Search Results for: boullosa

Translation Tuesday: The Double Cat Syndrome by Carmen Boullosa

June 1, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Jenny Staff Johnson

We urgently needed to ask questions, because there had been so many things we didn't understand.

One of Mexico’s leading writers, Carmen Boullosa gives us the unsettling story of a thirteen-year-old girl who comes to grips with the grief of losing her mother as she navigates life under the deranged household and authoritarian control of her father and new stepmother. All this while, supernatural elements haunt her experience of home: how is she the only one who sees the cat with eight legs next door? What does the ghost of her mother, who paces around the house visiting her six children, want to say? Blending the comic and the macabre, and told from the perspective of this unforgettably precocious narrator, this week’s story opens up the mutinous, multitudinous feelings of needing to find answers, of having to name one’s feelings, in short, the messiness of what we call growing up.

My season in hell lasted from November 1970 to July of the following year. It seemed so long, I thought for sure that it would last the rest of my life, that my only ticket was to misfortune. I was thirteen and had just barely become a woman—back then girls took a long time to mature.

Nothing made sense, and when I say nothing, I mean nothing. For example: the neighbors had a cat that I used to see from my bedroom window, basking in the sun and grooming himself at the foot of a glass door in his garden. He was black and white, which is how he got his name, Cow. Cow had a temper—on our block we said that he was our guardian cat because he attacked at the slightest provocation dogs, children, women, street sweepers, or cats. Since that hellish November, I continued to see Cow where he always was, and a short distance away, inside the neighbors’ glass door, I noticed another, identical, cat, lying on the rug, taking a nap. When I could, I asked the neighbor—who was my age—“Hey, is the other cat Cow’s son? Because they are identical.”

She answered me, “Come on, we don’t have another cat, Cow wouldn’t stand for it, you know that.”

“But I have seen him, inside your house,” I said, and in response she looked at me like I was crazy.

From my window, I continued seeing double: one sleeping cat, and one kitty grooming himself. Today I have no doubt that no one else saw the second cat, only me. But things went on like that. For me every cat had eight legs. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Carmen Boullosa

October 27, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Lawrence Schimel

Earth is a ball in disjointed flight. / The illuminated celestial sphere / is a sudden shot. / The cosmos trembles, the planetary spins jerk.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday we bring you a selection of poems from Carmen Boullosa, one of the most dynamic and prolific writers in contemporary Mexican literature. The haiku-esque “Dry Rain” discovers a scene of natural beauty in Brooklyn, leading to a final image that is both concrete and abstract. In “Puy de Dôme,” our speaker addresses the seemingly ageless French volcano which has outlived its ancient temple—and perhaps even the temple’s gods. And in the elegiac “The Match,” our speaker witnesses the tragic death of Italian footballer Piermario Morosini, whose final moments on the field are recounted with profound sorrow and admiration. As with her novels, Boullosa’s poetry (here translated by acclaimed writer and translator Lawrence Schimel) spans an eclectic range of aesthetic styles and sociocultural themes, traversing national borders in pursuit of a shared humanity.

 

Dry Rain

Rain of flowers in Brooklyn.
Minute white petals fall
heralding
the spring,
bathing us
without water
in fresh                                                                                           hypothetical laughter. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Jails Take to the Streets” by Carmen Boullosa

August 26, 2014  |  in Translations  |  by Kristina Zdravič Reardon

Fresh fiction by Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa, translated by Kristina Zdravič Reardon

Featuring a kidnapping, a prison, a drug lord, an inmate called the Inmate-Prince, and a prostitution network, Carmen Boullosa suggests through stark satire in this story that truth is, indeed, stranger—and more complex—than fiction. At the same time, she addresses the narrative gaps between truth and fiction head-on with four levels of meta-narrative.

To begin, she writes that this piece is “a conversation between a film producer (John Grandcaca), a multi-award-winning Mexican writer (Julio de la X), and the assistant producer, with a moralizing note from the author.” At once, we see four levels of narration: the writer’s script, the summary of the script from the assistant producer, the commentary on the summary of the script from the producer to the writer, and the commentary from the fictional stand-in for Boullosa. Yet the narrative proves even wilder than the layers might at first suggest.

