Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

February 19, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Chamini Kulathunga, and Eva Wissting

The latest news from Argentina, Sri Lanka, and Sweden!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Argentina, Sri Lanka, and Sweden. In Argentina, Betina González’s first novel to be translated into English, American Delirium, has been released; in Sri Lanka, renowned dramatist Asoka Handagama will premiere his new play in March; and in Sweden, the Swedish Arts Council has responded to the need for increased funding in the literary and culture sector. Read on to find out more! 

Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina

On Tuesday, Argentine novelist Betina González made her English-language debut with the publication of American Delirium (Henry Holt and Co.). The book chronicles the chaos that ensues after a strange hallucinogen invades a fictional U.S. town, and the stories of three central characters—Beryl, Berenice, and Vik—diverge and collide in a narrative that plays with notions of utopia and dystopia. To kick off publicity events for the novel, bookstore Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., hosted a virtual conversation between González and her translator, Heather Cleary.

Moderator Idra Novey, who is herself a novelist and award-winning translator, focused in part on issues of translation. González began writing the book, which is set in the U.S., while living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. González described how English served as a “ghost structure” behind her writing in Spanish. That “special Spanish,” as she called it, was also shaped in part by the various Spanish dialects and tones she encountered while living in the U.S.; incorporating those regional differences into the fabric of the narrative contributed to its hallucinogenic, dreamlike atmosphere. “The language,” she said, “needed to collaborate” with the plot.

The translation process began, Cleary explained, with close reading and a conversation with González about the three characters’ voices. Berenice and Vik’s sections are both written in the third-person, but the narration evinces subtle differences that reflect their respective personalities. Vik hails from an invented island in the Caribbean, which experienced first Spanish, then British colonization. (González conducted extensive research to shape his origins. In total, the book took about seven years to write.) To help capture González’s careful nuance, Cleary infused Vik’s sections with Briticisms, which hint at his home’s colonial history. (Vik, Cleary pointed out, was difficult to translate in part because he’s “kind of an asshole,” who is “as resistant on the page as he is in real life.”) READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (February 2021)

February 18, 2021  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

From writing columns to publishing translations, we’ve been keeping busy!

Assistant Editor (Fiction) Andreea Scridon will have a poetry pamphlet published in 2022 with Broken Sleep Books; in addition, she will be featured in Art and Letters’ anthology 14 International Younger Poets‚ forthcoming this summer.

Copy Editor Anna Aresi has begun writing a monthly column on children’s literature in translation for Italian kid lit blog Scaffale Basso.

Nonfiction Editor Bassam Sidiki published a poem in Counterlock Journal.

Chamini Kulathunga, Editor-at-Large for Sri Lanka, published her interview with Liyanage Amarakeerthi on Hopscotch Translation on February 9, 2021.

Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large for Hong Kong, has joined Cicada, a new literary magazine featuring nuanced and inclusive writing; it also welcomes translations.

Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania & Moldova, has initiated an internationally funded project on digital literacy, DigiLiBeRo, spearheaded together with Ana Iolanda Voda and Roxana Patras.  READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Persepolis

February 17, 2021  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Sarah Moore and Xiao Yue Shan

Persepolis stands out for being able to narrate the political through this fierce character.

“Although this film is universal, I wish to dedicate the prize to all Iranians,” spoke Marjane Satrapi as she accepted the Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival for Persepolis. Adapted from her bestselling graphic novel of the same name, Persepolis is the autobiographical story of young Marjane as she comes of age against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution. Although she left Iran for Europe as a teenager (briefly returning to Tehran at the age of nineteen) and has lived in France since 1993, her words clarify Iran’s continual importance to her, as well as its enduring presence throughout her work. Written in French, Persepolis is both a memoir about the challenges of growing up and finding an identity and a fierce, intelligent, and nuanced depiction of Iran following the 1979 Revolution. It is at once enlightening, wise, funny, horrific, melancholy, and profound. In the following conversation, Blog Editors Xiao Yue Shan and Sarah Moore consider this groundbreaking graphic novel, which has sold more than two million copies worldwide, and its 2007 film adaptation. 

