Posts by Alex Tan

Life Without Breathing: On Water: A Chronicle by Nguyễn Ngọc Tư

In this swirling quasi-novel, saturated with insatiable quests of all varieties, everyone is engaged in endless seeking.

Water: A Chronicle by Nguyễn Ngọc Tư, translated from the Vietnamese by Nguyễn An Lý, Major Books, 2024

Water might have been the first floating signifier, if the image is anything to go by. Depending on its form, quantity, and culture of reception, it can be an agent of ritual purity, a destroyer of crops, a source of life, a symbol of illegible emotion. For the Vietnamese, water has been an operative metaphor and a lived reality since time immemorial; the word nước indexes both ‘water’ and ‘country,’ the two elements inseparably wedded in the linguistic psyche. A ruler of the Nguyễn dynasty once compared his precarious position on the throne to being in a boat, with the hoi polloi as the waters around him, threatening to overturn him at the slightest discontent. The scholar-translator Huỳnh Sanh Thông pointed out that Lạc, the first recorded name for the Vietnamese people, has a sonic affinity with numerous words denoting water: lạch (creek), lạt (to taste bland like water), lan (to spread like water).

The newly translated Water: A Chronicle, by the Vietnamese writer Nguyễn Ngọc Tư, embeds itself in this serpentine tradition. Better known as a litterateur of short stories than a novelist, Nguyễn Ngọc Tư’s popularity is virtually unmatched in her native country, even being named by Forbes as one of Vietnam’s most influential women in 2018. Many of her other works are similarly obsessed with the liquid element—as evidenced by their titles: Nước chảy mây trôi (Flowing Water, Drifting Cloud), Đảo (Island), Không ai qua sông (No One Crosses the River).

Though she mobilises a distinct dialect that is difficult to translate, spotlighting rural inhabitants swept up in the caprices of fate, her oeuvre is not unknown to the outside world. Her short story collection Cánh đồng bất tận (Endless Field) snagged Germany’s LiBeraturPreis in 2018, but the Anglophone sphere has thus far only received her work in dribs and drabs. This is now set to change with the groundbreaking labour of Major Books—a brand-new UK-based indie publisher dedicated to Vietnamese literature in translation, and with the poetic flair of translator Nguyễn An Lý, who deservedly won two PEN Translates awards this year.

One of those awardees was Water: A Chronicle. A loosely linked collection of stories in the polyphonic vein of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, this crystalline text presents us with nine variations on a skeletal theme: a woman in search of a sacred heart that will cure her child’s malady. In every chapter, she wears a different mask; no one knows who she really is. A series of narrators, receiving reports of the woman’s quest through the grapevine, each assumes that they’ve figured out her identity—she must be the sister, the wife, the ex-classmate who vanished all those years ago. Many of these narrators pursue her, to no avail.

The thread that tethers these doubles together, then, runs along the axis of space rather than time, circling around a void of fantasy, disaffection, and mourning. We might conceive of Water’s chronicity as lateral rather than vertical, grazing the same wound through parallel iterations of equally plausible, bereft selves. As hinted by the Sino-Vietnamese words Biên sử (编史) in the original title, Water occupies a realm midway between fabrication and history.

Implausible as the premise first appears, it attests to the fantastical, often phantasmic lustre of Nguyễn Ngọc Tư’s imagination—and the coruscating intensities with which Nguyễn An Lý has rendered it in English. Each detail, though resolutely literal, is also burnished with a halo of myth; the heart being sought is as much a four-chambered organ as it is some ineffable panacea for worldly pain. The number nine, too, likely corresponds to the tributaries of the Mekong Delta—also known as “Nine Dragons”—from which Nguyễn Ngọc Tư hails.

The body to which the heart belongs is also of doubtful ontology, caught somewhere between the mortal and the divine. Amongst the nine pellucid tales that make up Water, some refer to the heart’s owner as ‘His Holiness,’ a quasi-deity to be jealously guarded from the depredations of natural disaster and human avarice. Elsewhere, he’s revealed as nothing but a fraud named Phủ, a member of nefarious gangs whose guile is so consummate that it even ‘fool[s] himself into believing his own tricks.’ Nguyễn Ngọc Tư displays, through these overlaid alternatives, a world stricken by cynicism and gullibility alike, desperate for a foothold.

From one story to the next, the particulars of the central plot are assembled over and over—not unlike new imprints tracking over what the tide has swept away. We don’t know for sure if the infantile ailment in need of treatment is an incessant case of liquid-oozing, or a constitutional inability to smile (though one seems easier to pathologise than the other). The mother herself is variously reincarnated as an absent-minded childhood acquaintance known for her facility with math, a reclusive sister who keeps cockroaches as pets, and a gaunt colleague whose paleness calls to mind the Chinese wuxia heroine, Xiaolongnü. Yet, beneath the protean restlessness of each version, there emerges an iconographic portrait of maternal (over-)solicitousness and exalted love, detailing the outlandish lengths to which she is willing to go to deliver her child from infirmity.

