Posts filed under 'Death'

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2024

Taking a closer look at Asymptote’s milestone issue!

Not sure where to start with our tremendous fiftieth issue? Our blog editors talk their favourites.

In its overarching theme of “Coexistence,” Asymptote’s monumental 50th issue draws together the quiet, the forgotten, and the unseen, allowing us to inhabit worlds that are not our own. From the bright unease of Elena Garro’s “The Week of Colors” (tr. Christine Legros), to the serene, dynamic stanzas of Eva Ribich’s Along the Border (tr. Julian Anderson), to the dedicated love in Almayrah A. Tiburon’s “Keyboard and Breastfeed” (tr. Bernard Capinpin), Asymptote’s Winter 2024 Issue examines the relationships we have with each other, with the world, and with ourselves.

Dark and unflinching, Maria Grazia Calandrone’s Your Little Matter delves into the ambiguous history of the author’s mother Lucia, her parents’ joint suicide in Rome, and all that was left behind. Central to the piece are physical mementos—two old photographs of Lucia, a list of items left in a suitcase, clippings from a newspaper—from which Calandrone pieces together the story of her parents’ lives, revealing aspects of a woman her daughter barely knew. Alongside the photos come memories passed down and memories created, as Calandrone pieces together the life of a young woman who was nearly forgotten. 

Translated by Antonella Lettieri, Your Little Matter is a work of empathy—of putting on a parent’s shoes, of imagining the pain and the love of the life that led to yours. The lives of our parents are distant, disconnected from our own. Even for those who knew their parents, the question of who they were before we existed can be haunting. What did you lose when you had me? What did you gain? It can be a self-centered venture, as relationships with parents often are, and Your Little Matter simultaneously veers away from and embraces this selfishness. Who were you? Why did you have to leave? I want to remember you; I want you to be remembered. Calandrone’s condemnation of the society that killed her parents; the somber moments spent amidst photographs, imagining; the love she holds for someone who can only be known retroactively—these elements draw you into Lucia’s life, her story, unforgettable. READ MORE…

I Was Young: On Mutsuo Takahashi’s Only Yesterday

[Takahashi] folds time’s unforgiving continuum in one motion, collapsing it into that narrow, white space between one line and the next . . .

Only Yesterday by Mutsuo Takahashi, translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles, Canarium Books, 2023

Classicists are not known for pared-back prose, but in the June 1936 edition of The Classical Journal, Hanako Hoshino Yamagiwa penned a candid, simple piece on the multiple, “surprising” similarities between Ancient Greece and the Japan of her time—a comparison drawn not through extensive research, but the “things which I actually saw, heard, or read from my childhood”. Published for its novelty more than its expertise, this quiet, strange essay touches on a myriad of surface resemblances: agricultural practices, the affinity of Athena and Amaterasu, the lack of romance in marital matters, the habit of passing things from left to right. Together, these daily observations hint towards a woman who, while reading about a nation that could not be further away, had seen a vision of her own life. And so, what emerges is not a convincing portrait of how these island countries may mirror one another between their spatial and temporal distances, but testimony for a vaster pattern: the travelling body hunting the ontological material of geography to retell history, to excavate an expression of the self from the mired cliffs and centuries. It is the story of a body curious, remembering, and in motion. Its muddied tracks.

In Mutsuo Takahashi’s Only Yesterday, Greece is the poet’s material, base, and centre. Through over one hundred and fifty short poems, each translated with much care and expertise by Jeffrey Angles, the poet casts upon shores and mountains, daybreaks and cicada-filled treelines, portioning out a lifelong fascination with the archipelago and all that links it to the world. An extensive corpus has already attested to the depth of Takahashi’s affinity for the Hellenic—from translations of Euripedes and Sophocles to a repertoire of essays and interpretations—but this collection, largely written in his seventy-ninth year, is the first to be entirely dedicated to Greece. And perhaps it is because of this timing, in the winter of the poet’s life, that the view presented in these brief lines is not one of raw precision, of wandering or travelogue, but of Greece dissolving, slowly, into the liquid called reflection.

READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2023

Taking a closer look at pieces on landscape’s multiplicity, unrequited love, and memory amidst grief.

