Place: Ethiopia

Asymptote Podcast: In Conversation with Bethlehem Attfield

Africa may have gotten itself another Nobel laureate, but African vernacular literature still needs advocacy, according to Bethlehem Attfield

It’s Steve Lehman’s final episode as our podcast editor, and we’re going out with a bang: a timely interview with the Ethiopian writer and translator Bethlehem Attfield. In this episode, Bethlehem talks with Steve about co-translating Mulugeta Alebachew’s short story “Heaven Without Prickly Pears” for our Summer 2021 issue. She also discusses the lack of representation of African vernacular languages in English translation, and her mission to change that by advocating for Ethiopian literature on the world stage. The episode wraps up with an excerpt of the short story, read first in the original Amharic by the author, followed by Bethlehem with her English cotranslation. Listen to the podcast now!

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2021

Our blog editors pick their favourite pieces from the Summer 2021 issue!

As Asymptote celebrates the first issue of our second decade in world literature, we bring to you new work from thirty-five countries and twenty-four languages in our Summer 2021 issue! Drawing from the theme of our Special Feature, “Age of Division,” these varied writings speak to a moment of mounting borders, fractious politics, and heightened suspicion towards the other—but so too do they hint at the possibility of unexpected solidarities, strange encounters, and new geographies of affinity. Not sure where to begin with this bountiful issue? Let our blog editors take you through some of their favourite pieces to reveal a world that is, in the words of Lêdo Ivo, “sweet, full, pungent, and luminous.” 

In the spring of 2004, an intifada singer in Ramallah said to his interviewer, “What I do on stage and what martyrs do on the streets are one and the same, just with different instruments.” Were resistance embodied in genre, the shape would undoubtedly be that of music. The art which “all art constantly aspires towards” for its certain coherence of form and content, this singular quality also speaks to its ability to move people passionately, crucially, to action. For music is a verb; it must be performed and enacted. It embodies, within its very idea, its eventual actualisation.  

In the excerpt from Olivia Elias’s forthcoming poetry collection Your Name, Palestine, she makes a graceful address: “Musicians, a few minutes more.” Moving on to materialise the scene in sensual, wondering lines, she makes gentle work of speaking the terrible wreckage done to the country where she was born. Born in Haifa and living now in France, she is said to occupy a privileged space within the Palestinian diaspora as one of the few poets in French. In these poems, translated masterfully by Sarah Riggs and Jérémy Robert, she creates in her adopted language the continuation of the Palestinian nation, transcending geographical realities to rhyme with the poetics of Palestinian agency, with both singing and the witness of singing.

Musicians, I am speaking to you of a country
engulfed in a fault of history
of a people chosen to pay the price
of another sacrifice
of a story more than a hundred years old
full of sound and fury and blood

Intended for voices set to instruments, Elias’s work speaks to the intifada singers, the debke performances that conceptualise art from the violences of occupation, and the traditional melodies evoking the dignity of liberation. But without violence and ideology, the measured cadences of her lines are patient with painterly instinct. These poems draw their necessity from their stoic dreams of clarity. Palestine, untorn, in concert, singing.

In Mulugeta Alebachew’s “Heaven Without Prickly Pears,” writing similarly seeks physical qualities—the savoury texture of the language, the kinetic scan of the eye as it seeks and takes in. The topography of the Ethiopian town, Geneté, is overlaid with the infinite dimensions of the mind. Familiarities, kinships, intimacies run through in capillaries of psychogeography, drawing further on its composite, ramified history: “her mosaicked gum-tattoos of more than a dozen languages and myriad cultures.” With co-translator Bethlehem Attfield, Alebachew has done a wonderful job of rendering the original Amharic text, lush with dialect, into a fluent poetry that nevertheless beholds the precision of references outside of the English language.

This town bears my fondest memories, life vividly lived, and lessons well learned . . . my yesterdays, todays, and predictable tomorrows lay on its streets. . . My home includes the highway. My home does not exclude the other homes. 

In this beautiful passage which eclipses the cautious private/public boundary, Alebachew speaks to the growing of the world. Just as in the acts of reading and writing, the dialectic division of outside and inside loses its binds, and one bleeds into the other. By bringing us into his Geneté, the subtle resentment of possessive being is defied; we are given interior knowing without it being our interior. In this world there is no space indifferent or vacant. It is all compounded in an infinite geometry of living; to inhabit a text that so generously navigates a place, it is an astonishing gift. 

