Posts featuring Cristina Rivera Garza

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Central America, France, and the United States!

This week, our team brings you literary news from around the world, including an experimental poetry reading and a festival celebrating comics! From cross-continental prize to a new exhibit at the Centre Pompidou, read on to find out more.

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the United States

On February 7, I watched as the internationally-renowned Mexican poet and recent Asymptote contributor, Rocío Cerón presented a spellbinding performance at New York University’s KJC Center. Through sound, voice, and moving images, the performance expands on Cerón’s 2022 book Divisible corpóreo, a poetry collection that thematizes the relationship between language, poetry, and the body.

While Cerón read from the book, the screen behind her projected images featuring her bedroom and herself. These visuals were not static. Rather, they transformed in rhythmic syncopation along with Cerón’s voice. In addition, Cerón not only read the book out loud. She also brought her poems to a further experiential dimension through several resources grounded in her voice: she raised and lowered her pitch and volume, repeated words and phrases with different speeds, and sometimes elongated vowels and stuttered consonants. The effect was dreamlike. I was immediately thrown into a trance, a characteristic effect of Cerón’s awe-inspiring transmedia readings.

After the audience’s applause, Cerón was interviewed by Irma Gallo, a student in NYU’s Spanish MFA program. During this Q&A, Cerón reflected on her creative process and approach to live readings, noting that her performances often include improvisation, which makes each one of them a unique, ephemeral experience. She also talked about the feminist elements in her poetry, such as references to lineages of women writers and reflections on the mitochondrial DNA, only transmissible from mother to child. To conclude, she specified that the book Divisible corpóreo is the second installment of a trilogy that explores the connection between poetry and different senses. The other two books are Spectio (2019) and Simultáneo sucesivo (2023). Paraphrasing Cerón’s own words, these collections explore the interrelation between what we can observe and what we can hear. Each text establishes an intertextual dialogue with the other two “creating,” in Cerón’s words, “a network of signifiers and symbolic fields that touch and traverse one another.”

The best way to get a sense of Cerón’s unique performances is to see them. Here is a recording of her February 7 event:

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting on France

Bandes dessinées and other forms of illustrated stories have long held a special place in the Francophone arts and culture scene, from the classic Asterix et Obelix series to more recent titles like Persepolis. With comics making up one in four books bought in France last year, the market has undeniably been thriving even more since lockdown.

January 2024 marked the 51st Festival internationale de la bande dessinée d’Angoulême, a yearly event which celebrates the art and authors of comics and graphic novels worldwide. Hundreds of artists, publishers, and industry professionals were in attendance from around the globe, as were more than 200,000 attendants.

Chief among the creators present was the winner of last year’s Grand Prix (the festival’s most prestigious prize): comic artist and film director Riad Sattouf. Sattouf hosted a vibrant and immersive exhibition of his acclaimed work, L’Arab du future – a biographical portrayal of Sattouf’s upbringing that took him from France to Libya to Syria. Featuring an array of concept art, video extracts, and personal effects from Sattouf’s life, the exhibit not only brought to life the characters and places featured in the series, but also offered insight into the author himself and the historical and social contexts that inform his work.

Renowned British artist Posy Simmonds took home this year’s Grand Prix. In the festival’s fifty-year history, she is only the fourth woman and the first Briton to do so. But the celebration of her work isn’t stopping there. The Bibliothèque publique d’information at the Centre Pompidou in Paris is currently hosting an exhibition honoring Simmonds’s life and artistic career. Spanning from her early work to her beloved graphic novels, visitors to the exhibit can feast their eyes on nearly 130 original or unpublished pieces.