Like the rivers she traverses, fluidity is the point. Barely materialising in any of the interlocked stories, she is more a vaporous concoction of rumour and recollection than a creature of flesh and blood. As each narrator hears the second-hand news of a heart-hunting madwoman, they each summon—in their own fashion—a spectre of someone they once knew. Sometimes the relation is a distant one of neighbourly adjacency; sometimes it is as intimate as romance and siblinghood. None of the tellers, however, can avoid projecting their own desires and anxieties onto the aqueous surfaces of feminine mystery. The condition of womanhood, maybe, is to remain diaphanous and elusive:

She had a way of fading into the distant blur of girls, all with the same arching ponytails, the same brown sugar complexion from a native ancestor hundreds of years back, the same postures sitting behind market stands or sewing shops or disappearing in and out of inns. They are there and yet they are not.

That last line, with all its ambivalence, sets the stage for a later, virtuosic chapter named The Shadow Bride, in which the eponymous maiden is literally someone’s own shadow. To other observers, ‘she was there and yet she was not’—see how the leitmotif of vacillation recurs—’she did everything with a lightness they found unbearable.’ With a rich surreality reminiscent of Carmen Maria Machado and Angela Carter, Nguyễn Ngọc Tư fiddles with the overdetermined tropes of heterosexist gender dynamics. She explains the husband’s infatuation: he’s taken precisely by her barely-thereness and her reticence, ‘the way she could create doubles of herself, or shapeshift in the blink of an eye.’

In this swirling quasi-novel, saturated with insatiable quests of all varieties, everyone is engaged in endless seeking, as if to plug some unbridgeable lack. A sodden melancholy clings to even the peripheral characters, disclosed like so many cries for help. One driver recounts a heartbreaking memory of an adolescent love who turns out to be a trans woman, describing her as ‘every inch a work of art.’ Another subplot features a failed photographer, who one day sets out for the mountains and never returns. While alive, he refused to concede to the glib manipulations of Photoshop:

Those pictures, the fruits of his time-forsaking labour to freeze a drop of time, were then sold at a laughable price to magazines which splashed them next to articles singing the praise of our beautiful countryside, reminiscing about rivers replaced by urban spaces, wallowing in a sentimental, dated rusticism.

There’s bitterness here, and it is not a Luddite’s light scoff. Whether wrought on the scale of gender or geography, interiority—that most private, inarticulable of spaces—is ever poised to flee from an outsider’s intrusive gaze. We might think of that slipperiness, too, as the reward of Nguyễn Ngọc Tư’s often challenging writing. She refuses to be palatable for a global market, alloying opaque localisms with an almost florid literariness, in what feels like an up-yours to diasporic fetishism. She’s especially adroit with deployments of in medias res, cataloguing emotional abysses with extravagant rigour. Blink, and you might miss the sheer density inscribed into her characters’ destinies—how a mother perishes under the pulverising weight of baskets of mangoes, or how a narrator’s dream of sprouting wings presages the imminent demise of those around him.

And why should we be exempt? Dissolved into the maelstrom are us readers, looking on from our detached perch. Bearing us from one ceaseless current to another, the narrative makes mockery of our wish for stable ground, troubles our hope of wrenching sense from the surging eddies. Like the prisoners in ‘A Cry from the Sky’, subject to a dystopian erasure of selfhood and renamed as digits, we too must grasp for ‘miscellaneous stories to fill the void’ of our minds.

Or consider what might be the most bizarre and fascinating story in the book, ‘Fairy Ascending’. Against the post-apocalyptic backdrop of a deadly bloodsucking fly plague, a couple survives by sheer luck; they happen to be word-eaters, sustaining themselves on printed matter. Once thought of as savages and freaks, now they have the last laugh, sheltering in a library to exploit their evolutionary advantage. They curate word-feasts based on how language tastes, taking into account tone, genre, and referent. The saccharine slush of love poetry should be counterpoised by the more sensible ‘balance’ of an essay; the lyricism of a sunbeam might be ruined by excrement on the other side of the page. Words become flesh, embodying the things that they would otherwise merely emblematise.

I would be remiss not to mention an uncannily resonant conceit in another work of Vietnamese literature published this year: Nguyễn Thanh Hiện’s genre-bending Chronicles of a Village, in a fabulous translation by Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng. There, a maximalist tale (embedded in the text as a quotation from a longer, fictionalised prose work) speaks of ‘letter-eaters’ and their post-prandial transmogrifications. After ingesting the letters, the eaters transform into ‘flowers and butterflies hovering above the skin and hair of exquisite maidens.’ Even ‘filthy coins,’ upon contact with these mystical glyphs, morph into ‘heavenly dwellings on earth.’

Is this not the secret dream of all literature: a utopia of language sufficient unto itself, the way a god enshrined in monumental gold lives a ‘life without breathing,’ emancipated from the frailties of the body? One disabled orphan in Water: A Chronicle is described as possessing a ‘semicolon pair of legs’; the shrine-keeper who cares for him evokes the semicolon as a mark that ‘neither proves nor puts an end to anything, it never takes sides, it holds in equal regard both what precedes and what follows it.’ Nguyễn Ngọc Tư might as well be enumerating the cavernous, rapturous pleasures of her own prose. A ‘lavish banquet of words’ to be caressed and savoured with desire, to be slowly digested against the flickering gratifications of ‘moving pictures and instant images.’ A semicolon holding the before and the after in equal relish.

