We thought of the Winter 2020 issue as a fantastic salad, surprising and delightful in its compact variety. We’re willing to concede, however, that it is a large salad; the challenges it presents might be more approachable if they’re coming from a buffet. With so many delights and delectables on offer, where does one begin? Perhaps, we humbly suggest, with these selections from our section editors, which include a Federico García Lorca play and an Eduardo Lalo essay.
From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction, Poetry, and Kurdish Feature Editor:
Brought into English by Caitlin O’Neil (a former team member, I’m thrilled to say), Corinne Hoex’s sensuous—and sensational—Gentlemen Callers is full of exquisite treats, rivaling Belgian compatriot Amélie Nothomb’s wit, humor, and imagination. Although Asymptote makes it its mission to move beyond world literature’s Eurocentric focus, it’s gems like this that remind me that there’s still much to discover from smaller, less heard-from countries within Europe. I would consider it scandalous if Hoex’s fiction is still unknown in the world literature canon ten years down the road. From the Poetry section, Gnaomi Siemens accompanies her sexy, updated take of Ephemeris (horoscopes from the 16th century) with a thought-provoking note: “Horoscopes (hora / time, skopos / observation) are ephemeral. Translation is an observation of time and a holding up of the writings and ideas of one time to observe them in a new temporal context.” Pair with Joey Schwartzman’s 21st-century renderings of T’ang dynasty poet Bai Juyi. Whip-smart and bittersweet, these timeless poems about transience will stay with you for at least a little while.
From Sam Carter, Criticism Section Editor:
This issue’s Criticism section introduces us to two poetry collections that embody the Asymptote mission by refusing to be contained by borders, whether linguistic or geographic. Our very own Lou Sarabadzic takes us through the important work done by Poetry of the Holocaust: An Anthology, which contains poems from ninety-three writers and nineteen languages in order to provide a comprehensive portrait of this terrible atrocity. And Emma Gomis reviews Time, Etel Adnan’s latest exploration of temporality and poetic form that arose from a series of postcards exchanged with the Tunisian artist Khaled Najar.
From Eva Heisler, Visual Section Editor:
Asymptote’s Iran Editor-at-Large Poupeh Missaghi investigates the art works that began appearing on the Twitter feed of an anonymous group of artists in Iran. Known only as “Some Artists,” @honarmandaan first emerged during the street protests that were followed by the government’s brutal crackdown. Missaghi writes that she was struck by the simplicity of the art works: the reliance on language that functioned also as image, with dated fonts and ochre backgrounds that recalled old newspapers. In response to Missaghi’s questions, the group discusses their struggle to find a visual vocabulary that would resonate with the current struggles. “We realized a lack of precedence of visual language for what we hoped to do, and this made our process hard,” they write. “Whatever existed before then was either the literature and visual arts belonging to the era of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which felt aged, or the politicized visual language of the Green Movement of 2009; there was nothing else. To address the issue, we decided that a simplicity in form and content would be our only way to go.” In spite of the art works’ simplicity of form, the historical and political contexts are complex, and Missaghi meticulously translates the language and images for non-Persian readers.
From Varun Nayar, Nonfiction Section Editor:
Eduardo Lalo‘s essay Unbelieve/Unwrite, translated from the original Spanish competently and sensitively by Sean Manning, addresses its subjects—contemporary Puerto Rico, its experience of climate catastrophe, and its neocolonial relationship to the United States—through a logic of negation. “Unbelieving the world means questioning the structures that sustain it,” Lalo writes. In the face of destruction both natural and man-made, Lalo’s diaristic style, and his personal engagement with thinkers such as Wittgenstein in the context of a post-María and post-Irma Puerto Rico, express his call to “unbelieve Western deception and unwrite Western excess,” as Manning writes in his translator’s note. With the Trump administration’s delayed and staggered release of disaster relief funds to the territory since 2017, Lalo searches, in language and form, for a way to address the personal and political anger that emerges from an enormous power imbalance—and attempts to channel this anger into something productive and generative. As he puts it: “Differentiate between a violent rejection of the world and simply rejecting it. This is fundamental since violence exposes the absence of true rejection.”
From Caridad Svich, Drama Section Editor:
Robert Eric Shoemaker translates and transposes Federica García Lorca‘s modern classic Yerma to a Barrens with distinctive passion and care in this issue’s drama section.
*****
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