Asymptote celebrates its ninth anniversary with the Winter 2020 issue, featuring new work from thirty-one countries and twenty-two languages (including three new ones: Kurmanci, Old Scots, and Serbo-Croatian)! To help you navigate through such an abundance, our blog editors reveal their favorite pieces below:
Each issue of Asymptote brings with it a utopian vision—that many nations (thirty-one, in this case) may share a page, with each literature distinct but gathered in communion, resulting in a chorus that somehow does not subjugate any single voice. As always, I am astounded by the way one is allowed to travel along the cartography of these collected texts, and how vividly they summon the worlds available in their language.
For a while now I’ve been entertaining the thought that the first step to harnessing language (if there is such a thing) is to distrust it, and so was stopped short by the first line of Eduardo Lalo’s “Unbelieve/Unwrite”:
Unbelieve. Unbelieving the world means questioning the structures that sustain it.
And a couple lines on:
Unbelieving so that writing will wash ashore, like a gift.
These writings are the result of a great loss that causes one to take solace in nothingness, and seems particularly resonant today in the age in which traditional anchors—nationality, religion, family, certainty in our survival as a species—are quickly being drained of their staying power. Arriving in the aftermath of Puerto Rico’s devastation, Lalo seeks to dismantle our reliance on infrastructures both physical and psychological, while simultaneously being brilliantly aware of life’s unassailable fullness. Lalo continuously returns to the art of writing as a source of stability and control, and in doing so affirms the act of writing as a way of approaching the world, absolving the art of its mystery but instilling it with conviction. It is bleak and somehow victorious.
There are also poems that brim with an unadulterated hunger for the thickness and lucidity of words, and Nhã Thuyên emphasizes this breathlessly. With lines that push themselves on with frenetic energy, the adjectives and nouns here are bristling and coloured, creating textures upon the page, carving out their own tarantella-like rhythm:
without decorating images of a poet-moth drunk on life’s darkness drunk on death by candle flame
the streets here are not Paris Rimbaud has died everywhere could be electric Africa
Translator Kaitlin Rees remarks ambiguous grammar characteristic of the Vietnamese language, that the infrastructure to which we expect words to consistently cohere is unbuilt by the way Vietnamese unhinges, setting certain elements of the poetic line free. This is unleashed unabashedly in the English rendition, defying logical procession in what seems to me a wonderful ode to the word’s role to signify. In addition, to hear the poet read these poems in the audio recording is wondrous: the sounds of traffic in the background, the breathing periods of silence, and her low voice enchanting the words into living dimensions.
I met Forrest Gander when he came to Tokyo in the summer of 2019 to give a reading from his collection Eiko & Koma, then newly published in a bilingual Japanese-English edition by Awai Books. A group of us set out for dinner after the performance and, after terrifying several small establishments with our large number, settled on a terrace at the mercy of late-August mosquitoes. The interview with him in this issue, conducted by Henry Ace Knight, is a wonderful cross-section of the sensitivity and acuity he emanates, as well as his openness and knowledge of the wild breadth of art and ideas external to him. He is a man who revels almost equally in Gōzō Yoshimasu and a mid-dinner highball—it’s delightful.
William H. Gass once described the purest poetry as “an understanding mix of longing, appreciation, and despair.” Of this, I somewhat agree, but resent his ending on despair. In this issue of Asymptote you will find such a potion and others: potent, arresting, and as always, original.
As for the purest poetry, it seems to me that we should end on longing, for in the word longing we detect a distance, and in the distance, a vision.
—Xiao Yue Shan
Kurdistan, like Utopia, is a place less mapped than dreamed. Putatively the largest non-self-governing ethnic group in the world, the Kurds do not share sanctioned territory, or a language, quite. (At least one anthropologist has argued that Sorani and Kurmanci—referred to as dialects of a common Kurdish language—are as grammatically distinct and mutually unintelligible as German and English.) Just how “Kurds” come together is a much-disputed subject now, as it has been since the end of the Ottoman Empire, when Kurdish nationalist hopes were first frustrated.
I am not sure that this issue’s special feature on Kurdish poetry, which features Kurdish-Sorani and Kurdish-Kurmanci, offers a particular thesis on what unifies Kurdish people or poetry (such that some of the former can have their work justifiably joined together under the heading of the latter) but, very subtly, it does offer counter-theses. Rojava has occupied left-wing imaginations for the last half-decade with the fantasy that Mesopotamia, site of first (known) recorded politics, could also bear witness to their dissolution by libertarian socialism, and Kurds play both martyrs and villains in popular perceptions of the region’s ongoing conflict. But, as translators Mohammed Faith Mohammed and David Shook note in their discussion of Khider Kosari’s “Let Us Be One in Name and Heart,” the identities and activities projected onto Kurds may be real, without their presumed entailments being so. (Shook, who lives in South Kurdistan, provides useful context in their introduction to a Rojava poetry feature at Words Without Borders and, at LARB, Mohammed Fatih Mohammed has an equally worthwhile essay on Kosari specifically.)