Meanwhile, water encircles the text and the world, bringing them closer in a planetary, glassy continuum. It surpasses every partition, obliterates every boundary. It is ‘daring, pig-headed, hellbent to travel ever further,’ frothing to leave no stone unturned, no vacuum untouched. An inspirational saying in Vietnamese goes: còn nước, còn tát—as long as there’s water left, it can be scooped out—meaning, don’t give up. But what if there’s an over-abundance of liquid, leaking into waterlogged corners and pooling on abandoned rooftops? ‘Having conquered all surfaces, it reposed with supreme calm, holding whatever mysteries in its depths.’ Maybe, congealed within Water’s inhuman heart is an eschatology; a longing to be made whole again.

Alex Tan is a writer in New York. They’ve been assistant managing editor at Asymptote Journal for three years, where they frequently review Arabic literature in translation. Other essays have been published in Words Without BordersThe Markaz ReviewArabLit, and Full Stop Quarterly; some of these writings can be found at https://linktr.ee/alif.ta

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Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel by Yoko Tawada

Tawada’s music-prose is a testament to the spirit of collaboration. . .

Yoko Tawada’s latest novel, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, presents us with the anatomy of a mind consumed by passion for a dead poet’s oeuvre. Ostensibly narrating the tale of a literary scholar mired in pandemic-era depression, the text expands into a reflection on various forms of friendship—and, one might venture, redemption—that might inhere between readers. At the same time, Tawada deftly traverses voice and perspective to meditate on language as pastiche, ventriloquizing another’s words within the space of one’s own consciousness. With this mysterious work, the German-Japanese author furthers her interest in questions of alienation and affinity across interpersonal, cultural, and temporal realms—polyvocal inheritances that are evocatively staged in Susan Bernofsky’s layered translation from the German. To enact and pay tribute to Tawada’s dialogic style through the spirit of collaboration, Blog Editor Xiao Yue Shan and Assistant Managing Editor Alex Tan decided—for the first time in the Asymptote Book Club’s history—to co-write this following review.

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 USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel by Yoko Tawada, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky, New Directions (US) and Dialogue Books (UK), 2024

Paul Celan’s is a poetry riddled with hiatus and dislocation. Words are condensed into weighty German compounds or displaced into shreds, as if in a dream; adverbs are turned into nouns, and pronouns and prefixes are broken off, left stranded on the blank page. In the shadow of the Holocaust, his language concurrently reached for and estranged the singularity of experience, resulting in a body of work that yearns for nothing so much as silence—for that which writing itself would annul: something “absolutely untouched by language,” in philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s phrase. Poetry, as gesture, becomes nothing but the contour of an intention to speak, against which presence is felt only as a silhouette.

For the writer Yoko Tawada, Celan’s poems are less storehouses than “openings,” thresholds onto the inexpressible. What she gravitates toward, in the compact verse, is everything that resists and goes beyond the flatly nationalistic, the “typically German.” In her own literary production, she toggles adroitly between German and Japanese, writing across the two; her earlier novel The Naked Eye, for instance, was originally composed in both languages. Not only does Tawada seek unanticipated constellations of affinity with the foreign, she also refutes the common instinct to read literary texts for ethnographic value, consistently underscoring the mutability of selfhood, its unfixed boundaries.

Her latest novel, the pandemic-inflected Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, draws on the surrealist toolbox to sketch a solipsistic, obsessive mind haunted by Celan’s turns of phrase, floating through the ghostly streets of Berlin. Imprisoned in alienation and “intermission-loneliness,” he is known to us initially as “the patient,” his identity tethered to an unspecified malady. His name Patrik arrives almost as an afterthought several pages in, amid scrambled reflections on the pronouns with which he designates himself in his interior soliloquies. In his vacillations between the first person and third person, he is perhaps heart-sick, struggling to survive and bear with the burden of himself: “Opening hurts. Closing brings comfort.” READ MORE…

Summer 2024: Highlights from the Team

Find out what our very own editors have to say about our bountiful Summer issue!

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 READ MORE…

Spring 2024: Highlights from the Team

More entrypoints into the glorious Spring Asymptote, courtesy of our generous team!

Aigerim Tazhi’s “Following the Breath of the Earth” is a refreshing reminder of another way of life through Kazakh spirituality—one that treasures the interconnectedness of nature and all of the species in it, where nature stands for truth in an undivided and nonhierarchical ecosystem. The ancestral belief in the gods of the sky (Tengri) and earth (Umai) echos the current calls for decolonial approaches to climate justice. And yet, the critique of the tourists who contaminate glacier lakes in Tibet, or the rise of yurts for camping trips North America, or the odd questions asked of the poet in Rotterdam, gently caution against the performative gestures that appropriate Indigenous beliefs. The story’s motif of nomadic travel and breath fits well in this conception of an interconnected world.

This theme of nature and the interconnected ecosystem for alternative worldbuilding is carried out in several other articles, including Jang Okgwan’s poems (tr. Susan K), with motifs of water and moonlight; and Leeladhar Jagoori’s poems (tr. Matt Reeck), of mountains and terrain.

I also appreciated the attention on language, the limits of the written word, and the rebelliousness of vernacular expression in this issue, especially in Sebastián Sánchez’s interview with Chilean author Diamela Eltit (tr. Fionn Petch) and in the poetry of German-Turkish Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç (tr. Özgecan Kesici). Each provides glimpses into the capacity of language play and hybrid rule-bending for community-building, political resistance, and memorialization.

