Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 27, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar and Xiao Yue Shan

Catch up on literary news from our editors on the ground!

This week, our editors report on literary gatherings, from a Chinese organization that seeks to bridge the cultural divide between the mainland and Taiwan, and Central America’s biggest book fair, FILGUA. Read on to find out more!

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting for China

The Taiwan Strait measures only 130 km at its narrowest point, but it is the other distance—the unphysical distance, imposed by human prescriptions—that defines it. Recently, with the US’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, Taiwan’s own future was placed into question, with many remarking that the island was due to become “the next Afghanistan,” and criticizing American foreign policy as a hasty manifestation of 始乱终弃—to play with and abandon as if with a toy. Whether or not the US will continue its disengagement of military intervention, the geopolitical tension has deepened the chasm between the island and the mainland—in history if not in nature—with the continual wear of weariness, suspicion, and speculation.

Yet in Pingtan, Fujian, from where Taiwan is vivid and impossibly near on the other side of the waters, there persists certain attempts of breaching the cultural distance, most recently by the Pingtan Cross-Strait Sinology Center, established in 2018. Regularly hosting forums and lectures on Chinese and Taiwanese scholarship and texts, the Center, on August 18, held a talk on Taiwanese women writers, and how they write about love.

As Taiwanese writer 余光中 Yu Guangzhong once remarked, it is the work of women writers that have contributed most significantly to the nation’s exceptional range of contemporary essays. The traditional memoirist 林海音 Lin Haiyin, the nomadic and impassioned diarist Sanmao 三毛, the erudite humanist 琦君 Chi Chun—the works of such women essayists both expanded and challenged the imagination and logics of Taiwanese letters, intervening in the traditional discourse with intelligent intimations of selfhood, voyage, and being. While delivering the lecture, professor Yuan Yonglin remarked on how writers such as 张晓风 Zhang Xiaofeng and 简媜 Jian Zheng impressed deeply in their works by giving personal insight as to how they defined their relationships with the men in their lives—the former with the letters written to her husband, and the latter with writings on her father. In the depiction of men as subjects of love, these texts identified passions, affections, and aestheticizations specific to the female experience, addressing their complexity and bringing them into public language. READ MORE…

On the Verge: Keila Vall de la Ville and Robin Myers Discuss The Animal Days

August 26, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Allison Braden

What gives the book its identity is this relationship with fear and with the extreme.

Keila Vall de la Ville’s debut novel The Animal Days is a thriller—but not in the traditional sense. Protagonist Julia, a climber, chases mountain highs as she tightropes between life and death, joy and grief, adolescence and adulthood. She also chases a boy bent on destruction. Julia narrates this time in her life—the animal days—in a powerful, fluid vernacular that plunges readers into her precipitous milieu. We’re proud to feature this cliffhanging novel as our Book Club pick for July and to share this conversation between Vall de la Ville and translator Robin Myers, which was held live for members. The collaborators discuss the delicacies of portraying gender violence, the climbers’ patois, and the way contemporary Latin American literature plays with time and tense.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive Book Club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only interviews with the author or the translator of each title!

Allison Braden (AB): There’s so much going on in this book, even though it takes place over a relatively short time span. Keila, how do you describe what the book is about?

Keila Vall de la Ville (KV): I think of the book as the story of the process of becoming, in which travel, spatial movement, has to do with the inner journey as well. That might seem a little general in the sense that many talk about displacement and movement, geographical movement, as a way to travel inwards.

What makes the book different and what gives the book its identity is this relationship with fear and with the extreme—not only because the characters are climbers but also because of their own particular intimate relationship. Julia’s actually transitioning from one state and one moment to the next. So, it’s all about extremes.

Gender violence pervades the whole story, and it’s very important to me. It took me a while to figure out how to talk about it. We all know how terrible it is, but at the same time, it has so many nuances, and so many colors, and so many ways of manifesting. I believe it’s important to show that it’s not only about physical violence or even psychological violence. There are many, many ways to feel violent, especially in an environment that is mostly masculine.