“We are the exalted history of a manuscript,” Kosari writes. “Let each one of us / Light a match / Then / Be the sun’s ray and radiance / . . . We are one single spring / So how long can any one of us be alone / On our own?” What could be saccharine turns Schmittian instead when Kosari reveals his call for unity to be based on opposition to a common enemy: “Together we will slaughter / Each one of our enemies one by one / One flag and One worshiped / One leader / And one message / In one charge / One victory after another / Even with a hundred lifetimes one dies only once.” I do not think appreciation is available, here, as an evaluative mode. Kosari’s speaker inverts precisely the pluralist sentiments necessary to sustain regard-without-endorsement; I take it his poetic vision will not accommodate nor be accommodated to a value system with competing conceptions of the good. Receiving Kosari’s work, then, seems to require not just engaging but confronting the jihadist content, so that it is not enough to ask of “Let Us Be One,” can I empathize with this speaker? Can I understand this plight and these positions and learn to tolerate them? But, more appropriately, can I embrace this? Can I leap aboard and give myself over to it? For Kosari’s original hearers, fellow soldiers in the Kurdish Islamic Movement, the answer to the second set of questions was presumably yes. That may not be true for the average Asymptote reader; it is not true for me. The challenge—and threat—of Kosari, then, involves whether and how to understand him from outside. I like difficult writers like Kosari, but I also wonder if that can even be a meaningful statement coming from a 21st-century Manhattanite. I recommend him to you more out of curiosity than recognition. How, when we read the world (as it is the promise of this magazine to do), does a figure like Kosari fit in?
And, to avoid the misperception that the Kurdish poetry here selected is strictly Sturm und Drang, let me also mention Rênas Jiyan, whose “Collection 1” is a love poem, sleepy-snowy-sexy with nostalgia for the moment just past, and includes this lovely couplet: “You who, just like snow, come in abundance at night / And suddenly in early morning, make everywhere white.”
—Rachel Allen
As Asymptote celebrates its ninth anniversary, the new Winter issue shows that it continues to expand our access to world literature and to engage with contemporary society, concerns, and politics. With the recent political unrest and protests in Chile now at the end of their third month, I was immediately drawn to the interview with the renowned Chilean poet and visual artist Cecilia Vicuña. Conducted by Sarah Timmer Harvey, this is a wonderfully nuanced interview, discussing an array of topics ranging from environment, tradition, Allende, contemporary Chilean politics, language, composition, and childhood.
Vicuña is acutely sensitive to both history and contemporary world crises. She discusses the tradition of the Andean quipu, the current devastation of the environment, and the legacy of Salvador Allende with remarkable knowledge and reason. But above all, her dedication to the potential power of poetry shines through:
In my poem, el poema es el animal hundiendo la boca En el manantial, I say: “the poem is the animal sinking its mouth in the stream,” and it’s not a metaphor, it’s like it’s my mouth. The poem is an organ, an organism, a being . . . What is true eventually comes through like water seeping through and appears where it is not supposed to appear.
Her insistence on listening, perceiving, and constantly reinterpreting the world is full of hope and resilience.
The presence of visual artwork during the recent protests in Iran in November 2019 is the subject of Poupeh Missaghi‘s fascinating interview with the group “Some Artists“. Last year I watched Iranian filmmaker Keywan Karimi’s documentary Writing on the City, which traces the use of graffiti in Tehran from the 1979 Revolution up until the documentary’s making in 2009. So, already interested in the long history of art as collective protest in Iran, I was drawn to Some Artists’ interview, which reveals what collective artist groups are doing currently, exploring crucial questions about protest art increasingly incorporating technology and social media.
Also not to be missed are the three prize-winning essays from Asymptote’s Essay Contest, judged by J. M. Coetzee. Runner-up Manuel Antonio Castro Córdoba‘s “What do talking machines write about?” particularly appealed to me as, despite my interest in Latin American literature, I am definitely guilty of being part of an audience that he describes as “still recovering from the greatness of Bolaño.” He very convincingly makes the case for Argentinian Alberto Laiseca to be more widely known, amongst Spanish-language readers as well as English. Describing Laiseca’s work as an “inexhaustible oeuvre whose diversity has few parallels in contemporary literature,” Córdoba provides a comprehensive overview of this oeuvre, as well as shrewd observations on what it means for an author to find success with translations in the Anglophone publishing world.
—Sarah Moore
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