 —Vuslat D. Katsanis, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

Chen Yuhong’s poem “Buddhist Pine” opened my eyes to different ways of being still/degrees of stillness. The way the poem successively transposes metaphors of animal, seasonal, granitic, and athletic stillness on the motionless pine made me understand that things can be still in different ways. That the pine might have a willed, disciplined stillness, or that it might be coiled, or frozen, or at rest, or somehow all at once.

 —Matthew Redman, Digital Editor READ MORE…

Scream of Freedom: Samar Yazbek and Leri Price on Where the Wind Calls Home

I love the world in Arabic, so I started to write it as my personal space.

Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home is a poetic rumination that shifts through the land of the dead and of the living, between thinking and intuiting, and from the vast destructions of war to its intimate, embodied experience. In taking us to the “other” side—that of the military—in Syria’s unsparing civil war, Yazbek offers a method of understanding pain’s blind immensity, as well as the metaphysical phenomenon of life at the precipice of death. With the incredible work of translator Leri Price, whom Yazbek calls here her “voice in English”, Where the Wind Calls Home arrives to us with all the weight of contemporary tragedy, and all the light of a spiritual encounter. Here, Yazbek and Price speak to us on the recurring motifs of the text, the fluidity of the prose, and how writing can reveal to us our own secrets.

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 USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Alex Tan (AT): Samar, in your previous novel, Planet of Clay, we follow the perspective of a mute girl from Damascus, caught in the middle of the Syrian Civil War. For Where the Wind Calls Home, why did you select a dying soldier as your protagonist?

Samar Yazbek (SY): First of all, we’re not sure if he will die—what will happen to him, and with his life. Actually, it was a challenge in my own life, because I was in exile from myself, and I had stopped writing literature. I came back with Planet of Clay, to literature, but when I decided to write this novel, I started writing it as poetry. I tried something different. It’s a very personal thing.

Ten or twelve years ago, I decided for the first time to speak about the victims who are living on the other side of the Assad regime. It was a very difficult choice for me. There’s a perception that the soldiers on the side of the regime are not victims, but the problem is that this has been a long war, and everyone is a victim. And what we’ve got to remember is that there’s a class element; we have to remember the poor. A fundamental part of literature, in my opinion, is that we learn to look at things from an alternate point of view, and to have empathy with others. Without that, it’s absolutely certain that things won’t change.

AT: The figure of the tree plays such a central role in the novel—it becomes this recurring motif, with Ali crawling towards it in the narrative present, and thinking back to all the trees that have shielded him, including the one next to the maqam. Did you have any specific personal, religious, cultural, or literary motivations in opting for the tree as the essential anchor of the text?

SY: There are lots of reasons. First, every maqam in the mountains has trees. They’re all surrounded by trees, and these trees are huge and ancient, hundreds of years old. Second, the tree acts as refuge for Ali. It represents a shelter from daily violence—from the sort of physical violence that he encounters in the village.

The most important thing is that trees are silent. Trees die standing, silently, without speaking the language of humans—and in this death they have dignity. Ali is able to communicate with the tree, together in their silences. Silence is Ali’s language, his way of resisting against the violence in his society, so he invents a new language with the trees, with the sky, with the wind. It’s like he builds a bridge between himself and all the elements of nature. Trees are part of his world.

I’m also talking about myself and my vision; I believe we need to be like a tree sometimes.

AT: I want to pick up on what you said about the language of the trees being Ali’s language in the novel. I’m also thinking of what you said earlier, that the novel began as poetry. Could you tell us how it evolved from poetry into the novel, and whether you think the novel becomes a good channel for this silence? READ MORE…

Announcing Our February Book Club Selection: Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek

Where the Wind Calls Home sidesteps the instant of carnage and cruelty, focusing instead on its shattered aftermath. . .

Where the Wind Calls Home, Syrian author Samar Yazbek’s latest novel to be translated into English, is a stunning offering of spirituality, memory, and all those implacable, liminal spaces wherein only the mind may venture. Written from the perspective of a young soldier as he lays dying from his wounds, Yazbek describes both the unthinkable wreckages of conflict and the translucent totems of faith with her singular musicality and vividity, tracing backwards through recollections and reveries to collage all the brute realities of civil war with the individuals whose rich internal lives pattern the battlefields.

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 USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price, World Editions, 2024

There is an unforgettable moment in Adania Shibli’s Touch when the child narrator, through whose eyes the world arrives in intensities of colour and sensation, attempts to decipher words emanating from the TV. Amid the flotsam and jetsam of indistinct syllables, she finally makes out “Sabra and Shatila”. She thinks then not of the horrific massacre in Beirut but of the sabr cactus growing in her vicinity; the name, stripped out of the matrix of history, can only signify as something tangible, close at hand.

Such strategies of defamiliarisation came to mind while I was immersed in the free-floating atmospheres of Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home. Its oneiric rhythms, elegantly recreated in the English translation by Leri Price, mimic the roving consciousness of an adolescent soldier, known only as Ali. Forcibly conscripted into the frontlines of the Syrian Civil War, he survives an enemy attack in the Latakia mountains only to hover on the edge of death. As he struggles to regain a feeling of where his injured, possibly dismembered body might begin and end, his mind takes flight; memories of childhood creep back into him. Time on the narrative surface runs the course of a single day, blue sky shading into a “raw and tender” moon. Beneath reality seethes the inexpressible current of remembrance, obeying its own laws of sequence and cadence.

