Posts filed under 'War'

The Air Itself Becomes Lead: On Mona Kareem’s I Will Not Fold These Maps

August 10, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Ruwa Alhayek

Are these scenes, these stanzas, dreams, memories, or prophecies? Or are they metaphors?

I Will Not Fold These Maps by Mona Kareem, translated from the Arabic by Sara Elkamel, Poetry Translation Centre, 2023

In 1986, just one year before the poet Mona Kareem was born, the stateless Arab population of Kuwait, who had been denied citizenship when Kuwait declared its independence in 1961, became categorized as illegal residents. Despite enjoying relatively equal status to Kuwaiti nationals until then, approximately 250,000 people were stripped of their access to free education, housing, and healthcare. Following the Iraqi invasion and the subsequent war of 1991, many of the Bidoon community, including Kareem’s mother’s family, were expelled from their positions or deported outside of Kuwait, accused of collaborating with the enemy. Forced to flee their homes, they became internal refugees when they arrived at Kuwait’s border with Iraq. For Kareem, memories of such scenes from childhood bleed into the present moment, where she is exiled in the US and denied the opportunity to visit the country in which she was born, as well as the members of her family who still reside there. I Will Not Fold These Maps, translated by Sara Elkamel, is a curated collection of poems covering twenty years of Kareem’s poetry, both previously published and new. It is a collection marred by exile, war, and the fraught relationships and ruins they leave in their wake.

Kareem’s poems are replete with unique images—they paint scenes in language that mirror the chaos of memory, the fragmentation of exile, and the mutilation of war. As Elkamel points out in her introduction, it seems that everything in Kareem’s poems has a body—one that bears the brunt of individual and collective traumas. At the same time, the poet is at a loss regarding what to do with her own body, as she tells us in her poem “My Body, My Vehicle” (Jasadī Markabatī). Her vehicle of a body is not one she can park or abandon just anywhere, for

When I go shopping, my wheels shatter
the glossy ceramic floors
and when I go to the beach
she sinks into the sand

small and dark, completed and broke
her windows are an almanac of winds
and her voice falters at rush hour.

READ MORE…

Come, Sisters: In Memory of Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ

July 26, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Thuy Dinh

In my memory, Mỹ Dạ’s speech takes on the resonance of wind chimes, softly rolling pebbles, and rustling waves.

In this essay, Thuy Dinh, one of the translators of Vietnamese poet Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ, remembers and reflects on the visual beauty, delicate music, and subtle dissonances of her work, in light of her recent passing.

On July 6, 2023, Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ, one of Vietnam’s major poets whose poetry was featured in Asymptote’s July 2013 issue, passed away in Saigon, Vietnam, due to complications from Alzheimer’s. She was 74.

An author of several acclaimed poetry collections and children’s stories, Mỹ Dạ attended the Nguyễn Du Writing School in Hà Nội in 1983 and Russia’s Maxim Gorky Institute of Advanced Studies in Literature in 1988. In 2007, she was awarded the National Prize in Literature and the Arts ⸺Vietnam’s highest literary honor ⸺ for her three poetry collections: Trái Tim Sinh Nở (The Blossoming Heart), Bài Thơ Không Năm Tháng (Poems Without Years), and Đề Tặng Một Giấc Mơ (Dedicated to a Dream). Her last two collections, Soul Brimming with Wild Chrysanthemums (Hồn Đầy Hoa Cúc Dại) and The Love Poems of Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ (Thơ Tình Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ) were also published in 2007. In the U.S., Green Rice, an anthology of Mỹ Dạ’s select poems, co-translated by poet Martha Collins and myself, represents her poetic legacy in translation.

I first met Mỹ Dạ in the summer of 2000 in Boston, Massachusetts, when she came to the William Joiner Institute as part of an invited four-member delegation of writers from Vietnam. I had come to the Institute that summer to attend workshops in translation and creative nonfiction; serendipitously, Martha, who taught the translation workshop, was looking for a Vietnamese co-translator to work with her on an anthology of Mỹ Dạ’s poetry. I happily embarked on this project, sensing that this collaboration—besides being my first major translation project⸺would also give me an immersive opportunity to study an important female poet from “the other side.” As a young writer whose family had been airlifted out of Saigon by U.S. military personnel near the end of the Vietnam War, I knew very little at the time about literature from the Communist perspective. We were still in the early years of the internet, and barely five years into the normalization of U.S-Vietnam relations.