Mexico released official crime rate statistics from the last several years this spring. While some claim the statistics are dubious, the publication highlights a high number of kidnappings, extortions, and thefts across the country. Boullosa draws attention to these through dark humor here, and in doing so, forces the reader to reflect on the gaps between truth and fiction and how we, as readers, navigate that divide.

—Kristina Zdravič Reardon

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 29, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Matthew Redman, René Esaú Sánchez, and Wambua Muindi

Literary news from Kenya, Mexico, and the UK!

This week, our editors bring news of literary realms colliding, collaborating, and interchanging in future- and truth-seeking dialogues. In Kenya, a titan in publishing is commemorated, and a Nobel Laureate establishes presence in a Swahili translation. In Mexico, World Poetry Day is celebrated wit aplomb. And in the UK, the London Book Fair brings vital interrogations pertaining to literary translation in the age of AI. Read on to find out more!

Wambua Muindi, Editor-at-Large, reporting from for Kenya

To paraphrase V.S. Naipaul, the world is what it is, and men who allow themselves to become something have a place in it. Such men, when death waylays them, come to define particular eras. Henry Chakava, a pioneer African publisher, is such a man.

On Sunday, March 24, Chakava was laid to rest. For a man who, from a young age and until his untimely demise, redefined publishing in Africa in many ways: publishing in Swahili and promoting publishing in African languages, focusing on educational publishing to promote literacy, diversifying traditional publishing to incorporate new literary thought besides the infamous African Writers Series. With this legacy, his death attracted reverential eulogies from across the book and knowledge industry. He had become the face of African book publishing when he became the managing director of Heinemann Educational Books, which he would eventually steer to a new dispensation under the banner of East African Educational Publishers, and his work endeared him to many in Africa and beyond, attracting global assignments including being named the chairman of Global Book Alliance in 2021. An ode to Chakava, surely, cannot be captured by a word-bound dispatch. All in all, go well, Chakava. READ MORE…

Memory as Terrain, Museum, Dictionary: On Kirmen Uribe’s Bilbao—New York—Bilbao

November 7, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

The mythologization of one’s personal repertoire begs the question of significance: what makes something worth telling?

Bilbao—New York—Bilbao by Kirmen Uribe, translated from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin, Coffee House Press, 2022

“I realized that our dad’s whole family history was made up of round trips, flights, and returnings,” reflects author Kirmen Uribe. Bilbao–New York–Bilbao, a novel which won Uribe the 2009 National Prize for Literature in Spain, stems from the family history in question. Translated from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin, it is a sort of metanovel that straddles fact and fiction, laying its mechanisms bare. Within the brackets of his own travel—a flight from Bilbao to New York—the narrator’s mind rambles through various elements he would like to weave into his hypothetical novel: interviews, folklore, philosophical reflections, images, and anecdotes. He meditates on structure and process, always on the precipice of making decisions, giving the whole novel the impression that it’s just about to start.

Uribe is from the Basque fishing town of Ondarroa, where the men have historically spent large parts of the year on the water. Urbanization, industrialization, and the mechanization of the fishing industry have by now, however, made the traditional way of life nearly obsolete. As a member of the intermediary generation, the rhythm of this extended round-trip journey is still familiar to Uribe; movement is not a means to an end, but a comfortable and creative mode of being that always ends in a provisional homecoming.

Throughout, the reader senses that his search for the novel’s structure is a search for meaning. Uribe’s desire for the moments that make up his personal, family, and national history to coalesce into narrative is tangible, though he struggles to make them conform. Details, encounters, images—he feels their weight and wants a story to give them coherence. But they resist, and his resulting frustration is echoed by the reader. When a new anecdote begins, we wonder: where does this fit in? Why should I immerse myself in this moment? Is this character major or minor?

