Place: Afghanistan

Translation Tuesday: “Parwana” by Lida Amiri

March 5, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Lida Amiri

One glance at the sky finally connects her with infinity, where she belongs.

This Translation Tuesday—three days before International Women’s Day—we bring you a tragic story self-translated by former Afghan refugee Lida Amiri—centering on the plight of a woman who is not free to pursue love. In her language, parwana refers to a creature that has wings but cannot fly. It is a fitting name for our despairing protagonist, who, up against forces larger than her, stages her escape. 

The night is her sole protector, her only companion. It represents shelter from the stares and noiseless chatter of passersby on the streets. People who recognize her whisper, “That’s the general’s daughter that I saw with another young man! How dare she stain the impeccable reputation of a national hero?”

To Parwana[1], her father’s military background has become a curse. With a swift and vigorous hand motion, she desperately tries to delete each of these stinging judgments from her mind.

Suddenly, Parwana stops her agonizing train of thought and notices her immediate surroundings. She sighs and has a last look around her lovingly furnished room. She is just one step away from a pile of mattresses without a bedframe, which she sometimes fell off of when the nightmares reminded her of her wrongdoings. The only piece of furniture in her room is the wooden chest of drawers next to her bed, which is decorated with her perfume bottle and her Surmi—a Kohl used daily to protect her from evil looks because, according to her neighbors, she has all a young woman could wish for: a loving family, a room in her parents’ house, a job as a midwife. Is she actually willing to risk it all? While her heart races as she reminisces, she looks in the small mirror on the chest of drawers before taking a deep breath addressing herself. “The situation can’t continue like this, and you know it. He will be the right one,” she says softly while sighing heavily.

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Language Is Not a Means to an End: An Interview with Hajar Hussaini

July 6, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Terézia Klasová

Engaging with texts from Afghanistan is only one pathway toward recognizing our imperialist hearts and colonizing minds. . .

Poet and translator Hajar Hussaini has made her mark powerfully with the debut collection, Disbound, which navigates the distance between her two countries—Afghanistan and the United States—with musical precision and great sensitivity to linguistic friction and spark. Additionally, in her work to bring the texts from her native Persian into English, she is continuing a vital poetic lineage of political urgency, independent voice, and pathways towards empathy—powerfully exemplified in her translation of S. Asef Hossaini’s poems in our Spring 2023 issue. In this following interview, Hussaini discusses her personal statement of a “poetics of abandonment”, the communication channel between nations, and writing from “within” as opposed to “about”.

Terezia Klasova (TK): In an essay you wrote for The Poetry Foundation, you suggest an approach to writing called a “poetics of abandonment.” Is it characteristic only of your writing of poetry, or do you consider it descriptive of most, if not all, of your writing? Do you think it can be applied to other types of writing or other authors, and if yes, how so?

Hajar Hussaini (HH): I intended the “poetics of abandonment” to be a statement on my poetry collection, Disbound, and I’ve described it as the culmination of political and personal losses that manifest in a radical offering of language, sincerity, and understanding—in the hope of creating a (perhaps false) sense of equilibrium between the poet and her reader. I used the Persian concept of Taroof as the central metaphor of this poetics; I understand Taroof, in its essence, as a refusal to become the subject of pity, and through writing about it I came to see it as the only way out of certain intrinsically hierarchical relationships.

As I explained in the essay, writing abandonment is contingent upon the circumstances in which a poet writes. Of course, Afghan poets of my generation share this context, and some may conceive of composing poetry similarly (e.g. in giving one’s all to the poem). But I don’t know if categorizing their works under “poetics of abandonment” is helpful because the poets I translate have a readership in Persian, whereas I write in English. Their readers come from similar sociocultural backgrounds and are familiar with that loss because they share a collective memory, whereas that memory does not have an equivalent currency for my readers because the average English reader of American poetry who would gravitate toward my work is presumably less familiar with my literary and political references. In this way, I have lost something that an Afghan poet writing in Persian has not, but I have also gained readers that they will only have in English if a translator mediates.

