

March 8th is International Women’s Day, and we wanted to take the opportunity to lift up the work of women in world literature. Below, find a selection of pieces published on the blog in the past year, across essays, reviews, translations, and interviews, curated to represent the breadth and brilliance of women working in writing.

Interviews

A Conversation on Kurdish Translation with Farangis Ghaderi
by Holly Mason Badra

But when you look deeper, when you look at archives, and look at early Kurdish periodicals, you find women. You discover these forgotten voices. An interesting example of that is Zeyneb Xan, who published under the pseudonym of Kiche Kurd (“Kurdish girl”). In 2018, when a publisher was reprinting Galawej (the first Kurdish literary journal published in 1939–1949), they decided to have sections on contributing writers. They came across this name, and one of the researchers working on the project uncovered that the identity of the writer was Zeyneb Xan (1900–1963), the eldest sister of Dildar—a very well-known figure of Kurdish literature who wrote the Kurdish anthem. Although her family was a literary family and at the center of literary attention, her manuscript remained unpublished until 2018. Her truly fascinating poetry collection covers a wide range of themes from patriotism to women’s education and liberation.

Wild Women: An Interview with Aoko Matsuda and Polly Barton
by Sophia Stewart

For me, films and television programs, as well as books and comics, have always been the places where I can meet outsider women, weirdo women, rebel women, sometimes scary women. When I was a child, I didn’t care if these women were human beings or ghosts or monsters, and I didn’t care if they were from Japan or other countries. I was just drawn to them, encouraged by their existence.

To Protect Oneself From Violence: An Interview with Mónica Ojeda
by Rose Bialer

Maybe if I was born in some other place, I would be writing about something else, but I do believe that Latin America is a very violent continent, especially for women, and in all of our traditions of women’s literature, there have always been women writing horror stories in Latin America. . .  I do believe that it’s because you can’t write about anything else. That’s how you live life. You are afraid for your life. You are scared of the violence in your family, the violence between your friends, the violence in the street. You can’t think about anything else except how to protect yourself from violence.

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Translation Tuesday: “The Snowman’s Son” by Aleksandr Kabanov

March 7, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Marina Eskina

I also am a snowman’s son, despoiled of hearing and sight

This Translation Tuesday, we deliver unflinching poetry from Ukraine that sheds cold light on the child victims of the Russian invasion. On translating Aleksandr Kabanov’s pioneering, at-times enigmatic style, translator Marina Eskina writes: “I chose ‘The Snowman’s Son’ for its expressiveness, force, and, last but not least, because it is more translatable. It includes Biblical references with some overtones from the Russian classical poet Aleksandr Pushkin’s famous poem ‘The Prophet’ which in turn is an allusion to the scene from the Book of Isaiah. My goal as a translator was to preserve these references and allusions without ruining author’s stylistics. Such close reading and search for meanings brought me closer to deciphering Kabanov’s metaphorical universe.” 

The Snowman’s Son

The snow of war that flies askew
ignoring all the rules,
it fiercely pierces us through and through
but partly stays the course.

Snow rested the seventh useless wing
on earth’s frozen spine,
the other luckier six it brought
underground to his son.

There, underground, the rink of ice
glitters and melts with the laughs
of kids killed casually by war:
let’s mold them a dad of snow.

But death is eerily cunning,
it swaps the crown for a pail—
amidst the hasty castling—
a carrot for the cross and nails.

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Asymptote at the Movies: Happening

March 6, 2023  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Georgina Fooks, Meghan Racklin, and Xiao Yue Shan

But how does the visual operate in cinema, as opposed to literature?

