Posts filed under 'obsession'

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2024

April 22, 2024  |  in News  |  by Bella Creel and Xiao Yue Shan

A deeper look into our latest edition!

With so many stellar pieces in the Spring 2024 issue, where to start? Read the blog editors’ top picks.

In a Bethlehem of the future, no one is left. Some undetermined ecological catastrophe, shown only through a black, viscous flood tiding over the narrow alleyways, had sent volcanic streams of smoke up through the minaret and the turreted roofs, obliterating the limestone, the arched windows, the indecipherable urban folds. This is where Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind’s 2019 film, In Vitro, takes place: a world where two of the last remaining survivors of the human race meet in an abandoned nuclear reactor. One of them is dying, and the other seems to be a designed individual, a living archive. In the dialogue that unites the disparate scenes—some archival, some distinctly futuristic, some shimmering with ghosts—the woman lying in the hospital bed says to her visitor: “Your memories are as real as mine.” The younger woman gets up and walks to the other side of the room. “I disagree,” she replies brusquely. “The pain these stories cause are twofold. . . because the loss I feel was never mine.”

Living within an increasingly crowded media landscape, combined with modern technology’s dissolution of physical distance, the significance of these lines from In Vitro do not escape most of us. The theorist Alison Landsberg called it “prosthetic memory”: a phenomenon in which recollections are lifted from a cultural landscape and implanted almost seamlessly within an individual consciousness, culminating in a psychic patchwork that does not distinguish between what has happened to us, and what was simply witnessed. Uban Cristina Ali Farah’s “Three Short Pieces”, in a delicate and tender translation by Brandon Michael Cleverly Breen, sees the Somalian-Italian author picking over such stitches in her own life, examining what has been lived and what has been given; what has been inherited and what has been picked up along the way. Some of the memories she discusses, as in a shared experience of migration, have slowly unwound inside her by way of language, and others, as in the first three years of her life, are echoed into the body through photographs, tastes, trails, stuttering fragments that she pieces together into a portrait of lineage, a half-there origin story. 

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Narrator as Narcissus: A Review of Hanna Johansson’s Antiquity

January 24, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Sofija Popovska

The textual body of the novel is a monument to the clash between the natural flow of life and its narrativized counterpart.

 Antiquity by Hanna Johansson, translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson, Catapult, 2024

“Where were they?” asks the nameless protagonist of Antiquity, Hanna Johansson’s gorgeous, lacerating debut novel, translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson. She is interrogating the lack of cemeteries in Ermoupoli, a luxurious Greek city where she spends her summer with Helena, a chic and volatile artist with whom the narrator is infatuated, and Helena’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Olga. In a city where “the dead should be more numerous than the living”, there seems to be no trace of “such monuments, not even a site for simple graves, no memorial grove in the little park in front of Saint Nicholas Church where the cats slept in the shade of the pine trees.” “Where are they?” she asks of both cemeteries and the dead, not realizing that it is she who haunts the suggestively-named Persefonis—“the short street where Helena’s house was wedged between an alley and a ruin”. Ever on the margins of life, of human relationships, the spectral narrator might touch other things and people, but she never leaves a trace. Throughout the novel, the wounded lament of this reluctant nomad begins to haunt us, too. And this is not only because she is undone by the very skill that enables her to tell a story—narrating—but because Johansson’s creation, in Josefsson’s translation, reminds us of our own tendency to narrativize life, to write ourselves out of the intimate joy of immediate experience by stepping back and fiddling with the details, fashioning an ideal self.

Antiquity feels destined to be a classic, as multifaceted, revealing, and transformative as works by Dostoyevsky, Mann, and Nabokov. Its power comes from its vulnerable, gorgeous prose, replete with lush images, and also from its structural sophistication—a complete convergence of shape and themes. The textual body of the novel is a monument to the clash between the natural flow of life and its narrativized counterpart, felt through the temporal textures of the story, its narratological conflict. In narratological terms, the novel’s fabula—its narrated structure—opens at the end of its syuzhet—its chronological timeline: the narrator, Helena, and Olga are leaving Ermoupoli, heading towards an inevitable separation. As they depart in a ferry, the narrator says: “I could hear my own voice narrating: the sun was so strong you always had to squint a little. I felt reality take its leave of me. I wasn’t there.” From the very start, it is clear that the novel’s tension will emerge from the ebb and flow between the lived truth and the narrator’s censorial customization of real experiences as a constructing of the self. This becomes especially palpable in the chafing of the chronological flow of events against the narrator’s private perception of time. Her narration moves backward and forward in time, then further backward still, only to reemerge somewhere after the middle and then proceed all the way to the end—that is, the beginning. The unpredictability of the temporal jumps precludes anticipation but heightens the sense of foreboding with which the beginning’s manifestly melancholy departure taints all subsequent pages; as in a Greek tragedy, the reader can sense the protagonist hurtling towards a bitter end. READ MORE…

Four-in-the-Morning Literature: On Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq

September 20, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Meghan Racklin

Insomnia does strange things to time, or time does strange things to insomniacs—it estranges, stretches, slips.

Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq, translated from the French by Penny Hueston, Semiotext(e), 2023

While writing this review, I began making a list of everything I’ve tried in my attempts to fall asleep. The first was reading, which didn’t help me fall asleep at all (though not sleeping has helped immensely with reading). The second, which I tried after the first time I told a doctor about my trouble sleeping at age eleven, was melatonin, and I took it dutifully, in varying doses, until stopping cold a year ago. I sleep no better and no worse since. Over the years, I have also tried: valerian root, passionflower, marijuana, CBD gel, NyQuil, keeping my phone in another room, counting sheep, white noise, earplugs, Xanax, watching the same six television shows over and over again, an eye mask, new sheets, exercise, an early and consistent alarm. I have a prescription for trazadone but don’t take it (the benefits of simply being in possession of sleeping pills are often extolled to insomniacs, though I haven’t noticed any). I often end up listing all the people I love, and this last is perhaps least helpful—I always end up imagining what I would say if asked to give a eulogy, or what they would say if they gave one for me. Sometimes I end up in tears, still sleepless.

This is insomniac thinking: each line on a list bends and branches outwards. Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq, in Penny Hueston’s translation, is written in this “totally insomniac mode.” The book, a meditation on this condition, is comprised of lists, footnoted investigations into the history of sleeping and not sleeping, worries about the meaning and morality of insomnia in the face of genocide and climate catastrophe, and a compendium of quotes and anecdotes about sleepless writers or the characters to whom they’ve lent their insomnia. It includes a two-page spread of photos of hotel rooms Darrieussecq has stayed—though often not slept—in. Researching, worrying, organizing, reading: all insomniac activities, which lead as easily away from sleep as towards it.

She circles around sleep, doubles back, spiraling like a Louise Bourgeois drawing (the artist, a prolific insomniac herself, often drew spiraling shapes when awake late at night, but spiraling which way?). Darrieussecq enacts insomnia in her style; the book is fragmentary, intense, shifting. Her metaphors are hypnagogic, caught between reality and analogy: “we insomniacs plummet into horrendous ravines and the bags under our eyes are bruise colored.” Metaphor, incidentally, is one of the things on Darrieussecq’s list of things she’s tried to help her sleep. “I tell myself that a good sleep would be to sleep like a mountain,” she writes, “Oh, metaphors, metaphors.” This effort, of course, failed.

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Translating Multiple Dimensions: Sarah Timmer Harvey on Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About

August 24, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Daljinder Johal

Life isn’t one-dimensional; it’s a blend of emotions, absurdity, and different tones. . .

Jente Posthuma’s striking, moving novel, What I’d Rather Not Think About, delves into the aftermath of an unthinkable loss: the death of a twin. In tracing the patchworked life of a narrator who has long thought of herself as one-half, Posthuma explores the complexities of our most intimate relationships with evocative reflection and unexpected humor. This distinct work and our July Book Club selection has been translated beautifully by Sarah Timmer Harvey, resulting in razor-sharp prose that navigates the most intricate aspects of our selfhoods—how we are with one another. In this following interview, Harvey speaks about her discovery of this novel and her translation process, as well as the intricate journey of following this book’s many thought-paths and references. 

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. 

Daljinder Johal (DJ): I’m curious about your background and your journey into translation. I read that you’re Australian-born but ended up living in the Netherlands, where you began reading and occasionally translating Dutch fiction and poetry. Was there a particular work that played a significant role in sparking this interest?

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): Of course. Back then, while learning Dutch, I relocated to the Netherlands at nineteen with the intention of staying for a year. That single year evolved into a fourteen-year stay. During this time, I was working at a university, which eventually led me to translation as a second career. It happened somewhat unexpectedly. I strove to read while learning Dutch, focusing on more accessible books such as Hermann Koch’s The Dinner and even Harry Mulisch’s The Discovery of Heaven—which, while not mainstream, deeply resonated with me.

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What’s New in Translation: August 2020

August 17, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Samuel Kahler, and Scarlett Castillo

New work from Guadalupe Nettel, Małgorzata Szejnert, and Daniel Galera!