AB: Robin, how did you encounter this book? What attracted you to the story?

Robin Myers (RM): I came into contact with this wonderful book after coming into contact with Keila herself. We’ve actually been working together for so long that I can’t even remember which came first, Poetics on Beauty or this novel, but we’ve been in touch for a number of years about different projects of Keila’s. Shortly before we started writing to each other, this book had won the Latino Book Award, so Keila was interested in having it translated into English.

I read it and was instantly fascinated. I was riveted by the story and by the force of the narrator’s presence—she has a very subtle narrative voice. But in terms of the language itself, which is always what does it for me or doesn’t as a translator and reader, I was so interested in the intensity and the directness of the narrative voice, which is very beautiful but also very blunt. It has this almost spoken quality, which I was really interested in. READ MORE…

Strangely Familiar: A Menagerie of Contemporary Thai and Indonesian Writing

August 25, 2021  |  in Dispatches  |  by Peera Songkünnatham

A comparative imagination is best guided by a “rebel consciousness” which works towards mutual emancipation from all systems of domination.

Although the Thai and Indonesian languages have no linkages and belong to quite different linguistic ancestries, both have long had a fatalistic image of a frog who lives all its life under half a coconut shell.

—Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries

What can two nations mired in their own peculiar chauvinisms learn from each other? How does a country take a long, hard look at itself without losing the exercise of hard-fought internationalism? Earlier this month, the conference “Thai and Indonesian Writing in an Era of Conservative Redux” yielded certain insights to these questions via literary means. Featuring twenty-one speakers and conducted entirely bilingually in Thai and Indonesian, the conference is a colossal collaboration between the School of Political Science and Laws, Walailak University, Thailand, and the Faculty of Letters, State University of Malang, Indonesia.

Exemplifying the critical spirit of this “South-South” comparison, Indonesia’s keynote speaker Linda Christanty shared a personal anecdote: on a visit to Thailand, she went to a cinema and was prompted to stand up for the royal anthem. The Indonesian writer and journalist had then felt proud that Indonesians, in contrast, did not need to stand up to pay respects to some royalty from Java. However, this pride was nullified when, in 2019, the Indonesian Minister of Youth and Sports Affairs—enamored with the Thai monarchy—came up with a proposal: requiring moviegoers to stand up before the images of Yogyakarta Sultan Hamengkubuwono X and to sing along to the national anthem. Even though the proposal didn’t become policy, this anecdote is an important reminder that one cannot afford national smugness when authoritarianism spreads internationally, as it increasingly does.

Neither does the conference dwell on the opposite of smugness—i.e. the grass is greener syndrome—otherwise prevalent in international comparisons from the standpoint of a terrible national situation, especially vis-à-vis the West. Even if the grass on the other side is really greener, the vital point of comparison remains first and foremost to find out exactly how it has become so not-green where one is.

Thai scholar and critic Chusak Pattarakulvanit concurs with Linda Christanty that the so-called “conservative redux” may be more accurately described as a re-strengthening of something that never went away. In his diagnosis of the phenomenon where formerly leftist or pro-democracy writers enjoy a “free right turn,” Chusak identifies three structural contributors: recuperation of subversive works, institutionalization via patronage, and fetishization. The last entails the reduction of literary work—with its inherent capacity to go against convention—to a single prescribed reading, as well as the fixation on a certain “resistant” aesthetics that mutates it into a sacred thing (khong), divorced from actually existing social conditions. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from The Letters of Hiragy al-Qot by Abdel Rahman El-Abnudi

August 24, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Mariam Moustafa

If this letter were a boat, / I would sail down the Nile to reach you.

