Posts filed under 'nature'

What’s New in Translation: June 2025

June 16, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan, Eva Dunsky, Henry Gifford, Jason Gordy Walker, and Xiao Yue Shan

New publications from Iran, Argentina, Spain, Peru, Mexico, Japan, France, Finland, Sweden, China, and Italy!

This month, we’re delighted to be bringing twelve brilliant titles from eleven different countries. Find here the novelization of a famous chess match that reveals the greater geopolitical game playing us all; a summery fiction that melds the structures of nature and human architecture; a poetry collection rendering tender portraits of working-class women; a lyrical rewriting of a remarkable nun-turned-conquistador’s New World adventures; and so much more.

oblivion

Oblivion: and Other Plays from Post-revolutionary Iran, edited by Nahid Ahmadian and Ali-Reza Mirsajadi, translated from the Persian by Nahid Ahmadian, Ali-Reza Mirsajadi, and Hesam Sharifian, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Henry Gifford

In order, the five plays included in Oblivion: and Other Plays from Post-revolutionary Iran are set in Arabia in the fifth century AD (The Sacrifice of Senemar by Bahram Beyzaie); China in the second century BC (Oblivion by Hamid Amjad); Spain in the twentieth century (Dance of Mares by Mohammad Charmshir); somewhere (per stage directions and blank spaces left in the dialogue) in the city you’re in, on the day you’re reading it (The Child by Naghmeh Samini); and a laundromat in Los Angeles at three in the morning (Bird of Dawn by Sepideh Khosrowjah). Their narratives are of a hubristic yet indecisive king and his palace; imperial bloodshed and familial betrayal; sex and mariticide; an infant born on a migrant raft, protected at the border by three women who all deny being his mother; and three generations of Iranian immigrants, each with romantic trouble and divided identities. Some are epic, and others are everyday. None of them are set in ancient Persia or modern Iran, and only the first and last are explicitly about Persians or Iranians.

Yet these are, in fact, plays from the same country over the same quarter-century, from 1995 to 2019. The diversity of their settings and scale is a wise editorial decision intended to highlight the diversity of theater in Iran, but it also reflects a practical need of addressing contemporary, local problems obliquely under a censorship regime. What is more interesting is the collection’s consistency, and in particular the nonchronological approach taken within almost all of the plays. Oblivion, for example, begins with two siblings going to meet their adoptive brother after years apart; the encounter then extends over the course of the play as a frame to the story of their lives and their parents’, acted out in shadows on a scrim behind them. The formal blending extends this sense of collapsed time; as the editors’ introduction explains in great detail, shadow puppetry (khayāl-bāzi) is an old Persian form, here embedded within a more modern, European-inflected mode. The other plays are similarly mixed—traditional aspects and motifs cohering with contemporary themes and styles.

Every nation has history, but I wonder, reading the plays of Oblivion, if there is something about Iran—a young nation of an ancient culture—that has made its past more palpable, fraught, and vividly present. READ MORE…

A Sacred Collaboration with Nature: An Interview with Natalia García Freire and Victor Meadowcroft

May 22, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by René Esaú Sánchez

I try to find answers in nature, in the mountains, the volcanoes, the animals—I wait for them to tell me something.

One finds a symphony of lyricism, naturalism, and generational phantasms in A Carnival of Atrocities, the latest novel from Ecuadorian writer Natalia García Freire and our Book Club selection for the month of May. Through a succession of perspectives that enmesh and build, a town and its chaotic history comes into view, and with it an illumination of postcolonial fractures, ecological conflicts, and tensions between the human and the divine. In this following interview, the author and her translator, Victor Meadowcroft, speak to us about the creation and the English rhythms of this complex narrative, as well as its place in the great, varied canon of Latin American writing.

