Posts filed under 'spirituality'

Announcing Our February Book Club Selection: Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek

February 29, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan

Where the Wind Calls Home sidesteps the instant of carnage and cruelty, focusing instead on its shattered aftermath. . .

Where the Wind Calls Home, Syrian author Samar Yazbek’s latest novel to be translated into English, is a stunning offering of spirituality, memory, and all those implacable, liminal spaces wherein only the mind may venture. Written from the perspective of a young soldier as he lays dying from his wounds, Yazbek describes both the unthinkable wreckages of conflict and the translucent totems of faith with her singular musicality and vividity, tracing backwards through recollections and reveries to collage all the brute realities of civil war with the individuals whose rich internal lives pattern the battlefields.

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. 

Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price, World Editions, 2024

There is an unforgettable moment in Adania Shibli’s Touch when the child narrator, through whose eyes the world arrives in intensities of colour and sensation, attempts to decipher words emanating from the TV. Amid the flotsam and jetsam of indistinct syllables, she finally makes out “Sabra and Shatila”. She thinks then not of the horrific massacre in Beirut but of the sabr cactus growing in her vicinity; the name, stripped out of the matrix of history, can only signify as something tangible, close at hand.

Such strategies of defamiliarisation came to mind while I was immersed in the free-floating atmospheres of Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home. Its oneiric rhythms, elegantly recreated in the English translation by Leri Price, mimic the roving consciousness of an adolescent soldier, known only as Ali. Forcibly conscripted into the frontlines of the Syrian Civil War, he survives an enemy attack in the Latakia mountains only to hover on the edge of death. As he struggles to regain a feeling of where his injured, possibly dismembered body might begin and end, his mind takes flight; memories of childhood creep back into him. Time on the narrative surface runs the course of a single day, blue sky shading into a “raw and tender” moon. Beneath reality seethes the inexpressible current of remembrance, obeying its own laws of sequence and cadence.

Yazbek is more interested in the sensuous immediacies of embodiment than in the airy abstractions of power. Her previous offering, Planet of Clay—a finalist for the 2021 National Book Awards, also translated by Price—inhabited the perspective of a mute girl, similarly caught starkly within the crossfires on the Civil War. Against its barbarities, she seeks a sanctuary in crayoned drawings and imagined planets. Even in Yazbek’s non-fictional accounts of revolutionary betrayal, ranging from the diaristic to the journalistic, she retains a similar sensibility: “Oh spinning world, if my little heart, as small as a lump of coal, is wider than your borders, I know how narrow you are!” READ MORE…

Casting the Spell: Damion Searls on Translating Jon Fosse’s A Shining

November 23, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Georgina Fooks

There is this very human, normal, everyday level, and at the same time there's this big, spiritual, complicated stuff.

Jon Fosse’s A Shining is both a luminous entryway for newcomers to the Norwegian author, and a fine distillation of Fosse’s long-running themes for familiar fans. We are proud to feature this latest English offering of the Nobel laureate as our October Book Club selection, and in this monthly interview with the translator, Damion Searls talks to Georgina Fooks about following rhythms, the translator as reader, and making his own rules. 

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.  

Georgina Fooks: To begin, congratulations on the Nobel Prize! I know the Swedish Academy likely would have been reading Fosse in Norwegian, but there’s no doubt that your translations of Fosse into English have been so important for the increased critical reception of his work.

Damion Searls: Thank you! Something that’s worth telling people who aren’t in the book business – I know Asymptote is well aware of this – is that for better or for worse (mainly for worse), English is the language that matters professionally for world literature. A German publisher told me a couple of years ago that if they have a book, they can get it translated into five or six languages, but it’s not until it gets a review in the Guardian UK or in the New Yorker that they can sell it to twenty or thirty languages—and they also told me that this is increasingly the case. English really is the gateway to bigger success for every other language; it’s not going to be a worldwide, translated-everywhere success unless it goes through English first.

