In ten years of Asymptote, we’ve brought you a stunning array of texts, from writers familiar to those brought out newly into the light, words of conviction, ardor, invention, and precision have graced our pages, and our history-making Winter 2021 issue is no different. Featuring three new languages—Cebuano, Kahmiri, and Marathi—and deploying works from thirty-one countries in total, we are additionally featuring a curated selection of writings in our Brave New World Literature feature, which presents a myriad of talented voices navigating and graphing the changing landscape of world literature. Here, our blog editors are rounding up their selections of the pieces of the Winter 2021 edition that ignite and inspire.
The notion of a brave new world literature indicates—beyond the trepidations upon coming towards the unknown—the writer’s own, omnipresent fears about their own craft. In writing, one is always fighting against the futility of the word, how it falters to encompass even a single sensation, let alone the impatient fabric of the milieu. Each piece of writing is measured up against its time to determine its true subject, and the works included in our landmark Winter 2021 issue has to bear the comparison to a moment in history that comes close to being immeasurable, both in the frenzied proceedings of markable events, and in the psychic tracks it has carved across the globe, as each person was forced to consider—in distinctly unequal polarities of rumination or emergency—what it means to have lived through, to be living through, such a time.
This seamless interchange between writer, reader, and the present shared between them—the writing must level all three terrains while insulating its cargo of ideas. As I move through this marvelous gallery of texts that the latest issue of Asymptote gathers, I was struck by the various and telling constellations they formed with this precise moment.
In Jan Němec’s excerpts from Ways of Writing About Love, there’s a beguiling—and somewhat precious—self-conscious tone, rendered with grace by David Short, that runs through the three proses, almost as if the writer has already recognized that the bold display on the awning of the text—those two feared and wasted words, writing and love—has already pushed the language deeply into that murky deluge where only those two most indulgent peoples, writers and lovers, would willingly submerge themselves. But as the oral rhythm of the story taps itself out (Němec and Short are to be commended for their preternatural sense of how the voice paces itself), and the symphony of the mind conducts its singular cacophony, one comes to decipher its inner textures, in which writing and love are scrutinized for the particularly heightened quality one achieves during such occupations—attention to how time, and knowledge, and sensuality congregate.
Němec creates paradigms of desire in which a personal intelligence is sent out to navigate the physical world, and thus the lover and the text are employed in a furious game of mutual passions. The lover’s presence (even if only in memory or imagination) calls the elements of the world into being, and writing projects that world into existence. They are locked into the insular vessels of a single mind. In fact the poeticism of Němec’s ruminations stem not from the lover’s discrete identity, but from the fact of her locked in his mind. A mind in which she must take place in writing. As he writes, in “Me and you and you”:
All the towns I’m going to build here, all the streets I shall be describing, all the houses whose doors I shall open, and all the rooms in which we’re going to have harsh words, make up, and make love, or so I allege, may be only on paper, but I can at least breathe in them.
Every essay in the Brave New World Literature feature is worth perusing, but Alain Mabanckou’s words in “An Open Letter to Those Who are Killing Poetry” continued to mutate and delve in my mind long after I stopped reading: “No, poetry is not dead. It is sitting somewhere, ruefully watching the indifferent passersby.” Translated into a powerful, assiduous English by Nancy Naomi Carlson, Mabanckou resolves with an earned wisdom the conceited torture of poets, who are unsurprisingly the most self-flagellating of writers: “Poetry comes before its function. The question of its utility, of its role, comes later.” And so easily absolves the timeless lamentation of the belles lettres by an elegant reversal of chronology.
If one trusts that poetry is the sublime nature of earthly things, then one should be less concerned for its ability to be marketed. The provocation that Mabanckou puts forth is one towards the poets, that it is not due to a dearth of demand but a complacency on the part of its creators that has dulled the work. Mabanckou’s recognition of African poetic genius, paired with his cognition for the multifarious guises of poetic sensibility, offers to incite the age-old practice with absolutely contemporary brilliance. That poetry must thrill itself again. That it must not spend so much time gazing wistfully at its reflection in the mirror, but be one with the world again.
The work of Swedish artist Lap-See Lam in The Chinese Restaurant as Portal, brought to us by our very own Visual Editor, Eva Heisler, resonated with me in a very specific way; in ruminations of psychogeography and the embedded narratives of place and location, the piece discussed, Mother’s Tongue, collages soliloquy and archaeology, rending the physical space we navigate translucent with gauze-layers of story, memory, and history. When one traverses the virtual world of the Mother’s Tongue app, guided by a map that compresses short films into geolocations, one is made tenderly aware of how the topography of our environments are distinctly informed by what has been enacted upon them, that we are continually trespassing into someone else’s story, what Lam describes as “stories about human relations, community, language, othering, and mortality.” The results are haunting, intimate, and transgressive; they are emblems of how place expands simultaneously in physical exploration and in the imagination-theatre of the mind, what is preserved in their longevity, and how they can be saved in return.
The function of an idea is to excavate ever deeper meanings, and to ever-proliferate further ideas in turn. I hope that you will find as much joy and as much richness in thinking within this remarkable issue as I have, and that they do their good work in collaboration, in ascribing their meanings into you, at this moment in time.
—Xiao Yue Shan
Asymptote‘s Winter 2021 issue is momentous and a testament to the publication’s tremendous achievements over the last ten years. While offering new fiction, poetry, dramas, and artworks from a wide array of countries around the world, the featured essays in this Brave New World Literature edition are especially pertinent for a tenth anniversary edition in looking both forwards and backwards: at what world literature and translation has accomplished, and what we can expect and hope for in the future.
In the poetry section, Najwan Darwish‘s poems from Exhausted on the Cross, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, are remarkable. Darwish’s texts are unafraid to decry injustice in frank, political, yet lyrical words. In this selection he confronts sexism, conflict, poverty, war, and betrayal with unflinching precision. There is so much power in his honesty and willingness to portray shame and disgrace. Darwish is well known for his poems on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and “In Shatila” demonstrates how his writing engages on both a personal and collective level. In both this poem and “Because of a Woman,” he speaks up for individuals, forcing us to confront voices that have been neglected.
Eliot Weinberger‘s essay “New Trade Routes of the World” looks at the history of world literature and dispels the myth of it as “the cultural product of empire-building.” His examples of how translation can revitalise a country’s literature are fascinating, showing how languages have always influenced each other in often surprising ways. Weinberger’s rich, lucid writing is always a delight to read, and his knowledge of the history of world literature is intricate, complex, and essential. Weinberger’s essay reminds us of the possibilities that translation has always offered to society, and how it is often chance encounters or discoveries by an individual that leads to a work crossing national boundaries. He celebrates the liberty that world literature has, freed of a fixed “canon.” Yet, most interestingly, Weinberger doesn’t only look back but considers the future of world literature.
Finally, Antonio Díaz Oliva‘s interview with James Salter is not to be missed. Conducted only six months before Salter’s death, their conversation is a rare an intimate opportunity to hear Salter’s thoughts at that time of his life. Salter talks openly about his writing process, from A Sport and a Pastime to All That Is, and how this has changed. He is frank about the difficulties of writing but as he says, ” you have to conquer that difficulty somehow.”
—Sarah Moore
If you’ve enjoyed what we brought you these first ten years, help us toward another decade of world literature by becoming a sustaining or even masthead member today—if only as a birthday present to us and to show how much our work has meant to you. In addition to the new perks (such as a 2021 digital calendar) listed in our newly revamped Donate page, all new supporters will also receive a brand-new ebook anthology, “Brave New World Literature,” collecting the best essays published under the aegis of our Special Feature but also including exclusive material not available anywhere else on our site. Thank you in advance for your support!
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