Posts featuring Oksana Zabuzhko

Hate Makes Us Weak

We should never forget that this war is about defending freedom, democracy and truth against dictatorship, chauvinism and lies.

As Europeans try to make sense of the war on their doorstep, boycotts targeting Russia have reached past the country’s oil exports to its poets, painters and tennis players. The invasion of Ukraine earlier this year set off the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II; it also, according to past contributor Vladimir Vertlib (tr. Julie Winter), inspired a wave of “outright hostility” against Russian literature. This thoughtful essay by the Vienna-based Jewish Russian writer is an argument about the baby and the bathwater—Pushkin and Putin—and a strident call for nuance in wartime.

When I was a child, other people always knew who I was better than I did. One day my parents told me that I was Jewish. But I wanted to be a Leningradian because I was born in Leningrad, known today as St. Petersburg. My parents laughed. They said that you could be a Jew and someone from Leningrad, that was no problem, even if you lived in Vienna. I didn’t feel Austrian or Viennese at that time, although I was undoubtedly at home in our neighborhood Brigittenau. To this day, parts of this Viennese district, as well as the adjoining Leopoldstadt, have remained the only place in the world where I feel I belong.

This ambivalent identity confusion was soon as much a part of my being as was my accent-free German and everyone’s mispronunciation of my first name, which I accepted and eventually even adopted myself. For my Austrian classmates and teachers, however, the matter was perfectly clear: I was a typical Russian. Why I was “typical” was a mystery to me because whenever my classmates or teachers described something as “typically Russian,” they immediately said that they “of course” didn’t mean me.

Brigittenau, where I went to elementary school and later to high school, had belonged to the Soviet occupied zone in Vienna after the war; the memory of that time was still fresh almost fifty years ago when I started school. The “Russians” were said to be brutal and uncultured. They drank water from toilet bowls, screwed light bulbs into sockets that were disconnected from any source of power and then wondered why they didn’t light up, raped women en masse, stole, robbed, murdered and destroyed senselessly, simply out of anger and revenge. Russians are emotional, it was said. Sometimes they’re like children—warm, naive and helpful—but they could suddenly become brutal and unpredictable like wild animals. They were, after all, a soulful people, in both negative and positive respects. The latter was attributed to me. If my essays or speeches were emotional, it was said to be due to my “Russian soul,” and people thought they were paying me a compliment. I, on the other hand, was always unpleasantly affected by these attributions, because I knew, even in elementary school, that Jews and Russians were not the same thing. No Russian, my parents explained to me, would ever accept me as his equal. In the former Soviet Union, ethnic groups, which included Jews, were clearly distinct. So my supposed “Russian soul” was not only embarrassing, it was also presumptuous. I was assigned something that I was not at all entitled to, based on my ethnicity. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary news from New York, Vietnam, and Sweden!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on Spanish poetry readings in New York, new Vietnamese translations of classic Japanese novels, and the Gothenberg Book Fair in Sweden. Read on to find out more!

 Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from New York

Though I usually report from Mexico City, I recently moved to New Haven to begin a PhD program at Yale. However, relocating has not prevented me from engaging with Hispanophone literary communities, particularly in New York City, a creative hub that connects people from all over the world, and where literary readings in Spanish are common.

The first event I attended was a multilingual poetry open mic at the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan. Hosted by Spanish poet Marcos de la Fuente, the soirée “Se Buscan Poetas / Poets Wanted” takes place every last Wednesday of the month. It brings together poets from New York and beyond, who sign up to share their work to the Bowery’s attentive audience. I went on Wednesday, August 31, and participated both as spectator and reader among other emerging Spanish- and English-speaking poets. The event opened with a performance by De la Fuente and actress Clara Francesca. They set the mood for the night with a dramatic interpretation of the bilingual poem “Solstice,” published in the anthology Poetryfighters (Ultramarina Editorial, 2022), assembled by De la Fuente himself. The reading was both exhilarating and engaging. Beyond simply voicing words from the book, De la Fuente and Francesca modulated their expressions and walked around the stage in synchrony with the content and rhythm of the text, creating moments of emotional and aural tension that excited the audience, more like a concert or play than a traditional poetry reading. In addition to hosting the monthly open mic, De la Fuente also directs the New York City part of the Kerouac Festival, an international poetry, music, and performance celebration that takes place in Vigo, New York, and Mexico City. Earlier this year, the festival featured the Chilean writer and Asymptote contributor Arelis Uribe.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary news from Thailand, Poland, and the Philippines!