This month’s selections of newly translated world literature seem to revolve around the unknown, be it to uphold or dispel it: a Mexican short story collection explores its protagonists’ dark psyches while providing no easy answers, a piece of Polish reportage rediscovers lost voices on nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrant experience in America, and a Brazilian novel hilariously tackles a group of friends’ exploits in almost unchartered digital territory during the nineties.

bezoar

Bezoar: And Other Unsettling Stories by Guadalupe Nettel, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine, Seven Stories Press, 2020

Review by Samuel Kahler, Communications Director

Unusual as they may be, the strange and wistful short fictions in Guadalupe Nettel’s Bezoar: And Other Unsettling Stories are not only clever in their portrayal of human desire and obsession; they are often wise as well. Nettel, an acclaimed Mexican author, was named as one of the Bogotá 39 and is a recipient of the largest Spanish-language short story collection prize, the Premio de Narrativa Breve Ribera del Duero. Bezoar is her second collection of stories, published in the original Spanish in 2008 and now translated into English by Suzanne Jill Levine.

Over the course of the book, Nettel and her characters have something fresh to reveal about their unique obsessions and secrets (the stories are told from the first-person perspective). But at just over one hundred pages, Bezoar is an all-too-brief journey through the grey areas and dark recesses of hidden passions, lusts, and compulsions.

Depending on one’s subjective definition, the narrators of Bezoar might be considered everyday people who, at face value, live quiet, unremarkable lives: a photographer in Paris, a man strolling through Tokyo’s botanical gardens, a teenager on a summer vacation, and—yes—a voyeur here, a stalker there, and one supermodel under psychiatric supervision. While memorable and idiosyncratic, these are not outsized characters with grand schemes; instead, they look inward and act in near-singular pursuit of resolving psychological issues. Fittingly, their stories are intimate chamber pieces that delight in the details of unfulfilled needs and wants, emotional attachments and detachments, and traces of personal insight that at times reflect a broader general truth about human dissatisfaction. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Platini’s Free Kick” by Vassilis Alexakis

July 30, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Rebecca Dehner-Armand

The more I studied the unbelievable curve of the ball, the more I found it sublime.

This week’s Translation Tuesday features work by Greek writer Vassilis Alexakis, who is known for his self-translation work: translating his own work from Greek to French and vice-versa in order to study the lived experience of moving through cultural and linguistic boundaries that recalls Beckett’s experimentation. “Platini’s Free Kick” offers a vision of a man obsessed with event and form. As the story twists on, the free kick is stripped of its content as it becomes the focal point for the speaker, a movement of concentration on an object that invokes idolatry and addiction. Rebecca Dehner-Armand’s apt translation brings out the mundane terror of Alexakis’ story, which offers a critique of the persistence of an object and the effects of transfer, wear, and social tension on the way that objects create meaning for the viewer and how that meaning can change and dissipate over time. This dissipation and wear hint at the anxiety of a text or concept being used and reused. Alexakis’ story forces us to ask: Can the original effect of an event or form hold its sway over an individual without both the viewer and the viewed dissolving?

Michel Platini scored the most beautiful goal I’ve ever seen in my life with a free kick against the Dutch team. I’m almost certain that it was the team from the Netherlands: on the videotape, there are still a few traces of orange, the color of the Dutch jerseys. It was not merely a magnificent goal: it seems, in fact, that it ensured the French team’s qualification for the World Cup, which must’ve been held that year in Mexico, or in Argentina. Or in Italy, maybe. No matter. It would not be an exaggeration to say that this historic goal changed my life.

I saw the match at home. I didn’t even regret not finding a ticket for the Parc des Princes, because some goals are shown exclusively on TV in slow motion. Fortunately, I thought to record the match, as if I’d sensed that it would be exceptional. I watched the match alone, because neither my wife nor my daughters like soccer. Was it during the first period that Michel scored? Actually, I think it was during the second half, I would even say during the last fifteen minutes, because things had grown very tense and anticipatory as much on the field as in the stands, as is always the case at the end of a game.

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Translation Tuesday: “The Logic of the Soap Bubbles” by Luna Sicat-Cleto

April 30, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Bernard Capinpin

. . . actually, it has now become more complicated because I now get imaginary enemies and lovers.

The mania present in this week’s Translation Tuesday is forceful and visceral, poured forth with a tide of senses, memories, tastes, smells, and visions. Upon the arrival of a spectral personification named Sandali, the inner monologue of Luna Sicat-Cleto’s narrator detonates, threading seamlessly through the past, the present, and the future. The word sandali, in Filipino, can be roughly translated as “moment.” In this story, we are reminded of exactly how broad, and how various, a moment can be.

