Posts filed under 'care'

Agitations on Fragmented Terrain: On Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny’s Trash

May 10, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Fairuza Hanun

“Trash” is not necessarily just the waste we can no longer consume or make use of; its entanglements prove to be far more complex.

Trash by Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny, translated from the Spanish by JD Pluecker, Deep Vellum, 2023

There’s trash in there, said the man who was cleaning our shower drain. He pulled out a rope of hair—in our household of mostly women, it collects. I thought of the specific word he used to describe our hair, that of a tangle of broken, dead, fallen hair: trash. No one in my circle, also mostly people with uteruses, has ever referred to hair as “trash.” To us, hair is hair, and we grieve its damaged pieces. It seems peculiar and disheartening that our being women (as a social construct) and people with uteruses (as an overlapping, but not coextensive, biological reality), have always been intimately associated to and related with trash. Our relationship with trash is indicative of our whole body and mind’s vicissitudes. In Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny’s recent novel, Trash, the fact that her three narrators all identify as women demonstrates a radical intention, revealing how certain sexual identities and wants are constructed as “bad” in order to maintain the patriarchal and ableist social order, where particular bodies and desires are rendered incapable of performing normative moral order, and are therefore unacceptable in society. When we reframe it that way, “trash” is not necessarily just the waste we can no longer consume or make use of; its entanglements prove to be far more complex, much deeper than that. The identities we align with, the politics we embody, the bodyminds we are, our presence unwanted and disturbing to the ruler’s home—when they stir up a stench which discomforts cisheterosexual (mostly) male desires, we become trash to their senses. 

In this stunning debut novel, we encounter biopolitical debilities — such as hormones for transitions, the toxins from medication, blood from menstruation — through which Zéleny wades to render the limitations of our social and biopolitical mobility. Trash, set in a municipal garbage dump, starts by familiarising us with its cycle of narrators, taking turns like a roundtable with each part written in distinct voices, pulling us into the lucid experiential timelines of each narrator’s embodied memory.  READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: February 2023

February 13, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Cecilia Weddell, Charlie Ng, and Meghan Racklin

New translations from Hungarian, German, and Spanish!

This month, we are excited to present new works in translation that consider survival and coexistence in many forms. From the Hungarian, renowned author Magda Szabó delves into the embittering effects of poverty and hardship. From the Spanish, Pilar Quintana creates a riveting familial portrait of vulnerable parents and too-wise children. From the German, Dr. Ludger Wess leads us on a journey to discover the smallest lifeforms amongst us. Read on to find out more!

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The Fawn by Magda Szabó, translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix, New York Review Books, 2023

Review by Meghan Racklin, Blog Editor

In The Fawn, the latest of Magda Szabó’s novels to be translated into English, it is 1954 in Budapest. For Eszter, the novel’s main character (it is difficult to call her a protagonist), it is 1954—but it is also the interwar years and the years of the war, and it is also, disastrously, almost the future. “The Future . . .’” she thinks, “[t]hat was something I had no desire to build. I had enough of the past about me already for the thought to do anything but horrify me.”

The novel is Eszter’s account of her life and her surroundings, told in a monologue directed at the man she loves, and the language is as beautiful as Eszter is bitter. In Len Rix’s translation, Eszter’s sentences are full of clauses; she’s in a rush, trying to get out everything she wishes she had already said. She recalls, of the evening when her childhood home was hit by a bomb, “Mother neither wept nor blanched; we slept the sleep of the contented in the main hall of a school, along with everyone else who had lost their homes; I felt like the nation’s favourite child, everyone seemed to want to look after us, and the whole city shared our grief.” As her outpouring continues, details pile up like debris. 

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Announcing Our May Book Club Selection: To the Warm Horizon by Choi Jin-young

May 31, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Alexandra Irimia

Choi Jin-young focuses instead on the possibilities for love and caring connections in a time of societal breakdown and civilizational disarray.

As pandemic literature carves out a space of its own in contemporary letters, such writings unveil what is seemingly opaque or inscrutable about the presumed normalcy of “the before times.” In our Book Club selection for May, To the Warm Horizon, Choi Jin-young sketches a fragmentary, kaleidoscopic tale of survival and longing in the aftermath of a global catastrophe triggered by illness. The focus, however, is not on contagion itself. Instead, it falls on the variety of ways in which human interactions unfold within a more general dynamic of contrasting forces: fear and hope, reason and unreason, cruelty and love. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive Book Club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom Q&As with the author and/or the translator of each title!

To the Warm Horizon by Choi Jin-young, translated from the Korean by Soje, Honford Star, 2021

Among the many side effects of the pandemic, we have witnessed a global reawakening of the taste for narratives of contagion, (post-)apocalyptic scenarios, and disaster fiction. If in March 2020, readers rushed to revisit the classics (Boccaccio’s Decameron, Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, or Camus’s The Plague), the public quickly moved to explore newer works as the pandemic stretched on, such as Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014). The early months of 2021 came with an entirely new crop of contemporary writing, whose publication in English translation was likely encouraged—if not sped up—by the timeliness of their subject matter. Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon, published originally in Korean in 2017 and in Soje’s translation in 2021, is an example of the newly acquired popularity of these viral themes.

An unnamed virus serves only as a distant background for the five first-person narrators whose voices echo one another in this book, wherein the disastrous toll of hundreds of thousands of victims a day has decimated the population of the globe in a matter of days, setting in motion massive flows of refugees headed for an ever-distant promise of warmth and safety lurking on the horizon. Not much is disclosed about the disease itself, except that it provokes a rapid death; Choi Jin-young focuses instead on the possibilities for love and caring connections in a time of societal breakdown and civilizational disarray.

Countering the entropy of a world in dissolution, the narrative stitches together twenty kaleidoscopic chapters, in which five nomadic voices each offer their own experience of the events. The fragments are titled after their narrators and read like curated journal entries, varying in length and intensity. Amongst the speakers, Dori and Jina are given the most depth and contour; they speak for themselves as queer women, and their burgeoning romantic relationship is at the core of the novel. Ryu is the spokesperson for her family’s story, while Joy and Gunji are episodic storytellers whose accounts center on their own desires. READ MORE…