Posts filed under 'sexuality'

What’s New in Translation: April 2024

April 15, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Georgina Fooks, Nestor Gomez, and Willem Marx

New titles from Kazakhstan, South Korea, and The Netherlands!

This month, our editors introduce three incredible new works that delve into family, solitude, and fractured legacy. From the lyrical explorations of family by Surinamese author Astrid Roemer, the delightful oddities of Yun Ko-Eun’s sincere and humorous short stories, and the vivid, compassionate vignettes of Kazkah author Baqytgul Sarmekova, these newly published translations invite reflection, tenderness, and joy.

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Off-White by Astrid Roemer, translated from the Dutch by Lucy Scott and David McKay, Two Lines Press, 2024

Review by Nestor Gomez, Editor-at-Large

In Off-White, Astrid Roemer weaves a grand, multigenerational narrative around the matriarchical figure of Grandma Bee and her family in Suriname, a South American country on the Caribbean coast. The year is 1966, and each member of the Vanta family is going about their lives in different directions, threatening the bond that is necessary to continue Grandma Bee’s vision of the family’s legacy.

While one part of this narrative is deeply embedded in identity, exploring how structures of race, class, and gender have been encoded within the family, another part is inextricably tied to loss and getting lost, as various characters all reckon with their history (cultural, personal, and traumatic) in different ways. Translators Lucy Scott and David McKay demonstrate remarkable skill and artistry in conveying the story with ease and clarity, relaying the subtle tensions in both the spoken and the unspoken. Through their work, Roemer’s prose enlivens with emotive and physical details (especially that of meals), deeply coloring the multiplicity that threatens the family’s unity while highlighting their diversity of experiences.

Even before beginning the novel, we are immediately confronted with the issue of color in the title: Off-White. The Dutch term, “Gebroken Wit,” is also included in the book’s very first page, and Roemer describes it as having multiple translated meanings, such as “broken white” or “refracted white.” In a conversation with Two Lines Press, Roemer states: “essentially, [gebroken wit] refers to refracted sunlight—a rainbow, for instance—showing a wide range of colors. . . [It] also means that sunlight always finds a way through time and always keeps gathering together.” This imagery of sunlight resonates strongly throughout the novel in the many harrowed struggles of the Vanta family: Heli’s burgeoning relationship with an older married man who teaches at her school, Louise’s ongoing incestuous relationship with her brother, and Laura’s diminishing mental health from the sexual harassment she experienced as a child at the hands of Grandma Bee’s brother, Lèon.  READ MORE…

Between Seeing and Listening: Dias Novita Wuri on Birth Canal

October 19, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Thuy Dinh

For me, it was important to talk about everyone's story and experience with the term “motherhood”.

 In Birth Canal, Dias Novita Wuri masterfully braids disparate storylines of women across various countries and time periods to track the shifting contexts of sexuality, femininity, family, and gender roles. What results is an alternative face of history, from the violence of wartime and colonialism to the contemporary dynamics of sex work and objectification. As our September Book Club selection, this subversive and unflinching text defies generalisation and presumption to consider the many ways a body can be used—and freed. In this interview, Novita Wuri speaks on how the women in her life inspired the novel, sexuality and politics in Indonesia, and the mental anguish that surrounded the writing and reading of this powerful text.

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. 

Thuy Dinh (TD): Could you explain the meaning behind the title Birth Canal?

Dias Novita Wuri (DNW): Birth Canal actually doesn’t have as much significance in English as it does in Indonesian—which you wrote about very well in your review. The term in Indonesian is jalan lahir; jalan means a road, or a way—something one has to go through, and lahir here means birth. You can see it doesn’t really translate very well to English, and my editor and I decided to go with “birth canal”. I wanted a short, impactful title because my first book’s title, Makramé, was very simple. Of course, the birth canal is part of the reproductive system, and I wanted to use a bodily word to symbolise the feminine struggle related to procreation. It’s hard not to talk about birth because it’s a woman’s “duty” to give birth, and I think this term nicely represents the stories of all the women in my story.

TD: Your book doesn’t seem to think there is a necessary connection between fertility and motherhood—as some characters in the book can’t have children but yearn to be mothers. Can you expound on this theme?