Comic enthusiasts who missed this year’s event or who couldn’t get enough needn’t fear; plans are already in motion for next year’s festival, with organisers promising that “the Festival will look, more than ever, at the bande dessinée as a form of literature in its own right, linked to the realities of the world…”

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

In early February, Berlin’s Academy of Arts awarded the prestigious Anna Seghers Prize to Carlos Fonseca the Costa Rican-Puerto Rican author of Colonel Lágrimas, Natural History, and Austral. Every year, the Anna Seghers Prize is awarded to two writers, one German and one Latin American. Previous winners include Cristina Rivera-Garza, Lina Meruane, Julián Fuks, Gioconda Belli, Arturo Arias, and Claudia Hernández. In an interview with the German news outlet DW, Carlos expressed his joy at receiving this prize and said he’s proud to be among many authors he admires.

There is also exciting news about new and forthcoming books. A few weeks ago, prolific Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon revealed the title and cover of his upcoming novel: Tarántula, which will come out under Libros de Asteroide in May. And famed Nicaragua author Sergio Ramírez recently presented his latest novel, El caballo dorado (The Golden Horse). The novel, which includes a cast of remarkable characters, explores Nicaragua in 1917, during the American occupation. Ramírez, one of Central America’s most renowned authors, has written fourteen novels, including Castigo divino, Margarita, está linda la mar, El cielo llora por mí and Tongolele no sabía bailar. In 2017, he became the first Central American writer to receive the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, previously awarded to authors like Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, and Elena Poniatowska.

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Read more on the Asymptote blog:

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

Literary news from North Macedonia, Mexico, and Palestine!

This week, our editors around the world bring news as to how different literary initiatives and publications are help shaping the present. From writers who embody multiculturalism and unity, to works of solidarity and hope, read on to see how writers, readers, and artists are working to shed light on what matters.

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia

“Rarely has any Macedonian poet attracted as much attention among theorists, literary historians, and philologists as [Kočo] Racin. Racin was . . . a pioneer in the artistic expression of the mother tongue, . . . an example of an ideal revolutionary and, in the end, a victim. He was the most honorable and most honored thing that the Macedonians had in the period between the two wars,” writes Goran Kalogjera, a prominent Croatian comparatist and scholar of Macedonian studies in his book, Pogled otstrana. Racin (1908 – 1943) (Side view. Racin (1908 – 1943)). Recently, this important biography was translated into Macedonian by Slavčo Koviloski, and published by Makedonika Litera Press.

Kosta Apostolov Solev is a canonical figure in Macedonian literature, hailed by some as the founder of modern Macedonian poetry. He is best known under his penname, Kočo Racin, which was derived from the name of his lover, Rahilka Firfova-Raca—a gesture indicative of his support for the socialist women’s movement. He himself was a political activist, participating in the translation of the Communist Manifesto into Macedonian, and acting as editor for several communist magazines. His political leanings had contributed to his mysterious and untimely death; mortally shot by a printing-house entrance guard in June 1943, some speculate that Racin had been purposefully targeted by the communist party, having fallen out of favor with them around 1940. However, his activism effectuated his ties to other cultures, enriching his literary oeuvre. Aside from his mother tongue, he wrote texts in Bulgarian and Serbian, and was published all over the Balkans. Kalogjera stresses this multilingual, multicultural aspect of Racin’s output in Pogled otstrana, noting his importance to Croatian culture. READ MORE…

Tampoco tenemos nombre / We, too, are nameless: A Conversation with Ilana Luna

When I translate, my approach is much more of an interpretation, in the musical sense; it is a jazz riff, it is a feeling . . .

I discovered one of my favorite poets—the musician, filmmaker, and diplomat Gaspar Orozco—through Ilana Luna in the pages of Scotland-based Reliquiae: A Journal of Nature, Landscape, and Mythology. In Luna’s lulling translation, Orozco’s El Libro de los Espejismos (The Book of Mirages) meditates on the lacuna between memory and myth, and the interstices between sentience and sleep. In this interview, I asked Luna about, among other things, translating Mexican poet Gaspar Orozco and essayist Carlos Monsiváis, as well as Mexican literature in translation, with small indie presses as their prime movers. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): I love your translation of Gaspar Orozco published at Reliquiae Journal! And you have a forthcoming book of translation from Orozco’s poems under the Corbel Stone Press imprint, Xylem Books. What should Orozco readers like me expect from this new title? 