Most of all, I was drawn to the prospect of translating Mỹ Dạ’s work by the voice of the poet herself—a voice that I have found, in person and through her writing, to be artlessly nuanced. I was born in the south, years after the 1954 separation of North and South Vietnam, but have remained deeply attuned to my family’s Hà Nội accent; as such, I had to learn to decode Mỹ Da’s voice. Her melodious Central Vietnamese cadence gradually revealed a mordant sense of humor that was not too different from my late maternal grandfather’s Northern brand of sarcasm. In my memory, Mỹ Dạ’s speech takes on the resonance of wind chimes, softly rolling pebbles, and rustling waves.  READ MORE…

The 2023 PEN/Heim Grantees Talk Translation: Part III

June 5, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Margaret Litvin, Noor Habib, Priyamvada Ramkumar, and Zara Khadeeja Majoka

. . .to rely not on formulaic logic but the magical leaping flame that brings to life static words on a page, that defamiliarizes. . .

In this three-part series, Asymptote has asked the 2023 PEN/Heim grantees to talk about their work in progress; their responses, brimming with excitement, conviction, and connection, are a testament to how much translators put themselves into their labor. Through the varied approaches and languages, they share the important commonality of surety: that the work they’ve been entrusted with has an immense potential to illuminate our reality, enlarge our world, and enrich our experiences of literature.

For this final instalment, Margaret Litvin is moved by the living mind behind the words; Priyamvada Ramkumar renders a vivid polyphony of suffering and survival; and co-translators Noor Habib and Zara Khadeeja Majoka work together on poems that both gather and transcend meaning.

Margaret Litvin on Khalil Alrez:

At first it was the rhythm of his sentences: polished and wry, leisurely but not ornamented, like no Arabic prose style I had seen. Next it was the Russianisms: what were all these references to Chekhov, Turgenev, and Bondarchuk doing in contemporary Damascus, as if tailor-made for my research on the literary legacies of Arab-Soviet ties? Finally, it was the personality of Syrian novelist Khalil Alrez himself, glimpsed through every gleaming line. Who else could write such a lovable and quirky novel while escaping from bombed-out Damascus suburbs through Turkey and Greece, eventually completing it in a refugee shelter in Brussels? Who else, well aware of Russia’s role in the war, would set that novel in a fictional zoo run by a Russian former journalist named Victor Ivanitch, and furnish it with a wall newspaper, two wolves, three eagles, a hyena, an Afghan hound, and her friend the poodle Moustache? Khalil and I spoke over Zoom, and for a while I told myself I was just asking questions, not preparing to translate the book. But who was I kidding? The Russian Quarter had captivated me; I needed to share it.

Keeping the Syrian civil war in the background for most of the novel, The Russian Quarter reads nothing like a news dispatch. The action stays close to the unnamed narrator and his Russian-speaking girlfriend Nonna, who live in a rooftop room inside the zoo, next to rebel-held Ghouta. The book’s moral center is a giraffe. Time plays Proustian games, uncoiling spirals of memory. The virtuosic opening paragraph sets up the tension between the narrator’s mounting anxiety (his girlfriend is late in a war zone) and his cool descriptive eye:

On the roof of the zoo in the Russian Quarter, my 14-inch television, balanced on its table near the giraffe’s snout, was showing an archival soccer match between Spain and Uruguay. The rumble of nearby mortar fire had not stopped since early morning; my tea had gone cold waiting for the apple fritters baked by Denis Petrovitch, the clarinet teacher at the Higher Institute of Music, as I sprawled next to the giraffe watching tiny black-and-white goals filmed in Madrid fifty years ago. The artillery was shelling neighboring Ghouta from the orchards of the Russian Quarter. But my ears were trained on the long, still-empty staircase behind the couch on which I lay, expecting it to fill with the sound of Nonna’s elegant footsteps at any moment. She had gone to the cultural center in downtown Damascus to visit her dad. The full moon shone on me, and the screen’s silver light reflected brightly in the giraffe’s wide black eyes and flowed over her thick-fuzzed lips, which nearly touched the long-vanished players, the long-vanished spectators, and the long-vanished grass of the soccer pitch. READ MORE…

Announcing Our September Book Club Title: No Windmills in Basra by Diaa Jubaili

September 29, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

[Jubaili] departs from reality and time to scratch at those seemingly eternal themes so often associated with fairy tales.