DNW: I wanted to talk about a lot of the women that I know in my life, some of which can’t have children, or struggle to have children but want to have children, and others who don’t want children at all. For me, it was important to talk about everyone’s story and experience with the term “motherhood”. I also knew people who got pregnant as teenagers outside of marriage, and that’s why I opened the book by talking about abortion, because abortion is illegal here in Indonesia. It’s very frowned upon—which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

Actually, when I open up to the women that I talk to in Indonesia—my friends and acquaintances—sometimes they would tell me that they have had abortions. It’s a shame that it’s illegal and not talked about, because it’s something that women need. It’s a basic healthcare right. To have such shame and stigma surrounding abortion can only be detrimental to women’s lives in Indonesia. Some of them might be mothers already, but they can’t handle another child or can’t afford another child. Yet, they can’t have an abortion. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2023

October 16, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal, George Newton, and Iona Tait

Discover new work from Venezuela, Poland and India!

In this month’s round-up, we present three works in singular styles. From Venezuela, Maria Pérez-Talavera gives us non-linear journal entries composed from a mental hospital. From Poland, modernist master Witold Gombrowicz puts his own spin on the Gothic tale, painting a psychologically sensitive portrait of a shifting society. And from India, some of the bold, experimental short stories of Rajkamal Chaudhary are gathered in a sharp and comic collection of unconventional plotlines and characters. Read on to find out more!

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The Possessed by Witold Gombrowicz, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Fitzcarraldo, 2023

Review by Iona Tait, Executive Assistant

A haunted castle, a mad prince, a pair of doubles, and a clairvoyant who saves the day—Witold Gombrowicz’s The Possessed has all the quintessential trappings of nineteenth-century Gothic fiction. Originally released as a serial in the summer of 1939, The Possessed merges its classic motifs with mystery and a comedy of manners, offering a remarkably profound reflection on authenticity at a time when older Polish divisions of social classes were being transformed.

Neighboring the Gothic castle—that relic of “antiquity breathing its last” where a deranged prince and his cunning secretary reside—lies a manor-turned-boarding house. Mrs. Ocholowska, the landowner and member of a downwardly mobile minor nobility, receives guests across all social classes: the petit-bourgeois Councilor Szymczyk, nosy and bickering middle-class women, a curious academic known as Skolinski, and a working-class tennis coach and parvenu named Marian Leszczuk. The latter proves to be a formidable rival to the tennis superstar and spritely daughter of the landowner, Maja Ocholowska, who is at the novel’s outset engaged to the secretary.

Lesczuk and Maja, however, are not only an equal match on the court; they also exhibit an uncanny similarity in their gestures and ways of speaking. Simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by this similarity, the pair undergo a process of self-discovery together, journeying between the manor and the haunted castle, with intermittent getaways to Warsaw. READ MORE…

Affirmation and Erasure: On the Queer Stories of On the Edge

September 25, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Matilde Ribeiro

[N]ew and translated works have continued to explore the rich depths of how Hindi literature explores same-sex relationships and queer desire.

On The Edge by various authors, translated from the Hindi by Ruth Vanita, Penguin Random House India, 2023

“We all live in a prison of some kind,” Manoranjan, the protagonist of Sara Rai’s story “Kagaar Par,” tells his lover Javed, from whom he is separated both by barriers of class and religion, and by the glaring fact of social opposition to same-sex relationships. “Not being able to love openly is my prison. . . I know that it’s very hard for an ordinary man to understand my compulsions and to love a prisoner.” The story’s title, translated as “On The Edge,” lends its name to this anthology of translations from Hindi by Indian author, professor, and activist Ruth Vanita, and echoes the themes of queer desire and alienation that run through the collection.

This book comes amid what the Booker Prize-winning translator Daisy Rockwell has described as a “boomlet” in translations of modern Hindi literature—a boom in comparison to the previous dearth of translations, but one in which “so much remains untranslated and unpublished,” including key modern works. On The Edge, which includes modern and older stories, can in some ways be considered part of this boom, which is highlighting the variety and depth of Hindi literature. The story collection also comes at a time when same-sex relationships in India are under increased scrutiny—the Supreme Court is currently deciding a batch of petitions to expand existing marriage laws to include same-sex marriages—and in this context, it is also an attempt to unearth stories depicting queerness in Hindi literature

In this way, Vanita’s anthology makes a powerful statement against the frequent assertion that homosexuality is an aberration or alien to Indian culture. This view of Hindi literature as devoid of queer stories is a common one. In the introduction to this anthology, Vanita demonstrates how widespread this misreading is, quoting Namvar Singh, a revered Marxist critic of Hindi literature, who described homosexuality as “an exception, not a widespread practice,” and declared that “that is how it should be portrayed in literature.” He also derided authors working in English who, he claimed, were “trying to gain cheap popularity by glorifying this exception,” and cautioned the Hindi literary world against this. READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

September 13, 2023  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Ian Ross Singleton, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Rachel Stanyon

Kaufman’s film strikes me as an example of domestication masquerading as foreignization. . .

When Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being was published, readers lauded the Czech writer’s delicately choreographed story of individual lives pulsating through social and political forces, and soon, the book was hailed as a classic. Philip Kaufman’s adaptation, written with the acclaimed novelist and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, was released four years later, in 1988—despite the director admitting that he had considered the book’s “elaborate, musical structure” to be “unfilmable.” In this edition of Asymptote at the Movies, our editors take a look at the works of Kundera and Kaufman in a discussion that ranges over domestication, kitsch, and the two artists’ respective treatments of “lightness” and “weight.”

Michelle Chan Schmidt (MCS): Let’s clear the elephant out of the room; Milan Kundera famously disowned the film adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being as “[having] very little to do with the spirit either of the novel or the characters in it.” In other words, Kundera felt that his novel’s “aura,” his authorial intent, was not translated well to Philip Kaufman’s screen. Much has already been said about the differences between the two works, especially in Patrick Cattrysse’s analysis of the adaptation. For one, the film elides the novel’s heterodiegetic narrative voice, instead inserting three expository intertitles at the film’s opening. It then never uses intertitles again. As such, the film’s narrative movement takes place at a distance, never immersing itself in its characters’ interior moral or emotional discontinuities. For me, this perspective erases a significant part of what makes reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being such a scintillating pleasure. The novel reads like a mirror, a commentary on the kitsch and contradictions inherent in human nature; the film reads like, well, a screen, projecting an image of kitsch without penetrating it.

The film’s chronological order also undermines that omnipresent, digressive, ironic voice, which swerves between focalizations and temporal frames to reveal the mind behind the speaker. I visualize it as a white expanse of space in which Kundera’s narrator, leaning forward on the edge of a stool behind a control panel, holds forth on the dialectics of “einmal ist keinmal.” In my view, the film opts for what we might analogize as a domesticating approach; it mechanically “reproduces” Kundera’s Czech novel in the traditional codes and modes of a Hollywood production, complete with primarily Western European actors. Kaufman’s direction untethers his film from the burdens of voice, nonlinearity, and metaphor, resigning the narrator’s ponderings on eternal return to a few hasty lines of dialogue. What does the novel’s aura, and its reproduction in the film, mean to you both? Is the film a product of lightness or of weight?

Ian Ross Singleton (IRS): I’ll start by answering your last question; I think the film is more of a weight, while the novel’s aura is, on the other hand, one of lightness. I agree with you that we can put aside a more superficial discussion of the differences between the film and novel—a friend of mine said that no film can ever reproduce a novel well, and I have to admit that any exception I can come up with is rare. It is interesting, nonetheless, to discuss, as you do, the quality of the transmutation (in the sense of Roman Jakobson’s idea of intersemiotic translation—that of verbal signs by means of a nonverbal sign system) of the novel into film. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2023

September 11, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Meghan Racklin and Samantha Siefert

New translations from the Catalan and the French!

This month in newly released translations, we’re featuring two authors of inimitable voice and style. From the Catalan, a surrealist masterpiece by Ventura Ametller sharply blends history with mysticism in an epic retelling of the Spanish Civil War; and from the French, the latest text by Annie Ernaux returns to some of the author’s most central themes—sex and memory—in a poignant examination of corporeal and psychological navigations.

Summa Kaotica by Ventura Ametller (Bonaventura Clavaguera), translated from the Catalan by Douglas Suttle, Fum d’Estampa, 2023

Review by Samantha Siefert, Marketing Manager

A monstrosity of a fish gnashes at a tiger, the tiger leaps towards a gun, the gun is aimed perilously at the prone body of a nude woman. . . It’s all so unexpected and moving, but what do these objects have to do with one another—or with anything at all?

Such is surrealism: the challenge of reconciling the disparity of absurdity. “Everything leads us to believe that there exists a spot in the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the high and the low, the communicable and the incommunicable will cease to appear contradictory,” declared André Breton in his manifesto. Riding on the coattails of Dadaism, surrealism emerged as an impulsive reaction to the tragedy of the First World War: If reason had resulted in such great suffering, then what good was a movement rooted in realism?

The antithesis of reason, then, was the way forward, and the efforts of the avant-garde were so resonant that they continue to exist today as comfortable figures of popular culture, where the discordance of fish, tiger, and gun feel almost familiar in Salvador Dalí’s famous painting, “The Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening.” The surrealist world of letters, however, leave room for discovery.