Memory has always been the terrain that grounds seemingly disparate moments, and Uribe’s memory is like the ocean maps that his ancestors drew for their fishing journeys; the features depicted are those most salient to the cartographer. Before the time of GPS, Uribe recalls his father drafting a map of his habitual fishing ground off the coast of an uninhabited Scottish island called Rockall. It was a personal map, jealously guarded, that showed the significant underwater features and the migratory patterns of the fish. Rockall echoes through the novel, looming large like a landmark, as it would have been for Uribe in his youth—the place where his father was when he wasn’t home. I looked it up on Google Maps, but as I zoomed out to see where it was in relation to the United Kingdom, it quickly disappeared. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

October 28, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Alton Melvar M Dapanas, and Andriana Hamas

The latest in literary developments from the Philippines, the Hispanophone US, and Bulgaria!

This week, our editors report on the state of regional, multilingual literature from the Philippines, the Feria internacional del libro de Nueva York, and the Frankfurt Book Fair and its presentation of Bulgarian writing. Read on to find out more!

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines

Panel discussions on publishing and writing served as pre-workshop events to the forthcoming Cordillera Creative Writing Workshop (CCWW). Dubbed Hobwal, book talks were co-presented by indie presses Milflores Publishing, Baguio Writers Group, and multilingual children’s book publisher Aklat Alamid. Ryan Guinaran, Dumay Solinggay, Richard Kinnud, and Sherma Benosa, writers working in Ibaloy, Kankanaey, Ifugao, and Ilokano respectively, spotlighted the panel on writing in the mother tongue. Last year’s workshop instalment featured panelists like Genevieve L Asenjo, International Writing Programme alumna and De La Salle University-MFA Creative Writing program faculty, known for her writings in/translation from the Kinaray-a and Hiligaynon. Other discussions centred on pandemic writings, Baguio City’s literary cartography, and climate fiction.

The University of the Philippines-Baguio’s College of Arts & Communication, and Cordillera Studies Center grant CCWW fellowships to emerging poets, fictionists, and essayists writing in 15 northern Luzon languages—from Bontoc to Ivatan, Kalinga to Gaddang, and major languages Kapampangan, Ilokano, Pangasinan, Filipino, and English. In a country where national writing workshops, awards, prizes, and festivals put premium to English and Filipino, so-called regional endeavours like the CCWW have epitomised what it means to be multilingual, thus sincerely national. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

January 28, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa and Charlie Ng

The latest from Mexico and Hong Kong!

January brought a plethora of literary events, from author talks to publishing announcements. In Mexico, the publishing house Juan de la Cosa / John of the Thing put out a new bilingual poetry volume. In Hong Kong, the Dante Alighieri Society hosted a discussion on writing in your second language. Read on to find out more!

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

The first month of 2022 has seen many commercial and independent publishers announce new books, both in Spanish and in translation. Though the year, like the two before it, will also be strangled by the global pandemic, the exciting vitality of the publishing scene brings momentary solace and hope.

North American publishing house Deep Vellum published The Love Parade, George Henson’s translation of El desfile del amor, a detective fiction by acclaimed Mexican writer Sergio Pitol originally published by Anagrama in 1985. An expert in contemporary fiction from Latin America, Henson has also contributed to Asymptote in the past, publishing the translated work of other outstanding Spanish-speaking authors such as the Mexican Alberto Chimal and the Peruvian Pedro Novoa. Deep Vellum is not new to Mexican literature either; its catalogue includes the names of contemporary international luminaries from Mexico, among them the poets Carmen Boullosa, Rocío Cerón, and Tedi López Mills.

