Last week’s Paris 2024 Olympics Opening Ceremony featured numerous nods to literature, art, and music, calling to mind Georgi Gospodinov’s statement in his interview for our Summer 2024 issue: “Culture is a continuous conversation, a hum of different voices, and it’s actually wonderful music, a sort of polyphony. We are not only immersed in that conversation, we are also part of it.” Indeed, as our very own Mary Hillis points out, this brand-new Summer edition is a “veritable parade of nations with works from 35 countries.” Read on to discover some of the highlights, courtesy of our multicontinental crew!
My favorite in this issue is Honora Spicer’s Spitting Sutures, with its mesmerizing fluid interplay of drafting a translation, selling a house, and experiences of the body. Fluidity also defines Olivia Sears’s in-depth historical exploration of Italian Futurist Ardengo Soffici in a conversation with Eugene Ostashevsky. Krzysztof Umiński’s Three Translators (tr. Soren Gauger) is also a wonderfully detailed dip into translation history, this time Polish. Two other texts I really enjoyed were Farah Ahamed’s The Day You Ate our Deliveroo Delivery and the dramatic excerpt Trinity by Hamid Ismailov (tr. Shelley Fairweather-Vega), the first for its many-faceted examination of an ethical confrontation, the second for its gorgeously translated insults and imprecations.
—Ellen Elias-Bursać, Contributing Editor
I love the compact, compressed nature of Adelheid Duvanel’s The Poet (tr. Tyler Schroeder). It’s got an amazing opening line that hooked me right away. The journey of the story that goes from childhood vignette to the awareness of the narrator as poet is really striking, showing how transformative and creative language can be, how altering a shift in perspective can be.
Micaela Brinsley’s Nothing to Be Owed is such a unique piece of writing, hybridic in its tone and structure, lyrical and poetic prose. The reflections on care in italics intersperse beautifully what’s going on in the almost journal-like entries. The line “I’m trapped by the transactional” will stick with me for a while.
Sarah Gear’s conversation with Georgi Gospodinov (tr. Angela Rodel) is a huge interview for Asymptote and it was a privilege to get such intimate access to the Booker International Prize-winning author’s mind.
—Hilary Ilkay, Assistant Managing Editor
Ae-ran Kim’s short story Thirty ( tr. Tamina Hauser) magnetized me from my first read. It entwines its veiled criticism of alienation in modern South Korean society with a shimmering, intricate narrative of loss. Illuminating the nebulous human connections that touch us but forever elude our grasp, Hauser’s masterful translation embodies the opposite in skill and technique. Instead, Hauser closes the distance between Korean and English, speaker and reader. Through the substance of translation, Kim’s text washes out the barriers of grief and guilt that separate humans from one another.
The prose of Pooya Monshizadeh’s Red Meadow (tr. poupeh missaghi) twists and turns through the electric grip of missaghi’s translation until its nerve-wracking, heart-rending conclusion, a revelation of the stakes of living and dying when one loses agency over one’s breath. His depiction of alienation between mother and daughter and world gradually delves into formal defamiliarization, brilliantly blurring the boundaries between substance and expression. The reader, by the story’s end, is uncertain, stoppered, touched by pathos.
Kateryna Yehorushkina’s journalistic intervention in I Was Offered to Become a Collaborator (tr. Mariia Akhromieieva) wends through chronology and voice in an incredible thematic exploration of life in occupied Ukraine after Russia’s full invasion. Instead of a conventional day-by-day narrative, Yehorushinka’s text redefines “cabbage[s],” “crosses,” and “self-respect” in the vein of Olena Astaseva’s A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War (reviewed in the Spring 2024 issue), and shifts abruptly between speakers in a gesture towards the collective “we” of partnership, family, and resistance in Ukraine. Akhromieieva’s excellent translation foregrounds the raw immediacy of this collective Ukrainian voice and highlights the continued necessity of global action to support Ukrainian lives.
I love the inspired concept of mutual exchange that Visual Editor Heather Green centers in this piece on translating modernist visual poetry. Olivia Sears’s and Eugene Ostashevsky’s dialogue isn’t the only fragment of exchange here. The works they discuss—foremost, Sears’ translation of Simultaneities and Lyric Chemisms by Ardengo Soffici—also constitute an exchange between language, text, and image. Inspired by Candice Whitney’s comment in a recent blog post on another piece of early-20th century Italian literature, another form of exchange might also exist between Soffici’s radical poetic experimentation and his later support of Mussolini’s fascist, racist regime, evincing cultural ties that shouldn’t be ignored between Italian modernist art and politics. I’m excited to read the second part of this piece!
Though this selection of Ekaterina Derysheva’s poetry (tr. Kevin M.F. Platt et al.) presents five separate texts, the translators’ collaboration has yielded a vibrant, precise thread of voice that almost makes a single continuous poem of the five. I especially love Derysheva’s use of curly and square brackets to denote close-ups on or zoom-outs of the natural environment, where peninsulas “quake,” or “inverted snow scatters” inside a telescope. Her elisions between space, the human body, and the microscopic eye/ “I” reveal the protean quality of war, dispossession, and displacement in Ukraine.
—Michelle Chan Schmidt, Assistant Editor (Fiction)
Farah Ahamed’s The Day You Ate our Deliveroo Delivery comes both as a bleak comedy and a welcome provocation, living amid a constant barrage of no-win deals in the contemporary gig economy. The device of a group of friends whose social bubble is continually popped by a delivery man’s inconvenient hunger escalates to the point of absurdist farce until, abruptly, a final note of realism forces the reader to confront their own helplessness.
