Place: California

Translation Tuesday: Three essays from “The Heart of a Dog” by Hiromi Itō

One day, Také stopped, too tired to go any further.

This Translation Tuesday, we’re thrilled to bring you three personal essays from pre-eminent Japanese author and poet Hiromi Itō, about her aging, beloved German Shepherd, Také. Unflinching in their portrayal of Také’s life, from her irrepressible youth to her gradual physical decline, Itō’s essays contemplate the often brutal inevitabilities of mortality in a quiet, understated prose, translated here by Jeffrey Angles with the aid of students in his translation seminar.

Canine Instincts

If I don’t write this quickly, I feel like I’ll be leaving Také behind, and I could hardly bear the thought of that.

Také is a German Shepherd who has reached the ripe, old age of thirteen. Meanwhile, I’m a fifty-six year-old human being. If I were a dog, I’d have kicked the bucket ages ago. Fifteen years ago, I came to Southern California with my two daughters, and we’ve been here ever since. A year and a half after our move, Také joined us. In other words, she’s been with our family for most of our time in California.

Today, I took Také on a walk to the park near our home like usual. Each time, she always wants to take the same path she’s walked her entire life. The route never varies, and once we start, she won’t be satisfied unless we go the whole way. That’s why I began to drive us back and forth—to decrease the burden on her tired, old body as much as possible.

Today, after we took our walk and returned to the car, I found my keys were missing. I must’ve dropped them somewhere. When I turned back to look, Také made a stubborn expression and refused to budge. READ MORE…

Asymptote Podcast: Hiromi Itō on “Living Trees and Dying Trees”

For our final podcast episode of the year, we sat down with Japanese poet Hiromi Itō, whose essay was one of Fall 2020’s highlights.

In this episode, podcast editor Steve Lehman chats with acclaimed poet, essayist, and novelist Hiromi Itō about her development as a feminist writer, the importance of the environment in her life, and the moving experience of reading her own work translated into another language. Plus, hear an excerpt from Itō’s essay “Living Trees and Dying Trees,” translated from the Japanese and read by Jon L. Pitt. You can check out the full essay, along with new work from 32 countries, in our Fall 2020 issue.

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

This week’s literary news from Tibet, California, and Brazil!

This week saw huge events to mark International Women’s Day around the world with its theme this year “Let’s all be each for equal.” Our writers are bringing news this week too of celebrations of underrepresented voices who, through their literature, translations, and discussions also strive for equality: a weeklong Instagram Takeover sharing the work of seven Tibetan women; an international symposium of Indigenous writers in San Diego; and two important forthcoming translations of Brazilian voices. Read on to find out more!  

Shelly Bhoil, Editor-at-Large for Tibet, reporting from Brazil

There is a slow but sure arrival of women to the Tibetan literary scene, evident in the takeover of High Peaks Pure Earth’s Instagram by seven Tibetan women, one each day, beginning February 24, the first day of Losar, the Tibetan New Year. 

In the cavalcade of visual stories, Asymptote contributor Chime Lama threw poetry exercises with shapes and games. A peek-a-book at her concrete poetry collection makes one anticipate it! Tenzin Dickie, the editor of Treasury of Lives, brought Tibetan humor and wisdom with snippets from her forthcoming family memoir—“if you don’t control your appetite even your knees are part of your stomach” or “a bucketful of vomit for a handful of food.” 

Beijing-based Tsering Woeser’s resistant rootedness in her inner exile is telling from the Dalai Lama’s photo, banned in China, at her Losar altar. She showed a view from her apartment window, where a blizzard had occasioned her poem “But It Was“. Kaysang shared the view of Dharamsala from her office space, calling it “Exile Home, The Only Home I’ve Ever Known”. She also left a heartfelt note on sustainable gratitude. Gratitude is something always becoming on Tsering Wangmo Dhompa for her late mother, whose photo she carries wherever she goes. In a work in progress, which Tsering shared, the discerning woman resists “the man who was uncertain of being loved” because “At best, he saw me as the best / of the worst number.” READ MORE…

Visual Noise: Alejandro Adams on Screen Languages

My films and fiction writing come out of notes and ideas that are rooted in this raucous inner life, this biological story urge.