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 USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

René Esaú Sánchez (RES): I would like to start by asking both of you about the title of the novel, A Carnival of Atrocities. The original title in Spanish is Trajiste contigo el viento, which could be translated like You Brought The Wind With You, highlighting the mythical connection between Mildred—the character at the center of the novel—and nature.

Victor Meadowcroft (VM): That was actually a publisher’s decision. My original working title was the literal translation of You brought the wind with you. We also changed the title of Natalia’s debut novel, This World Does Not Belong To Us (originally, Nuestra piel muerta), so that could possibly be why they decided to do the same with the second one. Or maybe they thought that the title didn’t sound as nice as it does in Spanish, because they had asked me to look through the book to see if I could find some lines that might work well. I came up with a list of ten possible titles and the publisher loved A Carnival of Atrocities; at one point she said she wanted to call all her books A Carnival of Atrocities from then on. And Natalia was very happy to go with that title, so it was a publisher led decision, rather than a translator led one.

RES: What are your opinions on the title, Natalia?

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The River and the Sea” by Abdoul Ali War

May 13, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Patrick Williamson

The sea is first / The sea is mother

That a poem so brief can contain a world may seem incredible to some, but here, Mauritanian poet Abdoul Ali War has accomplished just that. In this poem of fourteen short lines, elegantly translated by Patrick Williamson, Ali War offers a sparing vision of the interplay between river and sea, the water of life and the vast, world-separating lacuna from which all life once came, and to which all will, eventually, return. In a brilliant turn, Ali War inverts the traditional movement between the two forces, positing “The river is a branch / The sea is a tree,” calling our attention to the cyclical processes of the natural world, in which all that we the living depend on emerges from a greater, primordial body. Implicit in the brief, plainspoken lines and lack of punctuation is a deep appreciation for the delicacy of the relationship between these forces; we disregard the river and the sea at our peril. Read on!

The river goes to the sea
The sea has its own
space
It has its own
depth
The sea is first
The sea is mother

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Light in the Wound” by Evgenia Bogianou

May 6, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Gina Scarpete Walters

The fire burns within N. It burns without guilt in the wounded body.

“She was confirming her existence through pain.” With these words, Greek writer Evgenia Bogianou vividly illustrates the mind of her unnamed narrator, a small girl playing a field at the edge of town, only moments away from witnessing an encounter that will mark her for the rest of her life. Watching a man from her village make love to an unknown woman, the injured girl begins to discern the pain inherent to all desire, the wound in her knee giving way to the lifelong wound of love itself, ever present and impossible to satisfy. Rendered here in a luminous translation by Gina Scarpete Walters, this story is sure to leave you, like its narrator, caught in an impossible position: wanting to persist in a moment that must surely end. Read on!

Ν. was playing in the empty lot. She had scraped her knee, fresh blood on top of the scab. Her hand rebelliously scratched the wound. She felt pleasure from it even though she was in pain. Sometimes, the wound hurt so much that she felt the pain all the way to her head. N. wasn’t worried. She made sure that her body, her knee and everything else was hers, that’s why they hurt. She was confirming her existence through pain, despite the fact that the only thing she was doing was scratching the wound.

The empty lot was just outside the village, in an uninhabited area. If she could, N. would stay there until dawn, scraped knee and all. It was spacious there. In the village, everything was cramped—voices could be heard, the roofs were low and hung to the ground, cutting off the air, cutting off the light. But in the empty lot, the light was abundant. In the afternoons, the light fell sideways on the low fields of grass. In those moments, the grass ceased to be grass and the light, unimaginably brilliant, ceased to be light; it became something else.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Melonpan” by Sachiko Kishimoto

April 8, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Yui Kajita

Is everyone holding on to a piece of their dreams in secret, like this indigo ball of my dream that I’d kept for myself?