Sarah Moore (SM): Interestingly, Marjane Satrapi co-directed and co-wrote the film, so in Persepolis we can see how the author wanted to transform the drawings to animation. Satrapi recreates her own work, and she does so in a way that is loyal to the graphic novel, whilst clearly making use of what a new form can offer. Marjane is not a typical heroine. She is bold, honest, relatable, and she is blunt about the uncertainties she experienced growing up. The film transfers her to the screen with remarkable success, without losing any of her spark, humour, or complexity; Persepolis stands out for being able to narrate the political through this fierce character. It is the story of Iranian politics and life, as well as the story of a girl traversing through adolescence. Satrapi has often stated that one individual is the only universal thing—so whilst we witness the Iranian Revolution, the killing of political prisoners, and the Iran-Iraq War, we also follow Marjane as she dreams of being a prophet, goes through puberty, falls in love, has her heart broken, and suffers depression. I think Persepolis is rare in being able to move so much of the atmosphere and energy of a text into film, and one that genuinely works as a cinematic narrative as well. Of course, the plot is condensed, especially during Marjane’s time in Vienna. But the subtlety of emotion and the fullness of the characters carry through to the film, as well as the blend of humour and tragedy. What did you think of the move from book to film in a general sense?

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): There is something more automatic in the transition between graphic novel to film; in textual adaptation, a director must enforce their own visions in a discrete—albeit secondary—architecture, but the graphic novel has an established visual vocabulary. It is a transition that is made with minimal sacrifice. Still, I think there is a certain magic that is rendered between the pages of a graphic novel, in which two frames are juxtaposed by not the logic of movement or chronology, but mimics instead how a scene is pieced together in the mind—with interrupting segments of memory, reference, and unconscious categorization. The rationale of film narrative has to preserve a certain logic: the sense that something is always coming up next, much more resembling the way that biography proceeds—in the distinct knowing that a life continues.

In an interview published in Fourth Genre, Marjane Satrapi says: “When you watch a picture, a movie, you are passive. Everything is coming to you. When you are reading comics, between one frame to the other—what is happening, you have to imagine it yourself . . . It is the only medium that uses the images in this way.”

persepolis 1 READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from The Melee by Valentina Maini

February 16, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Sean McDonagh

The morning is a badly drawn sunrise, there are clumps of light to the left of the scene, the canvas is lacerated in several points.

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, a young woman loses her hold on reality in the aftermath of her family’s personal and political turmoil in this excerpt from Valentina Maini’s critically-acclaimed 2020 novel, The Melee. Translator Sean McDonagh introduces us to the novel’s protagonists: “Gorane and Jokin are twenty-five-year-old twins and children of ETA militants. Raised without rules, they take opposing and complementary directions: compliant and passive to everything, Jokin, a heroin-addict drummer, seems to follow in his parents’ footsteps, while Gorane, ambiguous and introverted, pulls away seeking refuge in an abstract world. When Jokin runs away and their parents become involved in a tragic event, Gorane finds herself prey to strange hallucinations of her parents.” In the following passage, we see Gorane’s dreamlike world through a powerfully-voiced omniscient narration. Childhood memories careen into present-day hallucinations as we veer further into first person—and deeper into the world of an unstable and unreliable narrator. This meandering stream of consciousness takes life through Maini’s virtuosic prose and masterful ability to warp perspective across numerous narrative threads. A lyrically stunning debut novel from an award-winning poet.

from The Melee

They say they don’t need medicine, they keep repeating that they’re healed. They look at her as if they were thirsty, but as soon as Gorane offers them a glass of water, they shake their heads and say: take us home. It’s impossible to make them stop. She signs some sort of verification form with her typically illegible handwriting. The nurse is called Robledo, she has blonde hair gathered in a bun and white latex gloves. Robledo is an open and frivolous surname that weighs a lot less than hers. It’s the surname of someone who cures. The border between Robledo and Moraza is that between Spain and her home planted in the land they call Euskadi. She moves closer to the first bed, her mother’s. As soon as Gorane comes to a halt, her mother raises herself into a seated position. The strain of that elementary motion moves her face, it seems to detach from the neck, distancing itself and fluctuating in the ether like a fish with no eyes. Gorane follows it with her gaze, she almost doesn’t speak, the fish doesn’t see but continues to swim in the air as if it knew by heart every angle of the hospital bedroom, as if its instinct was enough to give it faith, to not lose itself. This is her mother, this blind fish. Then she sees her father curled up on his side, she sees his incredibly lean and broad back and she thinks of the Oma Forest. In her poor repertoire of metaphors, her father was always a tree trunk, an oak. Gorane is a slender and dry branch that won’t break off. Gorane has spent her life fearing the foot that will break the equilibrium, split the frond; the blood of the branch that will sully the earth like an ancient tear. Her blood is now stone because of a sadistic sprite that has tested its pointless powers on her. She touches the cold shoulder of her father who wears a white t-shirt with red hand-drawn writing. The writing proclaims revolutionary words that she knows off by heart and no longer wants to hear. There’s a twisted snake that wraps itself around a badly drawn axe. They will spare her yet another political tirade, the identity that must form itself and grow through the political, which is nothing without a slogan on its backside. Eyes that shine for other people’s words in which to recognise themselves forever. To learn by heart: shout in unison, and keep the rhythm by clapping your hands. Finished sentences, in protest if possible. Without this you are nothing and you can never articulate the revival of your people towards liberty. But this time, her parents don’t attack with the usual slogans because they are tired, because the exertions don’t help to obstruct the path to a swollen body. It’s a kind of struggle that they don’t know, the one against the body that rots. She goes into the bathroom and washes her hands. The first time for Mum who, blind, slams against the furniture of the hospital bedroom, smiling still, saying everything is fine. A second splash for the back of Dad, his wooden head hidden within his jet black hair. The water will wash away all of the sins, if the job is done meticulously, if Gorane will commit herself to scrub at length, to not leave anything to chance and to the stupid belief that a handful of prayers will be enough to receive pardon. She returns to the room where her parents watch each other, smiling, continuing to talk quietly, or to sing. Gorane would like to tell them that the only reasonable option is rest, to close their eyes and await what passes, what heals, but she says it in silence, to herself, before her mother and her father disappear, engulfed by the first, then by the second swollen eyelid.

