Hot off the digital presses! Asymptote‘s new October issue is live—and completely, utterly alive and alight with literary voices from around the world. This season’s issue is especially star-studded—featuring star writers like Yves Bonnefoy, Sjón, and Thomas Stangl—but it’s equally stuffed with brilliant, lucid literary voices you simply haven’t heard of . . . yet. That’s where translation (and Asymptote) comes in.
But with so many gems of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, we get it—you might be overwhelmed at the prospect of so. much. reading. So if you’re sneaking a read at work (psst—we won’t tell), here are five quick reads sure to make the time pass more quickly:
1. Roland Glasser on translating Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83, by Roland Glasser
The difficulty of translating is something not only every budding translator but every writer can relate to all too well. The struggle of finding the right word, regardless of the language, is something that Robert Glasser iterates very clearly in the essay. Whether it’s a thin, overworked, minor-miner (known as a biscotte in French slang) or a slim-jim, as Glasser translates it—the right word at the right time can mean a world of difference.
Glasser understands this endeavor, and succeeds at illuminating the translation quagmires in Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83. The scenes of “melting-pot” Parisian people, food, and culture flow throughout the piece, juxtaposing the worlds people have left behind with the world of the novel being translated. Reading this piece is a surefire way to get excited, not only about Glasser’s writing, but also his translation of Tram 83, released on September 8th, 2015, by Deep Vellum. —Allegra Rosenbaum, asssistant blog editor
2. The Trace in Our Bones, by Leila Guerriero (tr. Frances Riddle)
Leila Guerriero’s nonfiction piece departs from and returns to a single image of a “striped sweater, ripped; a shoe, rigid and twisted like a black tongue; some socks” over a bed of bones. Guerriero’s portrait of a team of Argentine forensic scientists is haunting; her stark, lyrical prose similarly seem to get under our skin.
She returns over and over to images of bones: “Tibiae and femurs and vertebrae and skulls, pelvises, jaws, teeth, and ribs, in pieces.” Bones are the backdrop of the story, a grim tale of hundreds of thousands of murders committed by the Argentine military government during the country’s guerra sucia or dirty war of 1976-1983. The story she tells, however, of a highly-skilled team of forensic scientists responsible for returning bodies to the families of the disappeared, is a gripping account of commitment to life and humanity, rather than its destruction. Like her subjects, Guerriero’s prose engages the painstaking work of unearthing and honoring the past, fragment by fragment, bone by bone. Her discoveries are tangible, and essentially human. —Vera Carothers, assistant blog editor
3. Rumor of Days to Come by Glafira Rocha (tr. Gustavo Adolfo Aybar, with visual art by Samuel Hickson)
What do a housekeeper, a prostitute, and an infant child have in common? They’re all part of Mexican playwright Glafira Rocha’s wonderfully bizarre piece, “Rumor of Days to Come.” Just consider this opening for a second:
“The space is unimportant, since the characters will be able to develop throughout the setting already in existence, nevertheless there’ll be a plaza, the same characters will create it with their movements, not the scenery.
All of them are frozen, forming a circle where they surround HIM, who is naked on top of a shoeshine box.”
This pretty much sets the tone of the play, which brilliantly combines sadness and humor (much thanks to translator Gustavo Adolfo Aybar’s punchy lines) in a surreal universe. If you—like me—are the sort of person who is intrigued by a philosophical conversation between a mother and her infant, this piece of dramatic writing will definitely appeal to you. —Katrine Øgaard Jensen, blog editor
4. The Sea, or the Poet At Work, by Agnieszka Taborska (tr. Ursula Phillips, with visual art by Patrycja Orzechowska)
I keep on hearing that the lyric essay is having a “moment,” that writers today are living in an (ominously all-capitalized) Age Of The Essay—and I can’t help but side-eye the assertion. Weren’t Hebrew scholars writing what amounted to lyric essays in their (ostensibly scholarly) interpretations of the Bible? Didn’t Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the rest of the Enlightenment philosopher lot polish the art of lyric-nonfic literally hundreds of years ago? And the likes of Baldwin, Woolf, and Orwell have (to me) proved far more convincing in their “essays” than their “fiction.” (Though I admit the distinction is—and always has been—fuzzy).
Still, it’s remarkably nice to read an essay that surprises me in my huffy notions of what an essay should do. And how! In The Sea, or the Poet at Work, Agnieszka Taborska’s accretive, lovely imagery—coupled with the lovely collage-like visual art of Patrycja Orzechowska, magically manages to perform the relentless, totalizing work of a poet and the ocean. The essay is nothing short of remarkable in its exacting precision—its sensitivity to the machinations of language itself and its employment of intellectual matter and the ineffable to its utmost. It’s both documentarian, exacting, and utterly compelling, and it’s an essay of serious scope. It’s no five-paragraph essay, but in its incredible prose, it, too “calms and alarms” its reader. —Patty Nash, blog editor
5. the ship, by Nhã Thuyên (tr. Kaitlin Rees)
Perhaps it’s a pattern: my second suggestion similarly involves aquatics, is similarly accretive, similarly stark (and it goes without saying that it’s just-as-good). But I read Nhã Thuyên’s ship in a daze—and then I read it again, to make sure it wasn’t a fluke. The poem is persistent in its rhythmic sauntering, in its borderline-seasick undulation chronically on-the-brink of hysteria, and it reads both seductively and viciously, as the reader is absorbed in a speaker who is viscerally mired in the present moment, despite a staggering want to somehow be otherwise.
The very narrative of the poem appears under constant threat and meta-surveillance as its speaker sways, trembles under the pressure of what can only be a personal tragedy of disastrous proportions. The poem looks different, and even foreboding, too: as a block of text on your browser screen, it certainly doesn’t warmly welcome readers—or at least the eye-twitching kind of reading/scanning we, of the Internet age, have learned.
Stick with it. The poem grips in its anguished turns of phrase, and even reading it a fourth, fifth, time, I leave physically unsettled. I have a hard time believing it would be otherwise for you. —Patty Nash, blog editor