What if the price of a better world was the loss of your dreams? That’s the question that Japanese author Sachiko Kashimoto asks in this week’s Translation Tuesday, translated by Yui Kajita. In this spare, subtly plotted short story, an unnamed narrator goes for a short walk to pick dandelions, only to retreat to their apartment after experiencing sudden drowsiness. There, in conversation with their neighbor, the true nature of the narrator’s condition is revealed: their unremembered dreams are the physical substance from which their idyllic world is made. As they begin, once more, to dream, they find themself in an unexpected place, their elusive vision drawing a faint but powerful connection between their utopia and the altogether more painful world of the audience. Read on!

Today I’ll pick a hundred dandelions, I decided and walked out to the riverbank.

The sun was shining bright, the surface of the water glimmering in the warm breeze. It might’ve been a good day for picnicking by the river, too, I thought fleetingly.

All over the bank, green was shooting up from the ground, piercing through the round rocks, and there they were, blazing yellow dandelions, so vivid they almost stung my eyes, thriving everywhere. I would’ve felt sorry to pick five or six from the same clump, so I set a rule that I’d leave at least half of each cluster untouched, then started picking the flowers while counting each one in my head.

READ MORE…

Ordered Chaos: Katy Derbyshire on Translating Zsuzsanna Gahse’s Mountainish

March 20, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Matthew Redman

[M]ountains implicitly divide . . . the way we speak, so that people on different sides of the mountain will have a different words for ‘brother’.

Zsuzsanna Gahse’s Mountainish is a folding of dreamscape into landscape—a study of some of earth’s most majestic topographies through the discursive, vivid wanderings of a mind led by its own fascinations. Made up of just over five hundred notes, this compilation of observations, narratives, fantasies, and contemplations track a journey through the Alps in colours, in flanks and peaks, hearsay and memories, macabre moments of comedy, and a continual rumination on the crafting of writing and composing. These deft workings of language have been rendered into a fluid and chimeric English by Katy Derbyshire, and she speaks here of Mountainish’s scepticism of mountains, the beauty and comedic tone of the prose, and ‘little narrative islands’.  

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 USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.    

Matthew Redman (MR): One of my favourite aspects of Mountainish is when the narrator talks about the mountains and her fear of them; there is a kind of a mistrust of the mountains poking through a lot of the time, expressing itself in a lack of awe, a lack of overwhelm. When she’s faced with these mountains, it’s more like she’s peering at them, or stealing glances.

Katy Derbyshire (KD): Well, the narrator gives us that in the very first of her notes, when she starts off with this drive through the Alps and is terrified that they’re going to collapse onto her—and I think that continues all the way through. It really endeared me to the book, her scepticism. We, the two of us, between ourselves, we called ourselves ‘mountain sceptics,’ because Zsuzsanna doesn’t just accept this Swiss myth of the mountains’ magnificence. She sees the beauty, very much so, but she also sees the insularism—which she calls racism sometimes—and she sees the expectations and the narrow-mindedness that comes along with the landscape. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Silent Bird” by Csenge Fehér

March 11, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Dorottya Mária Cseresnyés

I vanished too. Bird’s wing, crone’s water, old man’s beard—nothing could hide me.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a haunting short story by Hungarian author Csenge Fehér, translated by Dorottya Mária Cseresnyés. In this eerie tale, A young woman, ostracized for her otherworldly beauty by the inhabitants of her small town, flees into the forest at the exhortations of her abused and overworked mother. There, she is pursued by a huntsman, here transformed from the noble rescuer of Western fairy tales into a rapacious brute, with none but the creatures of the forest to protect her—men and women whose transformations have left them barely human, ravaged by time. But even they cannot protect her forever—not from the violence the huntsman brings.

There lived I, a girl with black nails and pale soul, in a raven ravine, deep into the woods. My small village―bones banging―was wrapped in a thicket. I was so pretty that I was pelted with dung if I dared to speak, was chased by hounds if I dared walk alone. You’re such a treasure, not even pigs would desire you, they said. In vain did the moonbeams weave your skin. In vain does your river of hair flow after your feet. In vain do your eyes mirror the ashes of the nights―no one will desire you. You’ll be of no use, bear no fruit, grow old alone, what a shame.

