Place: Argentina

Our Year in World Literature

December 31, 2019  |  in News  |  by Alexander Dickow and Lee Yew Leong

The top 10 articles we published in 2019—according to you!

To send off 2019, we’re revisiting the ten most-read articles from our issues this year. Not surprisingly, most of them were concentrated in our Spring 2019 issue, voted by 290 readers as your favorite edition this year. Scroll down to see which article was the biggest hit in a year that saw never-before-published writing from 70 countries and 44 languages spread out over four quarterly issues.

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At No. 10 is Argentine author Sylvia Molloy’s thrilling but sensitive meditation on the bilingual condition from the Fall 2019 issue—read her essay “Living Between Languages.” READ MORE…

My 2019: Georgina Fooks

December 26, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Georgina Fooks

This year, I read more translated fiction than ever before, buoyed by my involvement in Asymptote

Here to continue our A Year in Reading series, please welcome Georgina Fooks, who made a conscious effort at the start of the year to expand her reading to include more women and non-European authors. Here is the result:

At the start of 2019, I consciously decided to read as much as possible. After several years of buying books and never reading them (a predicament neatly summed up by the Japanese word tsundoku), I resolved that this year, I wanted to read more books while buying less—so it is that I’ve done my best to read from my own shelves (although that doesn’t mean I have stopped buying books entirely).

The first half of this year was dominated by reading for academic purposes—so I read lots of French and Latin American fiction and poetry. My favourite author is Marguerite Duras, and I enjoyed Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein; there’s something special about the atmosphere she paints through language, her evocative style, and the way she explores desire. Throughout the whole book, Duras keeps you guessing as to who’s in control, who holds power, and she never answers that question for you. I was also really moved by A l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie by Hervé Guibert, which is an emotional read that blurs the boundaries between fiction and autobiography. When published in France, it caused a media stir for recounting how Michel Foucault died of an AIDS-related illness, but beyond media sensationalism, it’s a heart-wrenching account that explores betrayal in all its forms—betrayals between friends, broken promises, and the betrayal of oneself when writing an account of your own life. 

Some of my favourite Latin American authors are from Argentina, so in addition to reading Borges and Cortázar, two of my favourites, I also enjoyed exploring Silvina Ocampo’s stories for the first time; she is famously overshadowed by Borges (a fellow writer) and Adolfo Bioy Casares (her husband), but she’s received a lot more attention in recent years. My favourite story of hers, “Tales eran sus rostros”, has now been translated into English and serves as the title of a new collection of hers in English: Thus Were Their Faces, published by NYRB Classics. It describes a supernatural phenomenon, and is haunting and ambiguous in the best possible way. She writes that no one knew if what happened was terrible, but became beautiful, or beautiful, but became terrible—but she leaves it up to the reader to decide.  READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2019

December 16, 2019  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel, Georgina Fooks, and Jacqueline Leung

Our selected works of translation this month touch on the eternal themes of narrative, identity, and the poet's voice.

It has been a wonderful year of covering, dear reader, the most fascinating translated works of world literature. Today, we are back with three more varied and exceptional books. Below, find reviews of a discursive and genre-bending Korean work, a powerful Uzbek novel that traverses existential questions of migration and hybridity, and the intimately potent lines of a young Argentine poetess. 

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Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River by Jung Young Moon, translated from the Korean by Yewon Jung, Deep Vellum Publishing, 2019

Review by Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large for Hong Kong

To Jung Young Moon, the author of Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River, meaninglessness is a more accurate portrayal of reality than contrived narratives. Continuing the fascination of Vaseline Buddha, one of his earlier novels which delves into the mind of an insomniac writer, Moon experiments with how the novel as a genre may go beyond the typical constituents of character, plot, and structure, and whether or not readers are able to find enjoyment in navigating largely banal thoughts and experiences. 

Set in Texas, where Moon did a residency in 2017 (specifically, in Corsicana, which he refers to as “C, a small town near Dallas”), Seven Samurai culminated from his desire to write about the state. But Moon does not know much about Texas, nor does he pretend to do so. Meandering through a list of stereotypes, from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to cowboys to the disdain for adding beans to chilli, Moon does not so much feature Texas as a place of interest, but rather as a springboard for his endless ruminations that find beginnings in almost anything, but that ultimately lead nowhere. READ MORE…

The Grammar of Allegory: A Review of Hebe Uhart’s The Scent of Buenos Aires

November 20, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Leah Scott

Uhart’s characters often tread this line between innocence and incredible wisdom.