They walk side by side along the hospital corridor, Gorane keeps her right hand in her father’s left, her left hand in her mother’s right. The beaten bodies are theirs, but it is Gorane who staggers. Strength is applied to the legs, she squeezes her parent’s fingers, which barely reciprocate. The patrons, the relatives of the sick, the patients, watch only her at the centre of that human line that proceeds like an army in an on-the-ground conflict.

“We’ll need to take public transport, you shouldn’t put yourselves under too much strain.”

Gorane pronounces the words in slow motion, expanding each syllable, she makes every consonant snap as if to stamp it in the air, indelible. She continues to look in front of her, the panorama changes, the people enlarge, her body is as weak as theirs.

“We want to walk” they say in unison. “We need to walk.” READ MORE…

To Make Sense, Against All Odds: An Interview with Connie Palmen, Author of Your Story, My Story

February 15, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Sophia Stewart

In writing you unwittingly expose your most intimate voice, your soul. It’s beyond control.

There’s something about Sylvia Plath—the brevity of her life, the tragedy of her death, the haunting work she left behind. In the nearly six decades since her passing, she has remained an imposing figure in literary culture, romanticized and politicized and psychoanalyzed to excess. Plath’s relationship with English poet Ted Hughes, whom she married in 1956, has also endured as an object of public fascination. Their partnership was tempestuous—strained by Plath’s mental illness, Hughes’s infidelity, and the demands of the writing life. Yet on the outside, they were two beautiful, talented writers, bound by love and poetry.  

Dutch author Connie Palmen’s latest novel, Your Story, My Story, translated by Eileen J. Stevens and Anna Asbury, uses Plath and Hughes’s ill-fated marriage as a vehicle for larger questions about lust, loyalty, and grief. Palmen wrote the novel as she mourned her husband’s death, and explored her pain through the character of Hughes, who narrates the novel while grappling with the death of his own wife. Palmen, Stevens, and Asbury have achieved remarkable success in bringing Hughes’s literary voice to the page; reading Your Story, My Story feels like reading straight from Hughes’s diary. The prose is lovely, the emotions raw. But the novel’s existence also poses interesting ethical questions.  

Originally published as Jij zegt het in 2015, Your Story, My Story is written from Hughes’s perspective, Palmen’s intention being “to tell Ted’s side of the story.” As a narrator, Hughes explicitly posits that he has been unfairly vilified in contemporary discourse (“She was the brittle saint, I the brutal traitor,” reads an excerpt on the front flap. “I have remained silent. Until now.”). This is possible. But Plath’s recently discovered letters, in which she makes allegations of assault and abuse against Hughes, tell another story. Jij zegt het was published before these letters were made public; still, what is there to be gained by ventriloquizing the dead? 

Between Palmen and I there is a divergence of opinion regarding the ethics of this endeavor. The fictionalized Hughes condemns “the mudslide of apocryphal stories, false witness, gossip, fabrication, and myth” that shaped the couple’s legacy, but Palmen adds to this mudslide by producing a work of fiction that promises to deliver “the truth of [the Plath-Hughes] marriage” and “forever change the way we think about these two literary icons.” Turning a historical figure’s life into fodder for fiction is another form of speculation, but Palmen seems unbothered by the irony. And regardless of Plath’s credible allegations (the veracity of which Palmen doubts), the business of writing a whole novel to vindicate Hughes—who in the book weathers Plath’s erratic outbursts and volatile temperament with saintly patience—feels fraught. 

Nevertheless, Your Story, My Story is an engrossing and often elegant novel. Palmen, Stevens, and Asbury replicate Hughes’s writing style with startling authenticity, and Palmen deftly draws out internal conflict in her characters. The premise may be questionable, but the craftsmanship is undeniable. I enjoyed the novel most when I read it as a mesmerizing portrait of an imagined relationship, rather than as an assertion of Hughes’s innocence or a historical corrective, as it seems marketed to be. I recently spoke to Palmen about her writing process, artistic choices, and stance on biographical storytelling.

