Emma Ramadan’s work as a translator has been so important to me and my literary journey—not least because of the attentiveness she lends to the writers she translates from Francophone North Africa, such as Ahmed Bouanani. I also really admire the way she speaks about her process with Claire Mullen in her interview, the passion and commitment and genuineness that shine through, for instance, in how she discusses her feelings at finally finding a copy of Molinard’s Panics. It reminded me a little of Alice Guthrie’s work with Malika Moustadraf’s Blood Feast, which was also out of print and circulated online as low quality scans.
I really love the slow, meditative writing of Dejan Atanacković’s absent narrator in Lusitania (tr. Rachael Daum). When it ranges with a kind of radical exteriority over the ephemera that remains of Teofilović, and the marginal annotations of Stojimirović that accompany his journals, it reads almost like the prose of Sebald—with the enigma of Teofilović as one such central, inaccessible figure around which the story endlessly circles, never losing sight of the larger political and social context.
Laksmi Pamuntjak’s “The Tale of Mukaburung” could easily have been written and translated to pander to a white gaze, and it’s really to the credit of both Pamuntjak and her translator Annie Tucker that there is a pervasive self-sufficiency to the story and its world, a refusal to explain itself, a matter-of-fact revelling in the ordinariness of its own magic and ritual. This seems especially commendable when a dominant affect in the story is puzzlement and defensiveness, in confrontation with foreigners whose presence and purpose are unknown, even to the reader, until much later in the story when it is revealed that many among them are political prisoners.
—Alex Tan, Senior Assistant Editor (Fiction)
Olavo Amaral’s “Steppe” (tr. Isobel Foxford) is exquisite in every way: the writing of the translation, the unusual subject matter, the relationship and emerging love between the two main characters and how it is described, the mood created by the atmosphere of snow and remoteness.
I have been following closely the horrors of Putin’s war in Ukraine and though still angry and frustrated by its continuation, I thought I was fairly hardened to the extent of Russian atrocities. But I broke down towards the end of Galina Itskovich’s War Diary (tr. Maria Bloshteyn), where the unspeakable rape and violence against children is put into words.
—Janet Phillips, Assistant Managing Editor
Kudos to Jonathan Chan for beautifully translating such ancient poems of Choe Chi-won, whose characteristic loneliness metaphorized in natural images is successfully rendered in translation.
I think one of the most important missions of Asymptote is to sustain languages under oppression, be that a national language that is close to extinction or the voice of a people amid a political process of erasure. Lauren Bo’s review of The Backstreets by Perhat Tursun undertakes this mission in remarkable earnest and rigor, by not only posing the biopolitical question of survival faced by the Uyghurs but also diligently analyzing the text via a close reading, and ultimately marrying the two to derive a conclusion that engages readers with the enduring challenge of humanity that surpasses the violence that is immediately palpable: “The Backstreets is an account of survival and a reminder that even the cruelest elements of humanity are fabricated out of absurdity and fear of the uncertain.”
The elusive language of Krikor Beledian’s “Unpeopled Language” (tr. Taline Voskeritchian and Christopher Millis) is delicate yet piercing, and while the history of the Armenian genocide cannot be separated from the poetics of Beledian, its implementation of “the tool against the game of expression“ speaks to the broader context of the survival of a people and their language in and after the era of mass murder.
—Megan Sungyoon, Assistant Editor (Poetry)
In the bareness of sky and earth, snow and brutal winter, emerges the connection between cognition and language in Olavo Amaral’s “Steppe” (tr. Isobel Foxford)—a language with few, dense words and almost no syntax that can work only if coupled with reconciliation to silence. It was a fascinating read.
Eszter T. Molnár’s Teréz, or the Memory of the Body (tr. Austin Wagner) gave me the uneasy feeling of past and future colliding. Written and translated beautifully, it gave me the sense of a body collecting and elaborating information, dealing with its sensitive archival.
Light and sharp, David Rosenmann-Taub’s Psalm Songs (tr. Iván Brave) read like a rain of nails. I love how their brevity and fragmentation are coupled with precision, like every object, feeling or passing character, once conjured, is pinned down irremovably to the line.
I love this selection from Enrico Testa’s Ablative (tr. Henry Walters), which manages to carry across Testa’s slow, savoured language, limpid and only seemingly simple.
The colloquial tone and the surreal, visionary atmosphere of Marine Petrossian’s poetry (tr. Marine Petrossian and Arthur Kayzakian) make them a master class in crafting inner monologues. Starting from small and daily matters, they transcend beyond the mundane and reverberate with a brilliant light.
—Marina Dora Martino, Assistant Managing Editor
The nonfiction pieces really did it for me this time around. Karen Villeda’s The Water of Lourdes (tr. Allana Noyes and Andrea Chapela) alerted me to a reality so close to my home in Texas that I had no idea about. My understanding of the reality of being a woman in Mexican City was profoundly deepened. Villeda’s earnest, angry, and casual tone vividly brought the injustice she lives with to life. Some details (like the text thread of women who need to check in with each other when they go anywhere alone) really burrowed into me.
I loved the playfulness of Alejandra Eme Vázquez’s You’ll Leave Your Body Behind (tr. Nora E. Carr) and the way Vázquez used food to illuminate her understanding of Abuela and the ways she interacts with the world. The structure was captivating, the way she starts with her surprising conclusion (Abuela is a ventriloquist), and then winds her way through a recipe to explain this claim. The humor and the lightheartedness of the piece end up revealing a poignant, complex, bittersweet fact about Abuela: she doesn’t have her own voice, so she works around it by coopting the voices of others.
