Posts featuring T.S. Eliot

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

New poems, book fair discussions, and online publications from Thailand, El Salvador, and Palestine!

This week, our editors from around the world report on an international poetry volume in support of human rights, an author talk between two Salvadoran poets, and an online exploration of the history of Jerusalem that includes a wealth of Palestinian literature. Read on to find out more!

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

Five Thai poems got a chance to shine in the company of poems in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Swahili. On June 15, the Human Rights Defenders Poetry Challenge, organized by Protection International together with its partners from ProtectDefenders.eu and the University of York, concluded with an awards ceremony and a booklet launch. As part of the #StayWithDefenders campaign, the challenge called on “all creatives, activists and advocates for human rights” to submit poems honoring those who “have suffered, succeeded, fought and fallen.” The top three winners were announced from a pool of thirty finalists, five from each of the languages. You can read the booklet here; every poem not originally in English is accompanied by an English translation. How nice it is for poets to slip through the political and poetical confines of their countries into an ad-hoc international space, at least virtually on Zoom and in translation.

“To be a poet in this country is like being in a cage,” stated Mek Krueng Fah about Thailand upon winning third place overall. His poem “Remember, we’re all by your side” (โปรดจำไว้.. เราต่างอยู่ข้างเธอ) manages to console even as it stares into an unrelenting bleakness: “On the road of fighters that will know no end, / The ones who came before lie dead, uncovered; / Their bodies caution ‘watch your step, my friend,’ / And nightly, to protect, their spirits hover.”

First place went to “The Full Truth” (Ukweli Kamili) by Martin Mwangi from Kenya. The poem deftly impersonates the flippant attitudes of shrewd politicians who speak in half-truths: “Welcome, it is here that we will give you vegetable rice while we eat pilau rice / then if you complain we’ll say be thankful at least you ate. / However, for how long shall you live with these half-truths of at least? / I don’t know, answer that yourself.” Second place was awarded to María del Campo from Uruguay, whose “To Those Afraid of Windmills” (A quienes les temen los molinos) will make human rights defenders—“those who slip through the cracks and pose a threat to the wall as bridge, brick, step, door”—feel seen and touched. READ MORE…

Yes, and It Sometimes Is Like That, You Embrace Your Existence

A computer-generated collection of poetry in Slovak wins a national prize for poetry.

In 2020, the Slovak poet and intermedia artist Zuzana Husárová and the Slovak sound artist and software developer collaborated with Liza Gennart, a neural network they programmed, to write the poetry collection, Outcomes of Origin (2020, VLNA / Drewo a srd). To the surprise of many, the work won a major Slovak national award for poetry. In this essay, the second part of our coverage on Liza Gennart, the critic and scholar Ivana Hostová contextualizes the project within the rapidly developing field of electronic poetry, examines Liza Gennart’s subversive, unsettling poems, and explores their implications for our relationships with humanized machines. The following excerpts from Gennart’s collection were translated by Hostová.

Miscellanea 4.

Do you enter this world?
There is nothing to do. Not even in the bedroom, such misfortune, you leave it soak
in the brain and perhaps you also do it for my sake. But for my sake.

* late afternoon

* because it doesn’t sound like a reproach

* but you agree: it resembles a colourless key

* because wet words float out the window

Liza Gennart: Outcomes of Origin (Výsledky vzniku, 2020, VLNA / Drewo a srd), created by Zuzana Husárová and Ľubomír Panák, excerpt translated by Ivana Hostová.

In a recent ambitious attempt to comprehensively account for the lyric experience and practice in Western culture, Jonathan Culler in his Theory of the Lyric (2015) names the ritualistic as one of the defining features of what a poem has been over the centuries. Although Culler mostly excludes experimental writing including electronic poetry from his discussions and therefore restricts the scope of his analysis, the feeling of a ritual is surely present upon a readerly encounter with a book of poetry generated by one of our current Others—computers, neural networks, and machines. These, to our horror and admiration, have now absorbed the entire textual world produced during the whole history of humankind. We cannot help but wonder how much of what remains hidden from us they know and to what use they might put it. Instructing a neural network to write poetry provides an uncanny glimpse of such depths and shallow waters, reflecting the surfaces and masks of humanity.