In Catalonia with Dalí at the beginning of the twentieth century, the writer Ventura Ametller—the pen name of Bonaventura Clavaguera—was hard at work, producing a prolific collection of poetry, essays, and novels that turn the world upside down in raucous prose, described by essayist Lluís Racionero as “Dalí in words.” His work has remained only quietly appreciated, but perhaps the time has come for that to change with the new publication of Ametller’s groundbreaking magnum opus, Summa Kaotica, in a masterful translation from the Catalan by Douglas Suttle. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2023

August 14, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Irmak Ertuna Howison and Sofija Popovska

New work from Uruguay and South Korea!

This month, we take a look at two brilliant titles that embody the acts of interpretation and evocation. In Silvia Guerra’s poems, nature is given voice in stunning scenes of linguistic complexity. In Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s retelling of a Korean classic, beloved characters are brought to life in the graphic form. 

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A Sea at Dawn by Silvia Guerra, translated from the Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas, Eulalia Books, 2023 

Review by Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large for North Macedonia

What constitutes a translation? Thinkers like Mikhail Bakhtin and Jacques Lacan have argued that every utterance is a deeply intimate expression channeled through shared, culturally standardized verbal structures; that is to say, every time we speak, we are translating.

As with speaking, so with listening, as well. Bakhtin describes the act of conversing with someone else as a (re-)construction of our concepts upon the “alien territory” of the other’s mind. In A Sea at Dawn (Un mar en madrugada), a poetry collection originally published in 2018 and now out in English translation from Eulalia Books, the Uruguayan poet Silvia Guerra manages to push against even these (admittedly broad and inclusive) boundaries of defining translation. In her panoramic, evocative poems, she invites all kinds of life, organic and inorganic, to speak, thereby creating a delightfully strange linguistic landscape that is equally alien and welcoming to the voices of the world, all at once.

Given the vertiginous and heterodox nature of the book itself, it’s helpful to start with the afterword written by the translators Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas, which illuminates the process of recasting Guerra’s captivating and difficult voice into English, and offers various ways to think about her poetry. For those that have read her in Spanish, it might seem that translating Guerra might seem an exercise in futility, leading to “disappointment and outright lamentation”; however, Kercheval and Pitas’ exquisite translation evokes neither of those things. Instead, contemplating Guerra’s intricate verbal designs allowed the translators to experience “lost and found” moments—instances where English revealed its ability to produce accomplices to Guerra’s “extremely innovative soundscapes” and formulations. Kercheval and Pitas cite an instance where they rediscovered the potential of English words to be “sonically evocative,” in which editor Michelle Gil-Montero offered “hacked in half” as a match for “pensamiento imbricado hendido”—instead of the initial idea, “thought interwoven split.” Later, quoting Walter Benjamin’s notion that “translation makes one’s native language foreign to itself,” Kercheval and Pitas’ afterword shows that reading Guerra in translation not only allows one to experience her mysterious Spanish transformed into English (A Sea at Dawn being a bilingual edition), but leaves our image of English irrevocably altered by her expansive, multipotential approach to language. READ MORE…

A Place for Malice in Literature: On Izumi Suzuki’s Hit Parade of Tears

April 3, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Bella Creel

Women lead the stories in Hit Parade of Tears—with their desires, their passions, and their fears. . .

Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, and Helen O’Horan, Verso, 2023

In the moody, deliriously humorous worlds of Hit Parade of Tears, Izumi Suzuki’s protagonists embody searing emotions, from anguish to apathy, all felt at an apex that seems like a breaking point. Sharp and achingly present, these eleven short stories are transposed by writers Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, and Helen O’Horan, and present emotional and often unsettling glimpses into worlds both familiar and fantastical. Though each story stands on its own, there are elements that draw them together: the stream of Japanese rock from the 1960s and 70s playing in the background, a woman searching for her younger brother, a blurry line between mental illness and otherworldly abilities, and perhaps most consistently, a spotlight on some of the ugliest aspects of human nature—pettiness, cynicism, self-obsession, vitriol. We find these traits in her characters across the board, and those who veer from this standard are noted for their irregularity. Whether it’s a spunky teenage girl or an ungrateful husband, the dialogue in translation is natural and engaging, and each character reads with a distinct voice; descriptions are elevated by clever word choice, from a “galumphing figure” to “laparotomized remains,” and each paragraph is a newly vivid scene.