The thing about Fosse—which Americans and English audiences don’t really know—is that he’s incredibly famous worldwide as a playwright. He is, from what I’ve read, the most produced playwright alive today. There have been productions of his plays in fifty languages all over the world, and it’s just never taken off in England or America. And there is a question asked about Fosse’s work: is it inaccessible? Well, if he’s the most produced playwright in the world, then by definition, it’s accessible. He was honoured with many prizes in Europe and in Norway before the English translations.

It’s not the case that the English publication raised him from obscurity, but it does seem to be a kind of stepping stone to things like the Nobel or to more translations. I know that now, Septology is being sold to dozens more languages than it had been before. READ MORE…

Announcing Our May Book Club Selection: Venom by Saneh Sangsuk

May 31, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla

For every moment of beauty, there is the shadow of cruelty hanging in the background.

A story about the dissolving borders between human and animal, life and death, love and cruelty, Venom by Saneh Sangsuk is a kind of philosophical fairy tale, with both danger and beauty always lurking at its edges. Told through shifting perspectives in poetic prose, this slim novel is densly packed with ideas and energy, providing a thrilling introduction to Sangsuk’s work for English-language readers.

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.

Venom by Saneh Sangsuk, translated from the Thai by Mui Poopoksakul, Peirene Press, 2023

The world is full of poetry; the world is full of cruelty—this is not a contradiction. As I read Saneh Sangsuk’s deceptively slim novel Venom, I was reminded of Laura Gilpin’s “Two-Headed Calf.” At barely nine lines, Gilpin’s poem also has depth that reaches far beyond its brevity. The first stanza begins with a warning (that the idyllic pastoral will soon be disrupted), while the final stanza establishes a heart-wrenching and melancholic portrait of a recently-born, two-headed calf revelling in the light of the moon, “the wind on the grass,” and the warmth of its mother. The beauty of Gilpin’s poem lies in the way it holds two worlds in its lines, but also in how it makes possible for a cruel tomorrow to never arrive. In a sense, by returning to this poem, we are returning to a moment in another world where a two-headed calf—this “freak of nature”—is frozen in an eternal evening of joy and love.

I found in Venom the same sensations, the same negotiation between poetic beauty and cruelty. The former comes quickly and easily, as the book opens with a little boy contemplating a mesmerizing sunset in the Thai countryside: “Over the horizon to the west, the clouds of summer, met from behind by sunlight, glowed strange and lustrous and beautiful.” Additionally, the first thing we learn about this boy is that he was granted the privilege of naming his family’s eight oxen, and he had been eager to fulfil this task with care and artistic flare. He calls the animals by names like “Field, Bank, Jungle and Mountain—Toong, Tah, Pah and Khao,” and “Ngeun and Tong, Silver and Gold,” or “Pet, Ploy, Ngeun and Tong.” These group of names speak to him with prosodic logic: some rhyme, and others provide a chance for alliteration. All in all, they belong to a group of words that “sounded like [they] could be poetry,” a phrase that Sangsuk repeats twice. This act of naming, the author suggests, is an act of writerly creation. While the world is not inherently poetic, some people are more prone to make poetry from its elements. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2023

April 24, 2023  |  in News  |  by Meghan Racklin and Xiao Yue Shan

Diving deep into the issue with spotlights on Bolivia, Ukraine, Romania, and more!

Our Spring 2023 issue is alive. Animated with the wide plethora of voices, lifeforms, and phenomenon from thirty different countries, this selection of world literature is moving, feeling, singing, and changing—wonderfully emblematic of writing’s capacities to transcend the page or the screen. To aid you in your explorations of this multivalent “Vivarium,” our blog editors present their favourites from the issue, including our first ever feature of Bolivian literature, and work from Portugal’s famed modernist, Fernando Pessoa. 