READ MORE…

Blurring the Lines of Time: A Conversation with Ruoyi Shi

September 23, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Junyi Zhou

This sense of displacement, which many might perceive as humor, mirrors my relationship with language.

From a glass casket for sculptures, to a piece of a burial figurine cast into edible gummy bears, and gelatin-based fish placed on silver platters, Ruoyi Shi’s whimsical oeuvre spans the realms of the organic and the inorganic, the imaginary and the real to interrogate the nature of truth, storytelling, and language. An interdisciplinary artist working across the domains of sculpture, video art, and writing, inspired by the oral histories and mythologies she grew up with, Ruoyi invents a singular kind of artistic practice that transforms not only personal memory but also collective history. “I am interested in how people are encouraged to appropriate any image they encounter, and how our vocabulary was chosen and formed in today’s society. I consider my work as fragments I collected for creating an alternative reality,” she says in a talk with Shoutout LA. In the following interview, I spoke with Ruoyi about the role that humor plays in her projects, reinventing historical objects, and the everyday precarity of living with language and mass media.

Junyi Zhou (JZ): I’d like to begin with your work Tomorrow’s Comforts are Here Today, in which you built a casket for your glass skeleton sculpture, as if it were a living entity. “I always call my art creations creature,” you wrote in your artist statement for this piece. It seems that the relationship between the organic and inorganic, or the dissolving boundaries between the two, are central to your body of work. Could you speak more about this?

Ruoyi Shi (RS): Exploring the boundaries between nature and artificial existence, as well as the notion of truth and its fabrication, has been a central theme of my practice. I see my art-making as a process of building an alternative reality—one that can be fragmented, chaotic, and full of coincidences. This reality of mine lies in the area where the organic and the inorganic slowly merge into one another. My goal is to mimic nature and capture the moments when nature exposes its unnatural side.

Many decisions I had to make in my art were neither preplanned nor expected. My immediate environment, materials, and time worked together to provide me with options, and my choices were directed by instinct rather than logic. It’s a form of collective creation. In this era we live in, the term “organic” has been deliberately shaped into a manmade concept. By placing our collective creations on a more equal footing, I aim to express greater honesty and respect for the elements beyond my control.

Tomorrow's Comforts

Tomorrow’s Comforts are Here Today (2021). Performance, writing.
Courtesy of the artist.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Five Poems by Ling Feng

September 17, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Jonathan Chan

let us sing together, you can dance if you want to, / so those who are distant can hear us.

This Translation Tuesday, in honor of Mid-autumn Festival, we bring you five poems by the Chinese poet Ling Feng, in an immaculate translation by Jonathan Chan. The Mid-autumn festival, which originated in China and has since spread throughout East Asia, is a time for shared revelry among families—but not everyone can reunite with their families on this occasion, particularly expatriates living far afield. To commemorate the joy and sorrow of personal connections—familial, marital, platonic—across physical divides, we’re honored to present these five poems, which address love and longing with a singular attention to detail. In Ling Feng’s verse, a deep attention to the evanescence of life gives way to passionate descriptions both of the speaker’s beloved and the material world, a desire to cherish what is always passing. But the speaker’s attention to the transience of all things is ultimately a source not of despair, but of a renewed will to human connection in a fragile world: “let us sing together, you can dance if you want to, / so those who are distant can hear us.” Read on!

untitled

soft wind blows in a single direction.
that which must have passed has passed.
at the moment when a place wraps itself around me,
people will be singing the entire afternoon.
that which must have passed, is past.
if there are tears, there is a heart.
if there are wounds, there is enlightenment.
people are as beautiful as the dust.
flowers are more lasting than forests.
if there are ten Hai Zis, then we must be innumerable.
let us sing together, you can dance if you want to,
so those who are distant can hear us.
all that we have missed for so long shall all come back to life.