The renowned Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli co-edited the sixty-fifth edition of independent San Francisco-based literary journal McSweeney’s, assembling a stellar collection of stories, letters, and translations. The compendium is not only dazzling but also urgently political. According to the journal’s website, the issue “delves into extraction, exploitation, and defiance.” The quarterly includes work by several internationally acclaimed writers from the American continent. Many are authors whom Asymptote has featured in the past, such as Gabriela Wiener, Samanta Schweblin, and Claudia Domingo. Their names are listed alongside other famous voices who have rapidly achieved international fame, including Laia Jufresa, Megan McDowell, and Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Airports” by Daniel Saldaña París

June 22, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Louis Sanger

on horseback / caught between one era and another

Selected in 2017 as one out of thirty-nine most promising Latin American writers under the age of thirty-nine, acclaimed Mexican writer Daniel Saldaña París is no stranger to our pages—read our review of his “exquisite” novel, Ramifications, for a start. This Translation Tuesday, we introduce to our readers another facet of Saldaña París, with a curious aviation-themed poem from the collection La máquina autobiográfica rendered in Louis Sanger’s translation. Curious because nothing takes flight: the poem’s airports are empty, its turbines are violent. What soars instead is the poem’s dynamic syntax which zigzags through a word’s widening valences, where Saldaña París defamiliarises for us the everyday uses of the word and the world. There is no timelier moment than today to reconsider what we know of the poem’s titular space.  

Airports

(1)

Empty airports.
Themselves, I mean.
But also: with hundreds.
Hundreds who could.
Or could have been, but weren’t.

Airports themselves, no?
containing all times.

What is there to say about “grain of the voice”—seed:
say the truth
about the unsaid. (Listen.)

For example, a voice that sows fields of sorghum
in front of
unorganized fields:
cities seen from above.
The plane does what it has to, like I said,
better late, even late in the day
with a sun that sets this late:
all I love
is visible, and growing old. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from I Will Not Go Back by Caspar Eric

June 15, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Matt Travers

I can say nothing / that he himself / couldn’t say better, / say angrier

When the coronavirus struck Denmark in the early months of 2020, award-winning poet Caspar Eric adopted the practice of writing a poem a day for eighty days. Published eventually in Danish as I Will Not Go Back (Gyldendal, 2020), Eric’s practice finds in poetry the potential for serving as a mode of immediate witness to the unfolding of pandemic time and its political contexts. This Translation Tuesday, Matt Travers translates the poem Eric had written on Day 56, which eulogises the suicide of the Danish-Palestinian poet and political activist, Yahya Hassan, whose writing is praised for attesting to the link between “local violence with global violence” in his nominee citation for the 2020 Nordic Council Literature Prize. Written in one long, unbroken stanza, Eric’s voice pulses with a sharp political grief, and is a moving document to Hassan’s enduring legacy in literature as in politics.

DAY 56                                      228 hospitalised

I have to remind myself
that the crisis is here,
I cannot just
jump on the train to Aarhus.
They streamed Yahya’s funeral
on ekstrabladet.dk,
my thoughts are with his family,
my thoughts are with his loved ones.
And fuck those idiots
who whined on Facebook
about people not appearing
to keep proper distance.
Even on the day of mourning
Muslims are being shamed.
The racist narratives
lurking under the LCD,
fuck those people,
fuck their logics.
A hand in the air
for the poems of the impossible,
it is impossible to aim
towards the sentimental
without limiting
a boy to a poet
or to limit
the poet to a boy.
Nothing will ever be
the same again.
The moon’s corona
shone spiteful and beautiful.
I hammered down on the table,
dull tears,
in his own “Moonpoem,”
as salve and salvation,
he would not be killed
for nothing.
No, no one should die
for the majority’s peace.
I can say nothing
that he himself
couldn’t say better,
say angrier,
underneath his fury
a furious love.
I have already
quarreled with Ada
about what we can say
how it should be said.
It is a poor consolation
that everything has now changed.
What I miss
is also a young
human’s future,
the violence in the poems.
But the violence in the poems
is not only of the poems,
they are also the boy’s
and also his hands.
Everyone wants
A more real reality;
windows in the forehead,
concrete in the mouth.
Then they complain of the pain,
then they want it raw.
In with the shit
in the broken literature,
as long as the break
remains in the lines,
so we can stand on the sides
and clap very softly.
In these lonely minutes
it is a Brøndby fan,
let’s just call him Pervez,
who is my biggest ally.
Now we must lay
the identities in a coma,
try to find
a community
while the fire still
burns wildly.
Never let it go out,
never let it heat up.
Never let it heat up
a political project
if the project isn’t
also of doubt,
also of poetry,
like smoke forcing itself
down in the lungs,
forcing them to hack up
new melodies
in the petrified voices.

