The Fall Asymptote was a particularly special issue not least because of the focus on the ‘outsider’; many pieces resonated with the topic of alienation. In turn, the featured writers and translators—including many Asymptote colleagues—responded with sensitivity and care to questions of inclusion, liminality, and bordering. The most vital piece in the issue for me was colleague and editor-at-large for Palestine Carol Khoury’s translation of Bothayna Al-Essa’s The Gazan I Relate to. The translator’s note makes clear the stakes of translating even the title, and throughout the piece questions the limits of gestures of solidarity, especially when it is only the randomness of fate that means we are born in different nations, bounded by different borders, on one side, or the other. Al-Essa insists on the vitality of empathy but also the limits of solidarity; it is a piece that I am proud to see in the latest issue and I hope it spurs others to remember, reflect, and act.
He Wun-Jin’s short story “Guide Us, Chicken Booty!” (tr. Catherine Xinxin Yu) was a favourite, in its thoughtful exploration of grief for a trans sibling and the best way to remember them. As the title indicates, Yu translates with humour, but also with nuance, crafting a sensitive and moving text throughout.
Poet Ennio Moltedo (tr. Marguerite Feitlowitz) reflecting on the legacy of Chile’s neoliberal democracy in New Things was particularly potent, with a sharp critique of the limits of memory culture that feels even more potent since the failed attempt to reform the country’s dictatorship-era constitution. Feitlowitz’s translator’s note demonstrates the thoughtfulness that is palpable throughout the translation.
It is always a joy to read Alton Melvar M Dapanas’s translations of Stefani J Alvarez (The Autobiography of the Other Lady Gaga is a favourite of mine from the archive) and Dear Sol continues with the question of life writing, reflecting on migration and loved ones left behind. The multilingual touches of Filipino and German paint an evocative picture.
From the Outsiders Special Feature‚ which seems to have set the tone for the issue more broadly‚ Odette Casamayor-Cisneros’s essay Home of the Maroon Women was a powerful read. Translated with skill and precision by Anna Kushner, the photos within the essay created a sense of history, of listening to and witnessing the Black women who have gone before. The voices of her family are braided with those of vital Black feminists: Audre Lorde; Maryse Condé’s grandmother,Victoire Élodie Quidal; Angelamaria Dávila; Victoria Santa Cruz. Casamayor-Cisneros reflects movingly on the journeys—both internal and external—that led her to the present moment, to the decision to stop running. Throughout, embodiment is key: “When Black women commit to fully living within and for our bodies, we become ourselves. We render our humanity too eloquent to be stifled, as we find the inner peace freeing from the external expectations that define us solely by our actions and roles for others.”
—Georgina Fooks, Director of Outreach
”New Year’s Eve” by Cung Tích Biền (tr. Nguyễn Hoàng Nam) and ”Portami” by Lowry Pressly are companion pieces via their surrealistic and compelling portraits of the other. I love that the characters of Nạn and Peppiniello have a certain lyrical mystery, their grotesque appearances seem not so much freakish as reflecting their inherent tragedy of being perennially misunderstood by so-called ”normal” folks.
He Wun-Jin’s “Guide Us, Chicken Booty!” (tr. Catherine Xinxin Yu) was an absolute joy to read! The story’s riveting and gallow humor brings into sharp focus the struggles of Meh, the narrator’s deceased trans sister. The parallel of Tainanese folk magic and Meh’s gender shift via medical intervention is thought-provoking, in showing how the kaiguang ritual—in the context of cultural and religious beliefs—is accepted, while the other transformation, via medical science, is still socially fraught.
ariel rosé’s nonfiction Ukraine—A Polyphony (tr. Frank Vigoda) and Jon Fosse’s drama Someone is Going to Come (tr. Harry Lane and Adam Seelig) deftly and poignantly illustrate how difficult it is to keep out the intrusive presence of the outsider-as-oppressor, no matter how hard one tries to preserve the purity of one’s identity or relationship.
—Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora
Ornela Vorpsi‘s Offworld (tr. Antonella Lettieri) is serpentine, invincible, charting the entwined forces of desire and guilt in the rich first-person subjectivity of a young girl, Tamar: hers are more than growing pains. Lettieri’s prior publications in Asymptote have demonstrated her excellent literary taste and translative style, and this piece is no exception. Her stunning translation carries Tamar’s whirling torment through to lush, precise English, beautified by its encounter here with the more modular, expressive Italian.
Catherine Xinxin Yu‘s riotous, imperative title (“Guide Us, Chicken Booty!“), translated from He Wun-Jin‘s more narrative original Standard Chinese title, sets a tone of hilarity for the story’s gravity to subsequently subvert. Their lexical choices create a sense of drama that emotes without tripping into melodrama, one that lends itself to the story’s entangled lines of gender transition and folk Taiwanese rituals, urban disappearance and family estrangement.
Poet Katrina Haddad‘s collage (tr. Roman Turovsky) is an undulating, shimmering text that makes drama and catharsis out of nature: “the thaw arrives…” Here nature is the protagonist, the container, the perpetrator, the reverser of time; it collapses being and dreaming in the experience of war, a run-on sentence that flows over its syntax, masterfully ‘poured’ in Turovsky’s translation. But nature is also the cause, the beauty, to fight for, in Ukraine’s ongoing, existential war initiated by Russia, though “[nature] happened a long time ago.”
I admire Khalid Lyamlahy’s Venice Requiem (tr. Ros Schwartz) for the empathy it elicits, the erudite awareness (of the self and of others) of the speaker, who refuses complicity with the deaths of African migrants in EU countries any longer: “I must resist the infinite repetition of this death.” How can literature repudiate this horror? Lyamlahy finds a way in his attempted reconstruction of Pateh Sabally’s life, impossible to complete yet imperative to try; Schwartz’s translation rings with gravity and an equal attention to detail.
I really love the polyphony of Behzad Karim Khani‘s Dog, Wolf, Jackal, honed in Fiona Graham‘s exquisite translation to balance at least four distinct voices and a refined, elegant register against the complex sociopolitical backdrop of migration and ‘integration’ in 1990s Germany. Confident and compelling, Khani’s genuinely humanistic, compassionate story is a pleasure to read.
—Michelle Chan Schmidt, Senior Assistant Editor (Fiction)
I enjoy the succinct use of the metaphor of water to tell a story both personal and collective in Natascha Wodin’s “The River and the Sea” (tr. Mandy Wight)—as summed up in the beautiful line: “history repeats itself. It doesn’t move in a linear fashion, but goes round in circles.”
Ornela Vorpsi’s Offworld (tr. Antonella Lettieri) impeccably captures a childhood fear—very relatable for me—of personal fault and rejection by family and other beloveds for one’s imperfections. I love how clearly and yet poetically it expresses something so seemingly ineffable as emotion, for instance the alienation conveyed in “the crack, the cleft…the fissure that runs along the wall at my grandmother’s house…” and the awe and terror in “the refrain of Maria’s powerful steps between the courtyard and the rooms kept the house in line, like a pendulum splitting time in perfect seconds.” The translation transports me to the land of the story’s setting with Latinate words such as “frangible” and “limpidity.”
The poem from Prisca Agustoni’s Mutilated World (tr. Alice Osti Magalhães and Jenny Marshall Rodger) is my favorite piece in the current issue. I’m drawn to its graceful depiction of the interdependence of humanity and environment and its quietly fierce exposition of the ravages of social disintegration and climate destruction. The tight imagery of dry heat evokes the modern mood of urgency and crisis: “bog of the display,” “burns your retina,” “eczema,” “vertigo and nausea at noon,” “coins in a metal piggy bank,” “light up your iphone,” “faces glitter.” I hope to see the rest of the book in English translation!