Launched four days ago, our blockbuster Summer 2023 issue gathers never-before-published writing from a remarkable thirty countries—including a spotlight on Indonesia. Don’t know where to begin with this thrilling mélange of established and emerging voices? To help you dip your toe into this brand-new edition brimming with literary gems, our blog editors take you through their favorite pieces. Read on!

Within the tensions of unrequited love, the transformative faculties of ardor conduct their most astounding magic. Time is stretched to its utmost limits, unbound feelings hit a multiplicity of extremes, and the physical proof of reality collapse under the extraordinary pressures of belief. There’s not a lot of happiness that can be found amongst the shifting phantasms and polarities of this condition, but there is plenty of beauty, of poetry, of hope and awe, all of it stemming from nothing but the imagination in overdrive, sparked brilliantly alive by the beckoning figure of desire.

There are many examples of such love to be found in life and art, but one that seems particularly difficult to understand is the love of a fan. The indulgent culture of fandom gives free reign to displays of love-as-devotion, ranging from pedestrian claims of destiny to reckless acts of sacrifice—and because it often inflicts the young and the hyperbolic, its passions are seen as lacking any certifying element of truth. A one-sided, disingenuous, superficial love. But just try telling that to a fan.

In an excerpt from her novel, Phantom Limb Pain, Heejoo Lee does much to redeem this expressive, unrestrained love. Tracing the contours of a fan’s deep—even vicious—adulation for an idol, Lee’s forthright prose, translated with a sensitive colloquiality by Yoojung Chun, reaches a tender, natural honesty, describing an emotion that gives a rhythm to the days and months, a thrill to the pedestrian events of waiting and wanting, and a vividity to the fantasies making life more beautiful. Manok, the young woman who paves the way for our nameless protagonist into fandom, is “downright shameless,” keenly following her idol’s every move, openly displaying her possessive jealousy, and attributing her love to an act of God. Being a fan in South Korea’s multibillion-dollar idol industry is nothing less than laborious; fans religiously attend promotional events, spare no expense in purchasing goods and merchandise, and “pour their hearts out” at every opportunity. From the outside, one is made to wonder what any individual gets out of this all-consuming lifestyle, and here, Lee explains it to us through Manok, with the eloquence of absolute sincerity:

Their presence stayed mysterious over repeated encounters, and it refused to be locked into language. Their real presence rendered everything in high relief, so that everything—even their shadows or things that might be their shadows—became amazing to me.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Tachycardia” by Clara Muschietti

when I’m alone in bed, and I have tachycardia, I don’t know if it’s that or if it’s the echo of my life rolling in the silence.

Disease brings life into sharp focus and shades last moments with a hazy, but resolute acceptance in Clara Muschietti’s Tachycardia. Elegantly translated from the Spanish by Samantha Cosentino, the following Translation Tuesday is a strikingly honest portrayal of coming to terms with all that is unknown and unfinished in the face of an absolute end. 

1

There can’t be wind stronger than this.
Outside, the leaves stirred up. Inside,
the certainty—all of this will come to an end.

We leave, at one point we’ll go. And for now,
we just leave most of our dark mane in a modern hair salon. We didn’t want to.

We don’t know whether to stay or run away,
we don’t know if you were lying.
We don’t know if we were lying.

That cat follows me indiscriminately, we
thank him so much
but he thanks us for domesticating him.

We think about the worst diseases,
and cry,
we meticulously inspect our body
we survey it with an unscientific rigor
we’re already certain
we will die

If we live to be old women we’ll be grateful.
If the sun comes out tomorrow we’ll be grateful.

If this home doesn’t fall apart tomorrow, we’ll be grateful.
The body weighs less—we attribute it to the disease we attribute to ourselves.
The more fear we have, the more we love life.

A few human figures in the distance,
I can’t make anyone out—there are no names
or birthdates—are they my brothers?

Up really close, faces warp,
become accessible.
Your face is there, when I wake it’s there, when I lie down it’s there,
when I’m sleeping it’s there. Your face from afar.
My body from afar feels
irreconcilable. The images you gave me
distracted me—we looked truly happy.
Up close I’m me. From afar I look like my mother.