That moment comes, unexpected, uninvited, she just appears, like a visitor, a visitor whom I cannot shove off, I let her inside, offer her coffee, she will not drink the coffee, she will merely stroke the cup’s ear, and will look at me from head to toe, like a child, she will stare, and I know that she is sizing me up because I too am sizing her, she will look out the window and whisper something about the weather, I will nod, as if I had heard what she had whispered but actually hadn’t, I have been deaf for a long time, I don’t recognize the noise I heard, I no longer know if birds still sing in the morning, whatever noise I heard, I’m sure that my eardrums have already burst, a noise that had pierced through to my brain, but it’s funny that I still recognize the sound of my own name, and this gives me hope, hope is a dangerous thing, they say that it is what thrusts people to madness, and when the visitor called my name, I did not know if I was dreaming, I lifted my head up and smiled, I was about to mention something about the weather, or our weight, whether we have gained or lost some, but I had forgotten what I was about to say as soon as she squeezed my palm, where the pulse lies, where the welt from the blade rested and she whispered: flee, flee and I will know what she wanted to happen, she wanted to sleep with me, I will not object, I will be even the one to usher her to bed, and I will feel her trembling, I will take off her clothes and she will do the same and we will begin our voyage, that’s how I see it, a voyage I will not object to, I will try not to think, I will let it be, she will come again tomorrow, my door will be open, I will not refuse, for I want our world to be filled with our children, the whole universe even, so that I wouldn’t feel lonely anymore, isn’t it right, Sandali, for that is her name, Sandali, she has neither parent nor sibling, neither home nor job, she is not bound to anything or anytime. Sandali, her name does not suit her, perhaps I needn’t give her a name, she is like a poem, a poem that does not have a name, if a person labels a poem a poem, it vanishes, it disappears like bubbles that can no longer be touched.

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Translation Tuesday: “The Physiology of Memory” by Ricardo Lísias

February 19, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Francisco Vilhena

The most torturing memories aren’t necessarily images, frozen, but films of about three minutes each.

In this haunting short story by Ricardo Lísias, the narrator contends with multiple stubborn memories, around which his narrative revolves. From an injured taxi driver in Buenos Aires, to overwhelming loneliness in Krakow, these memories are strung together to create a potent, overwhelming mixture.

I

I have determined why I am so upset by writers of clear sentences: they don’t struggle with memory. Their transparency denounces a simplistic intelligence. If someone cries because they are not able to render trauma into words then that person is a deep person.

I identified the root of my issue with clear-writing writers when I was in Poland. It is a very stark memory. I felt, standing more or less five hundred metres away from a small bus terminal in Krakow, the most intense loneliness I have ever experienced.

A year later, when I decided to dig up the loneliest moment in my life, I realized that it is not a bad feeling. It doesn’t hurt me or make me suffer.

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Translation Tuesday: Wanich Jarungkitanand’s “We Both Live Here . . . in the Same Soi”

December 18, 2018  |  in Translations  |  by Aree Manosuthikit

She’s totally unaware that she has a secret admirer, an ardent observer.

Aree Manosuthikit’s translation of this short story by renowned Thai writer Wanich Jarungkitanand takes us to the urban slums of Bangkok, where a university student falls in love with a young woman who lives in his neighborhood. A poignant commentary on the social ills facing contemporary Thai society, “We Both Live Here . . . in the Same Soi” is one of Jarungkitanand’s best-known stories.

My house is in a soi (a narrow street branching off a main road). It’s like a thousand other cramped and congested sois in Bangkok’s Thonburi district. Since I have no time to mingle or make friends with anyone, I know only two people in this soi: the lady owner of a coffee shop and another from a small restaurant I frequent. We’re just acquaintances. Though I know them both by name, I don’t see why they should know mine or why I should bother to identify myself.

This soi is like all other sois, harboring boisterous gangsters and delinquents. They sit idly around in the coffee shop waiting for the weekend to come. Then they scoot over to the racecourse, come back flat broke at sunset, cry like babies over the money they’ve just squandered, and then plot a way to get it back in the darkness of the night.

This soi is a safe zone for drug pushers and addicts who abuse all sorts of illicit substances, from painkillers and marijuana to opium and solvents. It’s also a haven for all classes of thieves, from bandits-in-chief to rookies and the whole gamut in between. Frequenting this coffee shop has given me the idea that if I wanted to get involved in illegal activities, I could be an agent for the experienced criminals infesting this soi who steal cars, burglarize, brawl, rob, and murder. Once I witnessed two nonlocal gangsters getting beaten to a pulp right in front of the coffee shop.

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