While the women of Hit Parade of Tears occupy the traditional feminine roles of wives, mothers, and sexual objects, they are not held to stereotypical ideals of femininity when it comes to their emotions and motivations, which makes this a thought-provoking and relevant read for feminists interested in non-Western perspectives. Women lead the stories in Hit Parade of Tears—with their desires, their passions, and their fears—and the men often read like props to the women’s narratives, whether that’s a self-obsessed husband, an ex-lover, a wannabe sugar daddy, a sacrifice, or a younger brother. Men’s bodies are constantly on display and under scrutiny—balding, thin, hot, or literally cut open from the stomach and hung like an ornament in a medical facility—and they rarely have any part in moving the plot forward.

The men in the protagonists’ lives belittle them and take them for granted, but the stories paint them in all their egoistic ways. In the eponymous “Hit Parade of Tears,” we spend the majority of the story listening to the thoughts of a man born over 150 years prior, who hit his prime in the 1960s and 70s. He talks down on his wife and her job archiving that era: “She’s jealous of me, he thought. She’s seething because she couldn’t take part in my youth like someone from the same generation could.” Come to find out, she’s been alive just as long as he has—they even dated briefly a hundred years ago, but he, solipsistic and self-absorbed, forgot, and he can’t imagine her experiences living up to his. Suzuki’s fiction is explicit in its critique of men’s treatment of women—hypocritical, predatory, and strikingly uncool, Suzuki’s men believe they have the upper hand in their relationships. Behind this belief, Suzuki’s women pull the strings, using the hands they’ve been dealt (as housewives, as sexy schoolgirls, as the repressed desires of a depressed woman) to their benefit. READ MORE…

Announcing Our January Book Club Selection: The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel

January 30, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

The necessity of casting off shame and regret, of rejecting violence instead of our identities, are crucial messages in this book.

In Stênio Gardel’s The Words That Remain, everything hinges on the unfolding of a page. Through the Brazilian author’s vivid prose, a world unfurls between the covers: of unrequited love, of shame and survival, of rurality and history—all of it circulating a letter that its protagonist has never opened. Asymptote is proud to present this incredible debut work as our first Book Club selection of the year, a book that merges its triumphant celebration of language with the pivotal interrogation of marginalization, all along the long journey towards self-acceptance.

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. 

The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel, translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato, New Vessel Press, 2023

Much like the relationship that dominates it, The Words that Remain is just long enough to leave an indelible impression—but finishes in a flash. Stênio Gardel’s debut novel packs a literal and figurative punch, its brief pages flecked with contrasts: pleasure and pain, pride and shame, love and violence, peace and regret, strength and submission, what is spoken and what is kept silent. The storytelling moves fast, spanning half a century in its 150-odd pages, but Gardel’s sparse prose never creates a sense of freneticism. Through swirling reflections, the novel moves like a steady whirlwind, conveying inner turmoil and external inaction, punctuated by powerful, sometimes devastating change.

The Words that Remain tells the story of Raimundo Gaudêncio de Freitas, who paints his life as framed by two transformative events: learning to read and write at age seventy-one and falling in love at seventeen. Almost everything between the book’s covers oscillates between these two experiences, the chasm between them held taut by a letter—“half blessed, half cursed, wholly mysterious”—that he has never before been able to read. Penned by his past lover, the letter hangs over his life like a talisman, a burden, and a beacon of hope all in one.

Raimundo is gay. He and his lover, Cicero, are able to embrace their sexuality and one another for two years, but always with the fear of rejection from their families and community persisting in the background. This is rural Brazil in the 60s and 70s, and life is hard. Prevented from going to school by his father at an early age because “writing was for people who don’t need to put food on the table”, Raimundo must instead do backbreaking work to help support his family through floods, poverty, and infant death. While he longs for an education and the freedom to live with Cicero, the harsh realities of working-class life and widespread bigotry are so pervasive as to be almost completely internalised: being together gives them “a good taste, but [one] that left something sour in the back of their minds”, and even when they fantasize about living together, it is only imaginable in a big city—where no one will know they are more than just roommates. Sadly, their fears prove to be well grounded; when their families find out about their relationship, they are forbidden from seeing one another, and Raimundo is beaten mercilessly by his father for days, until he is driven away by his mother. In the long aftermath of this rejection, Raimundo thinks of himself as fated to wandering in a shadowy husk, his sexuality locked away, his life and love suspended in Cicero’s impenetrable letter, completely opaque like Cicero’s own destiny. READ MORE…

Will the Present Suffice? On Disappearance in Fiction

September 21, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by MK Harb

It seems that disappearance creates even more presence, focusing around the individual instead of erasing them.