We can’t know if this will last, we can’t
know until which day,
at which exact hour we’ll say goodbye.
We’ll go down one day for good,
we don’t know which. Hopefully it’ll be sunny
and we’ll be all grown up.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Bambirambo” by Mario Schlembach

Bambirambo is a fighter, and if you wait long enough, then it will certainly come back to life.

This Translation Tuesday, we deliver a story of coming to terms with death. Set on a farm which bears the scars of a prisoner-of-war camp, Mario Schlembach’s “Bambirambo” centers a child surrounded by decay, but only awakened to the harsh reality of decomposition when his friend, a rescued fawn, takes his last breath without warning. On translating this precise and delicate tale of reckoning, translator Cristina Burack writes: “The juxtaposition of the fawn—befriended and cared for, observed in death and decay, and never forgotten—and the buried prisoners-of-war, anonymous over decades, spur reflection on the human relationship to and remembrance of life and death, casting it in a unique light. The related tension between naivete and violence is even encapsulated in the title, ‘Bambirambo’, so wonderful in its alliteration and the associations it invokes. As a translator, I found it challenging to keep the prose as clean but specific as possible— something which German verbs do very well and very succinctly. I also had to decide how to translate verbs in a sentence where the subject wasn’t repeated. Ultimately, I decided to repeat the ‘you’ to emphasize the directness and the pull on the reader as a part of the story.“

Bambirambo

“Do you know what decomposition sounds like?” The rotating wings of the circling flies tumbling over each other. A humming and buzzing, vibrations, drawing the gaze, as if the dead creature were a place of life. You want to capture the moment, and you press the shutter button.

***

Once freed, this memory plunges you into the blood-colored afternoon. It’s early summer. You hear the noise of the old SAME tractor’s motor. The even strokes of the mower as it carves its path through the high grass around the dilapidated barracks. You, all of eight years old, go ahead to warn your father of barbed wire, rocks or ditches that are too deep. New relics grow each year out of the once scorched earth. You don’t yet know that you’re mowing over death and oblivion. It’s only much later that you’ll see photos from back then.

*

1940. Wood barracks, a seemingly unending number of them, and more than 50,000 people from all over the world, locked up like animals at a time when what was thought to be impossible had become possible. The brutalized bodies no more than display material and research objects for a perverted, deadly science.

*

The grass dries up into hay in three days. Your father rakes it into windrows and then brings the press. The machine advances tirelessly, picking up everything, as the unvarying waltz-like dance bathes your senses in its soporific rhythm, unleashing your fantasy.

READ MORE…

Refuting Domination: Margaree Little on Translating Osip Mandelstam

I found particularly disturbing the tendency to play up Mandelstam’s death in the translations, sometimes changing the poems radically to do so.

Featured in the current Spring 2022 issue, Osip Mandelstam’s “Lines on an Unknown Soldier” is a nightmarish yet poignant reflection on war. Margaree Little’s new translation aims to bring out previously overlooked aspects of Mandelstam’s poetry by practicing devoted attention to his original text and to its historical and personal contexts. In her discussion of Mandelstam, Little glides between erudition and intimacy with his works. Our correspondence led to surprising discoveries like the everyday object Mandelstam despised, serious consideration of the political significance of translating Mandelstam today, and renewed appreciation for how literary insight can shape translation.

Michal Zechariah (MZ): Before translating Osip Mandelstam’s poem this spring, you published another translation of his work in American Poetry Review. How did you first encounter Mandelstam’s poetry, and what drew you to translate it? What usually guides your choice when you decide to take on a translation project?

Margaree Little (ML): About ten years ago, around the time I was in graduate school, I first encountered Mandelstam’s work in the Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin translations. I was drawn to the poems, but remember feeling that I was missing something, as though there was a screen separating me from the poems.

In 2016, I began to translate [Marina] Tsvetaeva’s work, focusing increasingly on her political poems that have largely been neglected in English-language translation. This work drew me further into that world, that moment. Then, two years later, my partner and I were visiting our friend, the poet and translator Eleanor Wilner, in Philadelphia. Eleanor has talked about the influence of Mandelstam on her own work and gave me her copy of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s extraordinary first memoir, Hope Against Hope. The book describes the last four years before Mandelstam’s second arrest and death, but more than that, it offers a window into the worldview that grounded his poetry and his entire life.