It’s important to mention something about being an Afghan who has lived in between Afghanistan and Iran. I write poetry in English, and Persian is my mother tongue; I know both languages very intimately. Like Hossaini and myself, many Afghans have lived in Iran—and those who have not, have read Iranian books, watched Iranian films, and listened to BBC Persian. So, contemporary Afghan literature in Persian is a blend of Kabuli and Iranian Persian.

I think of the poetic statement genre as simultaneously personal and public. The statement traces the conceits of one poet while inviting other poets to similarly conceive. Regarding the influence of writing “abandonment” over my translations, I think it has so far played a role of gravitating me toward sincere and honest texts. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Most Solemn Song” and “Asleep in a Haze” by Nadia Anjuman

November 12, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Diana Arterian and Marina Omar

No one reads the book of your heart’s happy anthems

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the devotional work of Nadia Anjuman. Under pressure, the poems sing out—but not so much to the divine Patriarch as do many religious songs. Created under political pressure in Afghanistan, Anjuman’s poems speak to a feminine subject free from repressive structures. When she says “If one strand of hope finds me” one gets the impression that the “me” is the subject who speaks free of the restraints of strict gender norms. The self is shuttled into wispy metaphors of string and haze, surviving, on the back of lyric, as opaque lightness. The style of Islamic mystics is breathlessly combined with resolutely feminist concerns—the result is a dire urgency. Anjuman ultimately died under the same oppression she was writing against, and her poems give testament to the pervasiveness and resilience of song. The stakes are high here—read carefully. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

April 5, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Diána Vonnák, Lara Norgaard, and Poupeh Missaghi

Start your spring off with literary dispatches from around the world!

With the arrival of spring comes a new slate of literary translations, festivals, and events all over the world. In Iran, we follow the sprouting of two new literary journals and several translations challenging the country’s censorship laws; in Hungary, we look forward to the 26th Budapest International Book Festival and the season of literary awards; and in Brazil, we discover a range of upcoming events celebrating such topics as independent publishing, the Portuguese language, and International Women’s Day.

Poupeh Missaghi, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Iran

March 20 marked the spring equinox, Nowruz (the Persian New Year), and the celebrations around it. To see the previous year off and welcome the new one, in addition to providing their readers with reading material for the holiday season, Iranian journals have long published special issues, each covering a range of diverse topics including, but not limited to: economy, philosophy, sports, film, and literature.

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Winter 2015: We Almost Didn’t Make It

September 17, 2018  |  in 30issues30days  |  by Victoria Livingstone

Asymptote was giving—and continues to give—voice to languages and regions across the globe without ever lowering the curatorial bar.

If you’re just joining us, we invite you to revisit our first 16 issues via our #30issues30days showcase here. In honor of our milestone 30th edition, we’ll shortly be launching a contest giveaway with a top prize of $200, so watch this space!

2015 was a milestone year for Asymptote: We won a London Book Fair award and partnered with The Guardian. But only Asymptote staff back then know we almost didn’t make it past January. On 15 December 2014, despairing of the lack of progress in fundraising, I wrote the following (lightly edited) email: 

“Hello team, I’ve been reassessing the situation. It seems I underestimated the support for the magazine and it doesn’t look as if we’re going to hit our campaign target by December 19. Therefore, we’ll be extending the deadline to January 29, 2015. Our January issue will be pushed back to January 30, the very date of our debut in 2011, four years ago, so that we’ll have come full circle. If we don’t hit the target on January 29, we will announce in the editorial that the Jan 2015 issue will be our very last. Social media and blog activities (including the podcast, very sadly) shall cease with effect from 1 Feb. The magazine will fold. Planning for all activities after January should be halted with immediate effect. Please respect this. Section editors, please do not communicate any more acceptances, and please be prepared to rescind your acceptances for anything after the January issue on the event of our closure, if it does come to that. As promised, we will break for the holidays. (I’ll hold the fort on social media during this time.) In January, we will prioritize work on the January edition as well as the two January events. As for those who are willing to help, we will keep publicizing the IndieGoGo campaign and sending out appeals. We’ll see if the magazine can be saved. (During a recent discussion with the senior editors, the question did arise about whether to shield all of you from the hard reality in front of us. But I don’t think it’s good to keep mum, for morale’s sake; also, I would not be so cruel as to ask you to continue working on projects that may not see the light of publication, or events that have to be cancelled. The reality is that I am simply out of funds, and also depleted in other ways. If we don’t hit the IndieGoGo target, I would prefer to end on a high note and move on.)”