Ilana Luna (IL): In fact, we have several manuscripts we’ve been working on. The first we completed is El libro de los espejismos/The Book of Mirages. It’s quite a marvelous book, with prose poetry as well as formal poetry, haiku, sonnet, octaves. They were the most fun to translate, truth be told; I love the puzzle or game-like challenge that formal limitations pose. Several of these poems appeared in Reliquiae, as well as in the July 2021 issue of Indian publication Poetry at Sangam. The one you mention, with Corbel Stone Press, is what we’re currently working on. It is more of an anthology of Orozco’s work, with a focus on natural phenomena and a mythic tone, taken from across his ten-book corpus. As always, Gaspar’s poetry is full of luminescent landscapes, vignettes, and often, has a mesmerizing, rhythmic quality. I try to capture this in my translations.

AMMD: In his prólogo to Lapidario: Antología del aforismo mexicano (2014), critic-translator Hiram Barrios maps the presence of aforismos en verso (“aphorism taking refuge in the short poem”) within Mexican poetry since the late nineteenth century, naming Gaspar Orozco’s father as a practitioner of this “anomalous” free-verse that “questions the nature of genre.” Do you think Orozco has followed in his father’s footsteps, and how, if so, has that influenced the way you translated his works?

IL: I’m quite sure that Orozco was deeply impacted by his father’s love of literature, and he tells stories of youthful interactions with preeminent Mexican scholars and literati—for example, the infrarealist poet José Vicente Anaya, also from Chihuahua, whose famous poem “Híkuri” is a reference in our “Notas de un cuaderno de híkuri”/ “Notes from a Peyote Journal.” Orozco’s prose poetry has been elegantly analyzed in “‘Image Machine’: Gaspar Orozco’s Book of the Peony and the Prose Poem Sequence as Perceptual Trick,” Helen Tookey’s chapter of Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2022). As for how this paternal influence has impacted my translation, I’d have to say not very much—or at least not directly. I know I can’t be alone in this, but when I translate, my approach is much more of an interpretation, in the musical sense; it is a jazz riff, it is a feeling, it is something like a cover. It is always a direct interface between me and the poem, nothing else. As sheer as that, it is an immersion and a remaking, a new thing unto itself. 

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Solving for X: In Search of an Elusive Reader

The issue is that, like “border,” “Latinx” expresses an abstraction; it fails to capture intracommunal differences.

Last week saw the end of Hispanic Heritage Month in the US, a period meant to celebrate the Latino population through a series of countrywide cultural events. New York was, predictably, a hub of activity, and its Feria Internacional del Libro a clear highlight: held virtually in early October, it brought together Hispanic/Latino authors, editors, and critics for talks on craft, industry, and politics. Across several panels, one question seemed to loom large: what do we even mean when we use terms like “Hispanic,” “Latino,” or the more recent “Latinx”? In this brief hybrid piece (half essay, half dispatch), Editor-at-Large Josefina Massot gives us panelists’ take on the issue—and a bit of her own.

I’ve always mistrusted self-touted “movements,” and never more so than now: in the age of the hashtag, most won’t make it past their first bout of virality. My skepticism peaks each time a movement calls itself a “boom”; the lady doth protest too much, I think, and scoff away my irritation. These days, though, I find myself believing in the #NewLatinoBoom. I’m biased, of course: as an Argentine clumping her way through US literary soil, it’s in my interest to believe. Still, the data seem to back me up.

The landscape of Hispanic letters in America has never been lusher: Spanish-speaking writers are earning MFAs, publishing in dozens of magazines and presses, and showcasing their work at a growing number of festivals—key among them, Miami’s, Chicago’s, and (more on this shortly) New York’s. It makes sense: over 60 million Americans identify as Hispanic/Latino, and roughly 40 million are native Spanish speakers; that puts the US roughly on par with top-ranking Colombia, Spain, and Argentina (Mexico comfortably takes the lead).