After reading this book, I went back to his poems and started to translate them to get closer to the original work. I found the originals so rich in music, in layers of meaning and feeling, and so varied in tone, including sharp awareness and wit.

I also began to realize the degree to which Brown and Merwin, as well as other dominant English-language translators, have altered the poems. These changes range from what could be considered more benign (clunky wording or phrasing) to distortions that fundamentally alter the poems’ meaning. I found particularly disturbing the tendency to play up Mandelstam’s death in the translations, sometimes changing the poems radically to do so. This tendency creates a romantic myth of the poet, while erasing crucial parts of his actual work. The gap between the originals and existing versions made me want to continue to translate the poems and honor them on their own terms.

I suppose these are the dual threads that run through my translation work, whether of Tsvetaeva or Mandelstam; a connection to the poems and the deep urgency within them, and a frustration with how they have previously been translated—or ignored, or distorted—in English.

READ MORE…

An Occupied Literature: On Julián Fuks’s Occupation

Fuks has “put something more than pain, something more than misfortune” in his novel, making “something worth writing.”

Occupation by Julián Fuks, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn, Charco Press, 2021

I’m writing a book about fatherhood without being able to become a father—and probing motherhood as if I didn’t know that I will never learn it. I’m writing a book about death without ever having felt it switch off a body, in a speculation of feelings that one day will seem laughable, when I do encounter the pain. I’m writing a book about the pain of the world, the poverty, exile, despair, rage, tragedy, ludicrousness, a book about this interminable ruin surrounding us, which so often goes unnoticed, but as I write it I am protected by solid walls.

Occupation, Julián Fuks’ latest novel to appear in English translation by Daniel Hahn, is a quiet masterpiece. Touching on family and relationships, birth and death, colonialism, the refugee crisis, political activism, the Holocaust, our (in)ability to identify with one another, and how to find hope in a world of ruin, this novel is sweepingly ambitious in its themes, yet the measured, self-critical voice of the narrator and the calm, understated prose prevents it from veering into sensationalism or sentimentality.

The novel’s chapters alternate between the different preoccupations of our narrator, Sebastián: his father, who is occupying a hospital bed; his wife’s decision to have a child, which will occupy her body and shift the dynamics of their relationship; a group of migrants occupying a dilapidated building, many of whom exiles from lands that have been occupied, now seeking refuge in Brazil, a country with its own history of occupation; and his own attempts to understand what all of this means for his occupation as a writer.

Small jumps in time, along with chapters that begin mid-conversation, can at times create a sense of dislocation, but Fuks weaves the strands together so gently and dexterously that when they coalesce, it does not feel like the technique has been a pretext for creating suspense; rather, it is as though the narrative has been constructed this way so that the narrator might himself work through and better understand the components—as if each narrative thread must be understood on its own to bring the whole into relief. Nevertheless, the technical mastery of this construction should not be downplayed, and throughout the book, the reader will notice explicit motifs along with subtle echoes and patterns in the language. All this adds to a sense that the novel’s threads are both connected and discreet, amplifying the plurality of the voices and experiences which ultimately merge with the voice of the narrator, who “allow[s] them to occupy [him], to occupy [his] writing: an occupied literature.” READ MORE…

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

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…

To Make Sense, Against All Odds: An Interview with Connie Palmen, Author of Your Story, My Story

In writing you unwittingly expose your most intimate voice, your soul. It’s beyond control.

There’s something about Sylvia Plath—the brevity of her life, the tragedy of her death, the haunting work she left behind. In the nearly six decades since her passing, she has remained an imposing figure in literary culture, romanticized and politicized and psychoanalyzed to excess. Plath’s relationship with English poet Ted Hughes, whom she married in 1956, has also endured as an object of public fascination. Their partnership was tempestuous—strained by Plath’s mental illness, Hughes’s infidelity, and the demands of the writing life. Yet on the outside, they were two beautiful, talented writers, bound by love and poetry.  

Dutch author Connie Palmen’s latest novel, Your Story, My Story, translated by Eileen J. Stevens and Anna Asbury, uses Plath and Hughes’s ill-fated marriage as a vehicle for larger questions about lust, loyalty, and grief. Palmen wrote the novel as she mourned her husband’s death, and explored her pain through the character of Hughes, who narrates the novel while grappling with the death of his own wife. Palmen, Stevens, and Asbury have achieved remarkable success in bringing Hughes’s literary voice to the page; reading Your Story, My Story feels like reading straight from Hughes’s diary. The prose is lovely, the emotions raw. But the novel’s existence also poses interesting ethical questions.  

