Posts filed under 'solitude'

Symphonic Eternity: Gustave Roud’s Air of Solitude and Requiem in Review.

His poems evoke all the senses, his landscapes orchestral, described in vivid detail with all their changing lights and colours.

Air of Solitude and Requiem by Gustave Roud, translated from the French by Alexander Dickow and Sean T. Reynolds, Seagull Books, 2020

It is a question of the supreme instant when communion with the world is given to us, when the universe ceases to be a perfectly legible spectacle, entirely inane, to become an immense spray of messages, a concert of cries, songs, gestures ceaselessly beginning again, in which each being, each thing is at once sign and carrier of signs. The supreme instant also at which man feels his laughable inner royalty crumble, and trembles, and gives in to the calls coming from an undeniable elsewhere.

Once again the joy has fled with the change of season at the very moment we were about to come upon it.

Air of Solitude (Air de la solitude), the title of Gustave Roud’s most famous work is perfectly suited to the poet, who lived a secluded life isolated in Carrouge, his Swiss village in the Haut-Jorat. Moreover, it is crucial for the understanding of his poetry, which is rooted in these landscapes and customs, but often seen from an outside perspective. Considered one of Switzerland’s greatest poets, Roud’s work had a profound influence on the younger generation, the most famed of which is his mentee, prominent poet Philippe Jaccottet.

Roud published Air of Solitude in 1945 and Requiem, the second section of this two-part collection, in 1967. Whilst Air of Solitude expresses a celebration of—and nostalgia for—the inhabitants and landscapes of the Vaudois, Requiem displays Roud’s solitude through a personal quest to find a mystical fusion with nature and his beloved mother, who had already passed. This edition of his most important prose poems is now translated for the first time into English by Alexander Dickow and Sean T. Reynolds. READ MORE…

Announcing our July Book Club Selection: A Musical Offering by Luis Sagasti

If silence and solitude go hand in hand, so do music and communion.

After Fireflies’s acclaimed release in 2018, we are thrilled to present our July Book Club selection: Luis Sagasti’s A Musical Offering, the Argentine author’s second translation into English by Charco Press. Out this month in the UK alone, it is an early gift to our subscribers overseas. And what a gift it is: adding plenty of heart to the author’s signature heady humor, this exquisitely lyrical, genre-bending work explores music’s ties to everything from sand paintings to stars—and above all, perhaps, its ability to ward off death and loneliness.

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page

A Musical Offering by Luis Sagasti, translated from the Spanish by Fionn Petch, Charco Press, 2020

In his classic Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter waxes lyrical about the German composer’s BWV 1079. The Musical Offering is, he claims, J.S. Bach’s “supreme accomplishment in counterpoint”: “one large intellectual fugue” rife with forms and ideas, hidden references, and cheeky innuendos. The same could be said of Luis Sagasti’s near-eponymous book (the author humbly drops the “the” for an “a”), out now from Charco Press in Fionn Petch’s seamless rendition.

Anchored in music itself, this magpie suite of literary bites spans centuries, geographies, and disciplines. It opens with an allegedly nonfictional one-pager on the birth of the Goldberg Variations, another Bachian staple: in the retelling, Count Keyserling requests a musical sleep aid, to be executed nightly by the young virtuoso after whom it’ll be later named (a fetching origin story, no doubt, though I must side with those who think it apocryphal; as a seasoned insomniac, I can’t fathom sleeping through the shift from mellow aria to zesty first variatio, let alone the jump to outright fervid fifth).

Whatever its epistemic status—much of the book waltzes gracefully from fact to fiction—the narrative soon leads to something like a micro-essay packing a Borgesian punch: is Goldberg an inverted Scheherezade, Sagasti wonders, his endless performance meant to usher in sleep’s “little death” rather than stall it? These musings, in turn, link to a personal anecdotethe author humming his favorite lullaby—echoed in what can only be described as aphorism: “When a child first learns to hum a melody, the child stops being music and (…) becomes [its] receptacle” (or, ditching poetry for pop, “No child could fall asleep to [the Beatles’s] ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’”). This is just a sample; a thousand and one ties can be drawn among snippets on music and sleep, silence, space, or war, not just within the book’s broadly themed sections but across thema veritable fugue of insights and literary forms. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: May 2020

New work from Hye-Young Pyun, Keiichiro Hirano, Andrés Neuman, and Jazmina Barrera!

