Asymptote’s Spring 2020 issue is here, featuring new work from thirty countries and twenty-four languages, as well as a Galician Poetry Special Feature. Not sure where to begin? Our blog editors can help, as they reveal their top picks from the new issue below:
It’s difficult to write, these days. In this state of global precarity, wrenching us from our patterns into stasis, the days stretch towards their completion; daily urgencies take on a more sinister tone, heightened by circuity. There is indeed time, heavier in our stock, yet the dilemma remains: the heaviness, the disintegration of form, the failure of words to justify their surroundings. After a while I realized that it is because in order to write, and to write forcefully, the writer must be able to imagine a world in which their text survives, and contributes. Yet the time has arrived, much sooner than anticipated, of a future in pieces. I’ve never been one to envision literature as a portal for escape—it seems to me that the most sublime of texts enforce us into the deep centre of the world we live in. So from Asymptote’s Spring 2020 issue—a wondrous collection of work that arrives, across boundaries, to strike a new presence—I selected certain poems that bring a special dignity to our capacity for visioning.
Natalia Toledo’s poems, translated from the Zapotec and Spanish by Clare Sullivan and Irma Pineda, stir vibrant tremors across the senses. Precise in intimate reference and conditioned with everyday magic, her language is of the sacred nature we infuse into the ordinary in order to contextualize the world to our definitions. Take “Prayer”:
For those days when the sun burnished my hair
And my smile was the blinding bright of a salt crust.
For the photographs stuck to a piece of cardboard,
their swift migration to our family altar.
For the petate and its map of urine stains,
for the twisted trees upon the rippled water.
For all that I made into a life.
I sing.
The coursing rhythm and linguistic play of certain lines (“blinding bright of a salt crust”) curve into the soft day-by-day voice of others (“photograph stuck to a piece of cardboard”). There is a particular height of certain poems, when a reader may feel that the poem led itself to its conclusion, with just as much authority as the poet—it appears here, in “Prayer.” The travel within this verse seems to have circulated an entire realm before its realization in language, and that immense journey is apparent even within the poem’s relatively brief length.
As an indigenous poet, Toledo faces that intricate idea of the individual self as a metaphor for history. This selection of her work brims with remembering—not simply her own, but inherited collections of thinking and depth. There is a conspicuous attention to ritual as aegis, the merging of one’s own strength with those who came before.
With a different tonal force come the poems of Mina Decu, written originally in Romanian and now appearing through the sharp translation of Anca Roncea and Raj Chakrapani, who describe her work as cinematic. Of course, what cinema performs, in the expedited way of image technology, is motion—a fluidity of navigation that actively transports the eye. With Decu, the passages that she creates convert motion to emotion. These poems—untitled, largely free of punctuation—design travel in a series of still frames, in which both tenderness and intense awareness dwell.
(I was talking to him about him in my mind:) the scene helped him he is only one person in a scene any one person in a scene like this is interesting I was waiting for him I was transforming I didn’t even know what can happen in the soul of a half-asleep person when he sees in the window frame a horse I could only feel my arm moving slowly to the corner where I felt out the hiding place of the object he left behind and the gun powder iron and glass I no longer need to tell myself that the shapes I feel out have nothing to do with the numbers I’m supposed to find every step of the way my illusion of being in error is confirmed
All travel is a series of accumulations. Within her internal panoramic, Decu curbs corners and grinds in on details to defy the linear experience of moving forward. The fervid eye pushes in on neuroses that are desperate for a stillness in language. The reader is under attack by a fury of the senses—“the tireless pursuit of meaning when you pay attention to how someone breathes next to you.” Her deftness allows the reality of perceptual information to feed in on an emotional frenzy, which in turn drives the momentum of the poem, always in motion. Encapsulated within the “here” is an endless array of “there”—as she calls it, Detachment.
It is sight that we seek in poetry: a certain sight that arranges the elements of the world in alignment towards a truth, previously hidden. As we work through our days, and perhaps attempt to write, it is poems like the ones mentioned here that lend us their sight, and all the other splendid writings of this issue as well, bringing their worlds to our hands. As Carolyn Forché said:
and there is nothing
that cannot be seen
open then to the coming of what comes
—Xiao Yue Shan
Lidija Dimkovska‘s extract from her novel Grandma Non-Oui is a brilliant reflection on identity, language, and the need to recount (and remember) family history. Narrated by Nedjeljka, the granddaughter of a Croatian immigrant to Sicily, the passage takes place in Castellammare del Golfo. But it is essentially structured as two monologues, one embedded within the other. The vastly different experiences that people can have of a place, depending on their purpose for being there, is considered with nuance. As the narrator points out, many tourists will visit places that residents have never been in their entire lives. As we listen to Nedjeljka, we learn that the place her family has created for itself is not well known—not in the tourist guides—but is unique, intimate and assured by strong bonds of love. She speaks too of the powerful connections that language forges. Hearing a Slavic language spoken by tourists is what prompts Nedeljka’s father to recount his life story to them. And Croatian, taught to Nedeljka by her grandmother, is almost a gift bestowed on her, creating a bond between them, as well as a reminder of the past. Dimkovska, who is from Macedonia, is a writer esteemed across Europe and this is a great introduction for readers unfamiliar with her work.
From the Nonfiction section, Fiona Bell cleverly and wittily interprets the role of the translator as a “diva” in “The Diva Mode of Translation.” Seeing a translation as similar to a performance, she persuasively argues the case for the passion, bravura, and autobiographical insertion of a translator. After all, the result of such a presence is often a pleasurable translation. There are some great examples here: Anne Carson, Emily Wilson, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jennifer Croft . . . This piece made me want to reach for their translations and read them all over again.
Finally, there’s a lot to choose from amongst the fantastic Galician Literature Special but I particularly enjoyed the three poems by Manuel Rivas, translated by Lorna Shaughnessy. “Firefly” plays delicately with language and etymology. The attention Rivas pays to the names bestowed on the tiniest of creatures demonstrates his sensitivity and love of the Galician language, as well as the precariousness of keeping languages alive. “Chalk on the Blackboard,” more political, remembers poet Don Antonio Machado, and considers the poetry of exile. Those last four lines are stunning . . .
—Sarah Moore
*****
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