What is absence—this deeply felt substance that is not made of matter, but lack? In texts across time, writers have given form to vanishing and its metaphorical power, studying its mystery and its abjection, its myth and its experience. In the following essay, MK Harb discusses three cases of disappearance in short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Munro, and Danial Haghighi, and how the three authors use the duality of presence and absence to explore the psychology of those who go and those who stay, as well as experiences of class, gender, sexuality, and colonialism.

In a curious poem by the name of “Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage,” the late Larry Levis created, in words blown with the precision of a glassmaker, a philosophical text on life and desire. Beginning with, “It’s a list of what I cannot touch,” Levis narrates the myth of the Cumaean Sibyl, an ancient Greek priestess who, in her quest to ask the Gods for eternal life, forgot to ask for eternal youth. What ensues is a lesson in cruelty, for as time expands and centuries go by, she shrinks and dwarfs until she becomes as tiny as a thumb, upon which she is placed in a jar to “suffocate without being able to die.” As the years churn on, Sibyl eventually finds herself in a birdcage, placed there by an Athenian shop owner for her protection. She emits small bird-like whispers to Athenian boys, who often rattle her cage to ask: What do you want, Sibyl? To this she responds: death. Her voice goes mute as she witnesses an ever-changing Athens through to the Second World War, all the while continuing to be alive, shriveling and aging, yet somehow disappearing from living. Using Sibyl, Levis creates a melancholic irony in which a desire for a prolonged life leads to disappearance.

When I think of disappearance, I think of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and the soul-crushing friendship between Lila and Elena, two intellectual women haunted by the other’s abilities, acting out their insecurities through never-ending disappearances and reappearances within each other’s lives. I think of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1960s film Woman in The Dunes, where a depressive Japanese scientist spends the night with a seductive village woman in a remote sand dune. After their affair, the staircase leading outwards—a symbol of return to urbanity—vanishes, and the most Sisyphean struggle ensues. In such works, disappearance is an allegory for life and time, lost and spent.

Disappearance has long been a hallmark of serious prose, a thematic thread throughout literature of all variances. In three short stories set in Canada, India, and Iran, this allegorical device operates at the narratives’ center. The first is Jorge Luis Borges’ “Man on the Threshold,” which follows the tradition of narration through memory, telling us of the writer’s childhood friend, Bioy Casares, who brings with him from London to Buenos Aires a strange dagger. This object triggers another story from a friend sitting with them, Christopher Dewey, who served in the British colonies of India. READ MORE…

Everything is Permitted in Dreams: Corinne Hoex and Caitlin O’Neil on Gentlemen Callers

May 26, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

This book is more about feminine desire than erotic consummation, so it’s not pornographic at all.

Diving without abandon into the realms of sexual fantasy and desire, Corinne Hoex’s Gentlemen Callers is a series of vignettes that follows the erotic as it traverses into the pleasurable, the humorous, and the absurd. As our Book Club selection for the month of April, Laurel Taylor described Hoex’s text as “a truly astonishing outlier.” In the following interview, Taylor speaks to Hoex and her translator, Caitlin O’Neil, about the multi-layered operations of the epigraph, the difficult of translating wordplay and idioms, and writing with joy.

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 interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

Laurel Taylor (LT): The construction of Gentlemen Callers was really interesting—can you tell us a little bit about what your inspiration was for the novel?

Corinne Hoex (CH): Each time, it’s the situation—of the dreaming woman—that drives the inspiration. It always begins with the concrete, and from there on it’s a mixture of fantasy and reality; something comes from reality and introduces a rupture, an entry into dreams. Whenever the vignette was too realistic, or didn’t abandon reality through some kind of glitch or unexpected detour, I didn’t keep it.

There were texts with characters who were much too banal—a pizza delivery man, a doctor. . . There wasn’t that sparkle, that possible transformation, so I didn’t continue with those dreams. So even more than inspiration, it was an exercise in the material, in the writing process.

But a lot of the dreams, of course, correspond to anecdotes from my own life. For “The Astrologer,” for example, I had taken some astrology classes, and all of it—the books, the Ephemeris, all of those calculations—I found horrid, boring. I imagined this situation where she [the dreaming woman] is seated across from an astrologer, and this astrologer is trying to seduce her, but he’s tactless, he’s insufferable. He says: “My Mars is on your Venus,” and all that, but he isn’t pleasing her, so she waits and tries to find a way to escape. There have often been times in my life—at school, at conferences—when I would like to escape; in this fantasy, since we’re dealing with the stars, the comet comes in through the window and takes the woman away. It’s not the man who seduces the dreaming woman, but the comet.

Similarly, when the narrator’s with the geographer and he bores her, she sees a beautiful polar bear that’s much more pleasing to her. There are sometimes elements which are not human; everything is permitted in dreams. 