The best that literature has to offer us is not resolution, but that Barthian sentiment of recognition—the nakedly exact internal sentiment rescued from wordlessness and placed in a social reality. In this month’s selections of translated works, the authors confront a myriad of trials and ideas—despair, rage, guilt, purpose, obsolescence—with stories that attest equally to the universality of human feelings and the precise specificities of localities. Read reviews of four spectacular texts from Japan, Korea, Spain, and Mexico now:

law of lines

The Law of Lines by Hye-Young Pyun, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell, Arcade Publishing, 2020

Review by Marina Dora Martino, Assistant Editor

How does the world change us? Is it life and its unpredictable events that bend us; or is it something more fundamental, something that has always been hatching inside ourselves, ready to ripen at the right occasion? These questions act as the fundamental hinges of The Law of Lines, a novel written by South Korean author Hye-Young Pyun and translated by Sora Kim-Russell. Although ambitious and abstract, these existential questions acquire here a concrete form—they are investigated—not by philosophical or religious means—through the stories of two young women, Se-oh and Ki-jeong. Set in the vast South Korean suburban world, The Law of Lines travels through injustice, poverty, and grief, and exposes the thin threads that run between people who didn’t even know they were connected.

Ki-jeong is a teacher. She doesn’t like teaching—actually, she hates it. To get through her day, Ki-jeong transforms her life into a performance, and herself into a mere act of herself. Only in this way she manages, with varying degrees of success, to hide her frustration, her disengagement, and her lack of empathy for the people around her. Se-oh is a young woman who lives as a semi-recluse at her father’s house. She doesn’t go out because she fears the world, that churning machine that ruins and distorts everything. Ki-jeong and Se-oh don’t have dreams of a better life, or not exactly. They are dormant and static. But their stillness is not only a desire for tranquillity—it’s a method for concealment.

Soon, the world presents them with irreversible and unpredictable events, and their apparently quiet lives break irrevocably. In the middle of a stressful day at school, Ki-jeong receives a mysterious phone call that throws her on a desperate search for the truth. Her half-sister, the one Ki-jeong and her mother had never managed to really love, becomes her only thought and anchor to reality. Se-oh is almost home after one of her rare trips to the stores when she is startled by the view of her house enveloped by fire. She sees the paramedics carrying away a man on a barrel, and from then on, her life turns into a quest—to track down and plan the destruction of the man she blames for everything that went wrong. READ MORE…

Announcing our March Book Club Selection: Three Apples Fell From the Sky by Narine Abgaryan

Given the array of epic horrors she alludes to, Abgaryan could’ve opted for fast-paced . . . narration; instead, she goes for delicate portraiture.

On the tails of its celebrated success in Russia, Narine Abgaryan’s award-winning novel, Three Apples Fell From the Sky, is now available to English-language readers in Lisa C. Hayden’s expert translation. This tripartite tale takes on the form and mysticism of fable to spin a narrative of a village constantly at the mercy of catastrophe, and, as Josefina Massot points out in this following review, may act as a poignant response to our current age of precarity. With its characteristically sensitive descriptions, Abgaryan’s work explores the human things that evolve in the aftermath of disaster; in times that teeter on the edge of dystopia, it invites us to read our lives into them—a reminder that one of literature’s most enduring gifts is its expansiveness.