Galina Itskovich’s War Diary (tr. Maria Bloshteyn) was a hard read but I immediately sent it out to ten people when I finished it. The war crimes described, the brutal raping of children, the scale of the violence, and the people trying so valiantly and almost hopelessly to help. My understanding of the Ukrainian war (and all war) has now been changed in ways I don’t completely understand.
—Annilee Newton, Social Media Manager
I love the translational pair Kyung-Sook Shin and Anton Hur, and I was so excited to see their “Who is with Us Now?” published in the new Fall edition. I appreciate the quietness of this piece, as well as its format: the fact that the narrator is writing a letter to someone who might only know her in passing brings me even closer to the story. The scene in the kitchen, when she sees her husbands thin frame for the first time, made me cry.
I appreciate the strong imagery in Álvaro Fausto Taruma’s poetry (tr. Grant Schutzman), engaging all senses, tactile, something you can smell. The line towards the end is wonderfully written: ”I am the face of the infamous fisherman who abandoned the metaphor, I mean, his net and lost the quick-swimming fish of joy.“
—Bella Creel, Assistant Blog Editor
This issue’s Brave New World Literature Feature Montserrat Roig’s From Me to Us (tr. Eva Dunsky) combines the experience of being a woman with that of a writer and of a person who is coming of age, and shows the fragmentation, loss, and chaos inherent in these elements of identity without disregarding the ways that these experiences can also heal and allow one to reclaim power. I found it to be a very nuanced, albeit at times self-contradictory, journey.
—Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large (Macedonia)
Would Adam have fallen if he had been left alone? This is the provocative question behind Lina Wolff’s Carnality by Lina Wolff, translated from Swedish by Frank Perry and brilliantly reviewed by Sarah McEachern. As a reader, I tend to read reviews only after I have been acquainted with the book, in the understanding that someone’s else interpretation of the story might color mine, or perhaps even spoil the book to such an extent that I lose interest in it. McEachern’s review is the complete opposite: while it reveals the book to me, she does it in such a way as to elicit my curiosity and admiration rather than foreclose it with her attentive analysis of the book.
While the Mediterranean understandably has been at the forefront of conversations about migration in recent years, two books reviewed in this issue of Asymptote remind us of the importance that the Caribbean has had and continues to have in the matter, in particular when viewed in conjunction with the Americas’ history of slavery. While responding to two very different books, both Meaghan Coogan’s review of Boat People and Georgina Fooks’s take on Salt Crystals speak of a shared genealogy of grievance and lost possibilities.
—Barbara Halla, Criticism Editor
In this issue’s Drama section, we find two texts that explore the audience’s relationship to drama and to storytelling. In The Ghosts of Alloue by Rémi De Vos (tr. Katherine Mendelsohn), a guide takes us on a tour of actor Maria Casarès’ house and life. This tour allows the reader/audience to witness some of the people and events of her life, rich with literati like Albert Camus and Jean Genet. A delicate and surprising text translated with sensitivity by Mendelsohn. In The Deadman by János Háy (tr. Veronika Haacker-Lukács), a mother and her children wait for a possible apocalypse. This uncanny play thrusts the audience into a menacing world of political terror and mystery. The ground keeps shifting under the characters as they find that their house is probably under siege. Haacker-Lukács renders Háy’s text in precise and chilling prose-poetry.
—Caridad Svich, Drama Editor
Following on from the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Annie Ernaux, the nonfiction section of this issue of Asymptote explores the expectations of what women should and shouldn’t do. These pieces question those expectations. Thila Varghese’s translation from Tamil of S. Vijayalakshmi’s “Just Like a Womb” compares the night and the world to the womb, the place from which we all come. One would think women should rule this world. Yet congratulations can become condolences if a woman exercises her will. In Andrea Chapela and Allana Noyes’ translation from Spanish of Karen Villeda’s “Dead Women Who Share My Name” from The Water of Lourdes, the logic of the femicidal murderer is laid out: “You are mine or you are not.” That negation is behind the high rate of femicide in Villeda’s country, Mexico. And it’s a negation with which one could be familiar in the US as well. Instead of being respected as a source of life, women’s reproductive choices, women’s wills, are threatened and negated. Such thinking is similar to the logic of the invader. In Maria Bloshteyn’s translation from Russian of Galina Itskovich’s “The Womanly Faces of the War” from A War Diary of a Psychotherapist in Dire Straits, the Russian invasion of Ukraine catches everybody off guard but especially the women of Ukraine. They must resist the brutal Russian invaders, who weaponize femicide and rape. Somehow Ukrainian women carry on and even #sitlikeagirl. Finally, Nora Carr’s translation of Alejandra Eme Vázquez’s “What Happens to Your Voice” from You’ll Leave Your Body Behind presents another portrait of what’s traditionally considered women’s work, food preparation. Only in this Borgesian piece, the woman in the kitchen is more akin to a sorceress wielding a power beyond expectation, the power of her voice.
—Ian Ross Singleton, Nonfiction Editor
The first of the two Visual features, When the Cannons are Firing, by Caterina Domeneghini, features an interview with the Ukrainian-born artist Sergey Katran (tr. Irena Kukota), focused on many aspects of his œuvre, including BioArt, utopian work, and his 2022 exhibition Murals, in which “images were burnt into the walls in imitation of the explosions and bombardments taking place in Ukraine.” When Katran, in this in-depth interview, discusses “the necessity to leave one’s country in order to make art freely,” I immediately draw a connection with the second Visual piece in this issue, my own interview with Syrian artist Abdulrahman Naanseh, who was trained in Damascus as a traditional calligraphic artist, and, after fleeing the war in Syria, developed his own innovative, lyrical style of Arabic calligraphy: “a creative movement that breaks restrictions, a method that carries enough freedom.”
—Heather Green, incoming Visual Editor
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