Yazbek is more interested in the sensuous immediacies of embodiment than in the airy abstractions of power. Her previous offering, Planet of Clay—a finalist for the 2021 National Book Awards, also translated by Price—inhabited the perspective of a mute girl, similarly caught starkly within the crossfires on the Civil War. Against its barbarities, she seeks a sanctuary in crayoned drawings and imagined planets. Even in Yazbek’s non-fictional accounts of revolutionary betrayal, ranging from the diaristic to the journalistic, she retains a similar sensibility: “Oh spinning world, if my little heart, as small as a lump of coal, is wider than your borders, I know how narrow you are!” READ MORE…

Sounds Like Fiction: Traversing Minor Detail Again, in the Time of Genocide

Amidst the ruins, I want to read Shibli's writing ... as a pedagogy of hope, of waiting, and of revolutionary becoming.

After the shameful decision to cancel Palestinian writer Adania Shibli’s LiBeraturpreis award ceremony at the 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair, everyone in the Global North flocked to read Minor Detail (translated into English by Elisabeth Jaquette), as thousands of writers, intellectuals, editors, and others in the literary ecosystem rightly condemned the cancellation. It was a symptom not only of Europe’s routine silencing of Palestinian voices but, more perniciously, of Germany’s particular brand of virulent anti-antisemitism, its Holocaust memory culture metastasised into a total interdiction on critiques of Israel.

Adania Shibli cites Samira Azzam—a writer whose seemingly unthreatening short stories describing everyday life in Palestine managed to pass the censorship bureau’s checks—as a formative influence. Azzam “contributed to shaping my consciousness regarding Palestine as no other text I have ever read has done”, Shibli writes, for it cultivated in her “a deep yearning for all that had been, including the normal, the banal, and the tragic”. For many of us, grappling with what solidarity and hope can mean in the light of Israel’s ongoing genocidal violence against Gaza, Minor Detail might be such an essential touchstone. How might we (re)read Shibli’s work today, not only as a prescient source of information about Palestine but also as a text that theorises and maps its own aesthetic possibility? With what voice does it continue to address us, reverberating through silence and the distortions of language?

One day, a splotch of black ink bloomed on my well-thumbed copy of Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail. I didn’t know where it came from. The blemish, to my consternation, appeared in the light-grey region of the cover, which depicts an undulating terrain. Misted waves, perhaps, or the volatile sands of a desert. Obsessed with keeping my books as pristine as possible, I took an alcohol swab and wiped the black dot right off.

The smudge was dispatched as swiftly as it had arrived. Days later, I noticed the alcohol had also dissolved the matte surface of the cover where I had rubbed it. A tiny glossy archipelago emerged, its lustre and its jagged edges visible only at an angle, under the light.

Now the sheen reproaches me for thinking I could make something disappear with no trace.

*

Desert / الصحراء

 I want to juxtapose without asserting equivalence; the unnamed Israeli military commander in Minor Detail, too, believes in the seamlessness of disappearance. In the novel’s first half, he helms a Zionist platoon in a mission to conquer the Negev desert. This ruthless assertion of sovereignty takes place in 1949, a year after the traumatic Nakba dispossessed most Palestinians of their homeland. It is also a rearguard response to Egypt’s invasion of an Israeli kibbutz a year prior.

Charged with purging the land of “infiltrators”, the Zionist soldiers massacre a band of Arabs. They capture a Bedouin girl, humiliating, gang-raping, and murdering her. The horror of these bloodthirsty actions is continually evaded: “Then came the sound of heavy gunfire.” The narrative camera, as it were, turns its back on the moment of life’s desecration. Landscape itself seems to consent to these crimes. The desert, an aggressive mouth, collaborates in the erasure of evidence, each occasion with a different attitude: “languidly”, “greedily”, “steadily”, the sand sucks blood, moisture, substance into its depths. READ MORE…

Winter 2024: Highlights from the Team

Get excited to dip into our Winter 2024 issue with these highlights from our team!

Ilya Kaminsky’s “Reading Dante in Ukraine” makes an impassioned case for the crucial role of art amid the horrors of war. What we need, as Dante’s journey shows us, is to defend ourselves with it: a tune to walk to, even in the underworld, as long as one still walks. In Miklós Vámos’s “Electric Train,”  translated by Ági Bori‚ the question-answer format gives the piece levity and rhythm, and the counterpoint of the humor interplaying with the troubled relationships brings it powerful depth. I found wisdom in the wry humor of Jaime Barrios Carrillo’s poems in David Unger’s translation. I love the image of angels spending the evening in their hotel rooms, ironing their enormous white wings.

—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor

The masterful language in Ági Bori’s translation, as though hand-holding the reader through a children’s story, and the simple act of gifting a present in the story belie the depth and complexity of emotional turmoil that wash over Miklós Vámos’s characters in “Electric Train,” a turmoil that seemingly hits out of nowhere like a wave yet in fact stems from a deep brewing well of built up memories and tensions. The contrast highlights all the more the challenges, and perhaps even limits, of recognizing and understanding another’s intentions, experiences, and feelings.