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Three Apples From the Sky by Narine Abgaryan, translated from the Russian by Lisa C. Hayden, Oneworld Publications, 2020

They say the best way to ward off anxiety is to focus on the here and now. At the moment, though, “here” is a seemingly shrinking apartment and “now” is any time I hit refresh on decidedly growing pandemic statistics. It’s been that way for weeks, so when Abgaryan’s novel hit my inbox (my locked down city’s impermeable to foreign paperbacks), I was desperate for a folktale. What better than a nowhere, no-when land to flee the grim here-and-now—a tale that would end happily, or at the very least end, flouting the boundless infection curves that plagued my feeds and fed my dread?

Three Apples Fell From the Sky isn’t the strictly uchronic utopia I’d expected: most of it unfolds in the Armenian village of Maran during the twentieth century. When I googled “Maran Armenia,” however, I found no such place, and the search I then ran on “Մառան Հայաստան,” courtesy of Google Translate, yielded a stub on a village for which “no population data had been retained.” In fact, there seems to be no data at alljust an unverified note on villagers’ deaths and deportations during the Genocide. As far as I was concerned, Maran might as well have been fictional. Grounding the novel in time proved equally tricky: save for a few scattered references to telegrams or left-wing revolutions, its protagonists could’ve just as easily lived through the 2015 constitutional referendum or the Russo-Persian Wars. My sense of chronology was further challenged by recurring flashbacks, occasional changes in verb tense, and the Maranians’ own cluelessness regarding dates. Near perfect fodder for escapism, you’d think, but by the time I’d put it down, I was more firmly rooted in the times than ever. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from “A Cold Season” by Jin Yucheng

The drizzle fell steadily, and in the night, the shallow bridge, the village houses, all faded in the distance, so I could see nothing clearly.

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, novelist Jin Yucheng captures memories of Suzhou in this haunting excerpt from “A Cold Season.” Jin’s Proustian narrator evokes scenes which portend his sense of misplacement: buildings are ragged shades of decay; pedestrians roam silently like spirits; a young man appears pallid and skeletal as he laments his lost love, whose beauty is described as “bleak.” The only breaks in the town’s somber quiet are the omnipresent folksongs which seem to follow the narrator. Jin is a virtuoso of temporality and consciousness; here he slows down and speeds up the narrative via exquisite sensory detail. “Back then,” the narrator begins, though the recalled images of gloom are obfuscated by time and the town’s cold rain.

Back then, I could still sit by the bank all day, watching boats, looking at the town’s bridges. There were shops on both banks, the narrow streets boarded on top with awnings to protect them from the rain and sun. During the rainy season the buildings were ragged and gloomy, the color of mildew and decay. Pedestrians passed each other in a breathless, soundless silence, as intangible as spirits. It was a mournful scene. If you pushed open the window casements, inlaid with shell, you could hear the plaintive sound of girls singing folktales alongside the pluck of silken strings, filling the town with their poetry. Only in the pitch dark nights, by the lights from between the green plastered walls, could you see the fishing lights far off on the lake. READ MORE…

Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: History. A Mess. by Sigrún Pálsdóttir

We forget that we are reading someone else’s testimony and begin to take speculation as hard truth.

This month’s Asymptote Book Club selection, History. A Mess. by Sigrún Pálsdóttir, asks us to reconsider our understanding of how history is constructed. The protagonist, an academic who “leads an almost unpunctuated domestic existence of solitude and paranoia,” makes a shocking discovery about the secret identity of a seventeenth-century writer—and then seems to disprove her own theory. As the protagonist becomes increasingly unstable, her erratic prose leads the reader to reflect on the tenuous boundary between stories and history.

Lytton Smith’s translation of History. A Mess. is the twentieth title selected by the Asymptote Book Club, which brings outstanding translated fiction to readers each month. You can sign up to receive next month’s book on our website or join the online discussion on our Facebook page.

Translator Lytton Smith told Splice that “the Icelandic language doesn’t have two distinct words for story and history. It uses the same word, saga, and so those two ways of writing are more closely connected for Icelanders than they are for us.” As such, they are more concerned with storytelling as a craft, fidelity to emotional truth above accuracy to facts. Yet Sigrún Pálsdóttir’s novel, History. A Mess., seemingly centers around historical fact: a text whose existence could make or break an academic career.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “He Who Is Worthy of Love” by Abdellah Taïa

I am gay. Gayer now than ever.

