As Asymptote celebrates the first issue of our second decade in world literature, we bring to you new work from thirty-five countries and twenty-four languages in our Summer 2021 issue! Drawing from the theme of our Special Feature, “Age of Division,” these varied writings speak to a moment of mounting borders, fractious politics, and heightened suspicion towards the other—but so too do they hint at the possibility of unexpected solidarities, strange encounters, and new geographies of affinity. Not sure where to begin with this bountiful issue? Let our blog editors take you through some of their favourite pieces to reveal a world that is, in the words of Lêdo Ivo, “sweet, full, pungent, and luminous.”
In the spring of 2004, an intifada singer in Ramallah said to his interviewer, “What I do on stage and what martyrs do on the streets are one and the same, just with different instruments.” Were resistance embodied in genre, the shape would undoubtedly be that of music. The art which “all art constantly aspires towards” for its certain coherence of form and content, this singular quality also speaks to its ability to move people passionately, crucially, to action. For music is a verb; it must be performed and enacted. It embodies, within its very idea, its eventual actualisation.
In the excerpt from Olivia Elias’s forthcoming poetry collection Your Name, Palestine, she makes a graceful address: “Musicians, a few minutes more.” Moving on to materialise the scene in sensual, wondering lines, she makes gentle work of speaking the terrible wreckage done to the country where she was born. Born in Haifa and living now in France, she is said to occupy a privileged space within the Palestinian diaspora as one of the few poets in French. In these poems, translated masterfully by Sarah Riggs and Jérémy Robert, she creates in her adopted language the continuation of the Palestinian nation, transcending geographical realities to rhyme with the poetics of Palestinian agency, with both singing and the witness of singing.
Musicians, I am speaking to you of a country
engulfed in a fault of history
of a people chosen to pay the price
of another sacrifice
of a story more than a hundred years old
full of sound and fury and blood
Intended for voices set to instruments, Elias’s work speaks to the intifada singers, the debke performances that conceptualise art from the violences of occupation, and the traditional melodies evoking the dignity of liberation. But without violence and ideology, the measured cadences of her lines are patient with painterly instinct. These poems draw their necessity from their stoic dreams of clarity. Palestine, untorn, in concert, singing.
In Mulugeta Alebachew’s “Heaven Without Prickly Pears,” writing similarly seeks physical qualities—the savoury texture of the language, the kinetic scan of the eye as it seeks and takes in. The topography of the Ethiopian town, Geneté, is overlaid with the infinite dimensions of the mind. Familiarities, kinships, intimacies run through in capillaries of psychogeography, drawing further on its composite, ramified history: “her mosaicked gum-tattoos of more than a dozen languages and myriad cultures.” With co-translator Bethlehem Attfield, Alebachew has done a wonderful job of rendering the original Amharic text, lush with dialect, into a fluent poetry that nevertheless beholds the precision of references outside of the English language.
This town bears my fondest memories, life vividly lived, and lessons well learned . . . my yesterdays, todays, and predictable tomorrows lay on its streets. . . My home includes the highway. My home does not exclude the other homes.
In this beautiful passage which eclipses the cautious private/public boundary, Alebachew speaks to the growing of the world. Just as in the acts of reading and writing, the dialectic division of outside and inside loses its binds, and one bleeds into the other. By bringing us into his Geneté, the subtle resentment of possessive being is defied; we are given interior knowing without it being our interior. In this world there is no space indifferent or vacant. It is all compounded in an infinite geometry of living; to inhabit a text that so generously navigates a place, it is an astonishing gift.
—Xiao Yue Shan
The Summer 2021 issue draws a dense map, crossable borders tangled up in uncrossable boundaries. In her English debut, “Journey to the West,” Li Cunyan recounts her train trip through the Soviet Union and its satellites on her way to France. (The story, translated from the Chinese by Sarah Waldram, ends in a café soon after she arrives, but the author’s bio reveals that she went on to teach in Paris.) When the train pulls away from the Beijing station, eighteen friends bid farewell from the platform. The ellipses that trail from her sentences hide sobs and sighs, her tone and mood an echo of the desolate Mongolian landscape. This tentative punctuation gives way to exclamation marks as she collects acquaintances and Lake Baikal, “the deepest and by volume largest freshwater lake on earth,” slides past her window. Off the train, when she confronts travel snafus in languages she can’t understand, she senses an loneliness that outlasts the temporary friendships formed on the way. “Suddenly,” she writes, “I understood what the word ‘FOREIGNER’ meant.”
