Asymptote’s momentous fortieth issue features brand new work from thirty-two countries, a Dutch Literature Special Feature curated by 2020 International Booker Prize co-winner Michele Hutchison, and a literary roster spanning classics like Tagore, heavy hitters like Harwicz, and rising stars like Fabias. Dizzy yet? We’re here to help.
In the Chinese language, we never use the abstract noun of beauty. Instead, beauty is always a quality, a trait something possesses. There is, for example, no real way to express the notion that “beauty is all around us”; instead, one would say, “everything here is beautiful.” I find something wondrous in this distinct nature of what beauty is. It is a wandering state, a constantly mutating definition, a metamorphosing form that adapts to whatever subject it is applied to—never fixed, never permanent. Something is beautiful not for its appeal to the pure nature of beauty, but for its unique addition to the myriad of beauty’s appearances.
I was once again reminded of this definition while reading through the Fall 2020 issue, in which the writings from thirty-two countries have compiled and allowed the contours of literary beauty to vacillate and transmit. The various Englishes that evolve via translation do not subscribe necessarily to the English that certain texts are born to, instead bringing the colours and geometries of their own language, imparting a distinct and knowing pleasure. In Stella N’Djoku’s poems, the brief lines are vehicles for a cyclical musicality, emphasized by the rhyming Italian but also vivid in the tender translation of Julia Pelosi-Thorpe, sensitive in their lineation. The verses are potent with grief, but positions it within the great immeasurability of the world—creating a familiar dwelling for grace amidst pain, and the poem as our path towards that space.
As if yesterday today tomorrow
were not places
and were here now
in centuries.
In the two poems of Kashimiri poet Nādim, one is also reminded of the singular iterations of his the poet’s original language. As translator Sonam Kachru informs us in his translator’s note, “[Nādim] is thinking of [Kashmir’s] history—a history revealed, in part, through the history of its poetry.” There is then, an impression that we are not privy to when reading in translation, yet the poem still transmits the meditative, majestic quality of scanning the poetic horizons for something that reverberates from the past into the present, and back again. The stoic power of lines like:
I will not sing—
I will sing today no song of Nishat or Shalimar, no annealed song of waters
engraving terraced gardens, no bower songs of bedded flowers;
No soft songs flush or sweetly fresh, not green dew songs
nor songs gentle and growing—
Signalling a parallel vision of looking at the land and at what the land has wrought, “I Will Not Sing” is an epic rise of witness, testimony, and poetic treatise. The second poem, “Where We Dwell,” is similarly alive in image, yet is differently plentiful in its linguistic display. At once evoking a plurality of voices and the thrill of the unison, the poet has given us sight into what Neruda called “a gallery of ghosts shaken by the fire and darkness of his time.”
I’ve been a longtime fan of Hiromi Itō’s poems—they follow an independent logic, simultaneously visceral and playful—so I was delighted for the chance to dive into her prose work. Along the streaming consciousness of this essay, poetic sensibilities come through: the wavering nature of subject and perspective, the affinity with the natural order, and a curiosity that interchanges strange and familiar. Itō has been known to play with the art of oral narratives in Japanese religion, and a similar divinity can be witnessed here, even as the language—rendered expertly by Jon L Pitt—remains casual and colloquial. The essay incorporates a fascination of trees (“Oh, wait, this wasn’t meant to be a story about water. It’s a story about trees.”) into the ever-evolving mythology of life, death, and rebirth, and in doing so, initiates these overarching patterns with a quiet, unobtrusive beauty.
In the introduction to Jacques Derrida’s Cinders arises a question, posed by his translator Ned Lukacher, that points also at the larger fascinations of literature: “Why does language bear something within itself that somehow signals a language beyond language . . . ?” When reading, I am always looking at the words to escape their boundaries, their finitude. It seems to me that there are plentiful instances of such forcefulness to be found here, in the Fall 2020 issue.
—Xiao Yue Shan
I’ll begin my recommendations for the issue with Karin Amatmoekrim‘s piece for the Dutch Special Feature, Concrete (Ode to the Bijlmer Flats), translated by Asymptote’s Sarah Timmer Harvey. Amatmoekrim brilliantly explores the insecurity of identity through one of the populous urban city’s most striking symbols: the tower block. This block of flats takes centre stage as the protagonist, “a concrete constant.” Seen from the distance, its identity is in architecture, in numbers: 1,600 windows and ten stories. At its construction, it is poised to remain firm, protective, and to endure. Yet, as it deteriorates, inevitably altered by the people who have passed through it, Amatmoekrim moves closer to consider the individuals within its walls. In doing so, she considers the social realities and human struggles of its inhabitants—and the many different forms of resilience that they demonstrate.
Uyghur writer Tahir Hamut Izgil reflects on the condition of exile in the five extraordinary poems included in our Poetry section. Izgil was imprisoned for three years in Kashgar in the 1990s and, faced with the threat of a second detention in 2017 by the Chinese state, fled to the United States. In “Your Unknown Place,” the impossibility of severing past experiences is shown through two alternating voices. All descriptions of what is happening “Here” are refuted by the unchanging refrain: “Here there were no fugitive forgettings, / we said there were, it came to be.” The poem resembles a creation myth, but a creation determined by another voice. One’s own control of events is constantly questioned throughout his writing and words contain a sinister power. Yet the spirit of resistance holds strong and Izgil shows subtler, softer ways of communication and connection than “discolored words.” In “Somewhere Else,” during feelings of intense despair, his ability to conjure the vivid image of providing relief to another person is a beautiful instance of mental fortitude:
But
in my thoughts I trimmed your ragged hair
with two fingers for scissors
I splashed your chest with a handful of water
to douse a distant forest fire
Izqil is a leading poem of the Uyghur language and the 2020 PEN America World Voices Festival writer. With the oppression of Uyghur Muslims in the news again, the insight of his poems and his message of resistance are even more powerful.