Translated from the Danish by Matt Travers

Caspar Eric was born in 1987 and studied Comparative Literature at the University of Copenhagen. He has written five collections of poetry (7/11, Nike, Avatar, All What You Own, and I Will Not Go Back — Poems from the days with COVID-19), and written a well-received experimental pop adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (#amlet). Nike, his long autobiographical poem whose starting point began with his own handicap and which reflects on the value of living with a disability in a hyper-mediated society, won the Danish Michael Strunge Prize, and Sherilyn Hellberg’s English translation won the Leif & Inger Sjöberg Award from the American-Scandinavian Foundation. Eric’s fifth collection, I Will Not Go Back — Poems from the days with COVID-19, published in November 2020, aimed to outlast the COVID disaster with one poem a day for the first eighty days. He has also translated Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel into Danish. 

Matt Travers is a writer based in Aarhus, Denmark. He has published poetry, reviews and translations with 3:AM Magazine, Zarf Poetry, Overground Underground, Firmament, and is currently working on the English translation of Søren R. Fauth’s Moloch: The Story Of My Rage.

*****

Read more from Translation Tuesday on the Asymptote blog:

Meeting in Positano: The Late Modernist Fiction of Goliarda Sapienza

June 9, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Matt Hanson

The novel is easy to read, but it is not an easy read.

Meeting in Positano by Goliarda Sapienza, translated from the Italian by Brian Robert Moore, Other Press, 2021

Meeting in Positano was the very last novel that Goliarda Sapienza wrote before she fell to her death in 1996 at her home in Gaeta. Frustrated by many failed attempts to publish her writing throughout her life, Sapienza’s ultimate book was fraught with the existentialist neuroses of modernism as she searched for ways through and out of its sprawling, vicious embrace. Between its fragile subjectivity and ambivalent subject, Meeting in Positano traces the psychology of its protagonist, caught between film production in the Italian capital and the pacifying lure of the titular out-of-the-way town—wherein a fading daughter of the old aristocracy has also come to shed her qualms with the pace, pressure, and emptiness of materialism, money, and men.

The daughter of Sicilian socialists—who, among many plaudits, published Antonio Gramsci—Sapienza lived along that drift in which sensitive artists become hardened intellectuals before succumbing to outright revolution. Despite the environment of ardent intellectualism, the wayward, postwar Sapienza children were afloat in an Italy which resembled a rudderless raft in the Mediterranean—a country that had gone slack in its attempted confrontation of the country’s unresolved tendencies to fascism. In its quest for spiritual emigration, the literary work of Goliarda Sapienza details the inner lives of her fellow Italians, challenged by the trials of collective renewal following years of unspeakable despair during and after the years of World War II—even if the traces of those years are only seen, or merely felt, after the fact.

READ MORE…

Music, Midribs, and Mexicanisms: Christina MacSweeney on Translating Daniel Saldaña París’s Ramifications

November 26, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Josefina Massot

It’s hard to judge characters as a translator . . . because you’re living with them. They're part of your life.

Our first-ever live Q&A could have hardly gone better: award-winning translator Christina MacSweeney chatted with Blog Editor Josefina Massot for a solid hour, covering everything from voice, rhythm, and expletives in our exquisite October selection to her “unfixed migrant identity” and its effects on her craft. Read on for a taste of this riveting conversation, which Book Club members can request in full—hearty laughs, pensive pauses, and all!

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Josefina Massot (JM): Ramifications is largely character-driven, and there are so many elements to the protagonist’s psyche and voice. I was wondering about your experience inhabiting that complexity: were there aspects of it that particularly resonated with you, or that you found especially challenging to tap into?