—Sophia Stewart, Assistant Interviews Editor

Sophia Stewart (SS): Your very first novel De wetten came out in 1991. It went on to be translated and published in twenty-four countries, including the United States, where it was released as The Laws in 1993. Rarely do debut novelists find this kind of immediate international success. Were you surprised at all by the reception of your first novel? How did its success influence your writing and the books you wrote in the years after?

Connie Palmen (CP): It may, and most certainly does, sound arrogant, but I wasn’t overly surprised. I knew I had written a novel that was new and different, and that I wrote about a very twentieth-century coming-of-age of a woman. It has only been a short time since the search for identity has been regarded as not just a male quest, and in my novel this quest is also connected to knowledge, to stories. Women could recognize themselves in their struggle to learn and to find some kind of autonomy, and men would recognize their desire to define the world and the women in it. The novel has its roots in the literature of rebellions, as in the saga of Faust, who sells his soul to the devil to become a great artist. My main character Marie lets herself be defined by the men she meets till she has the courage and independence to tell her own story. A first novel is crucial, because it is an encounter with yourself as a writer. The book is a meeting, it discloses your style, your themes, your thinking, your idiosyncrasies, not just to the readers, but mainly to yourself. Only your first novel does that. From that moment on, you know. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

February 12, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by MK Harb, Sarah Moore, and Vivian Szu-Chin Chih

The latest news from Lebanon, Taiwan, and France!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Lebanon, Taiwan, and France. In Lebanon, translator Dr. Mona Kareem has won the National Endowment for the Arts Award and the Barjeel Poetry Prize winners have been announced; in Taiwan, the February issue of INK literary magazine presents work by sixteen Taiwanese authors on “A Memo for Literature of the Next Decade”; and in France, Vanessa Springora’s bestselling memoir about sexual abuse will be released in English translation. Read on to find out more! 

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

In Lebanon, the cultural world and the literary sphere has been rocked by the news of the assassination of Lokman Slim. Slim was a prolific writer and intellectual, and was an influential member of the cultural and political community, opening his research and documentation practice UMAM in southern Beirut. A celebration of his life and work was held on February 11.

In translation news, Dr. Mona Kareem, translator of Octavia Butler’s Kindred into Arabic, won the National Endowment for the Arts Award. Her award supports the translation from the Arabic of the poetry collection Falcon with Sun Overheard by Ra’ad Abdulqadir, a pioneer of Iraqi poetry. Here is Dr. Kareem’s haunting translation of his poem “A Song for the Lightning Bird.” Interested in learning more about the Arabic prose poem? Then listen to author Huda J. Fakhreddine’s online talk about it at Dartmouth College!

In more thrilling translation news, Sawad Hussain’s translation from the Arabic of A Bed for the King’s Daughter is being published by University of Texas Press. Written by Syrian author Shahla Ujayli, whose past work was long-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, this collection of short stories is experimental, witty, and loaded with uncanny images dealing with modernity, alienation, and patriarchy.  READ MORE…

Anti-Revolutions: How Nicanor Parra Predicted His Country’s 2019 Uprising, Part II

February 11, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Tim Benjamin

[M]aybe Parra is himself Hamlet, paralyzed with doubt about the truth of things and his own role in doing something about it.

Tim Benjamin continues his exposition of the collaboration between revolution and poetics in the  work of Chile’s notorious antipoet, Nicanor Parra. In Liz Werner’s witty translation of his verse in the brazenly titled Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great, cynicism, humor, silences, and brutal critique manifest in turns; the deep truths are gathered and reckoned with in the spaces where they collide. Read the first part of this essay here.

Revolts have their actual front lines, of course, and in the case of Chile, these were the columns of students, artists, and veterans of the “Penguin” movements of the early 2000s advancing toward increasingly hostile, increasingly anxious walls of police and military forces employing tear gas and rubber bullets. Recently back in Santiago, after the plebiscite had already been decided, a Colombian friend of mine gave me a tour of the uprising’s hot spots, where he went each evening in solidarity with his adopted country’s awakening. He described scenes of shifting pockets of absolute chaos which had popped up here and there, before dispersing with the wafting, seemingly intentional clouds of tear gas and booms of deterrent rounds. Walking down Alameda Ave, he pointed out to me all the landmarks that were forced to close during the uprising. That afternoon, he and I attended one of the Friday protests, which have continued to this day; as we walked down an Alameda Ave closed off to traffic, I noticed the small crush of people lining the street, not doing much except being there—in conversation with friends, smoking, or staring south to where, before a small plaza, a scuffle began. It wasn’t long before the gas came in one expansive burst, and the people in front of the plaza began to disperse. We thought we were far enough away, but a breeze brought us the invisibly searing burn—and a series of Good Samaritans hopping to with spray bottles of sodium bicarbonate and lemon juice, offering temporary relief. “You get used to it,” my friend said, as we turned back toward Lastarria and its street vendors and mid-scale restaurants. “You build up a tolerance.” And for some reason, through the sandpaper-burn in our cheeks and eyelids, we laughed at this. I don’t know why. I couldn’t imagine getting “used to it.”