In the aftermath of the United States’ war in Vietnam, Sydney Van To writes, “soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) seem to have vanished along with South Vietnam itself.” He reviews Other Moons: Vietnamese Short Stories of the American War and Its Aftermath, edited and translated from the Vietnamese by Quan Manh Ha and Joseph Babcock. This collection of twenty stories that have never before been translated into English resists, in its diversity and scope, the Vietnamese diaspora’s “erasure from global memory.” As the review points out, these are not trite war stories or even war stories at all, full of valor in combat—and yet they are. The conflict leaves a residue, a tension that lingers, submerged. In one story, “a woman is out catching crabs when she steps on one of the many undetonated bombs in the Chau River.”
The narrator of Tehila Hakimi’s “hybrid collection of prose,” Company, excerpted in this issue, only travels to and from the office, but as a woman in the workplace, she, too, explores the definition of foreigner. Joanna Chen’s translation from the Hebrew captures the staccato rhythms of the narrator’s solitary reflections on the multiple meanings of “company.” Her experience at the floundering startup skews her sense of time. Sometimes, she says, “it’s hard to remember when Mondays and Thursdays are.” Women’s long-sought place in the office becomes a purgatory: “Go ahead and click click click with the mouse, organize the folders in your mailbox, organize those in your computer too, in My Documents, sort everything into folders, that will fill half the day, maybe more.” Her toils take a bodily toll. The woman in the workplace is also a woman in space. Her acupuncturist asks where she hurts. She falls into a manhole, and the darkly comic symbolism is clear.
—Allison Braden
What a buffet spread of an issue, so let me recommend two pairings—wine and cheese, if you’d like—from our nonfiction (for the historically-minded) and fiction (for those looking to be disturbed) sections to start you off:
Compared to a bygone era when the Korean peninsula was connected by rail to as far as the tip of Western Europe, the acclaimed dissident writer Hwang Sok-yong reflects on the legacy of the 38th parallel in unflinching terms, “South Korea might as well be an island.” Translated by Anton Hur and Sora Kim-Russell, this excerpt from Hwang’s forthcoming memoir, “The Prisoner,” recounts the novelist’s incredulity towards his maiden journey abroad in 1985, to West Berlin, “a desert island in the middle of East Germany.” Reading this essay, one realises that, for all the veneer of post-war globalisation, the late twentieth century—seen especially from the periphery—was in fact underscored by deep division and enislement. But make no mistake: this is no dry treatise on the Cold War. I found myself lulled into the lyrical cadences of Hwang’s storytelling, as he illuminates—through his memory—the vast, starry archipelagos that form between these isolated worlds. At the heart of his narrative, we find the conscience of a writer who risks everything to bear witness to his trepidation and his times. The Prisoner, which promises to be at once epic and intimate, is high on my to-read list when it arrives in August!
On the topic of islands, Dora Kaprálová’s “The Island of Circumscribed Hope” is a perfect piece to read alongside Hwang’s. Here, through an opening incantation of many islands, the Czech writer invites us into one, Menedék: a fenced, communal cabin colony on an island in the Danube—home to Jewish communities in Hungary, communists, rowers—that was established before the Holocaust and exists till today. Although a real place, the name Menedék, as her translators Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood tell us, is fictional and means “refuge” in Hungarian. An “island on an island,” their world is still shaped by the tumultuous politics of the twentieth century, and offers another telescope to gaze at this grand history and its ramifications for ordinary people. From Menedék to Gwangju to West Berlin, to borrow the words of Kaprálová, islanders “dream of rivers and seas, and of crossing rivers and seas”—perhaps this crossing would first be traversed by telling stories.
Something darker courses in this issue’s selection of fiction, and two short stories which spotlight the sinister aspects of parenthood stand out to me: Venezuelan writer Gabriel Payares’s “The Fish Tank” and Croatian writer Maša Kolanović’s “Unending.” In the former, a couple’s newborn turns out to be so hideous, it—for there is all the doubt in the world about its sex—forces them to ask: “We waited all that time for this?” There’s a persistent pain to parenthood so powerfully conveyed in Paul Filev’s translation, and as grotesque as Payares’s descriptions are, I felt compelled to read this to the end—all the while keeping the screen at an arm’s length away. In a more humorous if equally dark fashion, Kolanović’s story follows a mother who “prepared for labor like a skydiver” and ends up in a “river of diapers”; her breasts are “bloated like the right-wing politician Željka Markić”—these are just some of the many wry images of motherhood that shines through in Ena Selimović’s translation. This pair of stories dare us to venture into the repulsive provinces of parenthood, their haunting sentiments lingering long after the last word.
Finally, take a few moments to savour the astonishing art works by guest artist Vladimír Holina which accompany our pieces—what delightful visual charm it lends the literary gems we are serving you this first issue of our second decade!
—Shawn Hoo
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