Poetry generated by artificial intelligence, as research into readers’s responses shows, tends to be most interesting when it involves cooperation between human and non-human actors. One such project, Es Devlin’s Poem Pavilion at Expo 2020 in Dubai, creates poems—in English and Arabic—using words submitted by visitors which are then processed by an advanced machine learning algorithm. The creative possibilities of recent developments in natural language processing have inspired artists and poets all over the world and have given rise to poems, novels, and plays in languages with limited diffusion—including Slovak. The creative duo composed of poet and intermedia artist Zuzana Husárová and the sound artist and software developer Ľubomír Panák collaborated with a neural network Liza Gennart to create the collection Outcomes of Origin (2020, VLNA / Drewo a srd). The book—to the great shock of many—won the national prize for poetry, “Golden Wave,” in 2021.

READ MORE…

Ambrosial Wafts: An Interview with A.J. Naddaff

I believe literature is the conduit to the deepest understanding of society.

The first time I corresponded with A.J. Naddaff was after I had read an early issue of his excellent newsletter Untranslatable, devoted to extensive conversations with Arabic-to-English literary translators about their craft. Startled by the sharpness, intimacy, and candour of each interview, I emailed him merely to convey my appreciation for the work he was doing and how fortuitous it seemed to me that he had begun this initiative at the time that I found myself falling in love with the limitless depths of classical Arabic literature. He wrote back, expressing genuine curiosity about my interests, saying: “Connecting with people who share this love makes the world feel a bit smaller and kinder.” That told me all I needed to know about how A.J. makes space for his interlocutors to arrive at such acute insights as “Every poem is a linguistic event which reimagines its entire tradition” (Huda Fakhreddine) and “That joy and pleasure of someone having it on with you is the very pleasure of literature. You know it and yet you still fall for it” (Maurice Pomerantz).

Besides being a gracious person and a master’s student in Arabic Literature at the American University of Beirut, A.J. wears many other hats: he is an award-winning multimedia journalist, translator, and social science researcher. He’s met and reported on people of diverse stripes, from Sufi intellectuals to ISIS extremists, co-translated Hassan Samy Youssef’s Threshold of Pain with Rebecca Joubin and Nick Lobo, and is currently working on a thesis regarding the translation of the pre-Islamic mu’allaqat into English. I was excited to encounter someone with his feelers in so many different worlds and to hear his meditations on the translatability of Arabic literature, the meanings of home, the in-betweenness of negotiating both the journalistic and the literary, and the state of contemporary Lebanese art in the aftermath of trauma.

Alex Tan (AT): In one of the first issues of your Untranslatable newsletter, you quote the brilliant Moroccan literary critic Abdelfattah Kilito, who wrote of how in the classical Arabic literary tradition, the ancients “endeavoured to make their works untranslatable.” What does untranslatability signify in classical Arabic literature? Why did you decide to name your newsletter after a quality that appears to defy the possibility of translation?

A.J. Naddaff (AJN): In my opinion, and this is up for debate, the idea of untranslatability is the wrong framing for understanding tensions that exist when translating Arabic. Alexander Key has proposed that the idea of untranslatability is a modern idea—that the ancients thought mental content (maʿnā) was always transferable between languages, from Persian to Arabic. So untranslatability was birthed out of early modern European notions, and we should push ourselves—as many translators are doing—to reimagine limits when translating Arabic into English.

Shawkat Toorawa takes it even further and believes that it’s possible to translate something sublime, like the Qur’an, into another language and to still convey the cadence, movement, and the beauty of the original, which I’m totally on board with.

AT: Most of the scholars you’ve chosen to interview so far are translators of pre-modern Arabic literature and contributors to the NYU Library of Arabic Literature series. I’d like to ask about your thoughts on the relationship between the pre-modern and the modern in Arabic writing. You work on the Mu’allaqat (hanging odes), but you’re also interested in contemporary Levantine literary production. How do you position yourself between these two worlds? Does your knowledge of pre-modern genres and forms haunt your approach to the modern?

AJN: Coming into my master’s at the American University of Beirut, I carried this notion that bifurcated “old” or classical Arabic literature from “modern.” I remember distinctly telling my teacher Bilal Orfali that I was excited to read old Arabic literature and he politely cut me off and encouraged me to think of literature more as a continuum. I think this is probably how we should think of literature in all traditions, but especially in Arabic.