READ MORE…

Ways of Seeing: On Humberto Ak’abal’s If Today Were Tomorrow

August 8, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Miranda Mazariegos

What do they think, those who we believe don’t think at all?

If Today Were Tomorrow by Humberto Ak’abal, translated from the K’iche’ and Spanish by Michael Bazzett, Milkweed Press, 2024

To read Humberto Ak’abal is to be transported: first to the Western Highlands of Guatemala, full of mountainous forests and ravines where corn grows amid the mist, and then through the natural world and toward everything it encompasses—the elements, their sounds, and even their language. In a world where the sun eats the mist, butterflies kiss the earth, and peach trees weep, the boundaries of the conscious world expand to envision a new, shared world. 

Humberto Ak’abal was a K’iche’ Maya poet from Guatemala. His book Guardián de la caída de agua (Guardian of the Waterfall) was named Book of the Year by the Association of Guatemalan Journalists, and he was awarded the Golden Quetzal award in 1993. A world-renowned Guatemalan poet, Ak’abal oscillated between writing in K’iche’—his mother tongue—and Spanish, the official language of Guatemala. This new collection, published by Milkweed Press in June, spans five sections, each delving into a different facet of the poet’s oeuvre, while always retaining his essence, humor, and care for the natural world. 

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Ode to Wood” by Pablo Neruda

July 9, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Wally Swist

I carry around the world / on my body, on my clothes, / scent of sawmill, / aroma of red boards.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a poem by the inimitable Pablo Neruda, translated from the Spanish by Wally Swist. Oscillating between the grand and the mundane, but never stinting on lavish detail, the poet draws an entire world out of his relationship to wood—the elemental matter from which so much of our world, from houses and coffins to ships and railroad ties, is fashioned. Dwelling in particular on the physical scene of trees being felled, Neruda not only pays vivid homage to the labor of woodcutting, but also illustrates the intimate connection between the world of human industry and the natural environment from which it arises—a connection that is more salient than ever, in our current age of ecological collapse. Read on!

Oh, how much I know
and recognize
among all things
wood is
my best friend.
I carry around the world
on my body, on my clothes,
scent of sawmill,
aroma of red boards.
My chest, my senses
feel impregnated
in my childhood
of falling trees,
of great forests
of future construction. READ MORE…

A Pointed Atemporality: Mui Poopoksakul on Translating Saneh Sangsuk’s Venom

June 22, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Barbara Halla

He's very aware of the rhythm and musicality of this text . . . he said it should take something like an hour and thirty-seven minutes to read.

In our May Book Club selection, a young boy struggles with a snake in the fictional village of Praeknamdang, in a tense battle between beauty and cruelty. In poetic language that is nostalgic for the world it describes without romanticizing it, Saneh Sangsuk creates a complex and captivating world. In this fable-like story there are no simple morals, in keeping with Sangsuk’s resistance to efforts to depict a sanitized view of Thailand and to the idea that the purpose of literature is to create a path to social change. In this interview with translator Mui Poopoksakul, we discuss the role of nature in the text, translating meticulous prose, and the politics of literary criticism.

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 USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

Barbara Halla (BH): How did you get into translation, especially given your law background?

Mui Poopoksakul (MP): I actually studied comparative literature as an undergrad, and then in my early twenties, like a lot of people who study the humanities, I felt a little bit like, “Oh, I need to get a ‘real job.’” I went to law school, and I worked at a law firm for about five years, and I liked that job just fine, but it just wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. 

So, I started thinking, What should I be doing? What do I want to do with myself? I had always wanted to do something in the literary field but didn’t quite have the courage, and I realized that not a lot of Thai literature been translated. I thought, If I can just get one book out, that would be really amazing. So, I went back to grad school. I did an MA in Cultural Translation at the American University of Paris, and The Sad Part Was was my thesis from that program. Because I had done it as my thesis, I felt like I was translating it for something. I wasn’t just producing a sample that might go nowhere.