Here to introduce our Winter 2015 issue, released one day after 287 supporters brought us past the finish line of $25,000, please welcome Assistant Editor Victoria Livingstone. 

“I am always trying to push the market very hard,” David Damrosch told Asymptote contributing editor Dylan Suher in an interview included in the Winter 2015 issue. The Harvard professor of comparative literature explained that he strives to bring so-called minor literatures into the canon of world literature by translating, anthologizing, and teaching works from underrepresented regions and languages.

Asymptote has been similarly pushing against the market since Lee Yew Leong founded the journal in 2011. When the Winter 2015 issue was published, I was finishing my doctoral work, which focused on connections between political contexts and translated literature. As I was immersed in the work of critics such as Damrosch, I was also reading Asymptote, and I recognized then that that the journal was doing something different. Rather than reproducing the inequalities of what Pascale Casanova calls “the world republic of letters,” Asymptote was giving—and continues to give—voice to languages and regions across the globe without ever lowering the curatorial bar.  READ MORE…

Summer 2014: The Tip of a Vast Iceberg

September 15, 2018  |  in 30issues30days  |  by Sam Carter

The best writing does not mirror something we already know but rather offers a new view.

Is world literature racist? (By ‘world literature,’ I refer specifically, of course, to agents in the world literature industry, say, programmers of literary festivals or those who disburse funds.) An unhappy episode looms in my recollection of Asymptote-related work leading up to the Summer 2014 issue. I have only ever brought it up once, and briefly, two years ago, in a blog post about editing a literary journal as a person of color. With Asians in America reclaiming their visibility recently, it may not such be a bad idea to ride the wave. So here is the story: Five years into helming a magazine as its only full-time team member, I came to know about an invitation sent to a part-time team member. This invitation, issued by a White person, to represent Asymptote at an international conference with an offer to be flown in from anywhere, was sent directly to the White female Assistant Managing Editor who’d been with Asymptote for less than seven months, and who actually lived farther away from the conference than me, based on her current city at that time. Appalled by the blatant racism, I told her that I would not authorize her appearance on behalf of Asymptote—if I couldn’t defend myself against the racist, at least I wouldn’t be complicit in his invisibilization. What surprised me was how incomprehensible this decision was to another White senior team member, who took it upon himself to sway my mind. Forced as a person of color to “accept offense and facilitate its reconciliation,” I chose to shut down the conversation instead, as Maya Binyam would have recommended. Since then, I’ve observed an interesting pattern: people will often rush to the aid of one marginalized group without realizing how it occurs at the expense of other marginalized groups—groups that don’t even have anyone else flying a flag for them, be it Asians or editors (more on this later). Here to introduce the Summer 2014 issue is Senior Editor Sam Carter.

This issue graced the Asymptote homepage when I was applying to join the journal back in August of 2014. As I put the finishing touches on a cover letter—and as I later drafted my responses to a series of follow-up questions—I came back to the contents of this edition again and again to explain why I wanted to contribute to such an impressively expansive, incredibly inclusive, and somehow still remarkably cohesive literary project. Greeting me each time was Robert Zhao Renhui’s stunning cover featuring a man leaping from an iceberg juxtaposed with a polar bear swimming in presumably icy waters. Amid a stillness that nevertheless captures a sense of imminent movement, both remain cool and collected despite the unknown that lies ahead. I soon followed suit, plunging into a new position that, as often happens with sudden immersion, proved instantly invigorating.

If you’re looking for an ice-breaker—or a place of your own to dive into the issue—you probably couldn’t do better than the excerpts from Raúl Zurita’s The Country of Ice, translated by Daniel Borzutzky. Yet unlike the cover photographs, ice here freezes time, recording the past rather than providing any sort of springboard into the future: “You then look at the giant wall of ice and you feel you were once there, perhaps hundreds, thousands of years ago, and you curl up in a ball as if wanting to save yourself from that memory.” The five prose poems have a decidedly chilling effect, one that the poet has been exploring his entire career. READ MORE…