Originally published as Jij zegt het in 2015, Your Story, My Story is written from Hughes’s perspective, Palmen’s intention being “to tell Ted’s side of the story.” As a narrator, Hughes explicitly posits that he has been unfairly vilified in contemporary discourse (“She was the brittle saint, I the brutal traitor,” reads an excerpt on the front flap. “I have remained silent. Until now.”). This is possible. But Plath’s recently discovered letters, in which she makes allegations of assault and abuse against Hughes, tell another story. Jij zegt het was published before these letters were made public; still, what is there to be gained by ventriloquizing the dead? 

Between Palmen and I there is a divergence of opinion regarding the ethics of this endeavor. The fictionalized Hughes condemns “the mudslide of apocryphal stories, false witness, gossip, fabrication, and myth” that shaped the couple’s legacy, but Palmen adds to this mudslide by producing a work of fiction that promises to deliver “the truth of [the Plath-Hughes] marriage” and “forever change the way we think about these two literary icons.” Turning a historical figure’s life into fodder for fiction is another form of speculation, but Palmen seems unbothered by the irony. And regardless of Plath’s credible allegations (the veracity of which Palmen doubts), the business of writing a whole novel to vindicate Hughes—who in the book weathers Plath’s erratic outbursts and volatile temperament with saintly patience—feels fraught. 

Nevertheless, Your Story, My Story is an engrossing and often elegant novel. Palmen, Stevens, and Asbury replicate Hughes’s writing style with startling authenticity, and Palmen deftly draws out internal conflict in her characters. The premise may be questionable, but the craftsmanship is undeniable. I enjoyed the novel most when I read it as a mesmerizing portrait of an imagined relationship, rather than as an assertion of Hughes’s innocence or a historical corrective, as it seems marketed to be. I recently spoke to Palmen about her writing process, artistic choices, and stance on biographical storytelling.

—Sophia Stewart, Assistant Interviews Editor

Sophia Stewart (SS): Your very first novel De wetten came out in 1991. It went on to be translated and published in twenty-four countries, including the United States, where it was released as The Laws in 1993. Rarely do debut novelists find this kind of immediate international success. Were you surprised at all by the reception of your first novel? How did its success influence your writing and the books you wrote in the years after?

Connie Palmen (CP): It may, and most certainly does, sound arrogant, but I wasn’t overly surprised. I knew I had written a novel that was new and different, and that I wrote about a very twentieth-century coming-of-age of a woman. It has only been a short time since the search for identity has been regarded as not just a male quest, and in my novel this quest is also connected to knowledge, to stories. Women could recognize themselves in their struggle to learn and to find some kind of autonomy, and men would recognize their desire to define the world and the women in it. The novel has its roots in the literature of rebellions, as in the saga of Faust, who sells his soul to the devil to become a great artist. My main character Marie lets herself be defined by the men she meets till she has the courage and independence to tell her own story. A first novel is crucial, because it is an encounter with yourself as a writer. The book is a meeting, it discloses your style, your themes, your thinking, your idiosyncrasies, not just to the readers, but mainly to yourself. Only your first novel does that. From that moment on, you know. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Ashes of Hell” by Brahim Darghouthi

I stared at the neatly made bed and whispered, “Forgive me, my dear, if I have to violate your secrets today.”

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, a son mourning his mother’s death unearths secrets of his family history in Brahim Darghouthi’s short story, “The Ashes of Hell”. Our unnamed narrator finds miscellaneous keepsakes of his parents in a locked box, including letters from his father, a Muslim murdered by the Nazis in an apparent case of mistaken identity. Reflecting upon his mother’s subsequent anti-Semitic resentment, our protagonist recalls a deeper pain beneath this prejudiced demeanour. A short but powerful portrait of compounding grief and the often-destructive ways we deal with it, “The Ashes of Hell” delves into the ethics of family secrets and our obligations to the dead. 