In this week’s collection of literary news from around the world, our editors report on political dissident writers in Thailand, a literary festival in Poland, and prizes for writers in the Philippines. Read on to find out more!

Peera Songkünnatham, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Thailand

Activists critical of the Thai establishment have to contend with not only the threat of royal defamation laws but also charges of mental illness. No one knows this more intimately than writer, translator, and bookseller Small Bandhit Aniya: in 1965, he was thrown in a psychiatric hospital by police after he camped outside the Russian Embassy in Bangkok and wrote “It is better to die in Moscow than to stay in Thailand” on the embassy walls in chalk. In 1975, he was charged with lèse-majesté for a booklet lambasting Haile Selassie I, the emperor of Ethiopia, but escaped imprisonment due to being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. This professional-opinion-turned-legal-fact would become the saving strategy for his lawyers in subsequent decades, most recently in 2014—to the dismay of the man himself, who insists he’s perfectly sane.

Starting this week, a literary translation initiative is putting a spotlight on Bandhit’s work along with the voices of other allegedly insane subjects in the kingdom. Under the theme “Madman, Madwoman, Madhuman,” the website Sanam Ratsadon released an excerpt from Bandhit’s autobiographical novel, in which he plays with the idea that he may indeed be insane. Rather than rejecting the diagnosis outright, as he has in his public statements, Bandhit takes the strange route of fictionalizing madness. “There is no doubt that I am mentally ill,” he writes. “Many things I have done in the past and will do in the future clearly signal that I am a psycho, the kind with paranoid schizophrenia.” Is this satire? In any case, this is a literary experiment that has yet to be fully appreciated and properly interpreted in Thailand. May the world be introduced to him, then.

Meanwhile, the short story “Sound of Laughter” by Mutita Ubekka, published as part of the same initiative, questions the self-help, positive-thinking mindset of the Thai public health sector and its allies through the perspective of a woman who is pushed to the brink of suicide by the country’s sociopolitical conditions, like many others in the “Sufferers Association of Thailand.” The story was originally written for a 2020 creative writing contest under the sunny theme of “Day of Suffering That Passed” as part of the project “Read to Heal the Heart.” Seeing through it all, the madwoman discovers her own way of overcoming suffering—through the Jokeresque laughter in a therapist’s office.

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Soft Power: Gabriella Page-Fort on Editing Oksana Zabuzhko’s Your Ad Could Go Here

. . . both a fairy-tale reverie and a feminist call to action; the book offers a window on twenty-first-century Ukraine and on ourselves.

One could not conceive of contemporary Ukrainian literature without Oksana Zabuzhko’s wide-ranging body of work coming to the mind’s forefront. With volumes of fiction, poetry, and essays to her name, her remarkable fusion of lyric and philosophy has earned her the unceasing admiration of both critics and the general public. We were enormously excited to present her latest English-language work, the short story compilation Your Ad Could Go Here, as our April Book Club selection. The eight tales are ripe with her signature eye for detail and acute insight into the heart of human matters, and signify the triumph of an author whose trusted voice remains her greatest tool in combating themes both personal and political. In the following interview, Allison Braden speaks to the volume’s editor, Gabriella Page-Fort, about the significance of Zabuzhko’s oeuvre and the impact of these powerful stories. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!  

Allison Braden (AB): How did you go about selecting and arranging the stories in this collection? What sorts of criteria, aesthetic or otherwise, did you consider? 

Gabriella Page-Fort (GP-F): With topics ranging from Ukraine’s Orange Revolution to sexual empowerment and attractive tennis instructors, Your Ad Could Go Here is both wildly entertaining and intensely provocative. Oksana decided which stories to include and in what order, but translators Halyna Hryn, Nina Murray, and Askold Melnyczuk were also part of the conversation about how best to order these stories. The collection’s three central themes—sisterhood, truth, and aging—strike a balance between the personal and the political. The result is powerful: both a fairy-tale reverie and a feminist call to action; the book offers a window on twenty-first-century Ukraine and on ourselves. What would it feel like to have power? What structures that define our lives are worthy of our submission, and what are the true risks of, say, admitting weakness truthfully to a man?