In this fantastic, sobering, and imagistic collection, Diaa Jubaili uses the folktale traditions of Iraq to reflect newly on war, country, and national history. Unlike traditional legends, where magic lives in the world as phenomenon and circumstance, the characters of these stories defy their grave realities with feats of imagination, in bold and moving demonstrations of how the mind can transcend matter. In humanizing the struggles of Iraq across its conflicts, Jubaili addresses the horrors of war with philosophical wit and metaphysical possibility.

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.

No Windmills in Basra by Diaa Jubaili, translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti, Deep Vellum, 2022

On the surface, fairy tales should theoretically be easy to translate (if there is a world in which translation is easy); they’re usually simplistically narrated, lexically limited, and short. But of course, texts that seem simple on the surface can often turn out to be immensely difficult, and in the case of fairy tales, perplexing questions arise almost immediately, because so much of what they impart depends on a reader’s pre-existing cultural knowledge. Can any of us remember a time when we didn’t know the story of Little Red Riding Hood?

The challenges of translation are made even more evident when the fairy tales are intended for adults, as is the case with Diaa Jubaili’s stories in No Windmills in Basra, translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti. In this collection of tales—some less than a page long, some ranging over several pages—Jubaili engages slantwise with the history of Iraq and Basra over the past seventy years. Rather than writing a collection of realist fiction, the author departs from reality and time to scratch at those seemingly eternal themes so often associated with fairy tales.

In the opening story of the collection, “Flying,” for example, a security guard named Mubarak thinks often of launching airborne as he guards the chickens at a poultry plant south of Basra.

. . . he flew twice—not on a plane, or by means of a hot air balloon or parachute, and not even on a giant demon’s wings or a magic carpet as happened so often in the tales from the Thousand and One Nights. Nor was he an admirer of the medieval scientist-inventor Ibn Firnas, who dreamed of flapping wings and soaring heights, since Mubarak knew that with that sort of thing, he would eventually end up a pile of broken bones on the side of the road.

There is no magic in this story—at least not the kind we associate with fairy tales—but that does not stop Mubarak from experiencing a journey from the everyday to the cosmic. In his first experience with flight, As an infantry soldier whose company is targeted by bombing, he is tossed into the air after a detonation, being sent briefly into a world where a man airborne is not shorthand for a fighter pilot honing in for the kill, but instead a miracle that allows for deferred violence and peace accords. Of course, Mubarak’s flight comes at the expense of his company, all of whom die in the explosion. Fairy tales are fantastic things, but they’re also dangerous things, and miracles usually have exacting prices. In fact, in this story, American munitions are the only means by which Mubarak can again take flight. The djinns and magicians of the Thousand and One Nights have been replaced by the darker realities of modern warfare. READ MORE…

Lover as Intimate Other: Chinatown by Thuận

July 13, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Thuy Dinh

Thuận’s protagonist roams ceaselessly yet neurotically in her imagination even as the main action is confined in both time and space.

Chinatown by Thuận, translated from the Vietnamese by Nguyễn An Lý, New Directions, 2022

In an interview with Italian journalist Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre in 1989, Marguerite Duras revealed she had chosen the rather nondescript title of The Lover (L’Amant), her celebrated novel about a love affair between a fifteen-year-old French girl and a Chinese man in French Indochina, as “a reaction against all the books with that same title, [for] it isn’t a story about love, but about everything in passion that remains suspended and incapable of being named.”

