Posts filed under 'personal essay'

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2022

This issue deeply reckons with fixing selves that have been lost, falsely performed, and fractured.

The Summer 2022 Issue is our forty-fifth edition, featuring work from thirty-one countries! From newly translated fiction by luminaries such as Elfriede Jelinek and Thomas Bernhard, to our special feature highlighting Swiss literature, and to probing essays that interrogate the adoption of new languages, these intricately linked writings feature characters who are thrown into abysses both personal and political but discover moments of solace, communion, and revelation. To introduce you to another rich, wide-ranging issue, our blog editors discuss their favorite pieces.

In Elisa Shua Dusapin’s 2021 National Book Award-winning novel, Winter in Sokcho, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins from the French, the unnamed narrator, a young French Korean woman living on the border between North and South Korea, experiences an ongoing crisis of identity due her inability to be seen, displacement, and strained relationships with her domineering mother and absent boyfriend. In the novel, the narrator seeks to recover a self that has been rendered invisible. One of Dusapin’s most fitting metaphors for this reassembling of the self is the narrator’s constant search for her reflection in the mirror of the guesthouse where she works. Similarly, the search for a true reflection emerges as a central theme in the introspective Summer 2022 issue. It is apt in these precarious times when the stability of the self is being shaken by forces of displacement and politics that this issue deeply reckons with fixing selves that have been lost, falsely performed, and fractured. The building of the self is literalized by Lu Liu’s playful yet melancholy cover art, in which two boys nervously construct a sand tower out of words, alluding to the Tower of Babel made personal in Jimin Kang’s moving essay, “My Mother and Me.”

The mirror is the object of Andrea Chapela’s kaleidoscopic, multidisciplinary self-inquiry, “The Visible Unseen,” elegantly rendered by Kelsi Vanada. It adopts the fragmentary form of a series of failed beginnings, in the manner of Janet Malcolm’s famous essay on David Salle, Forty-One False Starts. Chapela’s variation of the form represents the difficulty of locating the self in one’s reflection. By extension, Chapela argues that at a given time, the self can never be completely isolated; rather, it can only ever be seen through a particular type of mirror, at a certain angle, beneath a certain light, yielding a fragment of the whole. Just as Chapela scrutinizes the mirror through a variety of perspectives—scientific, literary, philosophical, memoiristic—so must we be as comprehensive yet fragmentary when we search for ourselves. As Chapela writes, “Little by little, I start to accept that each new beginning of the essay is just one piece of the full picture.”

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Translation Tuesday: Selections from A Woman Awaiting (The pandemic from a garret) by Agnieszka Taborska

When the world goes back to 'normal,' how quickly will we regain middle age?

Writer, translator, and scholar Agnieszka Taborska reflects upon the literary and historical precedents of the global lockdown in these excerpts from A Woman Awaiting (The pandemic from a garret), our selection for this week’s Translation Tuesday. In coping with the trauma and uncertainty of the current pandemic, Taborska offers a bookish yet personal perspective, one informed by an expansive breadth of literary knowledge as well as familial accounts of another historical tragedy: the Nazi occupation of Poland. Paradoxically, the speaker’s isolation takes us on a necessarily cosmopolitan journey through books, recontextualizing the pandemic through the lenses of Gabriel García Márquez, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Bram Stoker, and Spalding Gray, among others. With candid, irreverent wit, Taborska chronicles her daily thoughts about the absurdities, losses, and shared anxieties of our current global crisis.

What was a day, measured for instance from the moment you sat down to your midday meal to the return of that same moment twenty-four hours later?

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain [1]

Friday, April 3

With every passing day our activities take on more of the characteristics of ritual. In the morning we top up the humidifiers on our radiators, rolling up the blinds to let the plants soak up the sun from the first minute, and wiping down with a wet cloth the leaves that haven’t had time to gather dust since we last cleaned them. For the umpteenth time we move the flowerpots around to make their residents feel as comfortable as possible. The tiles, the bathroom, the bathtub, and sink have been scrubbed raw.  We recall with relief that there are still windows to be cleaned. We have shifted the furniture around, surprising ourselves with the audacity of our experimental solutions. Our new routine makes us laugh at the previous one. We strive to create hothouse conditions in our limited space. When all this is over, will we deliberately let our flat go to seed? Will we stick to a daily agenda or—on the contrary—will we turn day into night, drop in on our friends unannounced, wake up our neighbours by playing loud music at dawn, will we ditch every schedule?