Somehow, though, the pain felt justified—the concrete consequence giving body to a concept which I was only partly cognizant of. But it wasn’t the kind of pain that gives legitimacy to criticisms of the government, whose force (normally) seeks justification even after the fact. In other words, it wasn’t a political pain, which is reserved, fair or not, for the majority who hang back from the clashes, repeating the language of revolt that the front line incarnates. After the country’s President, Sebastian Piñera, declared the country “at war” with itself, other friends I spoke with said they would work during the day and go directly to Santiago’s main square after getting off every night, and it was these rear-guard protests that increasingly took on an air of intense jubilation—veritable revolutionary parties in streets fogged in tear gas and the volleying booms of urban warfare, as if the certainty of the success of the cause was enough to start the celebrations a priori. The reaction of those in charge were typically evasive, or offensive. One government minister casually suggested that instead of revolting in the streets, people should wake up early to avoid the increase in public transportation fares; others suggested “alien agents” descending on the country to induce chaos, which social media and protest signage quickly meme-ified.

While lack of shame and self-awareness is the realized utopia of the modern politician, it seems the uprising’s jubilance shared in Parra’s strangely unpretentious counter-narrative to it. More than a few of his poems might work as semi-mystical memes; take the poem “No president’s statue escapes,” whose three verses follow from the title to form a simple, declarative meditation on history’s losing struggle with time: From those infallible pigeons / Clara Sandoval tells us. / Those pigeons know exactly what they’re doing. Both the pigeons and the topless protesters straddling these same statues are definitive symbols of the “certainty” mentioned above, both moving into that rare space where parody becomes something more eternal than mockery.

READ MORE…

Anti-Revolutions: How Nicanor Parra Predicted His Country’s 2019 Uprising, Part I

February 10, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Tim Benjamin

On a fundamental level, Parra’s antipoetry culminates at that point where parody and devotion coincide.

Chile and its writers are no strangers to the conjugation between revolution and poetry, having long applied the ardent and inciting potentials of well-elected words to fortify and give lyric to its people’s desires for social change. Amongst the most powerful letters of the country’s struggles, the language of Nicanor Parra possessed especially an indomitable power, with its colloquial, irreverent nature lending an imitable voice to the static nature of words. Though Parra passed in 2018, his verse continues to establish itself in the public expressions of dissent, most recently revealing their prescience in regard to the severe 2019–2020 protests. In the first part of this essay, Tim Benjamin puts the poet’s legacy in relation with the social fabric of both his time and ours. Stay with us for the second part, to be published tomorrow. 

I had already left Chile before the country’s 2019 uprising, but I was still living there when Nicanor Parra became a centenarian. The grand misanthrope of Chilean letters had conquered his personal century, and in a country known for wine, political troubles, and writers, there was considerable respect payed to the antipoet’s gesture toward immortality. TV and newspapers dedicated front-page space to a sort of celebratory pre-obituary, and on the night of, I went out for drinks with friends, who talked a little about Parra’s work but mostly about the idea that the old, disheveled fuck seemed to have made it to such a ripe old age just so he could take the piss out of death, like he’d done to poetry sixty years before. Death returned the favor a little under two years before the uprising, but as the introduction of Liz Werner’s overlooked 2004 “antitranslation” of his later work, Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great makes clear, Parra took his joke further than anyone before him.

He didn’t coin the term. At least two poets—Vicente Huidobro and the Peruvian Enrique Bustamante y Ballivián, who published a book titled Antipoemas in 1926—had used it before him. But the concept will forever be etched alongside his name in whatever circle of the literary pantheon he comes to occupy. Parra would pass away in 2018 at the very anti-climactic age of 103, just under two years before the country’s most significant political movement since the “NO” campaign rejected Pinochetismo in 1989. And despite—or maybe because—of his reputation as the antipoet, it seems safe to say that dying before the Revolution was the kind of providential malfeasance he would have at least tried to have some fun with. Indeed, Werner’s “How to Look Better & Feel Great,” chosen in apparently intimate collaboration with Parra, is one of those disembodied parodies that exist somewhere between a wink and a groan. But it also points the way toward the mentality of a country, which, despite the crackdowns and a global pandemic, has hung a definitive asterisk onto South America’s “economic miracle.”