“Love does not fulfill itself,” the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy once wrote, “it always arrives in the promise and as the promise.” Though it seems almost flippant, in this line is the (not so well-kept) secret that has always led me to look for love in poems, that moves me to believe there is still no better medium than poetry to offer us love’s canyons and shadows, and that it is the poem’s purposeful language which allows us to seek love out—not in the validating or reciprocating constructs of daily life, but in truer forms: those sublime visions, conquerings of time, and suspensions of reality. Nancy knew that love is unfulfillable because its absolution is impossible, but it still comes to us as inextricable from eternity: the promise of love is love’s own perpetuity, the promise that love’s law is the one that overcomes all others. And though there are great, sweeping narratives of love in novels, there are wondrous portrayals of love in theatre and in cinema, there are photographs and paintings that capture love’s possibilities and devastations, but the reason I return to the poem is that it, too, is a form that recognises its own innate impossibility (because how can a word capture any of this), and then goes on to form its own laws, which enact the impossible.

Mariana Berenice Bredow Vargas’s alluring, propulsive work, “Let it Go,” is one of the most magical love poems I have come across in some time. Translated with the expert, time-keeping ear of Forrest Gander (whose prowess is especially evident in his rendering of the last lines), the piece begins with an invitation and does not wait a beat before seemingly taking us by the hand to sweep over the landscape, magic carpet-ing over the exhaustive obligations of everyday patterns and collected burdens, up and towards the vast and imagined horizon that separates the awake and the dreamed, into the kaleidoscoped marvels and cacophonic frequencies of everything the world has to offer. The poem is an exalted plea for the lover to recognise the availability of immense beauty and profound joy, but also a tender admittance that one can only get there travelling alongside another: “. . . there’s life // dreaming you past the pain, let’s go, I want / to dream it too . . .” Balancing the imploring voice of a hopeful romantic with the resonant fact that fantasy is essential to anyone wanting to live, within Vargas’s impatient call is the promise of love—a promise so beautiful, it almost doesn’t need to be kept. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 10, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Eva Wissting, and José García Escobar

Dispatches from Central America, Sweden, and Hong Kong!

This week at Asymptote, our Editors at Large report on the use of artificial intelligence in publishing, the return of in-person events in Hong Kong’s literary scene, and exciting award announcements! From a new book of poetry to multi-disiplinary festivals, read on to learn more!

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America

In February, Guatemalan poet Eduardo Villalobos published his latest book of poems entitled Ixtab (Catafixia Editorial), which draws inspiration from the Mesoamerican deity of suicide. Ixtab is Eduardo’s fourth book of poems, and he remains one of Guatemala’s most celebrated poets today. He has been invited to renowned festivals in Guatemala and around the world, such as the Copenhagen Literature Festival and the Festival Internacional de Poesía de Quetzaltenango.

Also in February, Slash and Burn by El Salvadorean writer Claudia Hernández and translated by Julia Sanches, was announced as the runner-up of the Premio Valle Iclán, awarded each year by the UK’s The Society of Authors. Hernández is the author of four novels and several short story collections and in 2004, she earned the prestigious Anna Seghers Prize. Slash and Burn was also shortlisted for the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize.

READ MORE…

Fact and Fantasy in the Black Forest: An Interview with Alexander Pechmann

September 20, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Anna Rumsby

The Austrian author’s latest spiritual adventure story asks readers to consider the nature of time.

Die Zehnte Muse (The Tenth Muse), published by Steidl in 2020, is a genre-bending novel set in the Black Forest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The story focuses on two main characters, Algernon Blackwood and Paul Severin. Blackwood is modelled on the twentieth-century supernatural author of the same name, well known for his short stories “The Willows” (1907) and “The Wendigo” (1910), while Severin is modelled on the German expressionist painter Karl Hofer. The novel centres on the mystery of Talitha, a timeless figure both men develop fixations on, twenty years apart, after glimpsing her in the forest.

Pechmann deftly weaves together strands of philosophy and layers of storytelling in under two hundred pages. On some levels, the book feels like a classic gothic ghost story. There are all the major elements: a forest; restless, disillusioned young men; a creepy, strict religious boarding school; a supernatural presence. But the book also covers the nature of time, dreams, spiritualism, and the occult, the psychological, Gnosticism, art history, translation, and Yenish culture. The Yenish are a nomadic people from central Europe, whose distinct culture emerged in the early nineteenth century, although the Yenish language predates this. Here, Pechmann discusses the many-layered novel and the enduring mystery of Talitha.