The habit of checking the weather forecast is now a thing of the past. The degree of air pollution has also become irrelevant. A million dollars to anyone who, asked out of the blue, can name today’s date and day of the week without having to stop and think. On the other hand, we are getting expert at telling the hour. We have our hand on the pulse. We are aware of the days getting longer. We are familiar with the path of the rays of the sun as they move across the floor. We could tell the shadows out in the street where and how far to fall.

Our window looks out onto a small grocery store. We have noticed a pattern: young people go in wearing gloves and face masks, the old behave as if nothing was happening. Our activist neighbour picks up litter from the pavement as usual. A sight that takes me back to the past.

The dogs waiting outside the shop are surprised that their two-legged friends have suddenly been spending so much time with them. Two Labradors who came with a gentleman on a bike kill time by simulating copulation, as always. They mount each other and make rubbing motions, too brief for ‘anything’ to really happen. The infection has not impaired their erotic fantasies. READ MORE…

There is Nothing Anymore: Auden in the Saint Lucian Countryside

No end also to loss, yes, but no end to our tragic struggle against despair.

In this personal essay, a young poet attends a funeral in his native Saint Lucia, where a spontaneous funeral chant puts him in mind of a poem by Auden. To Vladimir Lucien, the funeral chant and the Auden poem constitute different approaches to the finality of death. In their juxtaposition, we learn something not only about the language and customs in the Saint Lucian countryside, but about the universal human yearning for the transcendence of our finitude.

Alloy’s funeral was packed. It had to be. In the village of Mon Repos, Saint Lucia, he had been everything: head of the local “friendly society,” choir member, bus driver, community organiser and activist, folk singer. The church, however, was an unusually small and claustrophobic Catholic Church with a low ceiling; it felt like a house converted into a church and hurriedly sacralised. Alloy’s daughter—who was a lecturer, my colleague—delivered the eulogy.

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2017

Our blog editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2017 issue!

Each issue, our blog editors choose some of their favorite pieces to showcase. The Fall 2017 issue is extra special for us, since we get to introduce two new assistant blog editors: Sarah Booker, who translates from Spanish, and David Smith, who works with Norwegian. Together with Stefan Kielbasiewicz, they make up the Asymptote blog team. Enjoy these highlights! 

Ricardo Piglia’s piece, “On the Threshold,” is a philosophical, melancholic meditation on the art of reading and the construction of the autobiography. Composed of a series of diary entries in which the narrator muses on his grandfather’s life and on the practice of writing, this text poses fundamental questions about the practice of writing: How do you write an autobiography? What moments really matter when considering a lifetime of memories? How do you begin to write? The realization that experience “is a microscopic profusion of events that repeat and expand, disjointed, disparate, in flight” is what finally allows the narrative to unfold and the pieces of these two men’s lives to come together.

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What’s Foreign and Familiar: Part I

Writer Yuen Sin reflects on a childhood and adulthood spent finding herself between languages

“What is the Burmese word for cockroach (kar-chwa)?

Auntie Moe Moe interrogated in a mixture of Mandarin and Hokkien dialect. My brother glanced at me haplessly as I rummaged through the repository of my memory, biting my lips as my live-in domestic helper, nanny, and aunt tapped her feet impatiently.

There it was. “Po heart.”

The romanization under my childish scrawl appeared in my head, and I triumphantly recited the two syllables hiding beneath my tongue. READ MORE…

How Literary Translation Upgraded my MFA

Our new blog editor Katrine explains how literary translation transformed her creative writing MFA & writing practice overall.

First, I did it for the money. I used to work as a freelance journalist, and to support myself on the side I translated tv-shows, computer games, websites, you name it.  It paid well. So when I came to Columbia University to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing, I thought: hey, I’ll just do a double-concentration in fiction and literary translation so I can support myself as a translator of books while trying to make it as a writer. Ha! Ha.

I remember the writing program hosted a mingle with drinks on the first evening of our intro week, and halfway through the event I was already drunk on a) wine, b) nerves, and c) an incredibly long conversation with poet Timothy Donnelly about the great Danish poet Inger Christensen and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. READ MORE…