Posts featuring Radna Fabias

Section Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2020

October 26, 2020  |  in News  |  by Ah-reum Han, Garrett Phelps, Lee Yew Leong, Michele Hutchison, and Sam Carter

Our Section Editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2020 issue!

This year’s events have made us all a little rusty in the art of travel, so hopping across our fortieth issue’s thirty-two countries may feel equal parts thrilling and daunting. Luckily, our section editors (including our Dutch Literature Special Feature curator, International Booker Prize co-winner Michele Hutchison) are happy to lay out a road map. Read on for literary duos on life and love in the Netherlands, a Norwegian’s popular fury, a Mexican novelist’s elusive but lasting influence, and a German author’s and Iranian poet’s exquisite study of silence.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction and Nonfiction Editor:

Not quite as stunningly “out there” as The Haunting of Bly Manor’s episode five, Paweł Sołtys’s deeply moving “The Kiev Sea” (translated with great aplomb by Eliza Marciniak) nevertheless reminded me of it: we are in such close third-person mode that even the reading material that the protagonist uses to while away time seems to be directly absorbed as consciousness while operating as pivotal mise en abyme. Memories and regret flit through this consciousness, “maintain(ing) the other me within the present me,” even as everything is “already slipping towards an invisible edge.” In truth—as we follow the protagonist down the rabbit hole of nostalgia—the slippage began much earlier: “it seemed that since he’d turned forty, he could only discard things. Friends, women, memories even.” What is the sum of life then? How much can we hold on to? On this fateful October day of reckoning, this fictional protagonist is reminded, via fiction, as we all are perhaps, of how removed and frightfully impersonal existence finally is: “It really happened, all of it, but it’s as if it were a story, told not to me but to someone nearby, in the noise of a bar or during a fight, a proper one, when the sound of the blows drowns out the wailing.”

From Michele Hutchison, Guest Editor of Dutch Literature Special Feature:

Good fortune would have it that I was working on the selection of Asymptote’s Dutch special when my translation of The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld was awarded the International Booker Prize. Perfect timing for sharing these stunning new Dutch voices with you, coinciding with the spike in interest in our national literature. (I wrote ‘our’ without thinking: I’m a defected Brit, resident in Amsterdam.)

To be honest, Dutch literature has long had plenty to offer, and there have been other recent successes. Think of Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin (translated by David Colmer) winning the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award ten years ago, and think of the great reception Gerard Reve’s classic The Evenings (translated by Sam Garrett) and Tonke Dragt’s The Letter for the King (translated by Laura Watkinson, recently a Netflix series) have had in English. We haven’t exactly been hiding our light under a bushel. Nevertheless, it was wonderful to put together this selection of Dutch talent to entice you to read further. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2020

October 19, 2020  |  in News  |  by Josefina Massot, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Our blog editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2020 issue!

Asymptote’s momentous fortieth issue features brand new work from thirty-two countries, a Dutch Literature Special Feature curated by 2020 International Booker Prize co-winner Michele Hutchison, and a literary roster spanning classics like Tagore, heavy hitters like Harwicz, and rising stars like Fabias. Dizzy yet? We’re here to help.

In the Chinese language, we never use the abstract noun of beauty. Instead, beauty is always a quality, a trait something possesses. There is, for example, no real way to express the notion that “beauty is all around us”; instead, one would say, “everything here is beautiful.” I find something wondrous in this distinct nature of what beauty is. It is a wandering state, a constantly mutating definition, a metamorphosing form that adapts to whatever subject it is applied to—never fixed, never permanent. Something is beautiful not for its appeal to the pure nature of beauty, but for its unique addition to the myriad of beauty’s appearances.

I was once again reminded of this definition while reading through the Fall 2020 issue, in which the writings from thirty-two countries have compiled and allowed the contours of literary beauty to vacillate and transmit. The various Englishes that evolve via translation do not subscribe necessarily to the English that certain texts are born to, instead bringing the colours and geometries of their own language, imparting a distinct and knowing pleasure. In Stella N’Djoku’s poems, the brief lines are vehicles for a cyclical musicality, emphasized by the rhyming Italian but also vivid in the tender translation of Julia Pelosi-Thorpe, sensitive in their lineation. The verses are potent with grief, but positions it within the great immeasurability of the world—creating a familiar dwelling for grace amidst pain, and the poem as our path towards that space.

As if yesterday today tomorrow
were not places
and were here now
in centuries.

In the two poems of Kashimiri poet Nādim, one is also reminded of the singular iterations of his the poet’s original language. As translator Sonam Kachru informs us in his translator’s note, “[Nādim] is thinking of [Kashmir’s] history—a history revealed, in part, through the history of its poetry.” There is then, an impression that we are not privy to when reading in translation, yet the poem still transmits the meditative, majestic quality of scanning the poetic horizons for something that reverberates from the past into the present, and back again. The stoic power of lines like:

I will not sing—
I will sing today no song of Nishat or Shalimar, no annealed song of waters
engraving terraced gardens, no bower songs of bedded flowers;
No soft songs flush or sweetly fresh, not green dew songs
nor songs gentle and growing—

READ MORE…

Our Fall 2020 Issue Is Here!

October 15, 2020  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Feat. Andrés Neuman, Ariana Harwicz, and Rabindranath Tagore amid new work from 32 countries, including a Dutch Special Feature

We are proud to present the Fall 2020 issue of Asymptote, debuting new work from 32 countries:.  

This cornucopia of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, reviews, and more includes such treats as a sparkling new translation of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s century-old fiction, an exclusive interview with rising star Andrés Neuman, and Elisabeth S. Clark’s polyphonic book concertos. 

Perfectly timed to coincide with Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and Michele Hutchison winning the 2020 International Booker Prize, our Dutch Literature Feature, guest curated by Hutchison, zooms in on the emerging and established voices of a small but mighty country. Here you can sample the English debuts of Curaçao-born Radna Fabias, whose first collection swept up an unprecedented number of major poetry prizes, and of Sinan Çankaya, whose best-selling memoir My Innumerable Identities recounts his efforts to combat racism in the Dutch police from the inside—only to be othered for his Turkish origins. 

Elsewhere, Ali Lateef’s bittersweet “The Belle and Gazelle Statue” uses a public monument to illustrate the changing face of Tripoli after the 2011 Libyan Civil War. The unease of our current moment is captured in Ariana Harwicz’s “Longevity,” a cathartic tale about the effects of a pandemic-caused lockdown on a small rural community in France. Somewhere between nature writing and memoir stands Itō Hiromi’s essay on migratory plants and how the concept of “the Other” manifests in different cultures. The lure of the foreign propels both Vadim Muratkhanov’s dispatch from Tashkent’s labyrinthine Tezikova market and Hungarian essayist Noémi Kiss’s travel into the remote wonders of Azerbaijan.

Wherever we are, we find comfort in the global literary voices of our time, for even when they reveal harsh truths about our world, they give us hope, inspire mutual understanding and heal divisions. Please help us spread the word about Asymptote’s latest issue by downloading and distributing our Fall 2020 flyer/postcard, or by posting about it on Facebook or Twitter. 

To promote this brand-new issue, we’re holding another giveaway contest: Share any of our #Fall2020 posts on social media to stand a chance of winning an Asymptote Book Club subscription. Every retweet or share will be counted, and there’s no limit to the number of entries you can enter. We’ll announce the lucky winner on Monday, November 2!