Rage, sorrow, resilience, helplessness, hope, a hunger for life and love and connection, grief, a numbing screaming despair: it is difficult to put into words the sensations that ran through me as I read Samer Abu Hawwash’s “My People” in Huda J. Fakhreddine’s translation. It cannot possibly compare to the feelings and thoughts of Samer Abu Hawwash and the Palestinian people, to the reality of having each day and moment narrow down to dried bread and tear tracks.

I was intrigued by Laura Garmeson’s discussion, in her review of Brazilian author Itamar Vieira Junior’s Crooked Plow, of the tongue as “both creator and destroyer. It has the power to make and unmake worlds.” It is a through line in Crooked Plow that reminds us of the power and possibilities of language and story to shape our lives. Garmeson’s review, in a way, is also a fire that kindles awareness of Itamar Vieira Junior’s work and the legacies, realities, and possible futures for Afro-Brazilian communities. The tongue as symbol also feels like a through line between these pieces in their rumination on what is gained and lost and pushed aside in the choices we make of what, how, and when we say (or write) things, or not.

—Julie Shi, Senior Executive Assistant

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A Self Remaindered: On Iman Mersal’s Traces of Enayat

Mersal reveals that writing can embody the rougher textures of real life in its enmeshment with troubled, even buried, pasts.

Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger, And Other Stories, 2023

Since the ninth century, Cairo’s City of the Dead has served as the final resting place for Egypt’s caliphs, saints, poets and heroes. Their reprieve was disturbed a few months ago, however, when the Egyptian government began razing tombs in the necropolis to build a new highway. It’s a familiar trope: the uprooting of entire genealogies, the clearing away of accreting dust, all in the name of an ever-accelerated infrastructural modernity. Yet it isn’t only the dead who will be uprooted; many impoverished communities, working as morticians or caretakers, have built lives amid the deceased. Perhaps the cruellest irony is that the living, too, will be displaced in one fell swoop, sacrificed to what one writer has called “asphalt fever”.

She might not have known it then, but Iman Mersal’s perambulations through the City of the Dead in 2015, recorded in her sublimely digressive and moving Traces of Enayat, now read like premonitions of its disappearance. Primarily known for her poetry (her collection The Threshold was published in English translation by Robyn Creswell last year), Mersal is associated with Cairo’s nineties generation—a literary movement loosely characterised by a mistrust of totalising ideologies and an attentiveness to fractures in personal identity. One of her enduring themes have been to examine how exactly, if at all, the individual can be conjugated with the collective—the untraversable chasms that divide a self from another. It would not be too far a leap to connect Mersal’s quest to excavate hidden lives to Cairo’s penchant for hiding away—and obliterating—everything it deems trivial enough to forget.

Traces of Enayat resembles a biography, but is more so a catalogue of absence, a profound meditation on the limits and contingencies of the archive. Just as “there are no signs to mark boundaries in the City of the Dead”, Mersal’s hybrid work refuses the rigidity of genre. Winner of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award, it approximates the baggy shape of what she herself terms “jins jaami, a catch-all for every literary form and approach”. Julian Barnes’s famous comparison of biography to a “trawling net” is here overturned: rather than the thrashing fish hauled on shore, Mersal cares more about what has slipped away through the crevices—wanting, in fact, to document the constitution of the net itself as a “collection of holes tied together with string”. The result is a text in which theory, memoir, fiction, urban legend, and photography jostle against interleaved histories of psychiatric hospitals, marital law, golden-age cinema, orientalist Egyptology, and contested literary legacies.

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Upending Literary Hierarchies: An Interview with kotobli, a SWANA-Focused Book Discovery Platform

“It shouldn’t be this hard,” we thought. So we decided to make it easier.

kotobli is a book discovery platform dedicated to amplifying cultural and literary production from the Southwest Asia/North Africa (SWANA) region, with a special focus on independent publishers and marginalized writers. Curated with care according to geography, genre, and even theme, kotobli’s lists create opportunities for readers to encounter their next great read based on affinity and interest. I corresponded with the largely volunteer-run team behind kotobli on their conceptualisation of the website; in the process, I learned a lot about the difficulties underlying literary circulation in the Arab world, and the groundbreaking, creative ways in which small SWANA-based presses navigate them.

Alex Tan (AT): How did you begin to conceptualise kotobli? What distinguishes it from other book recommendation/discovery platforms like Goodreads, or even Bookstagram and Booktok accounts?

kotobli (k): A couple of years ago, we were getting frustrated with how difficult it is to look for good books about the Southwest Asia/North Africa (SWANA) region online. We found them to be badly categorised and difficult to sort through—and if we were looking for books in Arabic, they were almost impossible to find with only keywords and a topic in mind. Without knowing which titles to look for, we could hardly discover books worth reading.

On a brief visit to Lebanon in spring 2021, one of our founders, Omar, was determined to find Layla Baalbaki’s Ana Ahya, which he had discovered through an academic paper on feminism in Lebanon. After unsuccessful online searches and hopping from one bookstore to another, he finally found a used copy.

