Asymptote’s Winter 2022 issue is now out, marking the magazine’s eleventh year in publication! The newest edition features writing from a record forty-three countries and twenty languages. Here to introduce you to what this issue has to offer are our blog editors with some thoughts on the pieces that stood out to them the most.
In Maria Stepanova’s 2021 genre-defying work In Memory of Memory, she wrote that her excavation of family history was motivated by a desire to discover “the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.” Stepanova was absorbed with not only recovering the stories of her Jewish family but also probing her own obsessive relationship with memory itself. The memoir suggests the faultiness of memory in its rips and tears, while betraying an anxiety over its artifice in the way the memoirist manipulates the archive through inclusion, exclusion, and distortion for the purpose of her narrative. The reconstituting of memories that have been erased through the forces of time and displacement is a central concern for the playful yet meditative Winter 2022 issue. Like Stepanova, the authors of these varied works construct complex inquiries into the past through reappraisals of memory, dreams of alternate lives, and imaginative play with form. They seek the truth through memories while contesting their inevitable artificiality and malfunctioning.
In Rose Bialer’s deeply affecting interview, the Hungarian poet, memoirist, and translator George Szirtes speaks of returning to certain memories and themes in his personal history throughout his career in poetry, sometimes writing new poems that function as continuations of collections published decades before. This idea of Szirtes’s “return” to the same moments for their comprehension reflects his mistrust of memories but also his belief that truths are embedded within them. One of the talk’s many astonishing moments is when Szirtes claims that the return over time to the same memories in his poems reveals parallel narratives that add up to a palimpsest of personal history and identity. For Szirtes, formal constraints such as the terza rima continuously open the same memories to new facets and understandings. This illuminating conversation demonstrates how the fluidity of memory allows the poet-translator to construct an unstable past and self while “registering the sense of truth in all its complexity.”
Szirtes compares moments in the past with doors to rooms that can be freely re-entered for further exploration, but for the narrator of Rachida Lamrabet’s elegiac excerpt from Tell Someone, the past is kept at a remove, as if it belonged to someone else. In Johannna McCalmont’s spare yet poetic translation from this issue’s Flemish Literature Special Feature, the narrator admits to keeping the doors to his past closed: “For a long time, I had told myself I didn’t need to look back. Only the future mattered, the past was gone and meaningless. Just as the truth had vanished and was of no significance to anyone.” In the excerpt, the narrator, a French artist living in Morocco, encounters a boy who takes an unusual interest in his drawings. The boy drives the narrator to a painful recollection of an amorous meeting with the boy’s mother in another village. The passage subtly shows memory in a more insidious form, the way it snakes beneath one’s defenses to dredge up a past one has suppressed.
The transporting of a troubled past into the present is also a theme that recurs in the work of the visual artist and curator Jaro Varga, who assembles interactive projects that allow viewers to shape sculptures and exhibits in constantly shifting monuments, whether in a floor of ceramic tiles, Borgesian libraries, or plasticine columns. In Eva Heisler’s expansive interview, the artist describes an exhibition in which a column composed of modelling clay is placed horizontally on the gallery floor, allowing for viewers to create their own images on the column. Varga suggests the viewer’s shaping of the column evokes the overawing feeling of the monumental even in the absence of an actual physical monument. In this manner, Varga questions the effectiveness of traditional monuments for their static, uncritical nature while emphasizing both the ephemerality of memory and the mnemonic significance of touch. Varga’s work articulates our fraught relationship to memory on both the individual and collective levels in its inaccuracies, distortions, and erasures. In his exhibitions, memories appear and disappear, but in the brief moments they return, as Yeshua G. B. Tolle writes of the work of the Yiddish poet Aaron Zeitlin, “the memories cry, and a world flickers out.”
—Darren Huang
At a time of growing climate uncertainty, it is perhaps understandable that so many pieces in our Winter 2022 issue would push beyond familiar anthropocentric viewpoints. For better or worse, the human characters of this issue are constantly reckoning with other forms of life, with nonlife, with the dead. Frederik Willem Daem’s “Mont Prudent” (translated from the Dutch by David Colmer), part of the issue’s Flemish Literature Feature, is narrated by a mountain slope as it watches a pair of hikers trekking across its face. Daem’s choice of perspective gives us a strangely remote view of the action, even as we read the climbers’ innermost thoughts: as much as we are invested in the personal strife between the pair, we are also pulled outwards to a grander view of events encompassing all that has ever been and all that will ever come to pass on that remote mountain. Looked at from a geological perspective, should the loves and losses of these passing strangers rate more highly than the activity of a marmot colony or the fate of the season’s snow? Stijn Devillé achieves something similar in Conversation with the rain, in which a grieving father starts “talking” to his dead daughter about astrophysics (a subject about which her spirit proves surprisingly knowledgeable). As they discuss particle-wave duality and the Big Bang, his thoughts move not only towards the seconds before the birth of the universe but also towards the emotional valences of this time before time: a blissful apathy, the sublime equanimity of nothingness.