The whole field was all new to me, so I didn’t know how anything worked. I didn’t even know how many pages a translation sample should be. But then I ended up not having to worry about that because I did the book as my thesis.

BH: You mentioned even just one book, but did you have any authors in mind? Was Saneh Sangsuk one of those authors in your ideal roster?

MP: I wouldn’t say I had a roster, but I did have one author in mind and that was Prabda Yoon, and that really helped me get started, because I wasn’t getting into the field thinking, “I want to translate.” My thought was, “I want to translate this book.” I think that helped me a lot, having a more concrete goal. 

READ MORE…

A Wanting to Not Forget: An Interview with Autumn Richardson

September 7, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

There’s something about that interstitial state—between one language and another—that is extraordinarily powerful.

In Landmarks (2015), British writer Robert Macfarlane’s meditation on place, he named Autumn Richardson, among other writers, as “particularizers … who seek in some way to ‘draw every needle’ … [with] precision of utterance as both a form of lyricism and a species of attention.” Reliquiae, the journal of landscape, nature, and mythology which Richardson co-founded and co-edits with her partner, composer, writer, and artist Richard Skelton, is guided by this ethos and mode of engagement. In its ten years, Reliquiae has published texts from antiquity: Navajo songs; the Song dynasty poet Wáng Ānshí; magical and medicinal incantations from Catawba, Klamath, Chuckchee, and Winnebago peoples; southern African beliefs in naming stars; fragments from the German Renaissance alchemist-theologian Paracelsus; evocations to Yoruba deities; the Náhuatl poet Nezahualcóyotl; Egyptian spells; and hymns of the now-extinct Eoran language in Australia. The journal has also introduced readers to English translations from, among others, the original Algonquian, Binisayâ, Old English, Ancient Greek, Hindu, Old Icelandic, Iglulingmiut, Old Norse, Scottish Gaelic, West Saxon—along with their source texts.

Speaking to the precision and attention that guides her work, Richardson tells academic journal Studies in Travel Writing, “My own writing is more concerned with movement through landscapes … the vertical, going down through the layers botanically, biologically, geologically, etymologically, historically.” In this interview, I asked about the wondrous archive of Reliquiae, and how she explores landscape, ethnology, (vertical) travel, ecology, botany, and occultism in her own art, writings, and translations.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Personally, I think of Reliquiae—and its disciplinary breadth of landscape, folklore, ecology, esoteric philosophy, animism—as a treasure trove of consequential importance not only to specialists, writers, and translators, but also for a generalist readership. In the submission guidelines, there is emphasis on “beyond plain nature writing.” Can you elaborate on this?

Autumn Richardson (AR): Fundamentally, Reliquiae fills a niche that is shaped by our own unique interests. We couldn’t find a single publication that focused on landscape and the natural world, whilst refracting that focus through the prism of myth, esotericism, magic, occult philosophy, and anthropology. One of the reasons we formed Corbel Stone Press in 2009 was to begin publishing work that connected these disparate but allied disciplines. We began by publishing our own writing, but our goal was always to edit a journal, and 2022 is the tenth anniversary of Reliquiae.

AMMD: Let’s talk about Heart of Winter, your 2016 collection of found-poems assembled from the journals of ethnologist Knud Rasmussen and botanist Dr Thorild Wulff which chronicles the Second Thule Expedition, their 1917 journey through the north-western coastal landscapes of Greenland. When asked about your translation process from the Danish (and Inuit), you responded that, “it was a process of simplifying ever so slightly … [not wanting] to change [Rasmussen’s] words hardly at all … want[ing] to preserve his voice.” As a translator who questions her own discursive presence in the text, does this imply that between the competing ideologies within the translation of myths and folklore, you favour linguistic faithfulness over stylistic realism?