When I tuned in to the Feria Internacional del Libro de la Ciudad de Nueva York (FILNYC) a couple of weeks ago, I expected my newfound faith to be stoked. I was going to hear from famed author Cristina Rivera Garza, head of the country’s first PhD in Spanish creative writing; reporter Annie Correal would discuss some of her hard-hitting pieces on Latino immigration for The New York Times; author Paola Ramos would tackle her acclaimed essay collection, Finding LatinX; and a series of savvy press reps from across the country would swap industry secrets. READ MORE…

The Visceraless State: An Interview With Cristina Rivera Garza

[W]riting is a community-making practice . . . intimately, necessarily connected to the communities in which we live and which, ideally, we serve.

Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza is a foremost voice in contemporary Mexican literature. Known for her frequently dark subject matter and hybrid styles, her work focuses on marginalized people, challenging us to reconsider our preconceptions about boundaries and transgression. She has won major literary awards and is the only author to have twice won the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award (in 2011 and 2009). Her latest work to be translated into English, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, has just been published by Feminist Press and is a hybrid collection of journalism, crónicas, and essays, that explore systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the US-Mexico border. To coincide with its much-anticipated release, Asymptote’s Assistant Managing Editor Lindsay Semel spoke with Cristina Rivera Garza about the ideas behind this compelling work.   

“Let me just bring some tea, and I’ll be right back!” Cristina Rivera Garza dashed out of her Zoom screen briefly before settling back into her chair and adjusting her glasses with a warm smile, her air of familiarity challenging the oppressiveness of the geographical and technological distance to which we’ve lately become accustomed. In the following interview, we discuss Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, the striking latest collaboration between Garza and translator Sarah Booker. She reflects upon the demands that she makes of syntax, the enigmatic character of reality, the importance of solidarity and imagination, and how she and Booker coined the term “The Visceraless State.” Very much of the borderland between Mexico and the United States, her work meets the global, contemporary moment not despite its specificity, but because of it.

 —Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

Lindsay Semel (LS): You’ve stated in interviews, and it’s apparent in your work, that you intentionally test the limits between what language normally does and what it can do in order to discover new experiential possibilities between writer, text, and reader. I wonder if you could point to places in the text where you tested and stretched the limits of Spanish but were not able to do so the same way in English and vice versa. How do Spanish and English need to be challenged differently?

Cristina Rivera Garza (CRG): Every single project has to challenge language in specific ways. It always depends on the materials that I’m exploring, affecting, and letting myself be affected by, and there are specific ways that you can do that both in English and in Spanish. I tend to write longer sentences in Spanish and more fragmentarily in English, for example. When I am getting too long-winded in Spanish, I try to convey that thought with the directness and economy I associate with my relationship with English. At times, I try to use the semicolon in English, just because it is more common in Spanish and I want to see what happens to both sentence and sense. Constantly borrowing from English and borrowing from Spanish and taking traces and echoes from one language into the other, trying to honor and replicate the tension and friction that maintains them together where I live and how I think, has been almost a natural way of continuing to challenge both.

Sarah [Booker, translator of Grieving] is such a deft translator and we now know each other quite well. She’s been translating my work for a number of years and we have a very open, fluid conversation as she goes into the translation process: less a process of moving language from one context to a another, and more a search for similar effects based on the affective capacities of host and receiving languages. I work closely with syntax, especially if I’m exploring issues such as violence and suffering. Pause, breathlessness, all those aspects of a body going through tremendous pressure or pain inflicted—in terms of keeping both form and content responding to the same challenges, it is important that syntax and semantics are somehow reflecting and embodying that experience. That’s when writing occurs.

I think of translation as a creative process too. I see Sarah as my co-author and her work as a way through which I receive my book back anew. I think she’s a poet at heart. I don’t know if she knows that, but all those experiments with language, that’s something she’s very deft at. READ MORE…

Meet the Publisher: Feminist Press’ Lauren Rosemary Hook on Feminist Writing in Translation

Now that Trump is president, people are like, “of course we need a feminist press.” But five years ago people were really questioning why.