The Scent of Buenos Aires by Hebe Uhart, translated from the Spanish by Maureen Shaughnessy, Archipelago, 2019

Hebe Uhart’s The Scent of Buenos Aires is a series of musings on the complex makings of place that embodies the spirit of this city, revealing a secret magic woven into the countless lives that buzz at its center. Her stories highlight mundane, quotidian experience—from dinner parties to rides on the subway—but the aura of each piece is tinged with the surreal, the uncanny, emanating a subtle strangeness unique to her characteristic voice.

Prior to her death in 2018, Uhart’s life was defined by her meticulous attention to the world and its inhabitants, a perspective that enriched her interest in literature and philosophy. Her authorial career spanned several novels, Spanish-language short story collections, and literary workshops; she also served as a professor of philosophy at Argentina’s National University of Lomas de Zamora for several years. Uhart’s work has won numerous accolades (including Argentina’s 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Prize) and is defined by its ambiguous narrators, quietly humorous characters who display a certain skepticism about the world and the fickle nature of life. Although her stories reverberate with rich description, intricate details, and lively personalities—often functioning as direct projections of her own lived experiences—plot is never of major importance, the absence of which renders her work somewhat still, devoid of much action or narrative thrust. Instead, Uhart’s concern is that of the particulars, the subtle ways that perception unfurls from a specific point of focus, and though her life was dense with movement and progression, her work invites us to pause and pay attention to how we, ourselves, perceive our surroundings. 

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Wind and Wood and Word Sonnets: Toward a Multilingual Tradition in Translation

November 13, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Daniel Persia

Wind and Wood reveals new possibilities for translation and reinforces the maxim that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Poetry is a living creature; the aim of translators is not to tame it, but to cut its reins so that it may run free. This exceptional variousness is exemplified in the quadrilingual edition of word sonnets by Seymour Mayne: Wind and Wood, published in English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. This work is the second sequence of Mayne’s larger collection, Cusp: Word Sonnets (2014), which marked fifty years since his poetry first appeared in Montreal. A translation of the entire collection into Russian (translated by Mikhail Rykov, Silver Age press) was launched on October 24 at Library and Archives Canada. In this essay, Daniel Persia, Asymptote‘s Editor-at-Large for Brazil, discusses the new territory that this tremendous edition breaches, the generous particularities of Mayne’s form, and the dimensions of a single line, in different clothing.

Why settle for a good poem in one language when you can read it in four? Canadian poet and translator Seymour Mayne takes the art of the word sonnet to a new level in his quadrilingual collection Wind and Wood / Viento y madera / Vent et bois / Vento e madeira, published by Malisia Editorial (Argentina) just last year. In addition to an interview with Mayne himself—in which the author talks about the “intimate and creative relationship” between writer and translator—the collection brings thirty-three word sonnets, originally written in English, into Spanish (María Laura Spoturno et al.) French (Véronique Lessard and Marc Charron) and Portuguese (Maria da Conceição Vinciprova Fonseca). The project comes through the vision of María Laura Spoturno (Universidad Nacional de La Plata), who directed a collaborative effort in Spanish translation with sixty undergraduate students, successfully constructed bridges to Canada and Brazil, and served as general editor for the collection. Transcending the traditional two-language paradigm while exploring themes of aging, nostalgia, and the passing of time, Wind and Wood reveals new possibilities for translation and reinforces the age-old maxim that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

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Section Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2019

October 28, 2019  |  in News  |  by Ah-reum Han, Caridad Svich, Ellen Jones, Henry Ace Knight, Lee Yew Leong, Varun Nayar, and Victoria Livingstone

Our Section Editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2019 issue!

Eleven days after its launch, Asymptote’s Fall 2019 issue continues to capture the zeitgeist. Many of its pieces, drawn from a record thirty-six countries, simmer with polyvocal discontent at the modern world, taking aim squarely at its seamy underbelly: the ravages of environmental degradation, colonial resource extraction, and media sensationalism of violence, in particular. If you’re still looking for a way in, perhaps our Section Editors can be of some assistance. Their highlights from the edition follow:

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction, Poetry, and Microfiction Special Feature Editor:

Via frequent contributors Julia and Peter Sherwood, an excerpt from Czech writer and dramaturg Radka Denemarková’s latest Magnesia Litera Prize-winning novel, Hours of Lead, brings us into the bowels of a Chinese prison, bearing witness to a dissident girl’s defiance of state repression and censorship. Inspired by Václav Havel, the protagonist’s struggle is entirely private and self-motivated, untethered from any broader democratic collective or underground movement. Her guards are driven mad by her equanimity and individuality in the face of savage interrogation: “Even her diffident politeness is regarded as provocative. As is her decency. Restraint. Self-control. Humility. . . The guards find her very existence provocative.” Renounced by her parents and rendered persona non grata, “a one-person ghetto,” by the state, her isolation is both liberating and the ultimate gesture of self-sacrifice.