Alejandro Adams is a writer and filmmaker whose pictures include Canary (2009) and Babnik (2010), both about the buying and selling of body parts. (The latter involves sex-trafficking, the former organ-harvesting.) He is also the director of Around the Bay (2008) and Amity (2012).

Though Adams is an Anglophone filmmaker—most readily understood by his audiences in terms of a broadly New World sensibility—it does not follow that his films are Anglophone or monolingual: they comprise substantial Russian, German, and Vietnamese in addition to their English. Of interest to the Asymptote reader in Adams’ work are the complex translation dynamics involved in their trans-linguistic performance and production; Adams writes in English for multilingual casts and asks them to reproduce iterations or facsimiles of certain script segments in their respective languages. Then, returning the recorded dialogue to English in post-production, Adams subtitles with at least as much attention to his cinematic vision as to denotative content. (He discusses this process in more detail in an interview with Vadim Rizov, explaining, “We agreed from the beginning that I’d subtitle it however I wanted—the whole thing is fiction, why should I have any fidelity to translating dialogue?”) I originally recruited Adams for a conversation about the forms and functions of this multilingualism in his pictures, but when we actually spoke, the conversation expanded to include a broader range of visual and sonic signification in narrative cinema.

Rachel Allen (RA): I thought we could start by talking about your second feature, Canary, which features long passages of untranslated (unsubtitled) Russian, Vietnamese, and German. There are also these long, garrulous scenes—I’m thinking of the workplaces especially—of undifferentiated dialogue. The parallel I see between those two kinds of scenes is in their seeming disregard, at least from a narrative or expositional perspective, for the semantic content of language, suggesting that the narratively relevant stuff isn’t in individual propositions. But the dialogue in those scenes is also so specific to its context, and to the individual characters within them, which suggests to me that someone is attending very carefully to the language, even at the level of individual words. I wondered if you see or feel that tension in Canary, between attention to and disregard for language. Or words, maybe: is this a film that sees distinctions between “words” and “language” and “communication”? Does Canary distrust words? (Do you?)

Alejandro Adams (AA): You’re asking if I believe in language, or words, and I’m reminded of another interview I did where the first question was “Do you believe in morality?” It was about one of my other films, but the idea that I don’t put stock in some fundamentally human aspect of existence is troubling. These questions stop you in your tracks, but they also demonstrate that these films are made by someone who obviously can’t handle water cooler talk so let’s go for the throat, no appetizer.

About words themselves and the way words are used to create a texture in the film, the hyper-specific dialogue is extremely scripted—even the overlaps, like the litany of things one can do with a partial organ. Other material is entirely improvised but orchestrated down to how many times an actor touches a child’s toy or picks up a phone. So it would seem that I have all this vision around the sonic impact of human speech, trying to make an office lobby feel as chaotic as the beachhead in Saving Private Ryan, but what I really wanted was silence.

READ MORE…

We Can All Be Walking Poets: Sauntering Verse and Dada

“Walking artists walk to create something. So actually, you could argue that you are the walking artist.”

Sauntering Verse, a new app for auto-generated poetry, uses Dadaist language to redefine the experience of physical space. In this essay, Lara Norgaard tests the app while reflecting on its implications for our relationship with technology, and the art that it creates. What contexts do we bring to the art we create and consume? What does it mean to be an artist when art is made possible just by taking your phone on a walk?

It is warm and cloudy on the afternoon following the first round of Brazil’s presidential election. The extreme right-wing candidate Jair Bolsonaro received just over 46% of the popular vote—he would come to win the run-off election just weeks later. It feels like the world I woke up to earlier that morning was not precisely my own, as if a body-snatcher stole my world instead of my skin.

The day is a blur: I walk a few meters from the living room to the kitchen in my apartment. Outside the window, the skyline of nearly identical high-rises in the Brazilian city that I call home glint in clouded sadness, weighed down by more than 186 thousand people who voted for a man whom The New Yorker has called a cross between Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte. Perhaps he will not win in the second round, but perhaps what is already bad will get worse. This eventuality feels so surreal that I focus on boiling water for a calming mug of coffee. I glance down at my phone. It wrote me a poem:

She skipped it

A rear Jesus

They of them

The sagging can retract or sagging sagging

A quirky staging

She pots him

READ MORE…