—Xiao Yue Shan

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Translation Tuesday: “The Lost Spell” by Yismake Worku

Now I am only a sorrier version of the dog that traversed through the forest with the grace of a cheetah.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, visionary novelist Yismake Worku adopts fantasy and satire as probing social commentary in this excerpt from The Lost Spell. While researching a book of spells, a wealthy man transforms himself into a dog. We follow the (now) canine protagonist as he journeys to Addis Ababa, and through his eyes we witness the sublime beauty of the Ethiopian landscape. The story of one man’s literal dehumanization allegorizes the abasement our narrator witnesses around him as he simultaneously lauds and laments his country. Through the narrator’s unique position as both subjective participant and objective bystander, Worku presents a fly-on-the-wall (or a dog-on-the-road) view of contemporary Ethiopia that is at once a critique and a bittersweet love letter.

It has been a horrible few days. I feel like some life has been drained from my short dog existence. If I hadn’t managed to drag myself into the middle of a corn farm, I would have been picked apart by merciless scavenging birds.

The cause of my pitiful circumstances was an auto-rickshaw accident. If the God of dogs and all creation hadn’t spared me, I would have departed my dog life by now. The rickshaw didn’t hit me full on; it knocked me on my left rear, bending me like a rubber and causing me to plunge into a drain. An unseasonal rain had been pouring down all evening. So, the flood could have carried an elephant, let alone a battered dog. It hauled me along the garbage of Shashemene. Banging me around with every object it carried along, the flood finally threw me into a small river. The river in turn dragged me through shrubs, sometimes battering me against rocks, and deposited me near a cornfield.   READ MORE…

Announcing the Winter 2018 Issue of Asymptote

Celebrate our 7th anniversary with this new issue, gathering never-before-published work from 30 countries!

We interrupt our regular programming to announce the launch of Asymptote‘s Winter 2018 issue! Here’s a tour of some of the outstanding new work from 30 different countries, which we’ve gathered under the theme of “A Different Light”:

In “Aeschylus, the Lost,” Albania’s Ismail Kadare imagines a “murky light” filtering through oiled window paper in the ancient workroom of the father of Greek tragedy. A conversation with acclaimed translator Daniel Mendelsohn reveals the “Homeric funneling” behind his latest memoir. Polish author Marta Zelwan headlines our Microfiction Special Feature, where meaning gleams through the veil of allegory. Light glows ever brighter in poet Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s “syntactically frenetic” “Arachnid Sun”; and in Erika Kobayashi’s fiction, nuclear devastation blazes from Hiroshima to Fukushima.

The light around us is sometimes blinding, sometimes dim, “like a dream glimpsed through a glass that’s too thick,” as Argentine writer Roberto Arlt puts it, channeling Paul to the Corinthians in The Manufacturer of Ghosts. Something dreamlike indeed shines in César Moro’s Equestrian Turtle, where “the dawn emerges from your lips,” and, as if in echo, Mexican writer Hubert Matiúwàa prophecies for his people’s children “a house made of dawn.” With Matiúwàa’s Mè’phàà and our first works from Amharic and Montenegrin, we’ve now published translations from exactly 100 languages!

We hope you enjoy reading this milestone issue as much as everyone at Asymptote enjoyed putting it together. If you want to see us carry on for years to come, consider becoming a masthead member or a sustaining member today. Spread the word far and wide!

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My 2016 by Theophilus Kwek

Reading the Refugee Crisis

From today through Saturday, select Asymptote staff will be continuing our annual tradition of looking back on the year—specifically through the lens of literary discovery. First to go is Chief Executive Assistant Theophilus Kwek, who recently placed Second in the 2016 Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation. 

It’s hard to imagine where we were a year ago: on the brink of a nuclear deal in Iran, standing firmly in Europe, and with a cluster of literary titans—including Elie Wiesel, Umberto Eco, Harper Lee, Max Ritvo and Leonard Cohen—to light the road ahead. The intervening months have taken us around blind corners that will, undoubtedly, take many more months to comprehend.

For many, however, that tumultuous journey has been more than metaphorical. From stories of asylum-seekers defying death to reach the Arctic Circle town of Neiden, to weekly reports of dangerous boat journeys across the Mediterranean Sea or the Bay of Bengal, we’ve been confronted this year by the brutal realities faced en route by 65.3 million displaced people worldwide, including 21.3 million refugees. The figures are mind-boggling on their own, but it’s another thing to remember that each statistic represents a fellow human who has braved trials we could never begin to understand.

Or can we? My 2016 has brought—along with border-crossing award-winners like Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (translated by Deborah Smith), Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade, and Vahni Capildeo’s Measures of Expatriation—a selection of powerful work bearing witness to the refugee experience, both by refugees themselves, and those involved first-hand in the asylum process. More than before, I am convinced that there are ways that we, as readers and writers, can know and share in these journeys. And in a publishing climate that remains overwhelmingly first-world, settled, and white, the least we can do (with our wealth and our words) is choose to look outside those brackets. READ MORE…