Since 1970, Feminist Press has made it its mission to publish marginalized voices and authors writing about issues of equality and gender identity. From the start, founder Florence Howe focused on publishing works in translation from around the world alongside feminist classics by local writers. Almost fifty years later, the press’s catalogue continues to reflect these priorities. Senior editor Lauren Rosemary Hook spoke to Sarah Moses, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Argentina, about the press’s approach to publishing in the current political climate, acquiring works from different countries, and titles in translation that readers can be on the lookout for.

Sarah Moses: How did Feminist Press get started?

Lauren Rosemary Hook: We were founded in 1970 by an English professor named Florence Howe. It was very much a reaction to the few women’s studies courses that were popping up at the time. I feel like that’s something we take for granted—women’s and gender studies—now that programs are available at every university. But I can count on only one hand how many there were across the country then, so it was a very tight-knit group. There was a lot of talk about how there weren’t many texts available by women—besides Emily Dickinson—especially in literature, and Florence was a part of this dialogue. A lot of feminist professors and activists at the time met up and Florence went away on vacation and came back and she had all these checks in her mailbox made out to the Feminist Press, and she was like, “I’m doing this?” It’s a really fascinating story.

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Summer 2018: Dear Reader, From Our Lives We Write to You in Your Life

Happy International Translation Day—Enter Our Raffle To Win $200 In Prizes!

This September, we interrupted our usual blog programming to celebrate Asymptote’s 30 issues since our debut in January 2011 and draw awareness to National Translation Month while we are at it!  Whether you discovered Asymptote early on or just recently, we invite you to join us as we retrace the steps that brought us here. Beginning with the inaugural Winter 2011 issue, we will work our way chronologically through the archive, weighing in both as editors, shedding new light on how our editions are assembled, and as readers, drawing connections within each issue. Finally, don’t forget that you too can play a part in catalysing the transmission of world literature: share this #30issues30days showcase (and the actual issues themselves) far and wide! 

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief

Revisit every issue before reading about our 30th issue below:

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Section Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2018

Our Section Editors pick their favorite pieces from the Summer 2018 issue!

The brand new Summer 2018 edition of Asymptote is almost one week old and we are still enjoying the diverse offerings from 31 countries gathered therein. Today, our section editors share highlights from their respective sections: 

2501 Migrants by Alejandro Santiago” is a powerful meditation on the US-Mexico border, compellingly written by Cristina Rivera Garza, and beautifully translated by Sarah Booker. Rivera Garza writes gracefully about sculptures made by Oaxacan artist Alejandro Santiago and his team. Each of these clay vessels contains the spirit of a migrant who, having tried their luck at crossing the border, now stands in mute testimony to the absences and deaths that striate both America and Mexico. In this essay, Rivera Garza explores the multi-faceted meanings of these sculptures and uses them to explore the intricacies of the border-condition—the nostalgia of those who leave Mexico, and the melancholy of those who remain. At this juncture in American history, I can think of no more valuable essay to read today than this one.

—Joshua Craze, Nonfiction Editor

The King of Insomnia, who first appeared as graffiti on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, has now become a central character in the fictional world of the Insomnia people, a creation of artist Tomaz Viana—known as Toz. Life-size three-dimensional Insomnia figures, with a history and traditions drawn from Brazilian and African sources, inhabited the Chácara do Cée Museum and its grounds in 2017. Lara Norgaard, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large in Brazil, introduces the imaginary culture of Insomnia and interviews the artist who discusses his influences, including the Afro-Brazilian religion candomblé, and explains the evolution of these “fictional people with connections to the night, to the big city, but also to the jungle and the forest.”

—Eva Heisler, Visual Editor

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Announcing the Summer 2018 Issue of Asymptote

Introducing our thirtieth issue, which gathers never-before-published work from 31 countries!

We interrupt our regular programming to announce the launch of Asymptote’s Summer 2018 issue!