When Nasser commissioned the construction of the Aswan High Dam—a project pivotal to his legacy of modernising Egypt—most of the migrant builders who came from Upper Egypt were farmers who were unfamiliar with industrial machinery and faced hazardous work conditions. This week’s Translation Tuesday features a set of epistolary poems that relate the story of this historic project through the correspondences of a migrant worker Hiragy and his wife Fatma. These poems, drawn from the start of Abdel Rahman El-Abnudi’s The Letters of Hiragy al-Qot, were written when the poet lived amongst the labourers in Aswan who came from his village of Abnoud. One of the Arab world’s most respected vernacular writers—a true poet of the people—El-Abnudi’s works are social documents that chronicle the history of Egypt. In Mariam Moustafa’s translation, the emerging language of technological modernity is conjured with sensitivity, and the various registers of labour and longing are given emotional resonance. We are thrilled also to feature an audio clip of El-Abnudi himself reading the first two letters in Arabic—for our readers to appreciate why he too is known as “the sound of Egypt.”

“Abdel Rahman El-Abnudi always emphasized that his poems were meant to be listened to, not just read, and recorded most of his poems. I grew up listening to El-Abnudi reciting The Letters of Hiragy al-Qot, and was unsure how to convey the profound emotions that I hear in his voice to an English-speaking audience. A translator can communicate the meaning of sentences, expressions, and even untranslatable words to their target audience, but how can the emotions heard through the heart and soul be translated? In translating and revising this piece, I wanted English readers to feel and hear his voice, and asked constantly: “If El-Abnudi wrote these poems in English, what would they sound like?” This translation is my way of expressing gratitude to the poet, whose voice attracted me as a kid, enlightened me as a teenager, and kept me connected to my roots as a young woman.” 

— Mariam Moustafa

Letter 1

The addressee, the most precious diamond,
The marvelous pearl,
My wife, Fatma Ahmed Abdel Ghafar.
The address, our village of Gabalyat El Far.

This is my first letter to you, my love,
Sent from Aswan where I now work.
If I’d surrendered to the shame of being late,
I wouldn’t have written this letter.
Forgive me, Fatma, for the long wait.
I am sorry, I am ashamed, I am abashed.

It has been two months since you shed your tears.
I still remember how they burned my calming hand.
I promised you then, “Before my train reaches Aswan,
My letter will be in your hands.”
You didn’t believe me, you said:
“You’re such a liar. I know you’ll forget.”

I wish that moment could have lasted longer,
But my friends pulled me inside the train.
Their pull troubled my heart.
A fire raged in my soul as I left you, and our kids, Aziza and Eid.
The train began to move,
My heart plummeted.
I ran to the window and screamed,
“Fatma, take care of Aziza and Eid.”
The train screamed too,
Screeching off as if escaping a fire.
I heard your voice next to me, far away.
“My heart and soul follow you to Aswan, habiby.”
I threw myself inside the train, into the crowd,
And I cried aloud.
Our large village, where we could walk around for a whole day,
Was gone in the blink of an eye.

Forgive me, my love, for being late.
If this letter were a boat,
I would sail down the Nile to reach you.

Finally,
I send to you, to my village, and to my children,
A thousand greetings and salams.

Your husband,
Hiragy.

READ MORE…

Writer and Translator E.J. Koh Explores the Bridged and Braided Histories of Language

August 23, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Ruwa Alhayek

If my mother’s letters could sleep, my translations would be their dreams.

E.J. Koh’s memoir, The Magical Language of Others, was published in January 2020, but I read it in lockdown a few months later. Since March, I have read or listened to this book at least four times, each time encountering something else that makes me come back to it. Koh’s memoir is a coming-of-age story framed by translations of the letters her mother sent her from Korea, where she and Koh’s dad relocated for work. It tells the heartfelt story of a young Korean-American woman who comes to poetry and translation, to Japanese, and to a deeper understanding of her own languages, English and Korean. And she weaves into this story, with palpable sincerity and magnanimity, the stories of generations of women before her who survived the Japanese occupation, the Jeju massacre, and one abandonment after another. In this interview, she talks about avoiding seamlessness and translating war, wounding, and the seemingly impossible.

Ruwa Alhayek (RA): Has translation allowed you to inhabit your mother’s letters in a different way? 