In employing Chinatown as an equally unassuming yet versatile title for her 2005 novel, Thuận responds incisively to the Duras’s work from which she took inspiration by showcasing her pair of star-crossed lovers—an unnamed Vietnamese protagonist and Thụy, her ex-husband who is born in Vietnam but has Chinese ancestry. A Hanoi-born writer and literary translator living in France but choosing to write her novels—ten at last count—in Vietnamese, Thuận (full name Đoàn Ánh Thuận) deftly balances her complex content with a wryly confiding style. Making its English debut via Nguyễn An Lý’s incantatory translation, Chinatown’s generic title is deceptive, its compact length trapping layers of tensions to illustrate how political struggles in the public realm mirror emotional struggles in personal relationships. Subversive yet casually framed like a run-on conversation between friends, Thuận’s novel explores various iterations of Chinatown to convey exile, alienation, oppression, and artistic freedom.

Consisting of one vertiginous 184-page paragraph, the novel is compressed within a two-hour timeline during which the protagonist and her young son are trapped in a Paris metro tunnel while local authorities investigate a bomb threat. With nowhere to go, the protagonist soon launches into reminiscences spanning two eventful decades—from the last years of the Cold War to the period following Vietnam’s implementation of free-market reforms. As such, the novel is simultaneously expansive and claustrophobic, its experimental form disrupted only by two fragments from I’m Yellow, a novel-in-progress by Chinatown’s protagonist. This novel-within-a-novel structure embodies the ambiguous push-pull between oppression and freedom: Thuận’s protagonist roams ceaselessly yet neurotically in her imagination even as the main action is confined in both time and space.

READ MORE…

Refuting Domination: Margaree Little on Translating Osip Mandelstam

June 22, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Michal Zechariah

I found particularly disturbing the tendency to play up Mandelstam’s death in the translations, sometimes changing the poems radically to do so.

Featured in the current Spring 2022 issue, Osip Mandelstam’s “Lines on an Unknown Soldier” is a nightmarish yet poignant reflection on war. Margaree Little’s new translation aims to bring out previously overlooked aspects of Mandelstam’s poetry by practicing devoted attention to his original text and to its historical and personal contexts. In her discussion of Mandelstam, Little glides between erudition and intimacy with his works. Our correspondence led to surprising discoveries like the everyday object Mandelstam despised, serious consideration of the political significance of translating Mandelstam today, and renewed appreciation for how literary insight can shape translation.

Michal Zechariah (MZ): Before translating Osip Mandelstam’s poem this spring, you published another translation of his work in American Poetry Review. How did you first encounter Mandelstam’s poetry, and what drew you to translate it? What usually guides your choice when you decide to take on a translation project?

Margaree Little (ML): About ten years ago, around the time I was in graduate school, I first encountered Mandelstam’s work in the Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin translations. I was drawn to the poems, but remember feeling that I was missing something, as though there was a screen separating me from the poems.

In 2016, I began to translate [Marina] Tsvetaeva’s work, focusing increasingly on her political poems that have largely been neglected in English-language translation. This work drew me further into that world, that moment. Then, two years later, my partner and I were visiting our friend, the poet and translator Eleanor Wilner, in Philadelphia. Eleanor has talked about the influence of Mandelstam on her own work and gave me her copy of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s extraordinary first memoir, Hope Against Hope. The book describes the last four years before Mandelstam’s second arrest and death, but more than that, it offers a window into the worldview that grounded his poetry and his entire life.

After reading this book, I went back to his poems and started to translate them to get closer to the original work. I found the originals so rich in music, in layers of meaning and feeling, and so varied in tone, including sharp awareness and wit.

I also began to realize the degree to which Brown and Merwin, as well as other dominant English-language translators, have altered the poems. These changes range from what could be considered more benign (clunky wording or phrasing) to distortions that fundamentally alter the poems’ meaning. I found particularly disturbing the tendency to play up Mandelstam’s death in the translations, sometimes changing the poems radically to do so. This tendency creates a romantic myth of the poet, while erasing crucial parts of his actual work. The gap between the originals and existing versions made me want to continue to translate the poems and honor them on their own terms.

I suppose these are the dual threads that run through my translation work, whether of Tsvetaeva or Mandelstam; a connection to the poems and the deep urgency within them, and a frustration with how they have previously been translated—or ignored, or distorted—in English.