Step into our bountiful Summer edition to “look for [yourself] in places [you] don’t recognize” (Antonin Artaud). Hailing from thirty-one countries and speaking twenty-nine languages, this season’s rich pickings blend the familiar with the foreign: Sarah Manguso and Jennifer Croft (co-winner, with Olga Tokarczuk, of this year’s Man Booker International Prize) join us for our thirtieth issue alongside Anita Raja, Duo Duo, and Intizar Husain, and our first work from the Igbo in the return of our Multilingual Writing Feature.

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What’s New with the Crew? A Monthly Update

Check out the latest exploits of our stellar international team!

In the midst of sunny summertime beach reading in the north and cozy fireside reading in the south, intense world cup viewing, and political activism, the Asymptote team has been as creative as always! Below are some recent updates from the crew as well as exciting information for all you emerging translators!

Criticism Editor Ellen Jones contributed an article on Junot Díaz to Hispanic Research Journal. Her translation of Juan Pablo Roncone’s short story “Children” was published in the Bogotá39 anthology (Oneworld, June 2018). She also participated in a translation slam with Rosalind Harvey at Oxford Translation Day, where the two of them discussed their different versions of Chilean writer Nicanor Parra’s poem “Manchas en la pared.”

Blog Editor Sarah Booker contributed a translation of Cristina Rivera Garza’s “Simple Pleasure. Pure Pleasure” to The Paris Review.

Australia Editor-at-Large Tiffany Tsao’s new novel Under Your Wings was published on July 2 by Viking Australia, and has been reviewed at Readings.

Singapore Editor-at-Large Theophilus Kwek presented his paper “(Trans)National Service: Conscripting Second-Generation Migrants in Neoliberal Singapore” at the biennial conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia. In addition, his undergraduate dissertation discussing race in Singapore’s history textbooks will become a chapter in the forthcoming book Southeast Asian Education in Modern History (ed. Pia Maria Jolliffe, Thomas Richard Bruce) from Routledge.

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What’s New with the Crew? A Monthly Update

What is our literary powerhouse of a crew up to this May? Read on to find out!

We have such an amazing group of creative people over here at Asymptote. Check out some of our recent news and stay tuned for more of the international literature you love!

Poetry Editor Aditi Machado‘s poem “Epistle” appeared in Boston Review, and another poem of hers, “Archaic”, was reprinted by the Poetry Society of America.

From May 1 – 5, Romania and Moldova Editor-at-Large Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO organized DHSITE, a bilingual event introducing new computing technologies and their uses in education and research, at the University of Ottawa. Later this month, he will present a paper at the Kanada Koncrete poetry conference in the same school.

Both Assistant Editor Lizzie Buehler and Blog Editor David Smith have accepted offers to attend the University of Iowa’s Literary Translation MFA this coming fall. David also wrote a review of an early Jon Fosse novel, Boathouse, for Reading in Translation.

Indonesia Editor-at-Large Norman Erikson Pasaribu spoke with Indonesian writer Eka Kurniawan about his conception of horror, the diversity of Indonesian literature, and the rebirth of the New Order in Mekong Review.

Assistant Managing Editor Sam Carter published an essay at Music & Literature on Jorge Barón Biza’s The Desert and Its Seed.

Blog Editor Sarah Booker‘s translation of Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest (Feminist Press and And Other Stories) was included on the long list for the Best Translated Book Award.

Singapore Editor-at-Large Theophilus Kwek contributed work to Carcanet Press’s latest New Poetries anthology. He also published a piece in The Straits Times comparing citizenship opportunities in the UK (where he was able to vote in the European Union referendum as a Commonwealth citizen) and Singapore.

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What’s New with the Crew? A Monthly Update

A monthly peek at what our superstar Asymptote team members have been up to!

Poetry Editor Aditi Machado’s debut collection of poems, Some Beheadings, “exploring territories as disparate as India’s Western Ghats and the cinematic Mojave Desert,” has just been published by Nightboat Books.

Drama Editor Caridad Svich’s Red Bike has been selected for NNPN’s 2017 National Showcase of New Plays this December.

Contributing Editor Ellen Elias-Bursac was given an award by the Serbian PEN Center for her work translating Serbian writers into English.

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