Parra was born in 1914 in southern Chile to a bohemian father and a mother who shows up often in his poetry as the folksy sage “Clara Sandoval.” He was the brother of the legendary folk singer Violeta Parra, whose song, “La carta” was covered by Mon LaFerte during the uprising (The letter arrives to tell me / that in my country there’s no justice / the hungry ask for bread / the military gives them lead). He studied engineering at the University of Chile, physics at Brown, and cosmology at Oxford, which may or may not have contributed to the often sideways transgressions from formalism which defines much of his output—though Werner does emphasize Parra’s occasional use of an algebraic x and shorthand descriptions of relativity. He began publishing poetry marginally in 1938, but made his name in 1954 with the publication of Poems and Antipoems. As Werner’s introduction notes, one Chilean critic wrote that Parra’s book “Returned us . . . once again! [To the fact that] everything could be said in poetry.” Camus would make a similar point a couple of years later in The Rebel, claiming that an artist’s “rebellion against reality” affirms the same motivation as that of the revolt of the oppressed. Poems and Antipoems would go through multiple editions, and the 1967 English-language version would count among its translators Allen Ginsburg, who had joined Parra in an increasingly paranoid Havana two years earlier to give out the Casa de las Americas Prize. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Fragrance” by S. Vijayalakshmi

February 9, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Thila Varghese

the desire to share everything/stimulated the conversation/while the voice inside cautioned to wait

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, the promises of a domestic paradise belie a need for defendable boundaries in S. Vijayalakshmi’s poem “Fragrance.” We’re guided through a surreal mosaic of images that juxtapose lofty abstraction with quotidian concreteness: the soul leans against the door of a domestic threshold, time (itself concretized in clock hands) peeks and laughs, paradise beckons like a salesperson, and possible lives are stars that bloom corporeally with fragrance. The speaker’s interlocutor, described as having the disarming veneer of a wise man, evokes a sense of risk and relatability—his very speech is depicted as unusually cloying (honey drops with sweeteners) and performative (“courtesy words,” “mask having sloughed off”). Yet the speaker’s trepidation is expressed by dramatic, even violent metaphors: a circus ring of fire, a standoff requiring bullet-proof vests. Through its ironically “delicate” title, S. Vijayalakshmi’s poem confronts the ungentle truths of relationships, vulnerability, and possibility.

Fragrance

The conversation proceeded very smoothly.
In the voice that was preaching to me
like a profoundly wise man,
honey drops were mixed with sweeteners.
The figure hiding behind the rough voice
smiled, the mask having sloughed off.
The night breeze gathered up
the courtesy words and left.
As the desire to share everything
stimulated the conversation
while the voice inside cautioned to wait,
the clock hand peeked out
to check whether everything was going well
and laughed.
Within the boundaries of the conversation,
a thousand bouquets
extended their welcome.
A paradise opened and invited me,
like a sales agent, to come in.
Leaning against the door,
my soul struggled with the weight
of the boundary line’s bouquets,
unable to bear the load.
Even as I contemplated on
which foot to put forward first
to step into the door of the paradise,
an oracle declared,
“Enough with your cautionary instinct and analysis;
just discard them and come in.”
What to do with all the fragrances
from the countless stars
that bloomed within me?
Again, I draw a line.
The flames are burning
like those on the line of a circus ring of fire.
You seem to appear the same as I do,
and both of us are wearing bulletproof vests.
The bullets are waiting
in the tidal wave of conflicts. READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2021

February 8, 2021  |  in News  |  by Bassam Sidiki, Caridad Svich, Eva Heisler, Garrett Phelps, Lee Yew Leong, and Sam Carter

Our section editors present their favorite works from our Winter 2021 issue!

Our Winter 2021 issue marks a decade of diving into the languages of the world (our archive now boasts 113 of them!) in all their incredible singularity and variegation. Spanning thirty-one countries, this milestone edition feels like a fitting way to honor a decade of hard work behind the scenes. After hearing from our blog editors last week, let’s pass the mic to the very editors who had a hand in putting together the issue itself.