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A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

June 6, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Andriana Hamas and Suhasini Patni

This month’s edition takes us to India and Mexico!

With Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand in frequent contributor Daisy Rockwell’s English translation taking the International Booker Prize recently, Indian literature is having its moment. Editor-at-Large Suhasini Patni’s contribution to this edition of A Thousand Lives could not be more timely then, spotlighting as it does another pioneering female Punjabi author. Sign up for our newsletter to get these recommendations delivered right to your inbox.

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Amrita Pritam, the first female poet to win the Sahitya Akademi Award, is one of the most prominent feminist figures in Indian literary history. Not only did she take a public stance against marriage, she also openly wrote about female sex and desire, and questioned gender-enforced roles. According to writer and translator Khushwant Singh, her poems about the plight of refugees made her “immortal.” Written in 1950, the book’s title, Pinjar, means ‘skeleton’ in Punjabi. In this radical novel, a Hindu girl, Puro, is abducted by a Muslim man, Rashid, as an act of revenge against her community. She’s given a new name, Hamida, and her life from before is erased. When she tries to go back to her parents, she is seen as tainted and turned away. Forced to return to Rashid and settle into a new life, she eventually has a child with him. During the fraught years of partition, women had to become skeletons, “with neither a face, nor mind, nor a will, nor identity.” Hamida is enraged at the condition of women like herself: “Some had been forced into marriage, some murdered, some stripped and paraded naked in the streets.” The book details unexpected brutality, acts of desperation, and highlights the struggles faced particularly by women in 1947. It was adapted into a successful Hindi-language film in 2002.

—Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large for India

 

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Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World (2015), and its unsettling opening paragraph, which would doubtlessly throw the reader into a vertigo-like state, is a captivating read bound to make you question (if you haven’t done so already) the significance of borders, their concrete reality, and multiple figurative dimensions. Makina, a switchboard operator, is sent on a mission to find her older brother, who, lured by the empty promises of a substantial inheritance, had chosen to undergo a dangerous water crossing in order to reach the neighboring country—an almost mythical land to which his fellowmen flee in search of the so-called “better life.” The Mexican author’s use of symbolism and his timely focus on the issues of migration, immigration and war reveal the fragility of one’s identity and the various traps that await the self. As for the language of the book, I would simply like to mention translator Lisa Dillman’s note, which informs us that the Spanish original “is nothing short of stunning, and translating it is both fulfilling and daunting.”

—Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large for Bulgaria 

*****

Read more on the Asymptote blog:

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2022

April 25, 2022  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Erica X Eisen, and Xiao Yue Shan

Introducing our favorites from the latest issue!

Featuring work from thirty-four countries, the Spring 2022 issue is once again charting new territory across the landscape of world literature. From Hermann Hesse to Kim Hyesoon, as well as coverage of Ukrainian poetry and exceptional Swedish works in our Special Feature, these wonderful inductions into the English language are full of discoveries. Not sure where to begin? Read on for our blog editors’ curated selections!

Through the brutal scorchings and flighty erasures of passed time, Greek tragedies have endured—as though stone, and not words, were their material. Near as our own stories, ancient as storytelling itself, and inextricable from the passions they depict, the characters that had suffused the fifth-century Athenian air with their spectacle defy temporality, continuing to walk and rage within the immediate theatre of our world. In the betrayal of fathers and the names of flowers, in funerals and weddings, in any force that could be mistaken for fate. By the logic of the tragic’s pervasive mutability, their untimely timeliness, one is made to think of the ways cycles are kept and broken, if whether the knowledge of something coming has ever been enough to stop it.

In José Watanabe’s Antígona, translated with an impeccable ear by Cristina Pérez Díaz, Sophocles’s Antigone is given fluid, elemental form, a series of poetic rooms built for one actress to walk through, inhabiting their rhythm as she inhabits time. Written beneath the dense terror of civil conflict in Peru, Watanabe’s distilling of chorus into a single rivulet of speaking is to run a thin-wire sieve through the voracious appetite of mass violence and statistic, provoking the wide overarch of trauma into open intimacy, into something that is suffered individually, in bodies united by the likeness of experience but ruthlessly alone in bearing it. The voice is torn with the tension between thinking and knowing, between feeling and narration, spreading itself amidst the leaves of time:

The sacred eye of daylight does not penetrate that far
nor the cries of friends and relatives. In that silence,
death, laborious, enfolds the girl
in a dense cocoon of shadows.