Chase Harrow’s Cohort reached me when I needed a laugh. As someone who was forced to go to country club dinners as a child, I found Harrow’s gleeful skewering of the self-important chauvinist clientele they attract‚ and the nouveau-riche bitcoin yuppies with whom they clash‚ immensely cathartic. But for all its vulgar jokes, it retains a glimmer of compassion for its subjects, all of them united by shared frailty.
I found the excerpt from Earthly by Theis Ørntoft (tr. Mark Mussari) truly compelling. Like his protagonist, I’m a fan of Louis Sullivan’s architecture and oceanic voyages—which may have predisposed me toward this fiction—but the spare beauty of Ørntoft’s language in Mussari’s English translation, and the quick tempo it maintains without a single scene of high action or drama, were also a joy to experience.
—Julia Maria, Digital Editor
Can a persistent malady be a symptom for the rottenness of the world? Afflicted by a chronic condition that no doctor seems capable of treating, the titular character of Jamal Saeed’s My Grandmother Fatima’s Cough (tr. Catherine Cobham) recounts her illness’s genealogy, her memory of having to hold her breath, suppress her cough during the Tantura massacre in Palestine. Meanwhile the narrator’s mother, prone to bouts of emotion and unable to bear talk of death, bursts into tears. But this is no mawkish tale; the un-sentimentality of the grandmother is matched by Saeed’s controlled narrative voice in Cobham’s clear-eyed translation. Familial warmth and wit thrive beneath ongoing dispossession; the cough punctuates and resounds through the story like an inheritance.
Perhaps translation can be a mode of reckoning with grief’s aftermath. To the overdetermined metaphor of literary creation as birth, Honora Spicer adds the imagery of surgery, suture, shape. She probes the relationship between naming and pain, in the wake of her grandmother’s death; she relentlessly excises the words she couches in brackets. The text in question is Victoria Guerrero’s poetry, itself revolving around a maternal absence. Translation shifts and assumes many forms through this elastic essay: a “practice against absolute loss,” a reversal of mother and child, something “whispered in the company of the corpse.”
Aptly ensconced within our “The Story of Us” Special Feature, with its focus on collective voices, 2022 Prix Goncourt winner Brigitte Giraud’s “Widows” (tr. Laurel Berger) charts a model of survival‚ and what it means to surpass and to outlast the limits of an imposed identity. Incantatory and faux-anthropological in its repeated generalisations of “widows,” Giraud’s story greets sorrow and stale stereotypes with good humor: “Widows learn how to change a lightbulb….” She satirises the tendency to zoom in on the alterity of another’s mourning at the expense, ironically, of their humanity.
—Alex Tan, Assistant Managing Editor
I enjoyed Ekaterina Derysheva’s poetry (tr. Kevin M.F. Platt et al.) for their lush, stark, associative style—they remind the reader of their imaginative potential the way that a steep climb reminds one of their leg muscles. Rosselli’s style is equally lush, stark, and abstract, but also wounded and romantic; the mix of oneiric imagery and sensory concreteness creates a pleasant uncanniness. Shuntaro Tanikawa’s “Unknown Person” (tr. Martin Rock) struck me with how pertinent and contemporary its message is, despite the poem originating from a 1953 book; its animistic imagery foregrounds the impact and consequence of non-living things which are often overlooked in anthropocentric thinking. Olivia Sears’s and Eugene Ostashevsky’s conversation in the Visual Section was an instant favorite for many reasons, among which are the brilliant and bizarre neologisms that Sears defines. “Fellow Feeling” by Willem Marx was incredibly touching and evocative. I enjoyed the strange, bittersweet exploration of family ties, which reminded me of a Venclova poem, “To an Older Poet,” where he comes to terms with being “estranged but identical” with his father.
—Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large for North Macedonia
Ana Elisa Ribeiro’s poetry (tr. Anita Di Marco) compels with its invocation of photography (life refracted into imagery refracted into words—there’s a triangular aspect to it than I think is interesting especially in combination with such spare prose, because I think few words tend to make the visual structure and shape of a poem all the more memorable).
I’m kind of a sucker for work that acknowledges the banal inside massive, era-defining events, and Abby Minor’s The Village Elegies has so many great lines that create space for discussion of how weird it is to be an American right now (especially this line: “LIKE MOST AMERICANS, IT’S KIND OF HARD to explain / what I’m doing here”).
It feels really unique to come across a piece like Earthly by Theis Ørntoft (tr. Mark Mussari) with such a Scandinavian sensibility that’s situated in the US. Sitting in a motel room in a big empty place is such an American activity, and yet to also be contemplating whether some “spectral” truth about existence has also entered the room makes an even more delightfully uncanny combination.
Juan Carreño’s neozone (Maya Feile Tomes) plunges you directly into everything; its first run-on sentence is such a thrill, and an impressive feat by the translator. Spanish syntax often allows for longer sentences but to render them into English without breaking them apart, especially one that moves as fluidly as this one does, is really a feat in my opinion. But the way this piece moves through Latin America is just as mesmerizing; you don’t often get such a detailed look at so many cultural approaches to one another in such a compact piece of work.
—Marguerite Alley, Assistant Editor (Fiction)
*****
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