Christina MacSweeney (CM): One of the things that played into my experience is that I read the first fifty pages of the novel when they were still in the process of inception (Daniel will often send me work at early stages). As I read more—as he progressed and made subsequent changes—the character grew with me, with the reading. And he’s very complex, but what most came through to me was this sense of paralyzed masculinity, a sense of frustration that very much stayed with me. He’s somebody I want to root for in some way, for him to break through all the issues that are holding him back.

I often talk about translation as getting into a character’s shoes and walking around in them, feeling that I can wear them. Daniel’s writing is so beautiful and precise that it helps you get into it. When you’re translating, it’s usually months and months, and the characters’ voices are there with you all along: you wake up with them in the morning, you go to sleep with them at night, they talk to you while you’re washing the dishes. So I think it’s hard to judge characters as a translator; you can’t feel judgmental about them, because you’re living with them. They’re part of your life.

JM: You’ve lived with several of Daniel’s characters, too, since you’ve also translated his first novel, Among Strange Victims. There seem to be some commonalities between both books: the protagonist in Ramifications is in many ways passive, and at the same time, he’s trying to piece together clues about his mother’s disappearance; in Among Strange Victims, Rodrigo could be described as indolent, and Marcelo tries to retrace someone’s footsteps (not his mother’s this time, but an enigmatic boxer-poet’s). Could you point to other continuities? And might there be, in some sense, a “signature” Saldaña París book? I realize two novels are hardly enough to make such generalizations, and they’re also very different in tone, but perhaps you could point to certain tendencies.

CM: If we think about the two books, but also Daniel’s poetry and the non-fiction pieces that he writes, he is exploring masculinity. But in fact, in Among Strange Victims, the main character is Beatriz, the woman who is in Mexico with the boxer-poet at the beginning of the twentieth century. Rodrigo’s mother is also a very strong figure in his life. In that respect, the books are very different, because Among Strange Victims has a much clearer female presence. In Ramifications, you still have the mother figure (the absence of the mother) and the narrator’s sister, who is also an influence in his life. But they’re ultimately quite different. I don’t think Daniel is ever going to be the kind of writer of whom you can say, “This is a Saldaña París book,” because his writing is constantly changing—his point of focus changes, the angles from which he views things change. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Petroleum” by Héctor Tizón

November 17, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Alexandra Falek

"And we’ll be able to buy medicine so we don’t go around rotting like garbage. We’ll be rich. You get what it means to be rich?"

One man’s quest for “black gold” arouses a village’s hopes and dreams in Héctor Tizón’s short story “Petroleum,” this week’s Translation Tuesday selection. Set in a poor rural village, its flawed protagonist Nicolas leads his community’s search for oil, promising everyone a fast path to a better life. Our narrator is a subtle voice among a colorful cast of characters, and offers an interesting approach to satirizing Nicolas’s quixotic mission: he both adopts the point of view of a “fly on the wall” and actively participates in the town’s naïve aspirations. Nicolas’s unwavering hope and determination lead to a painful truth about his story: under the seemingly mocking veneer of comedy, “Petroleum” hides a heart of tragedy. A poignant (and funny) tale about class, wealth, and the nature of belief in the face of reality.

A long shriek, a holler. It could be heard loud and clear from the viaduct to the municipal garbage dump and even further, interrupting the peaceful siestas throughout the shacks. We had been trying to catch cichlids since noon, carefully lifting the stones on the shore after clouding the water, and we heard it too. We listened closely and then heard it again:

“Hey! Julian, Segundo, Gertrudis, Gabino, Doña Trinidad! Come! Everybody come!”

We tried to figure out where the shouting was coming from and caught on right away. Nicolas was waving his arms and started yelling again, from the immense crown of a willow tree.

“Petroleum!” he shouted, “It’s petroleum!”

I really think that even though I’d heard the word at some point, I didn’t actually know what it meant. That’s probably why, despite all the shouting, Mouse and I didn’t pay much attention to it. For the time being, we were busy with the cichlids. Someone had offered to buy them at two for fifteen cents, and anyways, we liked putting our feet in the water. It was super. I think Mouse, or maybe it was me, I don’t really remember, said:

“Nicolas has lost it again.”