“It shouldn’t be this hard,” we thought. So we decided to make it easier. kotobli started as a platform to help readers find interesting books from the SWANA region, by topic, genre, geography, the identity of the authors, and through our curated reading lists. We named it kotobli—written in all lowercase letters as a nod to its Arabic origin “كتب لي”—which means “books for me”.

Throughout the process of collecting book information to populate our platform, we noticed deeply entrenched weaknesses in the publishing landscape of Arab countries: many publishers, especially smaller and older ones, do not have any digital presence; as such, many readers, especially in the Arab diaspora, are missing out on incredible books just because they would never show up in internet searches. This is where our project “Daleel el Nashirin” (Publishers’ Guide) started. With a grant from Culture Resource, we’ve been digitising the metadata for thousands of books and more than a dozen publishers in the Levant and North Africa. We’ve also been building virtual tools with publishers and authors participating in the process, giving them a free webpage on our website that they can fully control through a simple and safe content management system. Additionally, the publishers themselves have access to statistics that show how many readers look up their books on kotobli. READ MORE…

Compound Vision: In Conversation with Catherine Xinxin Yu on Translating Wu Ming-yi’s “Cloudland”

Blurring this boundary [between speech and thought] almost creates an overlap between the human self and the personhood of the landscape. . .

Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-yi’s short story, “Cloudland”, makes use of grief’s overwhelming ranges to set out a narrative of exploration, dream-making, and the multiplicity of life. After the death of his wife, the bereaved Shutter begins a journey to write the ending of a tale that she had not be able to finish, and on his way, he finds the wondrous methods that landscape and animals have long used to express and communicate, offering a way of thinking and feeling that his technologically dense, hurried world does not allow. A gorgeous, lush story that introduces Wu’s sensitive ecowriting, “Cloudland” merges the richness of language with the richness of the natural world. In this interview, Alex Tan talks to the translator of “Cloudland”, Catherine Xinxin Yu, about the operation of images in her methodology, the trick of incorporating definitions into the prose, and making use of a textual reality.

Alex Tan (AT): Technologies of perception populate this excerpt from “Cloudland”: the night-vision cameras placed in the forest by Shutter, the Rift in the Cloud constituting a virtual catalogue of a life, the mediatised footage of the train bombing, and most fundamentally, the unfinished story of Shutter’s wife—which of course precipitates his grief and the quest for the elusive clouded leopard. There’s such an ambivalence to some of these forms of knowledge-making, as Wu also seems to be commenting on the ubiquity—and the risks—of digital surveillance. I wonder how you navigated the interplay between the visual and the textual, when you approached this work as a translator. Did it stylistically inflect your translation in any way?

Catherine Xinxin Yu (CXY): I remember interviewing Wu Ming-yi for my MA dissertation, which included a translation and commentary on “Cloudland”, focusing on eco-conscious ways to translate nature-oriented writing. I asked him why he decided to stop using Facebook and other social media from 2019 onwards, upon which he talked about his apprehension exactly of the ubiquity of digital surveillance that you mentioned.

Both in real life and in the collection that “Cloudland” is from (Kuyuzhidi 苦雨之地, which I tentatively translated as Where Rain Falls Amiss), digital traces are so fine-grained and invasive that they can piece together the most secret aspects of individuals. According to Wu, it is both frightening and cruel to be forced to see a loved one’s dark depths; I think that is a crucial part of the pain that pervades “Cloudland”: not only losing a spouse and a wild species, but also discovering how little one knew about them: seeing that “rift’’ and realising there is no way to remedy it.

Many of his works contain a multiplicity of perspectives, where vision functions as a means and a metaphor for perceiving, conceiving, and knowing. Reality (or its shadow) shapeshifts from the visual to the textual. As a photographer myself, I identify with this and I know how an entire narrative can be encapsulated in one gaze. Short of actually visiting and seeing the landscape where the story is set, I looked at a lot of images and videos while translating Cloudland, so it wasn’t just a text-to-text translation, but also image-to-text. Visualisation allowed me to embody the text and then perform it in English. I suppose the result is that, by describing the visual rather than simply transferring words from one language to the other, the translation ends up being more vivid and immediate. Or so I hope. READ MORE…

From Silly to Deadly: On Shalash the Iraqi by Shalash

. . .key to the humourist’s arsenal is none other than language itself—its malleability, its capacity for aggrandisement and diminishment alike.

Shalash the Iraqi by Shalash, translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren, And Other Stories, 2023

Anonymity fascinates and seduces. Endless speculations have circled invasively around who Elena Ferrante “truly” is; Catherine Lacey’s recent Biography of X reckons with erasing a layered past with a single letter of the alphabet; the first season of Bridgerton, the hit Regency-era romance on Netflix, has its narrative engine propelled by the question of Lady Whistledown’s real identity. These instances from the Global North exemplify the allure of mystery, but they fail to account for the stakes of remaining nameless in a political climate where to unveil oneself might be to threaten one’s own safety.

One might, in a moment of facetiousness, think of the eponymous chronicler of Shalash the Iraqi as the Lady Whistledown of Iraq’s Sadr City (or Thawra City, as it is lovingly christened by Shalash). Both issued frequent dispatches from within the epicentre of social disarray, guaranteeing the pleasure of gossip. More importantly, their pseudonymous veneers facilitated a lurid candour that might not otherwise have been possible.