So now, I position one foot in each world with no problem. I’m not haunted by my knowledge of pre-modern genres and forms besides by how little I know. Salim Barakat, one of the most celebrated modern Arabic authors, claims he only reads pre-modern works. Rachid el Daif’s novels are full of references to “pre-modern” literature: One Thousand and One Nights, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyei, the Kitab al-Aghani, al-Jahiz, Majnun and Layla, and Pre-Islamic (Jahili) poetry all make appearances. Mahmoud Darwish has a famous poem where he draws on elements from the sixth century poet-king Imru’ al-Qays’s final trip to Constantinople to allegorically critique the Oslo Accords. As T.S. Eliot said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did. Precisely, and they are that which we know.”

READ MORE…

Twenty Poems and Two Women: Kathrin Schmidt and Sue Vickerman

Schmidt is determined to use the most searing images to jolt the reader into the reality she has been forced to live in.

Twenty Poems by Kathrin Schmidt, translated from the German by Sue Vickerman, Arc Publications, 2020

Born in the former GDR and now of Berlin, Kathrin Schmidt is a renowned poet and novelist. Notorious in her native Germany as a competitor of Herta Müller (since beating the celebrated writer for the 2009 German Book Prize), she is a strong and serious voice of what translator Sue Vickerman terms “the left-behind east.” Schmidt, who has worked as an editor and a child psychologist, has published six poetry books and five volumes of fiction in German. A versatile author whose own interior and external experience stands at the base of her writings, Schmidt continually broaches contemporary topics, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to migration in the era of the internet, with relentless perspicacity and humor.

An excellent translator doesn’t necessarily have to be a writer, but when an exceptional translator is an exceptional writer in his or her own right, as is the case with poet-translator Sue Vickerman, the experiment takes on a new aura, advancing transcultural dialogue and culture itself. In her introduction to Kathrin Schmidt: Twenty Poems (the author’s first collection in English), Vickerman draws the reader into her own personal experience of translating Schmidt, a project she completed with obsessive attention to detail and superhuman dedication.

READ MORE…

Our Shared World of Language: Reflections on “US” Poets Foreign Poets

If I am a person, I make things with language. If I am a poet, I make art with language.

Today, as a sequel to this previous post, we are continuing to feature reflections on the computationally assembled poetry anthology “US” Poets Foreign Poets (ed. MARGENTO, frACTalia 2018) from some of the most outstanding contributors to the collection.

 “US” Poets Foreign Poets was launched in 2018 at the Electronic Literature Organization Conference and at Bookfest by the collective editor MARGENTO, featuring a line-up of Chris Tănăsescu, Diana Inkpen, Raluca Tănăsescu, Vaibhav Kesarwani, and Marius Surleac. The book won accolades from major theorists and practitioners in the genre such as Christopher Funkhouser, Maria Mencia, and David Jhave Johnston. It features both digital and page-based poets, represents and analyzes the resulting corpus as network graphs, and also includes an algorithm that expands the initial corpus by identifying poems that would “fit in,” that is, display certain stylistic features tracked down by computational analysis.

Regarding the previously mentioned way in which the anthology analyzes and expands its own contents, digital poet and critic Christopher Funkhouser has commented that, “I have never, in three decades of study, seen a literary anthology so determined to generate something out of itself, something beyond a 1:1 conversion, and then successfully do so. What an interesting idea, to both transcreate and more literally translate the contents of a collection of writing. Algorithmic, linguistic, and graphical expansion here grabs and holds onto my attention every time I delve into the book.”

In today’s feature, we choose to illustrate this “transcreation” Funkhouser speaks about as it goes even beyond the covers of the anthology, and continues in the digital or digitally inflected creative and/or critical work of four major names in contemporary electronic literature and digital humanities: John Cayley, Johanna Drucker, Alan Sondheim, and Brian Kim Stefans.

READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2019

Join our blog editors as they explore everything the Spring 2019 issue has to offer!

The Spring 2019 issue of Asymptote, “Cosmic Connections,” features work from 27 countries and 17 different languages. If you’re not sure where to begin, our blog editors have you covered with recommendations for some of their favorite pieces, including an essay about an adventure in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, a story that jumps from medieval Jewish theology to the relationship between an Argentine father and son, and poems that offer us a glimpse into intimate moments in the city of Shanghai.

Asymptote’s newest issue is one of the journal’s best to date, meaning that it was nearly impossible to choose just one piece to highlight. In the interviews section, I found Dubravka Ugrešić’s comments on literary activism and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s discussion of the role of Marxism in his work particularly illuminating, while, in the special feature, Nancy Kline’s essay stood out for its focus on the often-overlooked role of the writer’s (and the translator’s) accent and spoken voice in the translation process. But I’d like to devote my highlight to an essay by a somewhat lesser-known writer, one who might otherwise get lost among the many big names that appear in this issue.