As countries around the world celebrate Pride Month, this week’s Translation Tuesday reminds us of the challenges many members of the LGBTQ+ community still face every day. In this short story by Moroccan writer Abdellah Taïa, a gay man agonizes over the death of his mother, with whom he had a fraught relationship, and reflects on the power of both her disapproval and her love.

“My mother has gotten younger. The wrinkles on her face are gone. Look. Look. Her skin is brighter. You can see her veins. They’re blue. You can see the inside of her. Look. Look. It’s red, red. Mother’s younger than us now. She’s sleeping. That’s all. She won’t cry out anymore.”

It’s your daughter Samira who says this about you. And I’m surprised. More than surprised. She’s not afraid of you dead. She’s not gripped by any strange feeling or vertigo. You’re her mother. You’re dead. In an hour she won’t be able to touch you anymore, to physically feel the link to you. She’s not afraid at all. She looks at you. She sees you like she’s never seen you before. She puts her hand on your face. She says “my little mom” and she doesn’t cry. Like the other sisters, she stays focused, she doesn’t want to miss this last real moment with you, she doesn’t want to spoil this ritual. She puts all her heart into it. She forgives you, for absolutely everything. She says it.

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The Postcolonial Kitchen: Vietnamese Recipes from Marguerite Duras’ Childhood

Duras’ recipes illustrate how cooking—like literature, like memory—is a subjective experience in a continual state of being perfected.

The prolific French writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras is perhaps best known for her novel The Lover, winner of the 1984 Prix Goncourt, as well as for her 1959 Oscar-nominated screenplay Hiroshima mon amour. In 1987, she published a collection of texts entitled La vie matérielle (Practicalities), in which she relates “everything and nothing” relating to her life, from her work to everyday thoughts. Duras was an avid cook and had intended to include some of her recipes in the collection, too. Ultimately, though, while some recipes made it into La vie matérielle, most did not. After Duras’s death in 1996, her son Jean Mascolo sought to rectify this by publishing the slim volume La Cuisine de Marguerite (Benoît Jacob), a collection of his mother’s recipes as recorded in her handwritten notebook. After a false start in 1999 when Duras’s literary executor blocked its sale, the book was finally republished and circulated in 2014.

The recipes in La Cuisine de Marguerite are a captivating mix of flavors and influences. This can be expected from any collection of recipes curated over a lifetime. However, given her international experiences, Duras’s collection ranges wider than many others. Traditional French fare is sparsely represented in her recipe book, with leek soup, vichyssoise, and chicken liver pâté scattered here and there among the more plentiful offerings of further-off origins: nasi goreng from Indonesia, rougail sauce from Réunion, spare ribs from the U.S. The recipes are mostly brief, though some are characterized by spirited notes, such as her instructions for Dublin coddle (“The Irish will tell you: add more wine […] Don’t listen to them.”) and gazpacho (“The Spanish use broth in the place of water. They’re wrong.”). In the preface to the book, Jean Mascolo writes that the book “has no other pretense than to evoke Marguerite Duras in a daily activity that she did not hesitate, with a smile, to make as creative as her writing.”

Among the most personal recipes in the book are those originating from the place of Duras’s birth in 1914: the Gia Định province in French Indochina, near what is now known as Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Duras was the middle child and only daughter of two schoolteachers who had answered the French colonial government’s call for volunteers. Her father died early on, plunging the family into poverty, after which her mother allowed the children near-complete freedom. Unlike the other colonists, the siblings were allowed to play with Vietnamese children, and Duras spoke fluent Vietnamese. She had no taste for French foods—the Normandy apples and the meat that her mother occasionally served the family—preferring rice, soups from street vendors, and fresh fish cooked in nuoc-mâm, Vietnamese fish sauce.

READ MORE…