Hi there, Asymptote readers! When Asymptote’s April Issue came out (nearly two whole months ago!), we recommended five slick pieces to start off your reading. The issue’s still fresh, featuring dozens of articles, poems, interviews, stories, histories, and visual art definitely worth your perusal. These’ll work to stave off translation cravings until you can get your keyboard on to the July issue—which is slated to come out in a little over a month. Let’s get started (in no particular order, of course):
- An Interview with Ha Jin, by Henry Ace Knight—recommended by Allegra Rosenbaum, blog editor
When I first read Ha Jin in high school, by no means did I appreciate his writing. It wasn’t until I was applying to university that I really started to feel the effect that Waiting had made on my life. Part of the application process in the United States is a personal essay. I wrote the first draft and felt fairly confident about it. I told my mother when she got home. She had just seen Ha Jin talk at her job.“Ha Jin writes tens of drafts of each novel,” she said.Ha Jin has been a huge inspiration to me since. It came as no surprise to me that in his interview with Asymptote that he thought he should have worked harder at learning English. Today, Waiting is probably one of my favorite books of all time. I think about the journey of the protagonist and I admire his ambition and feel sorry for him at the same time. Ambition is a curse and Ha Jin expresses it so well.
Reading the interview with Ha Jin was really exciting for me, because it was as if I was hearing a personal writing hero of mine speak. He is the kind of hero that works extremely hard to get where he is, and continues to work hard. He took pain killers because learning English was so taxing. I remember having a similar challenge learning French. I would feel exhausted, my jaw aching after trying to pronounce each word.
For any young writer, the interview with Ha Jin is a must-read.
- “Report of a Public Hanging,” by Vali Khalili, translated by Poupeh Missaghi—recommended by Nina Sparling, Assistant blog editor How often are executions reported in few line snippets, designed to inform and encourage the reader to move on? Vali Khalili refuses such simple treatment. He recounts the hanging of two young thieves with remarkable grace and poetry. He meditates on the unpleasant, expands an action that last seconds into a dramatic tale. He makes no explicit commentary on justice or violence. A journalist by trade, he presents the facts, but written in a thick and pleasurable language. I delight most of all in the description of the local theater marquis, in Poupeh Missaghi’s excellent translation: “… another play had been added to the program for five in the morning, a public hanging staged in the open space north of Honarmandan Park, with only one showtime.”He writes, as the title clarifies, a “Report,” a factual account of a hanging and the events that led up to it. The article has everything a news story needs: facts, quotes from observers, context. Yet Khalili indulges in the descriptive details, forcing the reader to reconcile, to think, to feel. He repeats the rapidity of the death a few times, “a struggle that does not last more than a few seconds.” The death may be quick, but its story is profound. There is nothing dry or detached about this account. He manages an impeccable balance between objectivity and emotional depth.
- Poems from Hemflower, by Maiko Sugimoto, translated by Sim Yee Chiang and Sayuri Okamoto—recommended by Patty Nash, blog editor
There’s something very intimate and curious about these poems, almost as though their speaker were quiet and weird—looking out at an even quieter, weirder world. I love poems like these: poems that struggle to find or feign any kind of masterful lyric footing, instead skipping along in spurts and fortuitous spikes in imagination, as in the first stanza of the first poem, “Handclap:”
down below my spine is a little handclap,
neither a device nor a gift of chance,
I found it, one morning,
and pressed the switch (or I didn’t),
a doctor instructed
morning and evening, two times a day at most
and I’ve followed that law, at the very leastThere’s something benignly and adorably off-kilter about these poems. They are not grotesque: they do not parade their weirdness. The speaker of these poems knows that they cannot master the world—they cannot apprehend the wonderfully arbitrary categorical imperatives we are subject to. But the speaker can master language, can play with rhythms and directions and understandings in quiet, playful hesitation.