There the similarities end. The respectable circles of upper-crust London did not live in the penumbra of foreign occupation. Nor were they plagued with the constant risk of spectacular sectarian violence, or hampered by a corrupt government that has “thieves, cheats, swindlers, traders in conspiracies” for politicians. It was against such chaos that Shalash released his explosive, timely blog posts, garnering a rapidly expanding local readership despite patchy Internet access in the country. The academic Kanan Makiya tells us, in his introduction, that people were printing out the posts, “copying them longhand,” “bombarding Shalash with questions and opinions.” Even high-ranking cadres could not resist partaking in the fanfare: one official expressed admiration while entreating Shalash not to mock him, for fear of his children’s potential disappointment. Another claimed that upon reading the daily communiqués, he would fall off his chair laughing.

Laughter, perhaps, can always be counted on to forge an affinity, if not a unity, beyond fractures of sect, status, and ethnic affiliation. Iraqis would “drop everything for a good laugh”; they gather in bars and down glasses of arak to immerse themselves in a “great, communal, and nondenominational drunkenness.” Shalash knows this, and abundantly turns it to his advantage. Nothing and no one is spared from the crosshairs of his ridicule, populated by a variegated cast that encompasses sermonisers, soldiers, suicide bombers, and donkeys. A vice-president’s verbal pomposity sounds like “he just ate a few expensive dictionaries and is about to lose his lunch.” A woman about to be married off to an Australian cousin is told, should her fiancé divorce her, “just tell everyone that he’s a terrorist and you’ll have nothing to worry about.” An odious neighbour, eager to save a spot for himself in paradise, proselytises the necessity of voting in the referendum for Iraq’s new constitution: “Don’t you know the going rate for rewards in heaven for helping ratify the constitution? It’s worth a hundred visits to the shrine of the Eighth Imam, and that’s on the far side of Iran!” When the narrator casually uses Google Earth, he is accused of lecherously spying on the women of his residence, sparking off a widespread hysteria—and court case—about the “violation of the morals of the block.” Each instance of mockery is a shard in a wider mirror of collective trauma.

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Fall 2022: Highlights from the Team

Where to start with our glorious Fall 2022 issue? Here are some entry points, courtesy of our global team!

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.

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)

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What’s New in Translation: October 2022

New work from the Arabic, the Korean, and the Ojibwe language!

In this month’s round-up of the latest in world literature, our editors bring vital texts addressing faith, (false) mythologies, desire, migration, and Indigenous culture to the forefront: a collection of penetrating, prismatic poems from the lauded Egyptian poet Iman Mersal; from South Korea’s Lee Geum-yi, a fiction that tells the long-silenced stories of women crossing the seas to be wed to strangers; and a new collection of poetry, documenting Ojibwe lives, by eminent writer Linda LeGarde Grover. Read on to find out more!

threshold

The Threshold by Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022

Review by Alex Tan, Senior Assistant Editor

Perhaps it begins with a search. The Egyptian poet Iman Mersal returns to her homeland in hopes of procuring a book by Saniya Saleh, an elusive writer no one seems to have heard of. Instead she finds a table, piled with the canonized words of men; nowhere in sight is the person she seeks: a wife, sister, and mother, who can only secondarily be a writer in her own right. “I don’t know how she likes to see herself,” she laments in a wandering essay. Left with the “wasted potential” of what survives, she can imagine only a voice of muted cadence, “a whispered song of mourning which slips through to me amid the din of revolutionaries’ rabble-rousing slogans, of warriors intent on victory, of those broken by defeat angrily denouncing state, dictator and society.”

A similar quality of whispering, of slipping through, inhabits Iman Mersal’s angular The Threshold, a collection of poetry translated delicately by Robyn Creswell in conversation with the poet herself. In the titular piece, a collective biography of sorts charts a path through the streets and labyrinthine hypocrisies of Cairo in the nineties: “one long-serving intellectual screamed at his friend / When I’m talking about democracy / you shut the hell up.” Elsewhere a speaker ventures, “Let’s assume the people isn’t a dirty word and that we know the meaning of en masse.” Yet this momentary compact reveals its own fragility; language with all its alibis and forms of subterfuge seems a poor vessel, too riddled with holes to hold “all the wasted days” and the “nights / of walking with hands stretched out / and the visions that crept over the walls.”

Mersal’s work is unafraid of its own promontories and edges. Often, the writing advances a crepuscular view of the self, ever-partial and shrouded in semi-obscurity, divided from its figurations. The opening poem dryly declares, “I’m pretty sure / my self-exposures / are for me to hide behind.” Her name, which contains the Arabic for “faith” and “messenger,” is too “musical” for “a body like my body / and lungs like these—growing raspier / by the day.” On what map might we locate the trembling contours of that occluded life, “whose existence I’ve never been sure of,” and which appears to “have neither past nor future” in an encounter with a stranger, on whose shoulder she accidentally falls asleep? How unwieldy it feels in its bulk, how relentlessly it has been anatomized, in spite of its wispy resistance to measurement:

This is the life into which more than one father stuffed his ambitions, more than one mother her scissors, more than one doctor his pills, more than one activist his sword, more than one institution its stupidity, and more than one school of poetry its poetics.

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