AR: That’s a difficult question to answer. I’m not dogmatic in my choices—it’s more instinctual. I’m acutely attentive to the shape, texture, and colour of each word in both languages when I translate. However, I have noticed that provisional, literal translations are strangely compelling. There’s something about that interstitial state—between one language and another—that is extraordinarily powerful. This can often happen, for example, when the word order of the original is preserved, resulting in an unusual word-grouping in the translation. For me, I find this shadow presence of the original language unspeakably rich and evocative, and I always try to retain something of its colour in my work. My concern is always to mirror, as faithfully as possible, the poet’s choice of words, as well as what I perceive to be the emotions and motivations behind the poem or song itself. For example, within the Inuit songs in Heart of Winter, a primary and repetitive motif is the uncertainty of survival, and the consequent gratitude or joy when a new season is witnessed, when nourishment is attained. It was immensely important to me to try to carry these sentiments forward, because, to my mind, these expressions and emotions were the heart and the purpose of the songs themselves.

READ MORE…

Tapestry of Coincidence: An Interview with Fate Author Jorge Consiglio

July 21, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Allison Braden

If you look at the quotidian under a microscope, the most mundane things become unrecognizable.

Jorge Consiglio’s novel Fate (Charco Press, 2021) charts a tangle of crossroads, both literal and figurative. A taxidermist, an oboist, and a meteorologist do their best to direct their destinies against the background of Buenos Aires’s frenetic streets. Their worlds tilt and collide, and the sum of their experiences poses an eternal question about whether our everyday lives—and the incidents that jolt us out of them—are the work of fate or chance. Here, Asymptote Assistant Blog Editor Allison Braden talks with Consiglio about how a befuddled immigrant, a surfeit of street names, and a relentless colony of ants propel the plot, and why English—and Charco Press—was the perfect home away from home for the Argentinian author’s fifth award-winning novel. This interview, translated from Spanish, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Allison Braden (AB): You begin Fate with an author’s note that explains your central question: “fate or chance?” What was it about this novel that inspired you to include the preface? How do you think the note shapes readers’ experience of the story?

Jorge Consiglio (JC): I included the preface at the suggestion of Charco Press. The introduction is part of the collection’s design, and I was delighted at the suggestion. In Argentina, there used to be excellent publisher called Centro Editor de América Latina which had a collection that used the same idea. I remember I used to buy the CEAL books and always enjoyed reading the author’s reflections. They were useful for situating myself within the context in which the work had been produced, and it offered a window into the author’s aesthetics and point of view. It felt like I was allowed to attend the rehearsals before seeing a play. I think in this case, in addition to that, Charco Press takes care to allow the authors to introduce themselves in their own words in countries where readers probably have never heard of them. That’s a big plus.

AB: Philosophers have grappled with the question of fate versus chance for millennia, and they’ve proposed various approaches for dealing with the vicissitudes of an unpredictable life. (The Stoics’ recommendation to face everyday frustrations and furies with grace and patience certainly would have benefited a couple of the short-tempered characters in Fate.) How did philosophy shape your approach to the novel’s central theme?

JC: When I was struck with the idea to write Fate, I didn’t think about philosophy or anything like it. What came to me first was a scene in which two characters whose destinies had been tapping on each other missed the chance to exchange a glance of recognition only by a few seconds. That was the trigger for the text, but as I made progress in the writing, I suspect because of the evolution of the plot, I was presented with the question of fate versus chance. I’m not the first to arrive at this question, of course. There were—and are—many writers who create their fiction out of this counterpoint. I guess it’s inevitable that, by dint of our ephemeral nature, we’ll stumble into these existential issues at some point. It’s true that philosophy seeks to reflect on the vicissitudes of the unpredictable. Religion and magical thinking, too. The characters in Fate aren’t thinking about these questions. They act without much reflection, but the plot development, like a poor imitation of life, embodies these questions that will never be resolved.

READ MORE…