Our Winter 2021 issue marks a decade of diving into the languages of the world (our archive now boasts 113 of them!) in all their incredible singularity and variegation. Spanning thirty-one countries, this milestone edition feels like a fitting way to honor a decade of hard work behind the scenes. After hearing from our blog editors last week, let’s pass the mic to the very editors who had a hand in putting together the issue itself.
“Is it a Comedy? Is it a Tragedy?” Thomas Bernhard asks in our debut issue from January 2011. Ten years later, Brazilian author Adelice Souza’s fever-dream of a story (in Padma Viswanathan’s pitch-perfect translation) provides a direct enjoinder: “The play wasn’t a comedy, nor was it a tragedy . . . It was a drama very specifically for those two women.” Just as in Bernhard’s story, the point is not the play at all—we hardly know what the play is about, other than the fact that its two actresses play a lonely woman and her dog, and that tragedy ensues when one demands to switch roles with the other. In contrast to Bernhard, who focuses squarely on the theatre-goer, Souza makes it all about the two actresses whose eight years of traveling with the play to multiple cities have “put them through every type of relationship.” It’s not a story one imagines being plotted out; rather, the work feels like it has been ejected, like toothpaste from a tube, sentence by exhilarating sentence. In the “Brave New World Literature” Special Feature, we also come full circle but in a different way via the return of frequent contributor Jeremy Tiang, who debuted as a translator in our first issue. Combining pop-cultural references with theory, “The World Is Not Enough” is full of quotable gems, but nowhere is Tiang more on-point than when he muses, “Perhaps if the dominant anglophone culture actually acknowledged itself to be part of the world, rather than treating ‘world literature’ as a spice rack to save itself from total blandness, more than three percent of books published in the United States would be in translation?” Finally, anyone who is curious about the workings of a magazine of world literature other than our own will find plenty of food for thought in John Freeman’s riveting piece on how he remade Granta into a global publication.
—Lee Yew Leong, Fiction Editor and ”Brave New World Literature“ Special Feature Editor
Max Rojas is a constant enthusiasm of mine and so I was thrilled to showcase a pretty sizable excerpt from Zane Koss and Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz’s translation—the very first in English—in all its shining, breathless glory. Even though it’s a mere sliver of a doorstop-sized poem, it’s an excellent sample of Rojas’ talent and an overdue introduction for the Anglosphere. The language of Bodies is both baroque and ephemeral, rugged and philosophical, and its tone swings between that of a theologico-political treatise and a declaration of war. It’s some of this last century’s densest and most sophisticated Spanish-language verse, and some of the most woefully unknown.
—Garrett Phelps, Poetry Editor
I highly recommend these two pieces be read one after the other: Baron Dominique-Jean Larrey’s intriguing French colonial document The Description of Egypt—stunningly translated by Michael J. Rulon—followed by excerpts from Egyptian statesman Helmi Sharaway’s political memoir An Egyptian African Story, given life in English by Reem Abou-El-Fadl. It was a wonder to me how these two spoke to each other, how the colonial violence of ages past leaves its legacy in but is also written back to by postcolonial discourse. Sharaway’s document is also valuable for the solidarities it imagines between Eygptian and other national contexts, especially African and Palestinian ones. I was also fortunate to be able to publish a translation of Kashmiri writer Akhtar Mohuiddin, rendered beautifully by Onaiza Drabu. This personal reflection brings to our attention a much-needed exploration of caste in South Asia, especially in Muslim contexts where it is imagined to not exist. Reading Mohuiddin along with the Egyptian texts, as well as the German and Polish ones (translated with flair by Henry N Gifford and Scotia Gilroy respectively), shows that nuances of nationality, race, provinciality, caste, class, and disability not only adumbrated the blurred line between colonizer and colonized but also among those two groups. So for instance, even as Larrey constructed French identity as opposed to an Egyptian one, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, while traveling in the South of France, imagines Austrian identity as over and against the French, so much so that the south of France becomes for him “an Egyptian landscape.”
—Bassam Sidiki, Nonfiction Editor
A smartphone app that travels back in time and decades into the future? Mother’s Tongue, designed by Lap-See Lam with the filmmaker Wingyee Wu, appears to be a virtual guide to Chinese restaurants in Stockholm. In this tour, though, users move through hallucinatory apocalyptic interiors guided by an omniscient female narrator who claims to be the voice of the Chinese restaurant itself. The narrator confides, “Parts of me are so displaced, that displacement has become my sense of being.”
In her interview with Asymptote, Lap-See Lam discusses her documentation of Stockholm’s Chinese restaurants as the starting point for an ongoing exploration of the Cantonese diaspora in Sweden. She shares how the 3D scans of Chinese restaurants used as a source for Mother’s Tongue have been reworked in other creative projects, including installations and sculpture. The artist describes her fascination with the 3D scanning technologies used in archeological and forensic reconstructions, and how glitches and errors in her own experimentations with the technology led to surprises and creative breakthroughs.
—Eva Heisler, Visual Editor
Nili Lamdan‘s play Land of Onions and Honey (translated by Eran Edry) is a moving exploration and complex portrait of the daily life and conflicts between and among Jews and Palestinians in Israel. Edry’s supple translation is acutely rendered and sensitive.
—Caridad Svich, Drama Editor
This issue features reviews of two fascinating poetry collections from Uruguay and Israel. Honora Spicer guides us through the many unfolding strands of Marosa di Giorgio’s Carnation and Tenebrae Candle (translated by Jeannine Marie Pitas), which “inhabits and twists the pastoral genre.” And Norman Finkelstein situates us in the late Tuvia Ruebner’s final poems, which have been translated by Rachel Tzvia Back and collected in Now at the Threshold. As Finkelstein points out, here in these works produced at the very end of the poet’s life “it is as if Ruebner has surprised himself in the act of writing.”
—Sam Carter, Criticism Editor
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. Don’t wait—show us some love today!
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