“Is it a Comedy? Is it a Tragedy?” Thomas Bernhard asks in our debut issue from January 2011. Ten years later, Brazilian author Adelice Souza’s fever-dream of a story (in Padma Viswanathan’s pitch-perfect translation) provides a direct enjoinder: “The play wasn’t a comedy, nor was it a tragedy . . . It was a drama very specifically for those two women.” Just as in Bernhard’s story, the point is not the play at all—we hardly know what the play is about, other than the fact that its two actresses play a lonely woman and her dog, and that tragedy ensues when one demands to switch roles with the other. In contrast to Bernhard, who focuses squarely on the theatre-goer, Souza makes it all about the two actresses whose eight years of traveling with the play to multiple cities have “put them through every type of relationship.” It’s not a story one imagines being plotted out; rather, the work feels like it has been ejected, like toothpaste from a tube, sentence by exhilarating sentence. In the “Brave New World Literature” Special Feature, we also come full circle but in a different way via the return of frequent contributor Jeremy Tiang, who debuted as a translator in our first issue. Combining pop-cultural references with theory, “The World Is Not Enough” is full of quotable gems, but nowhere is Tiang more on-point than when he muses, “Perhaps if the dominant anglophone culture actually acknowledged itself to be part of the world, rather than treating ‘world literature’ as a spice rack to save itself from total blandness, more than three percent of books published in the United States would be in translation?” Finally, anyone who is curious about the workings of a magazine of world literature other than our own will find plenty of food for thought in John Freeman’s riveting piece on how he remade Granta into a global publication.

—Lee Yew Leong, Fiction Editor and ”Brave New World Literature“ Special Feature Editor

Max Rojas is a constant enthusiasm of mine and so I was thrilled to showcase a pretty sizable excerpt from Zane Koss and Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz’s translation—the very first in English—in all its shining, breathless glory. Even though it’s a mere sliver of a doorstop-sized poem, it’s an excellent sample of Rojas’ talent and an overdue introduction for the Anglosphere. The language of Bodies is both baroque and ephemeral, rugged and philosophical, and its tone swings between that of a theologico-political treatise and a declaration of war. It’s some of this last century’s densest and most sophisticated Spanish-language verse, and some of the most woefully unknown.

—Garrett Phelps, Poetry Editor READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

February 5, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Clémence Lucchini, and José García Escobar

The latest news from Central America, Hong Kong, and France!

This week our writers bring you news from Central America, Hong Kong, and France. In Central America, renowned Guatemalan writer Eduardo Haldon has released his latest novel, Cancón, and Savladoran writer Claudia Hernández’s book Slash and Burn has been released in English translation by & Other Stories. In Hong Kong, literary journal the Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine has pertinently published a special feature about “Distance,” while in France, Italian writer Sandro Veronesi has won the Foreign Book Prize for Le Colibri, to be published in English translation in spring. Read on to find out more! 

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

Guatemalan poet Carmen Lucía Alvarado was recently nominated for the Rhysling Award for her poem El vacío se conjuga entre tus manos (The void blends in your hands), translated by Toshiya Kamei. Read the poem in English and Spanish here. Famed Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon released his new novel called Canción (Song). Published by Libros del Asteroide, his latest book tells a new chapter of the history of Halfon’s family, centering on his maternal grandfather and his kidnap during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996). You can read an excerpt of Canción in English at The New York Review of Books site.

Also in Guatemala, the veteran poet and journalist Ana María Rodas released a new collection of short stories entitled Antigua para principiantes (Antigua for beginners). This new book includes several of Ana María’s most renowned short stories, plus other unpublished stories. This marks Ediciones del Pensativo’s first book of the year.

Additionally, in early January, & Other Stories published Slash and Burn, by the Salvadoran short story writer Claudia Hernández. The book was translated into English by Julia Sanches, who has translated the work of writers such as Daniel Galera (Brazil) and Noemi Jaffe (Brazil). READ MORE…

A Tribute to Antonín J. Liehm

February 4, 2021  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Aleksander Kaczorowski and Julia Sherwood

I couldn’t have wished for a more ideal guide to Czech history and culture than A.J. Liehm.

Czech journalist Antonín J. Liehm was a leading public intellectual who passed away on December 4, 2020, aged ninety-six. One of the movers and shakers of the cultural and political ferment of the Prague Spring, he left the country after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, and it was largely thanks to Liehm’s tireless work in exile that essays by Václav Havel and many other Czech authors reached readers in Western Europe and the United States before 1989. To help bridge the gap between the East and the West, he founded the ground-breaking journal Lettre International, which in its heyday appeared in thirteen different countries and languages. In this essay, Polish writer and journalist Aleksander Kaczorowski pays tribute to his mentor.

In the spring of 1992 my wife and I went to Sofia for our honeymoon. Don’t ask why, of all places, we picked Sofia: it was a random choice, yet one resulting in one of the major discoveries of my younger years. It was there, in the Bulgarian capital, at the Czech Centre, that I stumbled across a book that I bought and virtually devoured before our holiday was over.