This exploration of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman is not confined to the issue’s special feature. Like Carlos Saura’s 1976 film Cría Cuervos, whose main character (played by the wonderful Ana Torrent) is the young daughter of an officer in Franco’s army, Portuguese writer Jorge de Sena’s “A Tribute to the Green Parrot” centers on a child whose violent family dynamics reflect the fascist dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar against which the story is set. The deep unhappiness of the narrator’s parents—which at first merely seeps out from under closed doors but eventually explodes into the open—is signaled by the eerie transformations visible throughout the text: nothing stable, nothing as it should be. The boy’s father, a merchant in Portugal’s colonies, pays little attention to his child except to chuck a few souvenirs his way, religious idols desacralized and converted into secular playthings. Husband and wife use their son as an object in their feuds—“a white flag of surrender,” as de Sena writes in one scene, “which having been raised to serve its purpose, is then cast away to lie on the ground amongst the dead bodies.” The boy, for his part, speaks of his parents as though they are members of a different, lower species, cutting into the narrative from time to time with wary observations about what he terms “the adult organism.”
Gods made playthings, children made objects, adults made animals—is it any wonder, in such a context, that a bird should take on a bit of personhood? The boy’s beloved Green Parrot is given a capitalized name; he speaks of its “fingers” grasping his own (a small but clever translating choice by David J. Bailey). Recounting the parrot’s death, the narrator laments that “he was the first person I ever witnessed pass away.” If the text’s other miscategorizations constitute contractions of the human capacity for empathy and understanding, this last one strikes a more hopeful note: the boy’s reservoirs of love, instead of drying up, simply find another vessel into which to flow. Whereas Devillé and Daem use zoomed-out viewpoints that highlight both the majesty of the nonhuman and the ultimate smallness of the human, de Sena’s intimate story shows how close communion with other animals can enrich a single human life, revealing the manifold rich complexities that are visible provided we know how to look.
—Erica X Eisen
“I’m going to create what has happened to me,” Clarice Lispector once wrote. “I’ll speak in that somnambulous language which, if I were awake, would not even be a language.” To write the self—to ascribe the self as subject even as one remains in the world—is to navigate that terrain of the in-between. One must read the creases in experience’s origami, fold formlessness into architecture. Language rises, in these instances, as if sleepwalking, pulling the inner landscape of dreams along in the motions of wakefulness.
This is how Aida Moradi Ahani’s “Karamazov” begins: in the interstices. Or as she says: “There are moments when a certain sweet bewilderment calls on us . . .” With mourning as the magnetic needle pointing way, Ahani charts a restless nocturnal cartograph through the disparate territories of memory, hearsay, fictions, and inheritances. Beginning with her grandfather’s death, Ahani’s narrative flies and sails, drifts and tours, attempting to understand the sudden absence in her familial archive. Holding onto the restlessness of unknowing, “Karamazov” is the study of life’s borders—shifting and ill-defined—which transform us as we approach them. Transported from the Persian into a musical English by Siavash Saadlou, the text evokes the same Dostoyevskian interrogation that wars between a single mind and its vaster unknowns:
This wouldn’t make sense to you if you’re not a dreamer, but it was right after that moment that I began to conceive the seas, the oceans, and, long story short, the waters in my head. When you put those three holes together, you could say that the spark of a drama lit the blue touch paper and marked my entrance.
To arrange the borders of thinking into an entrance, to walk through it and meet something wholly new. It is not unlike Vicente Huidobro’s theory of creacionismo, which established the poem as a singularly pure form, with no frame of reference but itself and the facts of its own being: “Nothing in the external world resembles it; it makes real what does not exist, that is to say, it turns itself into reality. It creates the wonderful and gives it a life of its own. It creates extraordinary situations that can never exist in the objective world, that they will have to exist in the poem so that they exist somewhere.” As such, Huidobro’s “Fated Passenger” is a tremendous hymn to creationist poetry’s ambitions and altitudes, wherein the patterns and objects of our world are given liquidity by the the poetic line’s motion. Poetry is both living and the evidence of living, professing itself by the internal logic of something that is because it is not silence. There is a heroic tenor that rings through the poem’s speaker, sonorously rendered by Leijia Hanrahan, in the way of sermon; it is as if the poem itself is hanging on by the solid structures of human language, to prevent a disappearance into the beyond that it itself has conjured.
With a fabulous word in the center of the tongue
With a giant face between two threads of tears at the base of the eyes
Those eyes to become tender pebbles on the roads of the beyond
All of this is useful to form the surface
For the interest of an impatient fire deep down below
And we have to note its work and praise its law
Of the various sacred elements that poetry serves, it is perhaps most beholden to time. In Nóra Ružičková’s Contemporaneities, excerpted here, the poet weaves her work through the social fabric of history to call attention to the tyrannical, ideological impetus put upon artists and their work over the course of twentieth-century Slovakia. Throughout these selections, the siren call of “new art” reverberates through public consciousness, echoing the constant destruction and reinstruction that each successive political tide demands from the imagination. In the search for relevance, for topicality, for poets and artists who tell the absolute truth about these current times, Ružičková’s work insists on a transparency towards the cyclical nature of our invention and reinvention. The strange irony and jubilance of the line “today when new art is being made / today more than ever before” is achingly familiar, a reminder that all times have been unprecedented, and all forms of art once immortal.
To frame literary works within the superstructure of their times is perhaps to say that they are at time’s mercy—that we are always writing within the framings of a moment—but it is also only language which has the capacity to line up the multiple frayings of the present, to meet it squarely with the fabrics of past and future. It is such words, as found in these three selections from the Winter 2022 issue, that assure the instability of a wanting world with their capacity for wonder, for speculation, for even temporary dreams of timelessness.
—Xiao Yue Shan
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