E.J. Koh (EJK): Translating my mother’s letters for me is inseparable from experiencing the vast distance between us in my youth—from the US to South Korea, between English and Korean—and the violence of when that distance suddenly collided to a close. I am living my way back toward the pain of being separated and reunited again. I am holding two strings at the same time. One is the mother who delivered her child. The other is the child who can deliver her mother. That is why I say if my mother’s letters could sleep, my translations would be their dreams.

RA: If you were to issue a new translation of these letters, how do you think they might change? 

EJK: I am in love with and feel deeply grateful for the work of translators. I’d be honored to see her letters translated again, by different translators. What occurs to me is how I leaned away from seamlessness, translation as if written in the historically dominant English, and hoped to let Korean remain—against erasure—choosing instead words with sound, syntax, and rhythm to keep pace with my mother’s voice running circles inside me. But I feel there is no one way, and the assumption of one is the failure to see what can be different and what can be changed.

RA: I was really inspired by the scene of your morning ritual in Japan where you sit in the coffee shop with the hanging vines from dawn until your classes start, memorizing ten pages from your pocket dictionary every day—is there something about that type of immersion that resembles the process of translation for you?

EJK: When I lived in Japan, I starved myself. I wouldn’t eat a proper meal until I could order in Japanese without error. My eating disorder entered my language, and discipline became a place where I could intellectualize my self-harm. I learned the language quickly but with shame and guilt—not opposites to but the very sources of pride. I used language to isolate myself. I say, Languages, as they open you up, can also allow you to close. Where before I depended on separation, now I move in the world by way of connection and humanity. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 20, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Eva Wissting, and Peera Songkünnatham

This week, our editors report from Thailand, Sweden, and the USA.

Around the world, the way we read is changing: Eva Wissting digs into book sales data in Sweden and finds a spike in digital subscription services amid the pandemic, Peera Songkünnatham reports that Thai poets are reinventing a classic form, and Allison Braden rounds up a slew of Women in Translation Month events. The annual celebration, dedicated to shaking up the canon, makes for a perfect moment to envision the heady, vivid future of literature.

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

A literary project called Bokbastionen (“The Book Bastion”) is finally about to launch in Sweden. The Swedish Arts Council has granted Svenska Bokhandlareföreningen, an association of Swedish booksellers, 400,000 SEK to support in-store events with authors. Although it was the challenges posed by the pandemic that led to the idea of supporting booksellers, coronavirus restrictions have delayed its start because gatherings have not been possible until now. Finally, the first event supported by the project will be held this coming week at a poetry festival in picturesque Söderköping. The initial plan for Bokbastionen included twenty author events this year, but about half of these will spill over into next year instead. The interest to host events has been particularly large among smaller, independent bookstores, which now are looking for ways to create interest among readers and book lovers.

Even though the pandemic has had severe consequences for much of the cultural sector, book sales have had a positive development in Sweden, according to a new report from the Swedish Publishers’ Association. In the first half of 2021, overall book sales have increased by over 10 percent, but there is an ongoing shift between sales channels. The largest growth is in digital subscriptions with almost 20 percent, followed by an almost 15 percent increase in online bookstores. Physical bookstores, on the other hand, have had an 8 percent decrease in sales during the first half of this year. Both digital and printed books increased in sales, by 14 percent and 7 percent respectively, indicating that ebooks are not replacing physical books. Out of all book sales in Sweden, almost 80 percent take place online—50 percent through online bookstores and 28 percent through digital subscriptions. The report concludes that book sales have been greatly influenced by the pandemic. More customers have turned to online options, including digital subscription services. Though there are more bookstores closing down permanently than there are starting up, readers seem to be returning to physical bookstores as vaccination rates increase. READ MORE…

Lana Bastašić Still Believes in Beauty

August 19, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Jovanka Kalaba

The Yugoslav-born author talks happy endings, self-translation, and her award-winning novel, Catch the Rabbit.