LT: Caitlin, how did you first encounter this text? And what made you want to translate it?

Caitlin O’Neil (CO): This is my debut book-length translation, so it was very much my own choice of what text to pursue. When I started, I got some very good advice, which was: for your first translation, make sure that it is a work that you love wholeheartedly. Because you’re going to be working more closely with this text than you have ever worked with any text before in your life, and you are going to work very hard for this text as well. There may be rejections, and you need to love this text so much that you are willing to work through all the rejections that come your way. When I first started, I was coming from an academic background, so this was really a chance for me to dive deep into the world of Francophone literature, and hunt down a book that wasn’t known in the US yet. READ MORE…

Announcing Our April Book Club Selection: Gentlemen Callers by Corinne Hoex

April 28, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

Hoex’s playful romp through the transformative powers of female sensuality . . . toes the line of taste and teases the reader.

In the world of letters, sex is too often strangled with extremes. Whether entrenched in symbolism, proliferate with diverse politics, or avoided altogether, this pervasive element of human experience is too often deprived of its more irreverent, mirthful, and pleasurable evocations. In our Book Club selection for April, award-winning Belgian writer Corinne Hoex presents a series of sexual dreams and fantasies in Gentlemen Callers, a collection that astounds, subverts, and engages with physical pleasure in joy, levity, and dreaminess. Unabashedly funny and fiercely sensual, Hoex’s journey through the erotic is a breathless delight.  

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 interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

Gentlemen Callers by Corinne Hoex, translated from the French by Caitlin O’Neil, Dalkey Archive Press, 2022

Literature has—particularly in the last century or so—become a Serious Business. I’m not speaking here of economics or occupations, but rather the affect of seriousness. Very often, the more tragical, gritty, and dark a tale is, the more lauded its reception becomes. For whatever reason, we have decided that comedy is not as worthy of critical attention or canonization, in spite of the fact that, in my estimation at least, comedy is infinitely harder to pull off. Humor is culturally specific, temporally tied, and situationally contextual, and all of these facets are amplified in the context of translation, where puns and plays become tangled in tongues. This is what makes Gentlemen Callers, by Corinne Hoex, translated from the French by Caitlin O’Neil, a truly astonishing outlier. While French literature enjoys a fairly prolific publication rate in English, the kinds of literature chosen for publication are often cerebral, philosophical, and introspective. Hoex’s series of vignettes, too, are interiorized, in that they are dreamworlds, but they are also fleshy, sensuous, and gilded with a teasing tone firmly rooted (pun intended) in sexual exploration and fulfillment.

Gentlemen Callers is somewhere between a novel and a short story collection; a first-person narrator delivers each brief tale, and her power to call men (and other more fantastical lovers) into her dreams perennially returns, but nearly every chapter is self-contained, and the narrator shapeshifts as she sees fit, all the better to become the tool with which her lovers might exercise their expertise. Each vignette is titled after an occupation, some of which happily gesture to the realm of tried and true pornographic tropes (like The Mailman or The Schoolteacher) while others are more oblique: The Butcher, The Furrier, The Beekeeper. Following each chapter title comes an epigraph, all taken from some of Europe’s most famous canonical authors: Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Émile Zola. As one might expect, all the referenced authors are men, and all the epigraphs gesture to the occupation under examination, albeit some more obliquely than others. The narratorial play here is not only to reference the heights of physical joy one can achieve with a skilled workman, but also to reference the heights of intellectual joy one can achieve when toying with the phantom canon, with the master’s ghost.

Take, for example, the epigraph from “The Young Priest 2,” one of only three vignette continuations in the book. It’s from Thomas à Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ, perhaps one of the most widely read Christian works after the Bible itself. The quote: “How pleasant and sweet to behold brethren fervent and devout, well-mannered and disciplined!” This earnest, chaste sentiment takes on a new and sensually playful valence when paired with the priest’s vignettes, in which a handsome man of the cloth visits the narrator in her dreams and delivers an intercession upon which, “the Holy Spirit enters me. God clasps me in His arms, possesses me with His mouth, radiates His light by waking the wild urges of his servant’s potent sap.” No doubt Kemis himself, who in his teachings stressed silence, solitude, resisting temptation, and purging fleshly pleasures, would be outraged at the implication that actions “fervent and devout” might be found in the narrator’s oblique allusion to fellatio, “kneel[ing] on [her] white cloud, back arched, face upturned, lips parted, surrendering [her] flesh to the Redeemer.” READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: April 2022

April 11, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Arabella Bosworth and Georgina Fooks

Discover new titles from Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad and Korean novelist Kyung-sook Shin, out this month!