We shrugged our shoulders. The water was great and if we could catch about twenty more cichlids we’d have enough to buy something: the Boca Juniors jersey Mouse wanted and that donkey mask I liked. The one I had seen was a nice big mask with long soft ears and I think it even came with a whistle for Carnival.

And so we kept trying to catch as many cichlids as possible, downstream by the shoreline.

Every now and then a train raced by and we could feel the vibration of its motor and hear its piercing sound. Sometimes we didn’t even lift our heads to look, but when we did, we raised our hands to wave at the distant passengers who were staring out the windows. They seemed sad or distracted.

“Raul,” Mouse said to me from close by. “You know what petroleum is?”

I can’t deny that I regretted not knowing anything about petroleum. But I said:

“Yep.”

“Is it what they put in the engines?” he asked again.

“Yep.”

“What’s it do?”

“Who knows,” I said.

The sun had gone down a while ago. The water was cloudy and we could barely make out our own hands. READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Pedro Páramo

November 2, 2020  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Edwin Alanís-García and Xiao Yue Shan

The script writers seemed to juggle the fragmentary structure of the novel with the linear conventions of cinematic narratives.

Today, on Día de Muertos, Asymptote is resurrecting Asymptote at the Movies, our column on world literature and their cinematic adaptations. In a marvellously topical fusion, we’re returning with a discussion on Juan Rulfo’s beloved and widely acclaimed Pedro Páramo, and the film of the same name directed by Carlos Velo, who dared to take this complex and mystifying text to the screen. 

John Gavin, the American actor who portrayed Don Pedro in the film, likened Rulfo’s novel to Don Quixote, The Divine Comedy, or Goethe’s Faust. What those books are to Spain, Italy, and Germany, Pedro Páramo is to Mexico. It’s a declaration that would seem hyperbolic if it weren’t corroborated by so many other literary masters and critics. In her preface to Margaret Sayers Peden’s translation of the novel, Susan Sontag declared the novella “one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature.” Borges declared it one of the greatest texts ever written in any language. In the following conversation, Assistant Editor Edwin Alanís-García and Blog Editor Xiao Yue Shan dive into the myriad thrills that arise between this pivotal work, and its strange and brilliant cinematic counterpart.

Edwin Alanís-García (EAG): It’s a tradition to watch Pedro Páramo on Día de Muertos. I’m not sure how or when this tradition started, but I liken it to how airing It’s a Wonderful Life is a perennial custom at Christmas. To be clear, I don’t mean that Día de Muertos is simply another holiday. It might be unjust to even regard it as a holiday; perhaps ritual or ceremony is more apt. However we label it, it’s one of Mexico’s most sacred and revered traditions, perhaps even more so than Christmas or Independence Day. A defiant celebration (literally, it’s a party for the dead) of the ubiquity of death, Día de Muertos acts as a sobering reminder that the only guarantee in life is that it ends. At the same time, it’s a festival to remember and honor the dead, especially our ancestors and those we have loved and lost. On this day, it’s said that the spirits of the dead can travel to our world, hence the importance of ofrendas, ritual displays where gifts are offered to the dead to welcome them home.

In a very concrete way, these sentiments permeate Juan Rulfo’s novel and Carlos Velo’s film: the realm of the dead and the realm of the living are constantly woven together throughout the story. We start with Juan Preciado at his mother’s deathbed, vowing to fulfill her dying wish. His mother’s voice takes him to a literal ghost town in search of his father, Pedro Páramo. Through the testimonies of the living and the dead (and it’s sometimes difficult to tell the two apart) we’re treated to flashbacks of a once thriving town and the tyrannical legacy of our titular villain.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Cultural commemorations and reconciliations of death seem to be mirrored across the world. In China, during a day of early springtime (a varying date on the Chinese calendar), we observe the Qingming Festival—heading to the graves of our ancestors to sweep and tidy up the grounds, burn incense and paper money, pay tribute. It is—in the same vein as Day of the Dead—an acknowledgement of the steep and synchronous passage between the realms we experience, and all the others we are offered only brief glimpses at.