Finally, from our interviews section, I highly recommend acclaimed Spanish-Argentine writer Andrés Neuman’s exclusive conversation with Henry Ace Knight. As well as talking about the two principal themes—love and translation—behind his latest work to be translated into English, Fracture, Neuman also discusses how the recent pandemic has affected his work, the importance of a collective response to disaster, historical novels, and writing a Japanese character. His intelligence and dedication to his work shine through all his answers. Neuman combines astute knowledge of literature, multilingualism, and translation with political discussion and consideration of literature’s role today. His thoughts on the relationship between literature and the news are particularly compelling:
I’m afraid it’s somehow narrowing the margins and freedoms of our literary writing, as well as making us mistake the present (which is a complex thing strongly attached to the memory of the past) for the breaking news we consume every day.
—Sarah Moore
I’m not one for ready-made slogans like “you are what you read,” but when faced with a host of dazzling choices, I’ll go by its converse—I’ll read what I am. And since I am, among other things, a self-searching millennial, a longtime nomad, a child of colonization, and a hopelessly lapsed Catholic, my fortieth issue highlights won’t come as a surprise: they deal with identity, migration, colonialism, and faith in deliciously subversive ways.
Questions of identity run through the issue, but the poetry selections from Radna Fabias’s Habitus and Mustafa Stitou’s Two Half Faces (both in David Colmer’s translation) tackle them with special finesse. In Fabias’s “only the final frame is black,” the self unfolds into a series of “doubles”—stunt doubles, it would appear, given the title’s reference to film; and yet, far from stepping in for the poetic “i” in high-risk “scenes,” these doubles play out largely mundane sequences: one falls for the bad boy, another rounds off domestic bliss by getting a dog, a third endures a testy bureaucrat. They seem to take over the lead role altogether, too, since the “i” (lower caps fittingly intentional) only “come[s] on” at the end, presumably right before the screen goes dark. In “i seek you in the city,” the poet also alludes to a self that is built from others and ultimately proves elusive: “i unscrew body parts from passers-by and quietly use them / to assemble yours,” she says, but the “you” she addresses is ambiguous. Nowhere is this clearer than in “roosting tree”:
i peel the prints from my fingers
—careful i am careful—
i cut my hair because i am a victim
i dye my hair because i am a villain
i cultivate a moustache to match my forged documents
—i am calm i am calm—
The “i” here purposely erases and transforms itself. It is now forged and contradictory (at once a victim and a villain), its dual nature echoed in the graphic mirroring of each “careful” and “calm.”
Stitou ties his fragile, unstable identity to geocultural context: he was raised in the Netherlands but born in Morocco, torn between two vastly different worlds. In “Apart We Separate Darkness and Light,” he tackles this dichotomy and its racist, colonial underpinnings. Moroccan workers in the Netherlands used to be “illiterate,” he says, “selected on brawn and by dental inspection”; they were “willing slave laborers [that] stacked / bricks kept furnaces burning / swept ballrooms clean.” They got lost in geographic translation, in short—each now a faceless “number in a system,” part of “an almost extinct pack of anonymous adventurers.” The very title of Stitou’s collection, Two Half Faces, references the migrant’s split sense of self, as does Fabias’s “i seek you”: the poetic voice fruitlessly searches for the blackness of a body in “the city” (the heart of the Dutch empire, one assumes), but finds it in her “country of birth” (the constituent Curaçao); in “roosting tree,” she flies back and forth between the two until she’s finally able to rest . . . but also rust, as if staying put meant fading away.
Her rootlessness is not only geographic but familial, a product of paternal neglect: she travels across the world “to the man who casually and unintentionally begot [her],” taking a lover hostage so that she can tell him “this man reminds me of you i don’t want him.” Stitou’s “Apart,” too, is a heartrending ode to an estranged father. Perhaps due to these open wounds, neither is eager to procreate: “my clamped ovaries are magnificent,” declares Fabias in “roosting tree,” and the voice in Stitou’s “Affirmations” repeatedly flaunts his “soft dick.”
The tone shifts to irreverent humor in the latter poem and in Fabias’s “the laying on of hands,” showcasing their remarkable range. They take a dig at a different kind of Father here, poking fun at religious mores through cheeky winks and wordplay. “the laying on of hands,” for instance, mocks a priest’s unholy urges and concludes:
brother george pulls it out and it is holy because Christ
too was made flesh and He bore it with dignity
If the punchline lands as smoothly as it does, it’s also thanks to David Colmer’s chops: as he explains, the original closes “with a striking play on the word ‘kruis,’ which means ‘cross,’ but also ‘crotch’ in the sense of ‘privates’”; his solution is to “[let] English’s euphemistic ‘it’ shoulder the blasphemous burden of the Dutch pun” (his use of “bore” to mean both baring one’s parts and bearing the cross is a stroke of genius). In addition, Colmer does a stellar job of translating the poets’ unpunctuated, enjambed syntax to convey its multiple semantic connotations, as varying and ambiguous as the selves portrayed within.
This diversity explains (and hopefully excuses) my pick of two highlights as opposed to three: they quite literally contain multitudes.
—Josefina Massot
*****
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