Lana Bastašić’s novel Catch the Rabbit, published this year by Picador (UK) and Restless Books (US), has launched the author and her work into the orbit of contemporary world fiction. Translated into English by the author herself, the book delivers an unprecedented and riveting tale of female friendship, which spans the recent history of the Balkans. Best friends Lejla and Sara, a Bosnian Muslim and a Serb, whose strong yet strained bond suffers a twelve-year discontinuation, reunite on a quest for the missing pieces in the puzzle of their personal lives in post-war Bosnia. Here, Bastašić discusses her writing process and translating the book into English, as well as the possibility of catharsis in contemporary Balkan fiction—at a moment when ongoing political and social processes provide none in real life.

Jovanka Kalaba (JK): Catch the Rabbit, which came after two collections of short stories, a collection of poetry, and a book of stories for children, won the 2020 EU Prize for Literature for Bosnia and Herzegovina and was shortlisted for the NIN Award. Moreover, it has been widely read in the countries of former Yugoslavia. How do you understand the success and impact of the book?

Lana Bastašić (LB): In the past three years I have found myself in a very peculiar situation of having to explain or justify the success of my book. It was usually male journalists in the Balkans who would ask, “How do you explain this?”—the underlying assumption being that there is something surprising or unnatural about a young woman writing an internationally successful book. It simply doesn’t happen that often in the Balkans because we are faced with a thick firewall of institutionalized patriarchy. I didn’t make it through the firewall; instead I took another path, translated my own book, and found an agent in another country. But the most difficult part was not about getting published elsewhere. It had to do with battling impostor syndrome, becoming assertive, and believing that my work deserved to be read.

This is the battle all of us women writers in the Balkans have to fight within ourselves—to silence the centuries-old voice inside telling us we can’t write. Once I killed that phantom, I could do anything. And I did. The problem I am witnessing now is not about being successful or unsuccessful but about the language used to describe my success. My male colleagues in Serbia are usually “the biggest new talent” or “the most authentic new voice” and, if older, “genius,” etc. My female colleagues and I are simply “literary stars”—a category that says nothing of the quality of our work but simply states that we are popular. However, I can’t spend too much time dwelling on this, otherwise the phantom reappears and paralyzes me.

READ MORE…

Because Reading (Subtitles) Is What? Fundamental!

August 18, 2021  |  in Essays, Multimedia  |  by Francesca Leveridge

RuPaul’s Drag Race demands translation sensitive to global and local queer cultures.

In the twelve years since RuPaul’s Drag Race first premiered on the relatively unknown LGBTQIA+ cable channel Logo TV, the Emmy award-winning series has gained an immense global following and become one of the defining shows of our age. The reality TV show, which boasts thirteen seasons (along with six All Stars series), follows drag queens competing in a range of performance-based challenges to be crowned “America’s Next Drag Superstar.” More recently, the race has expanded overseas, with Spain becoming the latest in a series of international spinoffs, joining Thailand, the UK, Canada, Holland, and Australia/New Zealand. In its evolution from a niche talent show for US drag performers to a global cultural phenomenon, Drag Race has propelled a queer subculture from the margins to the mainstream and put drag performance in the international spotlight. In the journey to globalize the show, translation has played a key role in giving drag and LGBTQIA+ culture visibility around the world.

It is of course thanks to the subtitling and dubbing of Drag Race into multiple languages that the US original achieved global success and found audiences worldwide. For translators, capturing the nuances of the show is no small feat. Much of its entertainment relies on verbal and cultural humour, each episode packed with English-based puns, double-entendres, and innuendos that can be hard to translate. Similarly, the dialogue showcases slang terms, neologisms, and catchphrases that are deeply rooted in the drag and LGBTQIA+ culture of the US. Take “mothertuckin’,” for example. In drag culture, tucking, used here to rhyme with a certain English swearword, refers to a taping practice used by drag queens to make their genital anatomy appear more feminine. Recreating this kind of wordplay poses a challenge for translators working in a context with a less developed drag culture and associated vocabulary.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Salted Fish Shop (A Sonnet)” by Yam Gong

August 17, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Dorothy Tse and James Shea

Hear from Hong Kong poet Yam Gong, winner of the Workers’ Literature Award.