Meanwhile, poet Fabián Severo—the only Uruguayan writing in Portunhol, the language of the Uruguayan frontier with Brazil—revels in an act of presence just as radical and defiant of the mainstream, resisting the state’s attempted erasure of his language. Laura Cesarco Eglin and Jesse Lee Kercheval’s translation sings: “This language of mine sticks out its tongue at the dictionary/ dances a cumbia on top of the maps / and from the school tunic and bow tie / makes a kite / that flies / loose and free through the sky.” Don’t overlook the luminous poems of prolific French and Martinican Creole writer Monchoachi, whom Derek Walcott has credited for “completely renewing our vision of the Creole language.” “The Caribbean could be considered a workshop for the modern world,” he conveys in Eric Fishman’s English translation, “with its deportations, its exterminations, and also its ‘wildly multiple’ side, its ‘ubiquity of voices and sounds.’” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

October 18, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, Sarah Moore, and Sarah Moses

Literary awards and festivals abound in this week's news from Argentina, Sweden, and the UK.

This week our reporters bring you news of Sweden’s reaction to last week’s Nobel Prize in Literature announcement by the Swedish Academy, the FILBA international festival in Buenos Aires, as well as the surprise of the Booker Prize winner(s!) in the UK.

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

Since the announcement of the 2018 and 2019 Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Literature last week, the subsequent debate shows no sign of receding. Before the announcement, literary Nobel Prize discussions within Sweden focused on whether awarding a 2018 prize was good for the world of literature or bad because it would smooth over the Swedish Academy’s connection to misconducts.

After the announcement of Polish Olga Tokarczuk (“Flights”) and Austrian Peter Handke as the two most recent literary Nobel Prize Laureates, however, the pros and cons of announcing a 2018 laureate has waned in the shadow of the controversial choice of Handke. The disagreement in Sweden centers on whether Handke’s political standpoint is misunderstood—if he has simply been naive and used by others, if he is an apologist of war crimes—or if awarding Handke is correct on solely literary merits and that disregarding politics is possible. READ MORE…

Our Fall 2019 Issue Is Here!

October 17, 2019  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Radka Denemarková, Sylvia Molloy, Monchoachi, and a Spotlight on International Microfiction

Welcome to our spectacular Fall 2019 edition gathering never-before-published work from a record-breaking 36 countries, including, for the first time, Azerbaijan via our spotlight on International Microfiction. Uncontained, this issue’s theme, may refer to escape either from literal prisons—the setting of some of these pieces—or from other acts of containment: A pair of texts by Czech author Radka Denemarková and Hong Kong essayist Stuart Lee tackle the timely subject of Chinese authoritarianism. In “The Container,” Thomas Boberg performs the literary equivalent of “unboxing” so popular on YouTube these days, itemizing a list of things in a container shipped from Denmark to the Gambia—all in a withering critique of global capitalism.

The container lends itself to several metaphors but none as poignant or as on point as—you guessed it, dear Asymptote reader—the container of language itself, as suggested by London-based photographer Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee’s brilliant cover highlighting the symbolism of the humble rice grain. This commodity has, like language, been exported, exchanged, enhanced, and expressed in various forms from its various origins across the planet. Even when a state attempts to erase language, resistance remains possible, as poet Fabián Severo—the only Uruguayan writing in Portunhol, the language of the country’s frontier with Brazil—demonstrates: “This language of mine sticks out its tongue at the / dictionary,” he sings, “dances a cumbia on top of the maps / and from the school tunic and bow tie / makes a kite / that flies / loose and free through the sky.” In one of Argentine writer Sylvia Molloy’s many profound riffs on the bilingual condition, Molloy claims that “one must always be bilingual from one language, the heimlich one, if only for a moment, since heim or home can change.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 20, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden and Janani Ganesan

This week, news of trans literature in Argentina, an inaugural book fair in Patagonia, and awards season in India.

Our editors report on literature’s integral role in political resistance and in supporting underrepresented voices, as feminist and trans theory workshops are organized in Buenos Aires and fuegino literature is promoted in Patagonia. In India, our reporter leads us through the awards season successes, celebrating many translated titles.

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

Last month, a primary election that predicted a decisive win for the opposition in Argentina’s upcoming presidential elections sent the economy into convulsions, and the peso’s precipitous drop in value made headlines around the world. Amid the debate around the country’s future, the candidates have been conspicuously quiet on an issue important to many Argentine women: abortion, which remains illegal in most cases. But where the politicians are silent, Argentina’s women are not. Anfibia, a digital magazine of literary journalism launched by the Universidad Nacional de San Martín, is offering a workshop to challenge dominant ways of knowing and to provide women with tools to narrate experiences of violence. Also in this year’s lineup is a four-part workshop and practicum on trans theory, which seeks to answer whether it’s possible to develop a collaborative theory of the trans experience to guide, not only personal creativity, but also policy. Trans literature has won acclaim in Argentina recently. Rising literary star and trans writer Camila Sosa Villada, for example, unites literature and performance. According to a recent profile, “Camila is poetry onstage and puts her body on paper” (my translation). Her book Las malas was showcased at this year’s Feria del Libro in Buenos Aires, the largest book fair in Latin America. READ MORE…

All That Makes a Life: Jennifer Croft on Writing Her Memoir

September 2, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Sohini Basak

Translation requires striking a balance between two people’s voices that can be very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

From being the co-winner of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize alongside the writer Olga Tokarczuk, Jennifer Croft has just been announced as a judge of the 2020 International Booker Prize. Croft works across Polish, Ukrainian, and Argentine Spanish, and is currently translating The Book of Jacob, a nine-hundred-page epic by Olga Tokarczuk. She is the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, and National Endowment for the Arts grants, as well as the Michael Henry Heim Prize.

In Homesick, Croft’s memoir, words and their meanings shift and shine through in unusual, tender, and life-transforming ways as the subject moves from a family home, to being the youngest person to be enrolled in her undergraduate class, to going through tragic heartbreaks. A most engaging read, the memoir itself has shape-shifted in interesting ways, having started as a Spanish novel and as a blog. The English-language version (Unnamed Press, September 2019) too is accompanied by photographs, which operate as their own language system, bringing, by turns, softness and sharpness to the storytelling. On the occasion of the release of Homesick, poet and previous Social Media Manager of Asymptote, Sohini Basak, spoke to Jennifer Croft over email.

Sohini Basak (SB): I want to start with the photographs. Could you tell us a bit more about the role of photography in childhood and consequently in your memoir?

Jennifer Croft (JLC): Although photography played an enormous role in my childhood and adolescence, I didn’t really remember that until I started writing Homesick. Because I was living in Buenos Aires, Argentina when I wrote the book, I wrote it in my strange Spanish, which is both foreign (since I started learning Spanish only in my late twenties) and very local (since I’ve only ever studied and spoken porteño Spanish in Buenos Aires). In that first Spanish-language version (called Serpientes y escaleras, coming out next year with Entropía), that language provided a sense of suspense about where this character from Tulsa, Oklahoma was going to go next, and how she was going to end up speaking the way she did. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2019

July 15, 2019  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Barbara Halla, Helena Fornells, and Lindsay Semel

Four reviews of translations you won't want to miss this month!

From translations by heavyweights like Ann Goldstein and Jennifer Croft to novels by writers appearing for the first time in English, July brings a host of exciting new books in translation. Read on for coming-of-age stories set in Italy and Poland, a drama in rural Argentina, and the tale of a young man and his pet lizard in Japan. 

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A Girl Returned by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, Europa Editions, 2019

Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Editor

In A Girl Returned, Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s award-winning novel, a nameless young woman retrospectively narrates the defining event of her adolescence—the year when the only family she has ever known returns her to her birth family. From the title, the reader can already sense the protagonist’s conundrum. A passive object of the act of being returned, her passivity in her own uprooting threatens to define her identity. Ann Goldstein’s searing translation from the Italian inspires the reader both to accompany the narrator as she wades through the tender memories of that time and to reflect on her or his own family relationships through a new lens.

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Impossible Technologies: Pola Oloixarac’s Dark Constellations in Review

July 1, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Nina Perrotta

The characters and plot points can be imagined as stars in the night sky . . . that give the novel its visible, traceable structure.

Dark Constellations by Pola Oloixarac, translated from the Spanish by Roy Kesey, Soho Press, 2019

The Incas, according to Pola Oloixarac’s Dark Constellations, didn’t see the night sky as we do: instead of what we might call “connecting the dots,” they focused on the darkness between the stars, the shapes formed by negative space. If true—and it’s hard to know what, exactly, is true in Dark Constellations—it’s an intriguing image, one that informs our understanding of the novel’s structure as well as its content.