Annie Ernaux’s memoir of her 1963 abortion, Happening, originally published in 2000, and Audrey Diwan’s 2021 movie adaptation of the same name are the subject of our latest edition of Asymptote at the Movies. Ernaux’s memoir tells the story of an abortion she sought before the procedure was legal in France, and the story of her reflecting on the experience decades later, well after France legalized abortion. Diwan’s movie came out in a very different world than the one Ernaux’s memoir reflects on and, indeed, the one in which Ernaux wrote her memoir. Both the book and the movie follow young Annie’s struggle to find the medical care she needs—Ernaux said that watching the film “plunged” her back into the experience she wrote about. Taking the two together underscores the urgency of her situation and raises questions about the difference between cinematic immediacy and memoiristic distance. In the following roundtable, Meghan Racklin, Xiao Yue Shan, and Georgina Fooks discuss the relationship between these two works, the translation of memoir into fiction, and experience of reading and watching the movement of time.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Halfway through the pages of Ernaux’s Happening, there’s a line that I saw as a kind of summation of her entire corpus’ ethos: “I believe that any experience, whatever its nature, has the inalienable right to be chronicled.” It seems to me that a similar sentiment across nearly all of her texts—which are, after all, in their obsessive tunnelling and metaphysical depth, a refusal of any verdict that women’s lives are mundane, and their thoughts unserious.

And there is a particular impact to that Serious Verb—chronicled. In French, Ernaux opts for the less indomitable l’écrire, but I’d like to believe that Tanya Leslie, in her translation, understood that to write would have been too pliant for what Ernaux wanted to say: that such experiences needed to be inscribed into the archives of human history, that they needed to be preserved as well as they can for future excavation, and that such texts would fill the void in the scaffolding of time.

Happening, then, is a text about writing, but also the remembering that feeds the writing, and also the rupture that must be navigated when reality and recognition are trying to find one another on the page. If there was any image that came to mind while I read Happening, it was only of the older Ernaux holding a pen, gazing out the window, closing her eyes in conjuration of an image. Because Happening does not centralise the abortion that propels its narrative, but the intellectual clarity that is required to unveil “what can be found there,” I almost expected a cinematic replication of that once-removed perspective in Audrey Diwan’s adaptation: voiceover narration, analepsis/prolepsis, superimpositions . . .

The film, however, makes no use of such manipulations, and completely isolates itself within the parameters of the Event; it is a movie about abortion, and its illegality and ramifications in 1960s France. It is so dissonant from its source text—not in content but in intention—that it jarred me when Anamaria Varolomei, who plays Ernaux, is first addressed as Annie. It was impossible for me to connect her with the woman of the book—not only because the woman is older, but because the woman is remembering, not living through. The film is an intimate, occasionally chilling, and politically effective film about the alienation and humiliation of being accidentally pregnant in that era—and as such it is rooted in the immediate, in the physical, and in the cinematic present. Ernaux’s text read to me in direct opposition, weaving and defining that tenuous space of the eternal past. How did the two of you feel about this variation in treatment? Was it as disconcerting for you?

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 3, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Areeb Ahmad, and Wambua Muindi

Dispatches from Mexico, Kenya, and India!

This week at Asymptote, our Editors-at-Large report on book fairs, Annie Ernaux’s visit to India, and celebrations of International Mother Language Day all around the world. From the efforts of Trans activists and performance artists in Mexico to a recent multilingual anthology published by Olongo Africa, read on to learn more!

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

The literary community in Mexico City has been vibrant and active in the first months of 2023. Between February 23–March 6, the Feria Internacional del Libro del Palacio de Minería took place in Mexico City. This forty-fourth edition of one of the biggest international book fairs in Mexico brought together writers, scholars, editors, and artists from all over the world. They gathered in the historic downtown to host readings, panels, and roundtables on literature, social sciences, and politics.

There were more than a hundred events, ranging from book presentations to movie screenings to workshops for children. In one panel, Asymptote contributor Tedi López Mills presented an edited anthology of her poetry, published by the National University of Mexico in its pamphlet series Material de lectura. The publication will bring López Mills’s poetry to a wider public. In another event, Cuban poet Odette Alonso moderated a talk with Lía García and Jessica Marjane, two Trans performance artists and organizers that have been at the forefront of the movement for Trans rights and recognition in Mexico. García and Marjane founded the National Network of Trans Youth, which has strengthened the community bonds among Trans young people in Mexico. García has acquired international recognition, having been invited to perform and read to institutions outside of Mexico, among them Harvard University and the University of Illinois’s Humanities Research Center.

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