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We Stand With Ukraine: “Mother Says” by Andrii Krasnyashchikh

April 23, 2022  |  in We Stand With Ukraine  |  by Andrii Krasnyashchikh and Matthew Hyde

Every morning in the faculty chatroom they do a headcount: ‘Alive’, ‘Alive’, ‘Alive’.

This piece, a war diary by Kharkiv native Andrii Krasnyashchikh translated from the Russian by Matthew Hyde, marks the conclusion of Asymptote‘s We Stand With Ukraine Series. Over the course of the series’s run, we have brought together translations and original English-language compositions from around the world. Collectively, these pieces report on the war from the ground and examine the voyeuristic feeling of following it from afar; they comment on the latest developments and put them in dialogue with other conflicts from history. Above all else, they are an expression of solidarity with the victims of this war and a call for an end to the violence.

Mother Says

Translator’s note: Andrii Krasnyashchikh writes from his hometown of Kharkiv, a town of literary renown, as Russian bombs fall. The added tragedy of the situation is that history is repeating itself, in a distorted form. Much of Kharkiv was reduced to rubble in World War II; now Andrii’s mother says: ‘they’re worse than the fascists.’ The other bitter irony is that Andrii is a Russian-speaking Ukrainian, a representative of the ‘Russian World’, whom Russia has supposedly come to liberate. In his sparse, tense style, Andrii documents the reality of life in a town under bombardment, everyday mundanities offset against the ever-present, terrifying backdrop of war. But hope is not yet lost, and humour is one of the coping mechanisms; Andrii’s daughter finds an anecdote on the internet in which Putin returns to earth from hell, only to find that wherever he goes he is charged in the Ukrainian currency, the hryvnia; the whole world is Ukrainian now.  

—Matthew Hyde

Kharkiv, March 2022.

Mother says: they’re worse than the fascists.

She was born in 1946, she doesn’t remember the war. My father remembers, he was born in 1940. He talks about the missile which hit their house, how he and his brother fled through a field, how a bomb fell right next to them. He remembers plenty from the war.

Mother talks about her granddaughter, about when she was little, how she’d say ‘tyup’ instead of ‘soup’. Her granddaughter’s not so little now—ten years old already, she’s sure to remember this war.

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Listening to Syntax: Eugene Ostashevsky on Lucky Breaks

April 20, 2022  |  in Book Club  |  by Shawn Hoo

[Belorusets] writes in this beautiful, off-kilter, very non-state, non-Russian Russian

Reviewing Yevgenia Belorusets’s Lucky Breaks, Shawn Hoo writes, “The question of what photographs and literature can do in war, I suspect, will not be resolved anytime soon.” Still, as one reads Belorusets’s text of stories from the fringes of wartime, the role of writing within conflict—even if varied and not always discernible—emerges as vital, urgent. Our Book Club selection for the month of March, Lucky Breaks provides a doorway by which the voices and images of Ukrainian women, and their ordinary lives, emerge and connect in unexpected, miraculous ways. In the following interview with Eugene Ostashevsky, whose expert and precise translation of Lucky Breaks has given this title a formidable presence in English, Hoo and Ostashevky discuss the rejections of typical narratives, transitions of impossible grammars, and translating as a pursuit of poetics.

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.

Shawn Hoo (SH): You have translated mostly Russian avant-garde and absurdist poetry. Were the things that drew you to these poets the same things that drew you to Yevgenia Belorusets’s Lucky Breaks?

Eugene Ostashevsky (EO): I translate as a poet, if that makes sense, which means that translation is vital to my poetic work (which foregrounds translation, which problematises translation) but, more importantly, that my poetics help me make translation choices. I started translating the OBERIU, the so-called absurdists, an avant-garde group in the ’20s and an underground group in the 1930s. The way their work formed me as a reader and a poet, even before I started translating, was their absurdisation of language: the way they took classical poetics and projected avant-garde poetics on them, breaking up classical poetics to build these very beautiful linguistic structures which questioned rather than affirmed language. They questioned rather than affirmed reference or the veracity of statements, and greatly relativised linguistic truth. So here’s the important point: I think maybe what drew me to them was the fact that I’m an immigrant. It was the fact that—I don’t want to say I don’t write in my native language, but—I don’t write in my native language, technically speaking.