AB: What was it like working with a diverse team of translators? Did you edit their work to create a cohesive narrative voice throughout, or did you welcome stylistic discrepancies from one story to the next?

GP-F: We worked with five different translators for this collection, each bringing their own element of style and theory to the text. This was a really exciting creative challenge. Oksana wrote these stories in a variety of voices, so a single tone for the whole collection would be inappropriate, but we also wanted to make sure the book flowed nicely. Rather than undoing the translators’ elegant individual contributions, Nina, acting as volume editor and an expert in Ukrainian translations and Oksana’s work, and I, with an eye toward an English-language reader, focused on developing patterns, such as consistent logic in punctuation choice, to result in a smooth read without compromising style or the diverse range of voices here.  READ MORE…

Announcing our April Book Club Selection: Your Ad Could Go Here by Oksana Zabuzhko

The eight stories that make up the book . . . conspire to place the collection right at the border where our world gives way to magic.

In a collection that coheres pivotal ideas about womanhood and history with impeccable craft, Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko has once again impressed her brilliance upon the English-speaking world with the newly released Your Ad Could Go Here. At Asymptote, we are incredibly proud to present this volume of stunning short stories as our Book Club selection for April. Known equally for her adeptness in criticism and philosophy as her accomplishments in poetry and fiction, Zabuzhko’s refined perspective on Ukrainian identity and feminism, enlivening her characters and narratives, is a gift for readers everywhere.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page

Your Ad Could Go Here by Oksana Zabuzhko, translated from the Ukrainian, edited by Nina Murray, Amazon Crossing, 2020

As I read Oksana Zabuzhko’s newest collection of short stories, Your Ad Could Go Here, I recalled the scene in Paradise Lost when Eve, new to the world, is startled to encounter her own reflection in a pool of water:

As I bent down to look, just opposite
A shape within the watery gleam appeared,
Bending to look on me: I started back,
It started back; but pleased I soon returned,
Pleased it returned as soon with answering looks
Of sympathy and love: There I had fixed
Mine eyes till now, and pined with vain desire,
Had not a voice thus warned me; ‘What thou seest,
‘What there thou seest, fair Creature, is thyself

Like Milton’s Eve, Zabuzhko’s protagonists—invariably women—turn their attention inward, without losing sight of their physical selves. They find strength, power, faults—and a wellspring of self-love, despite being riven by the natural contradictions of a full life. READ MORE…

The Multilingual Carpathians: Weronika Gogola in Conversation

“Only by picking up a magnifying glass and taking a close look at things can you see the truth about yourself and others.”

Weronika Gogola is a Polish writer and translator from Slovak and Ukrainian. Her first autobiographical book Po trochu (Little by Little, 2017), which depicts her childhood in the small village of Olszyny in the Carpathian mountains, is composed of “stories from real life that are usually told bit by bit, in snippets and fragments.” The book was nominated for several literary prizes and in October 2018 won the Conrad Award for a prose debut. For the past three years, Gogola has been based in Bratislava, where Julia Sherwood, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Slovakia, caught up with her last November.

Julia Sherwood: First of all, congratulations on winning the Conrad Award! I loved your book and think that the prize was more than deserved. What does it mean for you?

Weronika Gogola: This award is incredibly important to me, especially since, in the case of the Conrad Award, it’s not just the judges who decide but, first and foremost, the readers. I’m incredibly grateful to them. Besides, a prize is a kind of validation, as well as a bargaining chip for the future. I know that sounds unfair but that’s how the world works—the more prizes and nominations you have the more seriously you are taken. Unfortunately. But, of course, it’s nice to be appreciated. In addition, the Conrad Award includes a grant, which has allowed me to concentrate on my writing without financial worries.

JS: Your book is very firmly located in the world of your childhood. You grew up in a small village in rural Poland, yet ended up living abroad, and are currently based in Slovakia. Were you already living abroad while working on your book, and did the geographical distance give you a new perspective on the place, or did this make the writing more challenging?

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