Asymptote’s Winter 2023 Edition is out, showcasing literature from thirty-four countries and fifteen languages! Marking our twelfth year in world literature, this issue is headlined by César Aira, Geetanjali Shree, and César Vallejo. Here, blog editors Xiao Yue Shan, Meghan Racklin, and Bella Creel introduce their highlights from the issue, from an explosive, violent garden, to a perverse love story and vengeful doll, to a piece of criticism that reads more as art than review.
In a short eulogy for the brilliant, transportive Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda, Gabriel García Márquez recounts a brief visit he once paid her in Barcelona, around a decade before her death. Slightly taken aback by her impeccable resemblance to her characters, namely in what she had described as her “innocence,” the García Márquez intuited that Rodoreda, like the people she had raised to such stark emotional reality, had a penchant for growing flowers. “We spoke about [gardening], which I consider another form of writing,” he recounts, “and between our discussion of roses . . . I tried to talk to her about her books.”
The botanic, as both these great writers knew, is transportive. There is nothing so beguiling as the language of flowers—their ancient names, colour, perfume, their mystic properties and secret variety; we know this, because the writers before us had long known it, just as the writers before them had known it, and on and on backwards, ever since the first poets looked at the world in bloom, and saw in it an opening to the sublime. Over and over, we’ve harvested from the natural world to give our poems tint and fragrance, to purple our prose and frame our visions, and in the same way that soil can be exhausted, the power of this invocation has since waned through countless verses. The challenge to the text now, when evoking landscape, is what García Márquez knew: the writer cannot simply pick the flowers—she must grow them herself.
In Marosa di Giorgio’s excerpt from The Moth, the garden is explosive. Translated with a musical ear by Sarah María Medina, the prose poems luxuriate in their sheer volume of lush imagery, of ripe fruit and their rainbow palette, bacchanalian sweetness and insatiable appetite. Di Giorgio has always been an exceptionally visual writer, with her prodigious use of images inspiring comparison to the works of Bosch and Dalí—and here her painterly instincts are once again ravishing. In broad strokes a feast is spread before us, peaches and dates and syrup, as her image-language fills the lines with taste and spectacle. She once said that “only the poet knows what colour to give each word . . . In The Moth, I paint myself as a reciter who interprets in front of the rosebush.”
The Moth, however, is not a work of indulgence. It is a work of violence. Published in the aftermath of the Uruguayan dictatorship, the poems are as stifled as they are rich; it is almost as though these mouths are filled with sweet fruit to prevent them from speaking. Centred around the recollections of a young girl—who sometimes seemingly merges with a moth from the land of the dead—the poems open a psychic space where objects, natural and unnatural, are infused with the almost delicate (yet by no means less visceral) terror of a child. Alongside the verdure and the saccharine, di Giorgio weaves a dark choreography of watching, hunting, hiding. There are few verbs that are not weaponised: apples and plums are “hunted”; men “prowl”; the sky turns orange but the orange trees turn black. The pastoral landscape of the orchard, the garden, and the home shapeshift, unfixed and untenable, all in an effort to accommodate fear:
I enter the house; there’s no time to hesitate. I continue to go lightly around the cupboards and dressers, I steal from the boxes. Someone gives a scream; others scream. I flee. I don’t know if, over there, they wait with hatchets, or if it was only a scream.
Under her command, the language of fruits and flowers, of trees and seasons, is reawakened to the poet’s gift of attention. Everything alive is electric in its relation to each other; di Giorgio, standing in front of the rosebush, flicks the switch on, invites us to see.
—Xiao Yue Shan
I heard Laura Marling’s debut album, “Alas I Cannot Swim,” playing in my head as I read “The Woman Who Walks in Her Sleep,” by Alfred Döblin, in a new translation by Joachim Redner. It is an album about a bad relationship and the things that frighten us at night, when we are somewhere between asleep and awake. Döblin’s story shares these themes, set in a Berlin that both pushes the central characters together—in the office, in neighboring apartment buildings—and keeps them apart, rushing from one place to the next. It is a story about people who could love each other, if only they were a little better than they are, people grasping for something, but only sometimes one another.
Herr Priebe is, at first, a bit affected and a bit affecting. There is humor and even pathos in his attempt to mimic “the lords and masters of the world,” trying and failing to show off his violet stockings to passersby. But as the story unfolds, it also darkens: his affectations begin to look sinister, especially from Antonie’s vantage (though it takes her too long to see it herself). The story becomes a warning about the ways in which men who cannot be lords and masters of the world will insist on being lord and master of whatever they can. Antonie thinks of Herr Priebe, “my love, I want to love you again,” but he never quite lets her. He abandons her over and over again. In “Your Only Doll (Dora),” a song towards the end of “Alas I Cannot Swim,” Marling sings “you’ve broken your only doll/what will you do with a girl if she refuses to be alive?” In an eerie twist that forces Herr Priebe into the nightmarish world Antonie had been dwelling in, “The Woman Who Walks in Her Sleep” provides an answer to that question.
—Meghan Racklin
While compiling my favorites for this edition, I found that the pieces that most drew my eye were intimate, strange, and full of questions. Tagged #TheReturn, this collection in many cases seemed to come back to looping questions: What is poetry?—is art?—is translation?—am I? With each question, we find ourselves again at the start, and yet we keep asking.
One such piece, a stand-out from the issue, is Jared Joseph’s review of Johannes Göransson’s most recent publication, Summer. In conversation with Göransson, Ivan Blatný, Joyelle McSweeny, Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Greek mythology, and seemingly everyone and everything else, Joseph speaks of Summer’s multilingual poetry as though he heard it pressed against a thin wall and is trying to convey the muffled words—and not only the muffled words, but also what the poem felt, thought, will think, had for breakfast, etc., and I come out the other side convinced that Joseph was there as the poems ate French toast, and even shared a bite. While reading this review, I thought that Joseph must have found a back door into Göransson’s mind and tracked down all the connections and tethers that came together to make Summer. I also thought that, if he hadn’t found that back door, and if this review was brewed solely in Joseph’s brain and all the things he thinks about, spending ten minutes in his mind would set me on fire.
Translation is “betrayal” as Joseph opens, like sealed letters, Swedish words that are foreign to him and exposes their hidden, synchronous poetry. Translation is “poetry” as Joseph states, “The translator dreams of producing the perfect copy; the poet dreams of a word ‘tree’ that will grow actual branches.” Translation is “metaphor” at an etymological source of “carrying over.” And metaphor—as translation; as poetry—is that which “remake[s] the world,” and Summer (metaphor) (translation) (poetry) . . .
Summer exposes the holes in capitalist and nationalist circulations that attempt to vampirize and exploit our griefs and our arts. Like snow and under the cover of snow, these systemic circulations offer to deaden and muffle this pain; Summer burns it off and uncovers how these systems—through desire via capitalism, through individualism via nationalism, through redemption via poetry, even melody—only widen the scope and magnify the violence of these wounds, and attempt to remove us from engagement with the world.
Itself a work of art, this review is one stone turned to reveal another stone, under which lies another stone, and then again another, beneath which is poetry, or perhaps, another stone, and you begin to think: Was it poetry all along? Through his review, Joseph brings us to see poetry as Summer does, which is radical, translational, and intrinsically all-encompassing:
I think Baudelaire was wrong in saying poets are the custodians of the intangible, and I think Summer is right: poetry is against all in the same way one leans “against” a wall. What I mean is where poetry is prepositional, it touches on and touches everything; it is held against all. If there is an allegory of this book, I think it is that everything and everyone belongs in poetry.
—Bella Creel
*****
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