Anna Rumsby (AR): How would you classify this genre? I’m tempted to say neogothic, but it’s also a fairy tale, historical fiction, a semi-biography, and in some places almost a philosophical essay.

Alexander Pechmann (AP): In some reviews, the book was called a “Künstlerroman” (art novel) or a psychological ghost story. That’s OK, but I like to call it—as well as my other novels—a “spiritual adventure” or “adventure of the soul,” in contrast to “adventures of the mind,” such as detective stories or science fiction, or “adventures of the heart,” such as stories about love and relationships.

Adventures of the soul are rooted in dreams and make use of ancient traditions, fairy tales, superstitions, and religious ideas. Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen wrote this kind of fiction, and Blackwood also had a certain love for symbolistic paintings. Symbolism had a strong influence on me while I was working on the novel, but I feel also close to the Romantics with their deep love for nature, and classic Austrian writers like Leo Perutz who mixed historical facts with fantasy.

AR: How did your experience as a translator and linguist inform this novel? There’s a huge attention to language—I’m thinking specifically of the Bible translation chapter regarding Talitha, but there’s a great blend of English, German, French, and Yenish throughout.

AP: I have a special interest in writers who move freely between cultures and languages. I’m thinking of Lafcadio Hearn, who was born in Greece, grew up in England, went to the USA, and ended up in Japan, or Marmaduke Pickthall, who went to Syria as a young man and would be the first English translator of the Holy Quran. Algernon Blackwood spoke German and French fluently and was also a traveller between cultures. The attention to language in Die Zehnte Muse grew naturally out of the fact that the school of the Moravian Brothers in Königsfeld was and still is visited by students from all over the world. Also, the Black Forest, the background of the novel and place where I live, has always been a melting pot of different languages, dialects, and cultures. While working on the novel, I learned more about Yenish and was astonished that this language uses both Hebrew and Yiddish words. This fit in perfectly with my idea that Talitha was accepted by the Yenish, even though she obviously came from some other ancient culture.

AR: Who or what is Talitha?

AP: In my first draft, she was just a wild child, living in the forest. I knew she was somehow related to the Yenish, so I was searching for typical Yenish names. I liked Talisha or Talitha best, and then I read the story of a priest’s daughter named Talitha who was raised from the dead by Jesus. This opened up new possibilities for my story. Could someone who was resurrected by Jesus grow old and die like a normal person? What if this girl was damned to live on and on? I do not answer this question in the novel and leave it up to the reader to decide whether she was just a lost Yenish girl, the ghost of a murdered girl, or the resurrected biblical Talitha. She might also just be a fantasy of Paul Severin, she might have stepped right out of Maurice Denis’s painting, or she could be even an incarnation of time itself. 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…

The Personal Apocalyptic Journey: On Liliana Ursu’s Clay and Star

December 19, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by MARGENTO

Only long, silent, patient, and focused respites spent really close to things . . . will perhaps spawn such indelible images.

Clay and Star: Selected Poems of Liliana Ursu, translated from the Romanian by Mihaela Moscaliuc, Etruscan Press, 2019

With an impressive record of thirteen collections in Romanian and five collections in English translation, it is no wonder Liliana Ursu has now arrived with a generous (over seventy pages) collection of selected poetry, published by Etruscan Press in Mihaela Moscaliuc’s translation.

It is just that, unlike your usual (American) volume of selected poetry, the book does not divide the poems by their appearance in previous collections, but simply lists their titles in the contents, every now and then mentioning under their last line where and when they were written. Other poems mention the location in the very title—Văratec Monastery in northern Romania, for instance, is both frequently present and representative of the poetics, but Sibiu, Bucharest, Boston, and San Francisco also appear—while others are dedicated, in their epigraphs, to people met in those places. The book thus amounts to a sort of journey that, while capturing fleeting specifics of literal locales in snapshots, is most prevalently a progress of the soul.