In this month’s roundup of translations, we review the works of two iconic feminist writers, Forough Farrokhzad and Kyung-sook Shin, who trace, narrativize, and engage with gender and politics in its most vivid and various forms. In dialogue with the greater schemes of sexuality, passions, and poetics, these women writers work within and trespass the boundaries of their language to paint bold new portraits of the world, as a place lived in the mind.

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Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season by Forough Farrokhzad, translated from the Persian by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., New Directions, 2022

Review by Georgina Fooks, Director of Outreach

A poet of (com)passion: such is just one of the myriad ways to encapsulate the unique encounter with Forough Farrokhzad and her poetry. One of 20th-century Iran’s most celebrated and outspoken poets, she was controversial for the ways in which she lived and loved—openly, in transgression of patriarchal societal norms—and as a result, her work was banned for more than a decade after the Islamic Revolution. Yet, her legacy has lived on in illicit fragments and poems shared between readers, and now she is one of Iran’s best-loved women poets, widely read and translated. Through the work of Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., this latest translation seeks to offer lovers of poetry a comprehensive critical edition of Farrokhzad’s work.

Born in 1934, the poet’s turbulent life was tragically cut short by a car accident in February 1967, leaving us with a nonetheless prolific oeuvre spanning a wide range of creative endeavours. A poet, filmmaker, actress, painter, and more, her work across various formats bears witness to the vibrancy of human life in the face of suffering, and to the wonders and pleasures of living despite overwhelming pressures and pushbacks.

Farrokhzad is undoubtedly a poet of romance. Drawing on a long tradition of Persian love poetry (Rumi was one of her great inspirations, according to Sholeh Wolpé), Farrokhzad’s work remains unique in its fervent declarations of physical and emotional intimacy, opening up possibilities for women poets in the Persian language. The opening poem of the collection, ‘Captive’, points to the vastness of desire:

I want you, and I know that never
will I hold you as my heart desires
You are that clear bright sky
I am a captive bird in the corner of this cage

READ MORE…

To Love God and Women: On The Last One by Fatima Daas

September 16, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Fairuza Hanun

The Last One . . . challenges what constitutes faith and its validity, between society’s shared meaning and love in all its variant forms.

The Last One by Fatima Daas, translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud, Other Press, 2021

Of the human world, love is both conflict and destination. Our understanding of love—what it is, how to do it—is immensely varied, and its dominating presence rules our formative years. To be deprived of, or shamed from, an open expression of love can be a numbing experience, one that rearranges the nucleus of our social interactions and emotional familiarities into a sinister puzzle. Still, no matter in estrangement or intimacy, our lives revolve around our need, or lack thereof, for closeness; the life of The Last One’s narrator, Fatima, is no different. For Fatima, the precariousness of love applies to her human relationships, but are further compared and contrasted with the relationship she nurtures with God.

The novel, comprised of vignettes and fragmented memories, is coalesced by Fatima’s attempt to comprehend, or perhaps mend, the conflicting multiplicity of her self—queer, Muslim, Algerian-French, woman. Each scene opens in a diary-like manner: “My name is Fatima,” followed by a personal fact—sometimes trivial, such as the consequence of her naming or her like/dislike for commuting—and other times, a profound reflective statement: “I regret that no one taught me how to love”. The entire book charts her pilgrimage of probing about in the study of love, of creating and maintaining meaningful and intimate relationships with other people, with God, or with herself. All of this is interlaced with disparate interpretations of cultures and languages, often governed by paternalistic attitudes.

From the beginning, we learn the precious nature of her name—that it “mustn’t be soiled,” or “wassekh”: to “soil, stir shit up, blacken.” The origin and meaning of her name is sacred, derived from the Prophet Muhammad’s beloved daughter Fatima—which means “little weaned she-camel.” She analyses the different definitions of “fatm”—the Arabic for “to wean”—compiling all three in the same paragraph as if to correlate them with one another: “Stop the nursing of a child or a young animal to transition it to a new mode of feeding; feel frustration; separate someone from something or something from someone or someone from someone.” In the same scene, she compares and contrasts her strained familial circumstances with the other Fatima’s:

Like Fatima, I should have had three sisters. […]

Fatima’s father deems her the noblest woman in heaven.

The prophet Mohammed—may God’s peace and blessings be upon him—said one day: “Fatima is a part of me. Any who harm her harm me.”

My father would never say such a thing.

My father doesn’t say much to me anymore. READ MORE…