Dark Constellations, translated into English by Roy Kesey, is the second novel from Pola Oloixarac, one of Argentina’s rising literary stars (pun intended). Like her countrywoman Samanta Schweblin, whose story collection Mouthful of Birds has recently garnered considerable attention, Oloixarac tends to blur the line between science and the supernatural, taking a certain kind of pleasure in repeatedly throwing the reader off balance. Dark Constellations, however, has a much wider range than Schweblin’s stories, skillfully handling subjects as varied as botany, world history, and computer programming. The book’s publisher, Soho Press, calls Dark Constellations “ambitious,” and while I agree completely, I would argue that the novel’s ambition is its greatest weakness as well as one of its strengths. 

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Meet the Publisher: Chris Fischbach of Coffee House Press

June 5, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Moses

It’s a well-known fact that I am often drawn to books that tear your heart out and stomp on it.

Coffee House Press is an independent publisher of fiction, poetry, and essays. Since 2014, with the publication of Faces in the Crowd and Sidewalks by Mexican author Valeria Luiselli (translated by Christina MacSweeney), the press has sought out authors from Latin America and farther abroad. Coffee House Press is also a nonprofit organization that collaborates with artists on Books in Action projects that expand the relationship between reader and writer. Over email, Chris Fischbach, CHP’s publisher, and Sarah Moses, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Argentina, discussed the press’s interdisciplinary collaborations, how they discover books by Latin American authors, and some of the titles in translation readers can check out.

Sarah Moses (SM): How did Coffee House Press come to be?

Chris Fischbach (CF): We were founded by Allan Kornblum in the early 1970s in Iowa, and we were purely a letterpress venture back then, publishing poets from both Iowa and from the New York School, where Allan had moved from. In the early 1980s, Allan moved the press to Minneapolis, where it became the first press-in-residence at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. A couple years later, we incorporated as a nonprofit, became Coffee House Press, moved down the street, and started publishing trade editions (fiction and poetry) as well as continuing our letterpress work. I joined the press as a letterpress intern in December of 1994 and was hired as an editorial assistant in August of 1995. I became publisher in 2011.

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Section Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2019

April 29, 2019  |  in News  |  by Ah-reum Han, Caridad Svich, Ellen Jones, Eva Heisler, Joshua Craze, Lee Yew Leong, Sam Carter, and Victoria Livingstone

Special selections from our Spring 2019 issue!

If you have yet to read our spectacular Spring 2019 issue, what are you waiting for? Maybe for our Section Editors to give you their favourites so you can get off of the right foot—well, we’ve delivered. From the poetry by the hand of acclaimed fiction writers, to century-traversing tales, to contemporary criticism on the role of the translator, here are the highlights, straight from those who have devoted themselves to perfecting this issue.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction and Poetry Section Editor:

This issue’s fiction lineup is bookended by two Argentine authors (born in 1956) who grapple with Jewish identity in their work. With The Planets shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award in 2013, Sergio Chejfec is much better known to Anglophone readers, but Daniel Guebel is not exactly an unknown entity—recently the publisher Beatriz Viterbo released an anthology of essays contributed by such writers as César Aira celebrating Guebel’s work. Via “Jewish Son,” Jessica Sequeira’s perfectly pitched translation, English readers are introduced to bits of a weltanschauung that include pilpul (aka spicy thought, a method of interpreting the Talmud), tango singers, readings of Kafka and The Aeneid, all taking place in the last act of a father-son relationship. Yet, it is also very emotional—despite, or perhaps all the more so because of, the philosophical exposition. As with the best fictions, Guebel gestures toward a gestalt beyond the text. I can’t wait for more of this heavyweight to appear in English.

In the poetry section, which I also assembled, two highlights (also bookending the section) are Raymond Queneau, co-founder of the now-international formalist Oulipo movement, and Georgi Gospodinov, acclaimed for The Physics of Sorrow, showing that they have as much talent as poets as they do as fiction writers. An especially exciting discovery is Gertrud Kolmar, nom de plume of Gertrud Käthe Chodziesner, advocated by cousin Walter Benjamin, but only now celebrated as one of the great forgotten poets. Characterized by mystery, the taut but dreamlike poems channeled with elan by Anna Henke and Julia Gutterman are fueled by an “ache unnamed”; “a glimmer burning out its flame.” 

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