The book, Generace (A Generation), was a collection of interviews with Czech and Slovak writers that was finally able to appear in Czechoslovakia, after a twenty-year delay. It featured many authors whom I had already come to love and whose books had enticed me to study Czech language and literature at Warsaw University: Milan Kundera, Josef Škvorecký, and Václav Havel, as well as many others whose work I would get to know only later, like Ivan Klíma and Ludvík Vaculík, or the great Slovak writer Dominik Tatarka. Many of them had joined the communist party in their youth, and in these interviews conducted by Liehm between 1963 and 1968, they take a critical look at their own involvement, as well as the contemporary social and political situation in Czechoslovakia. They called for political changes (many of them did indeed play a key role in the Prague Spring of 1968) but what interested me most was what they had to say at the time about literature, the sources of their literary inspiration, and their own plans. In particular, the interview with Kundera—whom Liehm had met when they were both young, their friendship lasting nearly seventy years, until his death—was full of extraordinarily interesting biographical details that are hard to find in later interviews with the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Following the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the book became unacceptable to the censors. Instead of Prague, it first appeared in Paris in 1970, together with a lengthy preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. German, English, Spanish, and Japanese editions soon followed. Over the next twenty years, several of the writers featured in the book achieved world-wide fame. However, until I encountered in Sofia the reissued Czech edition of A Generation published in 1990, I knew next to nothing about the man who had conducted the interviews: the Czech exile journalist Antonín J. Liehm. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2021

February 3, 2021  |  in News  |  by Sarah Moore and Xiao Yue Shan

Dive into our wide-ranging tenth-anniversary issue with our blog editors.

In ten years of Asymptote, we’ve brought you a stunning array of texts, from writers familiar to those brought out newly into the light, words of conviction, ardor, invention, and precision have graced our pages, and our history-making Winter 2021 issue is no different. Featuring three new languages—Cebuano, Kahmiri, and Marathi—and deploying works from thirty-one countries in total, we are additionally featuring a curated selection of writings in our Brave New World Literature feature, which presents a myriad of talented voices navigating and graphing the changing landscape of world literature. Here, our blog editors are rounding up their selections of the pieces of the Winter 2021 edition that ignite and inspire.

The notion of a brave new world literature indicates—beyond the trepidations upon coming towards the unknown—the writer’s own, omnipresent fears about their own craft. In writing, one is always fighting against the futility of the word, how it falters to encompass even a single sensation, let alone the impatient fabric of the milieu. Each piece of writing is measured up against its time to determine its true subject, and the works included in our landmark Winter 2021 issue has to bear the comparison to a moment in history that comes close to being immeasurable, both in the frenzied proceedings of markable events, and in the psychic tracks it has carved across the globe, as each person was forced to consider—in distinctly unequal polarities of rumination or emergency—what it means to have lived through, to be living through, such a time.

This seamless interchange between writer, reader, and the present shared between them—the writing must level all three terrains while insulating its cargo of ideas. As I move through this marvelous gallery of texts that the latest issue of Asymptote gathers, I was struck by the various and telling constellations they formed with this precise moment.

In Jan Němec’s excerpts from Ways of Writing About Love, there’s a beguiling—and somewhat precious—self-conscious tone, rendered with grace by David Short, that runs through the three proses, almost as if the writer has already recognized that the bold display on the awning of the text—those two feared and wasted words, writing and love—has already pushed the language deeply into that murky deluge where only those two most indulgent peoples, writers and lovers, would willingly submerge themselves. But as the oral rhythm of the story taps itself out (Němec and Short are to be commended for their preternatural sense of how the voice paces itself), and the symphony of the mind conducts its singular cacophony, one comes to decipher its inner textures, in which writing and love are scrutinized for the particularly heightened quality one achieves during such occupations—attention to how time, and knowledge, and sensuality congregate. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Oyster Pond” by Xosé Anxelu Gutiérrez Morán

February 2, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Xosé Anxelu Gutiérrez Morán

When I swallow saliva I can feel / how it rained the afternoon I first knew about you.

Memories of a family outing are preserved for posterity in Xosé Anxelu Gutiérrez Morán’s “Oyster Pond,” this week’s Translation Tuesday selection. Our speaker’s second-person address captures the intimacy and awe of a parent-child relationship, here a one-sided epistolary written for a hypothetical being (the future adult) recording the experiences of an actual being (the present child). The recurring images of wetness—foam, rain, saliva, the sea—evoke images of nascent life and mimic the ebb and flow of a child’s mind (e.g., the “life or death” urgency of collecting beads). At the metapoetic level, the gift our speaker offers the child is placed into the interim care of the reader—we are witnesses and keepers of a private and cherished memory.

Oyster Pond

To Nora, barely two years old

You are not going to remember this moment,
that is why I am writing it down for you.
You do not know either that you have
all your memory to celebrate
while you bring us
more beads for a necklace
as if your life depended on them. READ MORE…