When I returned from the cemetery that bleak and fateful morning, I tapped on my mother’s door softly as if she were still lying asleep on her sickbed. I entered on tiptoe and went straight to her antique, oak coffer, decorated with all the colors of the rainbow.

Her distinct fragrance still hung in the air. I stared at the neatly made bed and whispered, “Forgive me, my dear, if I have to violate your secrets today.”

Taking me by surprise, she answered, “The coffer’s key is under the pillow, my darling.”

The scent of heaven immediately struck me as soon as I turned the key in the lock and slowly raised the paneled top. Some small items were neatly arranged inside: sandalwood, amber, small bottles of rosewater, a yellow quince, a small book of dhikr the size of a hand, three new candles, and a fourth that was half melted.

My mother had always hated power switches; to her, they resembled the fangs of rabid dogs. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2020

New work from Taiwan's Amang and Germany's Jenny Erpenbeck!

This month’s selected new translations from around the world cross more than geographic boundaries: the first combines deliciously feral Taiwanese poetry with exclusive, first-hand conversations on the process of writing and translating it; the second features a series of stylistically varied but equally poignant essays on an acclaimed German author’s personal and political journey. Both titles prompt us to peek into their subjects’ fascinating lives and work, and we’re all too happy to indulge.

amang

Raised by Wolves: Poems and Conversations by Amang, translated from the Chinese by Steve Bradbury, Deep Vellum, 2020

Review by Filip Noubel, Editor-at-Large for Uzbekistan

When I agreed to review Raised by Wolves, I thought I had signed up to read a translation of contemporary Taiwanese poetry. I very quickly realized my mistake: Raised by Wolves is much more than that; it is an invitation to partake in a feast of words that agree to disagree, that clash and dissolve to reemerge in another language. It is also an act of transgressive eavesdropping, as the poet and her translator let readers in on their intimate discussions about their craft (the book’s subtitle is “poems and conversations”).

Amang has published several collections, including On/Off: Selected Poems of Amang, 1995-2002 (2003), No Daddy (2008), Chariots of Women (2016), and As We Embrace Thousands Are Dying (2016). In addition, she is a filmmaker and blogger, and her eclectic interests are clearly reflected in this new translation of her work. A couple of themes, however, seem to be especially prevalent throughout.

First, as the poet discloses (incidentally explaining her collection’s English title), she was raised mostly by her grandmother, who “was quite a character. She was very powerful and courageous. A she-wolf. She would do or say whatever she wanted. None of th[at] Confucian nonsense for her.” In line with this almost feral sentiment, many poems include raw images celebrating nature or the vibrance of the human body. In one, for instance, Amang writes: “Thrusting your hand down a tiger’s throat / to tear out his heart  / so, too, I / cut from a book a sheet of / ice.” And elsewhere: “I can give you anything / . . . / except that puny little stick / they call a prick / and is that worth making a fuss about?” READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Solaris

[Tarkovsky's] films are not designed to entertain—their pleasure comes from the possibility of being forever changed by seeing them.

Our second feature for Asymptote at the Movies is Andrei Tarkvosky’s Solaris, a 1972 Soviet masterpiece based on Polish writer Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel of the same name. Arguably one of the greatest science fiction films ever made, the plot focuses on psychologist Kris Kelvin and his arrival at the space station orbiting Solaris, a planet whose ocean had been the focus of intense scientific study for decades. As the two other scientists aboard behave increasingly strangely, Kelvin discovers that they are being “visited” by figures of their past, resurrected in the space station. A complex exploration of man’s place in the universe, his quest for knowledge, and the meaning of love and life, Solaris is a triumph.

Sarah Moore (SM): Sometimes it appears that a novel exists, destined for a certain filmmaker, as if it had in fact been written for such a connection. So it is with Lem’s novel and Tarkvosky; Solaris lends itself perfectly to Tarkovsky’s slow, profound meditations on human nature, the purpose of existence, memory, and the function of art. Lem’s novel is classified as science fiction but (as with many works of science fiction) incorporates a wealth of philosophy and spirituality. Tarkovsky unabashedly confronted the big questions. His films are not designed to entertain—their pleasure comes from the possibility of being forever changed by seeing them. Both the novel and the film are immensely detailed; whenever I watch Tarkovsky’s film, I am always struck by how much there is to comprehend, how much more there is to be contemplated each time. Perhaps a good place to begin this discussion, therefore, is with Tarkovsky’s own impression of Lem:

When I read Lem’s novel, what struck me above all were the moral problems evident in the relationship between Kelvin and his conscience, as manifested in the form of Hari. In fact if I understood, and greatly admired, the second half of the novel—the technology, the atmosphere of the space station, the scientific questions—it was entirely because of that situation, which seems to me to be fundamental to the work. Inner, hidden, human problems, moral problems, always engage me far more than any questions of technology; and in any case technology, and how it develops, invariably relates to moral issues, in the end that is what it rests upon. My prime sources are always the real state of the human soul, and the conflicts that are expressed in spiritual problems.

Tarkovsky’s preference for the human problems over the technological is clear in his huge re-structuring of the plot—or rather, his ability to lengthen the chronology. Whilst the action of Lem’s novel is restricted solely to the space station, such action contributes only three-quarters of Tarkovsky’s film. In a forty-minute prelude, the day before Kelvin’s departure to Solaris, we see him at his parents’ home, surrounded by lush nature. Long sequences of forests, flowing streams, underwater reeds, and large ponds contrast with the sparse, sterile settings of the space station that will appear later. Here, his complicated relationship with his father is introduced and he burns documents over an outside fire, preparing for a total rupture from his life on earth. For a text that so explicitly posits the choice between remaining on Solaris in the pursuit of scientific study and returning to earth, beginning the film in such a naturalistic setting is a huge gesture that places the human at its centre. How do you feel about the tension between “the scientific questions” and the “hidden, human problems” in the film? READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Antonia Pozzi

But I burned / with the desire to spring out, / in the encroaching sun

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the work of Antonia Pozzi. Translator Amy Newman writes that “Pozzi’s poetry was posthumously altered by her father Roberto Pozzi to reshape her public image; he scrubbed any evidence of his daughter’s passionate love affairs and her doubts about religion.” These translations represent the restoration of a singular vision, showing that the work of translation can polish away the muck of misrepresentation meant to stifle the subjectivity of women. In these poems the brightness of the mind is painted next to the depths of angst. Here, Pozzi explores the poetry of her own body and what it means to contemplate an individual death in a time of the hierarchy and patriarchy of war.

Thoughtlessness

I remember a September afternoon
in Montello. I still a young girl,
with slender braids and itching
to race wildly with my knees.
My father, crouched inside a passage
dug out in a rise of the ground
pointed out to me through a fissure
the Piave and the hills; he spoke to me
of the war, of himself, of his soldiers.
In the shadow, the grass, cold and sharp
grazed my calves: underground,
the roots were perhaps still sucking
some drops of blood. But I burned
with the desire to spring out,
in the encroaching sun, to gather
a handful of blackberries from a hedge.

Milan 22 May 1929 READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Don’t Cry” by Mohamed M. Farrag

“Men don’t cry, whatever happens.” And then he wiped my tears.

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the work of Mohamed M. Farrag. The prose is short, succinct, and hits like a hammer—much like the vision of masculinity embodied in the story. Enigmatic messages, the codes that construct subjects along certain lines, flow freely between a boy and his grandfather. These messages transport generational models of masculine repression as they are passed down; in just a few lines, Farrag aptly demonstrates the ways in which the social codes that dictate behavior are transferred. However, the end of the story leaves us with a question: can the script of behavior be broken by reflection and release? Or is this too a planned movement, derived from what came before? Regardless, the emotions captured here are delivered with an uncanny availability: the rhythms that the translator pulls from the original present an ordinary scene that makes one feel as if the answer to some pressing, universal question is close at hand. But the true answer is only a choice: to show or to hide.

He sat beside his dying grandfather; a man known for his cruel heart. He’d never seen him cry. ‎Gently, the grandfather caught his grandson’s hand. “Do you know, son, what my father ‎told me when he saw me crying on the day of my mother’s death?”‎

“No.” The young boy shrugged.

He said, “Men don’t cry, whatever happens.” And then he wiped my tears. “When my wife died your ‎mother was still young. Her death stung me, but I didn’t cry in front of her. I didn’t want her to fall apart. I ‎kept my tears inside.” READ MORE…