READ MORE…

Fall 2015: Taking the Spaceship Back

Time, the fourth dimension of our existence, threads through the whole Fall 2015 issue as its unifying motif.

The third quarter of 2015 is thorny with developments. On July 31, we announce the second edition of our international translation contest judged by Michael Hofmann (Poetry), Ottilie Mulzet (Fiction), and Margaret Jull Costa (Nonfiction—a new category), this time awarding a total of $4,500 in prizes. Technical Manager József Szabo (also one of the editors behind the fabulous Tumblr blog Writers No One Reads) completes a laborious site migration that has taken almost two years. Our website is now both adaptable to mobile devices and optimized for search engines. On October 1, I receive an invitation from The Guardian initiating a partnership that would see Asymptote simultaneously running our blog’s Translation Tuesday articles on their site for 76 weeks, starting from October 27. (Of the 11 Guardian Books Network Members announced on October 21, we are the only magazine dedicated to translation and also—I can’t help noting—the only one from Asia.) This turns out to be the first of three partnerships that we formalize in October (the other two being with PEN America and Lithub), all three of which we announce proudly via our first-ever Fortnightly Airmail, launched on October 29, thanks to then Communications Manager Matthew Phipps and then Graphic Designer Berny Tan (who valiantly turns around a new newsletter design within 24 hours after I veto the first). This inaugural newsletter doesn’t yet spotlight PEN/Heim grant winners (the first boatload of these would arrive on November 13). Instead, it carries Jennifer Croft’s essay “When the Author You Translate [i.e., Olga Tokarczuk] Gets Death Threats,” which Lithub republishes on their website on November 2. (We would also go on to be the first to excerpt Olga Tokarczuk’s 2018 International Man Booker Prizewinning Flights in our Winter 2016 edition before it hit bookstores anywhere.) October 2015 also ushers in our first-ever virtual event featuring Mexican author Albert Chimal’s “The Time-Traveller.” Originally composed in Spanish as a series of tweets, the English translation by George Henson, which also respects Twitter’s character limit of 140, is published twice: first, as a headliner in our Fall 2015 issue, and then via our English Twitter channel as a long string of tweets pushed out (by then Marketing Manager David Maclean) to the world over a span of 40 hours. If you were there for the tweetathon, thank you for being a part of the work. Here to introduce our Fall 2015 issue is Hong Kong editor-at-large Charlie Ng Chak Kwan.

If I were able to travel back to 2013 and meet my younger self, I would enthusiastically tell her that she was about to become part of a community devoted to breaking cultural and linguistic borders in the literary world and that she would never regret joining a journal whose mission was translating and publishing works written by people far and wide. It is unbelievable that I have now been a Hong Kong Editor-at-Large for Asymptote for more than five years. The many issues of Asymptote have seen me face a few life hurdles—graduating from my Ph.D., securing my first job as a translator, and becoming a full-time university teacher—and still I stay with Asymptote. Time definitely changes a lot of things—for good or for bad—but the ever-expanding archive of Asymptote tells me there are some things that remain constant, like the journal’s perseverance.

Time, the fourth dimension of our existence, threads through the whole Fall 2015 issue as its unifying motif. The issue’s pieces transport us to a wide range of times, from the Armenian genocide in Gostan Zarian’s “The Traveler and His Road” to the forensic anthropological investigation of the dead in Leila Guerriero’s “The Trace in the Bones”. We are not restricted by conventional time frames that confine our experience as words allow us to exist in the past, the present and the future simultaneously. The first line of Alberto Chimal’s “The Time Traveller” actually says it all: “Good morning, afternoon, evening, says the Time Traveller when his machine is moody and doesn’t ask him where (or to when) he’s going.” The Time Traveller’s trouble, in other words, is not where to go but rather the lack of a good temporal compass. Chimal’s story—comprised of a series of the Time Traveller’s wild and witty Tweets—portrays a compassionate titular character with ample knowledge of history and literature. Although its protagonist is no Gulliver—he is much more sophisticated than that 18th century traveller—Chimal’s story amuses and fascinates as much as Swift’s, even as it avoids the latter’s satiric bitterness. READ MORE…