The confessional therefore sets the tone, but is at the same time placed in multifaceted perspectives that render the speaker both observant and observed. The title of a poem meaningfully speaks—for instance—of the “poem composed while being watched by a bird.” The multiple angles are accompanied by a functional synaesthesia that brings together the senses and speech alike. READ MORE…

Prose Against the City: Ibrahim Al-koni and the Matters of the Desert

October 31, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by MK Harb

Al-koni is . . . giving the desert an ideological value that he believes has been lost.

Emptiness, desolation, and thirst—these evocations of the desert are the ones most familiar to the bulk of us, but for some, this wild landscape resists such simple evaluations, holding instead a kingdom of history, knowledge, and narrative. In this essay, anthropologist and writer MK Harb takes us through the literature of the North African author Ibrahim Al-koni, whose sagas reveal the historic philosophy that these regions have preserved. Despite the othering hierarchical nature that has plagued literature, Al-koni’s writings invoke tender and human shapes from his landscapes, arising from that mysterious creature: the Sahara. 

MK Harb recommends listening to this playlist while reading this article and the works of Al-Koni.

The mahri convulsed and its skin turned bloody red. It jittered with pain, its stomach containing a fire burning within and howled “Aw-a-a-a-a-a-a-a.”

Ukhayadd had given the mahri a silphium plant known for its magical capabilities for physical healing, but also for its mind-twisting qualities. Ukhayadd himself began to convulse, through his emotions he felt every bit of the pain the mahri was going through. He pleaded to the various gods in the Sahara from Allah to those guarding the temples to transfer the pain on to him. He yelled “Lord, divide his share of pain. Let me be the one to lighten his burden,” but the mahri still jittered and yelled “Awa-a-a-a-a-a-a.”

Ukhayadd’s emotions then turned to anger. He pleaded with the mahri, yelling “do you think you can escape your fate? Brave men do not try to run from themselves. Wise men do not try to flee from fate.” Ukhayadd did not see the mahri as a horse. He shared with him a sort of otherworldly love and addressed him with the various emotional capacities you would with a human. 

This imagery ripe with lore and the transfiguration of pain comes to us through the words of the novelist Ibrahim Al-koni. Al-koni is a prolific writer, having penned over eighty novels, with his most famous being The Bleeding of the Stone (translated by May Jayyusi) and Desert Gold (translated by Elliot Kolla), from which this preceding passage of Ukhayyad and the mahri comes. Al-koni hails from Libya, though he does not identify as a Libyan author; while he comes from the land that is now nationally defined as Libya, he is unwilling to commit to nationalist or modern labels. Having grown up in the traditions of the Tuareg, an Amazigh group that inhabits the borders in and out of the Sahara and whose cultural and geographic traditions were heavily disrupted by the imposition of colonial and national borders, this nomadic upbringing seeps throughout his words. His writing is divorced from a need to construct urban environments or a sense of linear time and space; instead, it is imbued with a Sahrawi melancholy, which conjures up vast plateaus that are full of events as enthralling as those unfolding in cities.

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Translation Tuesday: Xenia Emelyanova, Untitled

November 27, 2018  |  in Translations  |  by Katherine E. Young

“Once upon a time,” I hear. “We were alive, we lived, bred impassability in our heads,

Xenia Emelyanova’s luminous “A golden cloud goes to fetch / the evening star” is dedicated to Russian punk singer Yanka Dyagileva who drowned under mysterious circumstances in 1991. Dyagileva’s final recording, “Pridyot voda” (The Water is Coming), includes the refrain “The water is coming / I will sleep.”

In this poem, as in her other work, Emelyanova explores what it means to be a woman, mother, and artist alienated from her surroundings and, at the same time, inextricably bound to them. Emelyanova’s poems resonate with an inner spirituality tied to nature, motherhood, and a certain faith in eternity and rebirth that shines through even the deepest suffering. For the translator, these poems present particular problems of register because their simplicity, sincerity, and spirituality are qualities difficult to render in contemporary English, where so much of our poetic discourse is highly self-conscious and skeptical.

READ MORE…