Something I thought about was that—when sorting through the wreckages of a national trauma, there tends to be a reprise of narratives that amalgamate death and spirituality with day-to-day life. Day of the Dead, and what it means to Mexico, bring to mind a section of Robert Bolaño’s vividly wandering long poem, “The Neochileans”:

To the Virgin Lands
Of Latin America:
A hinterland of specters
And ghosts.
Our home
Positioned within the geometry
Of impossible crimes.

“Holidays” of remembrance are communal methods for managing the irresolution of death; when the abrupt disappearances of lives become a ceaseless tide, acceptance of its pervasion does not equate to understanding. Reading and watching Pedro Páramo brought to mind firstly the human impulse to fight against and disprove the terrifying concept of permanence. Death, our only pedestrian encounter with the eternal, is something that feels instinctually wrong for both its ineradicability and inevitability—perhaps because we have nothing to measure it up against, no certain qualifiers or records, a complete void of comparability. The persistence of ghosts, and spirits, and their continual autonomy and humanity, then, is an automatic salve for the mystifying absolution of death, and Pedro Páramo is such a brilliant dissolution of permanence, an astonishing textual disprovement of linearity and the limits of our living experience. I often find that cultures that incorporate spirituality more seamlessly into their daily philosophies are also generations that have suffered formidable violence. Along this vein of thinking, there are some who say that writing this book was Juan Rulfo’s way of protesting the failed promises of the Mexican Revolution. What do you think?

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In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

May 30, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Lawrence Schimel

We spend days between four walls, but nobody said anything about nights.

Bringing you translated literature from around the world during troubling times, this week’s In This Together presents a selection of Spanish writer Jordi Doce’s journals. Translator Lawrence Schimel introduces this work and its significance below:

These entries come from Spanish poet, translator, and critic Jordi Doce’s careful attention to and recording of the minutiae of life under quarantine, his looking inward (while at the same time observing the world around him) just as Madrid began that explosive & expansive flourishing that is Springtime.

Originally published on his blog, forty entries (the literal “forty days” of the Italian “quarantena” that ships suspected of carrying disease were required to be isolated before passengers and crew were allowed to disembark) spanning eight weeks—Sunday, March 15th through Monday, May 11—are about to be published in book form under the title La vida en suspenso (Life on Hold), by Fórcola, in June 2020.

Jordi has been a steady if intermittent diarist since the Spring of 1997, as he notes in La puerta del año. Enero-febrero 2004 (The Year’s Gate: January-February 2004), the first of his diaries to be published in book form. He continues to write his diaries, first and foremost “out of a need to order my thoughts, to soothe them, but also with a will of lightness, almost weightlessness, as if wanting to remove the thorns of reality.” Sometimes (as in the case of these entries) he also shares them online or in book format, when the observations can stand on their own or make a sort of thematic sense or unity.

I began translating these entries into English while Jordi was still writing them—a curious twist which perhaps helped him at a dark moment. As he noted, “the tone has grown darker and even bitter with the days. I guess it was inevitable, but I resist. I don’t want to turn these notes into an account of aggravations and laments.”

He wrote: “If these notes brought a bit of serenity to friends, a bit of patience and good humor, I’d be satisfied.” Hopefully, his satisfaction is even greater as these notes and observations are now available to an even broader audience, in English translation.

Confinement Notebook

by Jordi Doce

Confinement Notebook 8
Tuesday, March 24, 2020

The midday sun (a clean sun, like one between storms) warms the large cauldron of the patio. One can see clothes hung out to dry at the rears of buildings and people (few) working on their balconies. Others simply emerge to get some air or smoke a cigarette. The light falls directly on the window and dazzles me. I’ve had to lower the blind. In the street it’s cool, but here I note how the studio heats up in just a few minutes. I feel the urge to greet the sun, like in Frank O’Hara’s poem, but I don’t yet have the necessary level of intimacy. I prefer to celebrate it with words. READ MORE…