With Belorusets, you read Lucky Breaks and there is a lot of Daniil Kharms, member of OBERIU, for the reason that Kharms really reflects on and deconstructs narrative. When Belorusets takes her stories about war and cuts out authorial omniscience, writing about the fog of war, and about interacting with people whom you don’t know much about, she describes these people in this kind of glancing way, often slipping into these Kharmsian rejections of classical narrative.

The second thing is that, like virtually all Ukrainians, she is bilingual. But she writes in Russian because that’s what they speak in her family. Now the Russian language is associated with the Russian state, but there basically used to be, in the twentieth century, two forms of Russian: an émigré Russian and a Soviet Russian. After the Soviet Union collapsed and the émigrés started publishing in Russia—because that’s where the readers were—it turned out that the compromise, the attaching of the language to the political unit of the Russian Federation (even though nobody did it consciously) turned out to be very harmful for the language. [Belorusets] writes in this beautiful, off-kilter, very non-state, non-Russian Russian which has (it sounds like I’m talking about wine) tinges of Austro-Hungarian syntax. Also, she is trained as a translator from German, so that’s also there; beyond that Central Europeanness of her Russian, there is Gogol. You feel that in the ironies, in the way the words and the clauses are not lined up one after another but rub up against each other, the way they are defamiliarised. I just love that.

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We Stand With Ukraine: “Charred Snow” by Deborah Kelly

April 16, 2022  |  in We Stand With Ukraine  |  by Deborah Kelly

and all words swallowed hard / on themselves.

In this edition of our column that spotlights literature expressing support for the citizens of Ukraine, we present Deborah Kelly’s poem, “Charred Snow.” Through tightly coiled lines, the poem evokes both the ongoing devastation and the inarticulable grief of victims of war. 

Charred Snow

Who sings a folksong on the steps of ruin
knows, there are words one swallows
under bombardment,
but I, in another town, could cry devastation,
as many times as it fell.
In the charred snow, burnt bread.
The least of it. To say devastation,
I cried sons, daughters.
But then, Bucha,
and all words swallowed hard
on themselves.

READ MORE…

We Stand With Ukraine: “The Ghost of Kyiv” by B. R. Dionysius

April 9, 2022  |  in We Stand With Ukraine  |  by B. R. Dionysius

Through his phone’s / cracked canopy he plays you a black streak / over Kyiv

In this week’s edition of literary works written in support and solidarity with the citizens of Ukraine, we are proud to present a poem by B. R. Dionysius. “The Ghost of Kyiv” movingly comments on the distancing voyeurism of watching tragedy unfold from afar, and of wide-ranging human affairs condensed into byte-sized consumption. As we continue to navigate the ever-shifting boundaries between the virtual and the real, Dionysius’ poem works between man and machine, its precise lines edging out the bodies caught within them.

The Ghost of Kyiv

Your son shows you a Tik Tok clip;
You both play Russian computer games.
Simulators that glorify World War Two/
mid-century armour & the cold war era
where each new development increased
penetration; rounds that defeated steel’s
stubborn thickness. You watch your son
take to the skies over maps of Ukraine.
1941. Get shot down a lot. The next best
thing to flying solo. Through his phone’s
cracked canopy he plays you a black streak
over Kyiv; a medieval, barbed arrowhead
punching through the sky’s grey cuirass. For
fifty years the fulcrum has been idle; three up
-grades, engines, radar, missiles, but never seen
combat. Seventies bones good enough to mix
it over the capital with its modern successors,
flankers & frogfeet; a retro jet where the ghost
got good purchase from his re-engineered multi-
role fighter. The first ace in a day in fifty years.
Not since Alam’s F-86 sabre rattled in the Indo-
Pakistani war has the aerial world revelled in six
kills in one day. Your son doesn’t bother to fact
check the video, sold on social media’s bravado;
a pilot’s last stand. He tells you the ghost was shot
down, but ejected. His short clip trimmed to fit.
READ MORE…

We Stand With Ukraine: “Life’s More Enduring Than War” by Irina Ivanchenko

April 2, 2022  |  in Translations, We Stand With Ukraine  |  by Ian Singleton, Irina Ivanchenko, and Marina Eskina

As the war in Ukraine continues, our new column shows that the world stands with Ukraine.

In our fourth installment of this new weekly column, we collect the works of writers around the world in response to the ongoing war in Ukraine—texts of compassion, of endurance, of commemoration, and of reaching outward. This poem expresses the resilience of both the art of poetry and the Ukrainian people in the face of violence.

Life’s More Enduring Than War

When the water runs out,
light fades, frost falls, and the
firmament freezes over,
we won’t stoop to prose.

Тhe grasses, dry and stiff,
have not yet grown above us.
Until the words run out,
we’ll speak in verses

of those who are far and near,
and say that we’re one and loved,
above the Bug, the Vorskla, the Dnieper,
in Warsaw, Rome, and Prague.

When all the words run out,
in bird language, we’ll proclaim,
in one universal roll call—
our homeland is alive.

Life’s more enduring than war,
long-lasting, sacrosanct.
We’re all her children, and while
she lives, we won’t be orphaned. READ MORE…

Announcing Our March Book Club Selection: Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets

March 31, 2022  |  in Book Club  |  by Shawn Hoo

Belorusets is the peerless documentarian of her times, a meticulous stitcher of the incongruities that beset contemporary Ukrainian life.

As war cruelly rages on in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one searches for elucidation amidst madness from the country’s writers. As pivotal statements of witness, hope, persistence, and humanity, such texts will undoubtedly go down in history as bright sparks of intelligence and endurance in the dark obfuscations of violence. In Lucky Breaks, Yevgenia Belorusets’s stunning documentation of daily life in eastern Ukraine, the author expertly renders stories of women struggling to reconcile their existence with the broken infrastructure of their country, weaving oratory and textuality with an expert balance of surrealism and sobriety. Testifying simultaneously to Ukraine’s tumultuous history and its uncertain present, Belorusets’s timely work speaks, necessarily, to what survival means, as it is happening.

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. 

Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky, New Directions, 2022

More than a month now since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the crisis for Ukrainians continues to have no end in sight. For those of us spectating from afar, the internet has burst into a deluge of breaking news: images of aerial attacks, fleeing citizens, and pulverised buildings circulate and refresh, drawing us into the eye of the conflict. As for the heart, how much of this goes into cultivating real empathy and solidarity, and how much into encouraging a lethargy towards the bits of violence we witness daily through the screen? Literature and translation have risen up almost instinctively to defy this impersonal onslaught: from readings organised by The Guardian to Odessa-born poet Ilya Kaminsky’s advocacy of Ukrainian poetry. Asymptote, too, has launched a new column in support of Ukraine, and as Translation Tuesdays editor, I published Oksana Rosenblum’s translation of Yevhen Pluzhnyk’s “Galileo,” which, while published a week before the invasion, eerily voiced the fate of small states: “I am quiet as grass, even quieter still,/ I am so easily unnoticed.”

The question of what photographs and literature can do in war, I suspect, will not be resolved anytime soon. Amidst this media torrent, however, the daily war diary of Ukrainian photographer and writer Yevgenia Belorusets stands apart for her ability to document the war in both its pedestrian and surreal registers. On the third day, for example, Belorusets writes about meeting a woman in the park who, while carrying two huge shopping bags, admits happily to her: “When there are two of us, I’m less afraid of the artillery.” Two weeks later, she hears two students speak outdoors about what it means to teach as air raid alarms sound. Occasionally, she includes photographs: friends walking their dogs after curfew; a woman holding two bouquets of flowers. Often, the moments she records are ordinary, allowing the mingling of fragile, contradictory truths—that of people living in a simultaneously exceptional and quotidian time and place. Receiving these daily dispatches in my inbox, they come across as disciplined, tender, and urgent.

READ MORE…