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you a sonnet from the award-winning Hong Kong poet Yam Gong, translated by Dorothy Tse and James Shea. Rows of dried salted fish dangle in Hong Kong’s streets but, here, Yam Gong’s woefully romantic working-class speaker singles out one as an object of his adoration. First appearing in his 1997 collection, And So You Look at Festival Lights along the Street, this poem shows Yam Gong—himself a former mechanical technician—as a shrewd voice of labour and the everyday.

The Salted Fish Shop (A Sonnet)

It hung there for a long time, that salted fish
On the first day of work I used a pole
to hang it up and I started thinking
this salted fish is so handsome
surely someone is going to pick it
but day after day it hung there upright
and not a single grain of salt fell
Today someone should pick it
Looking at it every morning I think every day
this same thing every day I look at it
and slowly it became my hope each day
until my boss came to me today and said
You look as dumb as a salted fish
Don’t bother coming back tomorrow READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2021

August 16, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan and Fairuza Hanun

New work this month from Lebanon and India!

The speed by which text travels is both a great fortune and a conundrum of our present days. As information and knowledge are transmitted in unthinkable immediacy, our capacity for receiving and comprehending worldly events is continuously challenged and reconstituted. It is, then, a great privilege to be able to sit down with a book that coherently and absorbingly sorts through the things that have happened. This month, we bring you two works that deal with the events of history with both clarity and intimacy. One a compelling, diaristic account of the devastating Beirut explosion of last year, and one a sensitive, sensual novel that delves into a woman’s life as she carries the trauma of Indian Partition. Read on to find out more.

beirut

Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse by Charif Majdalani, translated from French by Ruth Diver, Other Press, 2021

Review by Alex Tan, Assistant Editor

There’s a peculiar whiplash that comes from seeing the words “social distancing” in a newly published book, even if—as in the case of Charif Majdalani’s Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse—the reader is primed from the outset to anticipate an account of the pandemic’s devastations. For anyone to claim the discernment of hindsight feels all too premature—wrong, even, when there isn’t yet an aftermath to speak from.

But Majdalani’s testimony of disintegration, a compelling mélange of memoir and historical reckoning in Ruth Diver’s clear-eyed English translation, contains no such pretension. In the collective memory of 2020 as experienced by those in Beirut, Lebanon, the COVID-19 pandemic serves merely as stage lighting. It casts its eerie glow on the far deeper fractures within a country riven by “untrammelled liberalism” and “the endemic corruption of the ruling classes.”

Majdalani is great at conjuring an atmosphere of unease, the sense that something is about to give. And something, indeed, does; on August 4, 2020, a massive explosion of ammonium nitrate at the Port of Beirut shattered the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. A whole city collapsed, Majdalani repeatedly emphasises, in all of five seconds.

That cataclysmic event structures the diary’s chronology. Regardless of how much one knows of Lebanon’s troubled past, the succession of dates gathers an ominous velocity, hurtling toward its doomed end. Yet the text’s desultory form, delivering in poignant fragments day by elastic day, hour by ordinary hour, preserves an essential uncertainty—perhaps even a hope that the future might yet be otherwise.

Like the diary-writer, we intimate that the centre cannot hold, but cannot pinpoint exactly where or how. It is customary, in Lebanon, for things to be falling apart. Majdalani directs paranoia at opaque machinations first designated as mechanisms of “chance,” and later diagnosed as the “excessive factionalism” of a “caste of oligarchs in power.” Elsewhere, he christens them “warlords.” The two are practically synonymous in the book’s moral universe. Indeed, Beirut 2020’s lexicon frequently relies, for figures of powerlessness and governmental conspiracy, on a pantheon of supernatural beings. Soothsayers, Homeric gods, djinn, and ghosts make cameos in its metaphorical phantasmagoria. In the face of the indifferent quasi-divine, Lebanon’s lesser inhabitants can only speculate endlessly about the “shameless lies and pantomimes” produced with impunity. READ MORE…

Announcing A Three-Day Flash Sale!

August 13, 2021  |  in Book Club, News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Even better than ice cream in August, our Book Club will take your reading to the next level!

Splash into savings this August with a special 10% discount off three-month Asymptote Book Club subscriptions, now fortified with monthly Zoom Q&As with the author and/or translator of each title. Offer ends Aug 15, so don’t wait: Try our Book Club for as little as USD15 a month!

BONUS: If you’re among our first five new subscribers, we’ll even throw in our July Book Club title for free!

What’s New with the Crew? (Aug 2021)

August 12, 2021  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

In addition to editing your favorite literary journal, Asymptote staff are publishing books and winning awards!

After organizing a #GraphPoem computational poetry event that attracted hundreds of participants and thousands of viewers at DHSI 2021, Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, is in the process of collaboratively starting a Digital Literature Lab at the Royal Library of Belgium on a FED-tWIN grant involving Université catholique de Louvain.

Chinese Social Media Manager Jiaoyang Li has received a China-Scotland Digital Collaboration Grant from the British Council and the City Artist Corps Grant from New York Foundation for the Arts to work on a series of community based literary events and workshops.

Assistant Director of Outreach Ka Man Chung’s English translation of Over the Left Bank of the River by Chung Wenyin has been awarded a translation and publication grant by Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture. The work is expected to be released by Serenity International in 2022.

Educational Arm Assistant Katarzyna Bartoszyńska’s new book Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature has just been published this month by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has a new short craft essay on the retrospective narration in J.D. Salinger’s “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” up at Fiction Writers Review.

Assistant Editor (Poetry) M.L. Martin’s collection of ekphrastic prose poems, Theater of No Mistakes, won the 2021 Rick Campbell Chapbook Award, and will be published later this year with Anhinga Press (USA). In addition, her anti-translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem by the anonymous, pre-10th c. proto-feminist, Wulf & Eadwacer, was named a finalist for CSU’s 2021 Lighthouse Poetry Series (USA). READ MORE…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

August 11, 2021  |  in News  |  by Carol Khoury, Eva Wissting, Kent Kosack, and Mary Hillis

Here to help you diversify your bookshelf, a selection of staff reads from Asymptote’s Fortnightly Airmail

If, as the adage goes, readers experience a thousand lives before they die, then readers of translated literature experience a thousand cultures without ever leaving their armchair. Set in Canada, India, Finland, Italy, and Jordan, here is a selection of international reads recommended by our staff for the newsletter. Get ready to be transported!

unnamed-4

The year is 1506. The great artist Michelangelo is furious at his stingy patron the Pope, “the bellicose pontiff who had thrown him out like a beggar.” But as one door closes, another opens in the form of an invitation from the Sultan of Constantinople to come to his city and design a bridge to cross the Golden Horn. Tell Them of Battles, Kings & Elephants, written by Mathias Énard and translated by Charlotte Mandell, is a feat of richly-imagined historical fiction that tells the tale of this sculptor’s journey. Michelangelo is abstemious and driven, consumed by his art and ego. But he soon succumbs to the charms of cosmopolitan Constantinople, its sounds and smells, its poets and performers. Yet dark forces conspire to thwart the artist from completing his designs. Intrigue. Assassins. Daggers in the night. Will Michelangelo complete his bridge and join cultures and continents? What will be the legacy of his journey? You’ll have to read it to find out.

—Kent Kosack, Director of Educational Arm

unnamed-6

Kjell Westö’s novel The Wednesday Club, translated from the Swedish by Neil Smith, takes us to Helsinki in 1938–ten years after the Finnish Civil War. The Second World War has not yet started, but Hitler and his policies are already a recurring discussion topic far beyond Nazi Germany. Lawyer and recent divorcee Claes Thune wants to keep the gentleman’s club with his three friends amicable but not only the world around them but also the past keeps intruding. As some of the friends start drifting apart, Thune finds a friend in his new secretary Matilda Wiik. But why is she so secretive about her background? Westö is one of the most highly praised Swedish-language writers in Finland. Although he writes poetry and short stories as well, it’s with his novels set in twentieth century Helsinki that he has truly established himself as a writer. Readers of the engaging and intriguing The Wednesday Club understand why.

—Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large for Sweden

unnamed-8

Smita sends her daughter to the village school in Badlapur for the first time, an action that sets a daring journey in motion. Guila works in her family’s wig workshop, the House of Lanfredi in Palermo, but soon receives news that changes the course of their business forever. In Montreal, a successful lawyer, mother of two, and woman who has it all, Sarah’s priorities are about to shift dramatically. Laetitia Colombani’s The Braid, published by Picador in 2019, interlaces the stories of Smita, Guila, and Sarah—each on the precipice of change. Cinematic in scope and expertly translated from French by Louise Rogers Lalaurie, it is ideal for binge reading. Set in the present day, the alternating perspectives flow seamlessly and are further linked through a poem. Colombani creates a deeply personal tale of women building new paths upon generations of faith, culture, and tradition, while revealing unexpected ways in which our modern lives intersect.

—Mary Hillis, Educational Arm Assistant READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from The Diagonal of Desire by Sinziana Ravini

August 10, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Kaylen Baker

If I must begin with a muse, why not a woman who’s already embodied many women?

This week’s Translation Tuesday follows a woman who—in pursuit of materials to build the protagonist of her novel, Madame X—visits, amongst others: a psychoanalyst, an actress, and a Pierre Huyghe exhibit. This extract from Romanian-born and Paris-based Sinziana Ravini’s debut novel La diagonale du désir, is the Swedish writer’s metafictional romp through a world of artistic and literary references in order to ask the question: how much of our own desires are constituted by our fictional encounters? Conversely, how much of fiction’s desires can be found in the actions of the world? With her translation, Kaylen Baker shows us a voice which, with characteristic humor and intelligence, uncovers the role that art and aesthetics play in forming the ground on which the mystery of our own desire is made visible.

The Pact

The building presides over the street like an impenetrable stone palace but, here and there, kissing cherubs cling to the molding façade, as if to draw out a repressed sensuality from such sobriety. Several floors up, I’m standing in the middle of a room full of books, and paintings of divinities, opposite a man who’s always filled me with dread.  

“And what might I do for you, mademoiselle?”

“I came to see you because I’m writing a novel.”

“You must’ve mistaken me for someone else. I’m a psychoanalyst, not a publisher.” 

“I know . . . I called on you because I want to take my main character to a shrink.”

The man begins to finger a cigar. “Imagine if every writer brought in their creative work for analysis. I’d never see the last of them! Who is this character?”

“Her name is Madame X. That’s all I can tell you for now.”

He cuts the cigar, lights it and inhales. “And what do you hope to explore through this novel?”

“I want to create a character who sets out to discover her real desire. Since I don’t have a lot of courage or imagination, I decided to ask a few women I admire to pick the plot themselves, by giving me missions, which Madame X will carry out.”

“And why not solicit any men, mademoiselle? Or do you have something against them?”

“On the contrary, but it’s the female unconscious I’d like to explore. Imagine finally being able to respond to Freud: What does a woman want?”

“Won’t she be . . . somewhat divided, this woman?”

“I see her rather as a subject in perpetual transformation.” 

“So why have you come to see me—me, and not a woman?”

“Exactly because you are a man.”

“Hm. I see.”

Silence settles around us. What am I doing here? When Faust signed the pact with Mephisto, did he find his soul, or lose it? 

“I think we’ll stop here.”

“So, you’ll accept to become my fictional analyst?”

“Fictional? I’m quite real myself.” 

“I’d rather conceal what’s real. Didn’t Oscar Wilde say that masks make us tell the truth?”

“Yes, well, the truth, you know . . . it’s debatable. I’m not sure I’m ready to play your game.”

“And psychoanalysis, that’s not a game?”

“Indeed, but a serious one! The game you’re about to create is quite dangerous. I’m under the impression you don’t really respect psychoanalysis as it is.”

“Then treat my lack of respect like a symptom.” 

“Humph.” 

Taking my purse, I make as if to leave.

“Let’s say your project intrigues me. When can you come back?” READ MORE…