Hamoud Saud’s On Music, Writing and Solitude (tr. Zia Ahmed) strikes me as basically an essay in poem form, a hybrid genre that I love. Every line of the piece teems with layered meaning, which is enhanced by the separation on the page of each line or short paragraph from the next. I especially enjoy the observations on both the universality and the cultural specificity and personal connections of music: “flying wingless to distant horizons, breaking the boundaries of place, language, and ideology” and “what ties people to the memory of land, blood, war, birth, tears , and laughter.” Seldom have I read such evocative words on the power of music to heal and bring peace to humanity.
Last but not least, I’m captivated by Odette Casamayor-Cisneros’s “Home of the Maroon Women” (tr. Anna Kushner) for its poetic depiction of collective rage: “It’s like mounting the crest of a wave. Riding it. Sinking. My being split apart and dissolving itself.” I’m struck by the timelessness of ancestor connection, eloquently expressed through the image of the ancient photograph of a great-great-grandmother on a cell phone screen. And a concluding line is truly revelatory for me as person who suffers from chronic pain, giving me a novel perspective on both my own healing and that of the narrator, a person whose body is under the constant racist scrutiny and surveillance: “And it dawned upon me that everything was already there, inside me. Pain does not overpower me because I am the pain.”
—Sauvryn Linn, Copy Editor
While only a glimpse under the cover, Hilary Ilkay’s review of Simone de Beauvoir’s Diary of a Philosophy Student (tr. Barbara Klaw) ushers in a vivid and complex portrait of a young Beauvoir taking hold of her life, thoughts, and philosophy.
Hamoud Saud’s On Music, Writing and Solitude (tr. Zia Ahmed) is a poetic conversation on the enduring presence, place, and purposes of music, and the entwined nature of writing and solitude.
Carlos Oriel Wynter Melo’s The Names of the Panama Canal (tr. Miranda Mazariegos) was a powerful reminder that what is now is only because of what happened, who contributed, and how things unfolded, and that there is unity even in a time when everything feels so far apart.
Mikhail Shishkin’s interview, conducted and translated by Sarah Gear, articulates the tensions between politics and political intentions, and a people and their culture very well—tensions that the media and mainstream discussions often struggle with: “The history of Russian culture is the history of desperate resistance to successive totalitarian regimes. For centuries the Russian people’s survival strategy has been silence, humility, and submission to the authorities no matter what they demand. “The people are silent” is the strategy described by Pushkin [in Boris Godunov]. And the only thing that can counter this silence and obedient submission to the authorities is the word, is culture. That is why the regime has always considered culture as the main enemy—that is why they eradicated it and continue to eradicate it. Culture is resistance to totalitarianism. Culture exists as a form of human dignity, and that is why culture will always be the enemy of the regime in Russia.“
—Julie Shi, Senior Executive Assistant
”New Year’s Eve” by Cung Tích Biền (tr. Nguyễn Hoàng Nam) is a story that manages to capture the complexities of human feeling, from animal brutality to angelic kindness, without mawkish sentimentality or oversimplified moralizing
Jon Fosse’s Someone is Going to Come (tr. Harry Lane and Adam Seelig) is a sparse and self-contained scene that generates powerful drama from small moments.
I was unfamiliar with André Griffo’s visual art. Visual Editor Heather Green‘s thoughtful questions added substance to the powerful immediacy of his work.
Lowry Pressly’s short story ”Portami” effortlessly brings out the uncanny qualities everyday experiences can possess.
Nava Ebrahimi’s The Cousin (tr. Sebastian Smallshaw) is a dazzling example of how an apparently straightforward narrative can quietly reveal deeper layers of meaning.
—Joseph McAlhany, Copy Editor
I always find myself drawn to the visual section of Asymptote, and the Fall 2024 issue was no different. Here we have Part Two of an interview with translators of visual poetry, titled “Eugene Ostashevsky, Fantastic Radiation and Ferroconcrete: Olivia Sears and Eugene Ostashevsky on Translating Modernist Visual Poetry.” The slideshow of period pictures and pages from Tango with Cows perfectly complemented the text of the interview.
—Mary Hillis, Educational Arm Assistant
*****
Read more from the Blog: