Posts by Shawn Hoo

What’s New in Translation: June 2022

June 13, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eva Wissting, Shawn Hoo, and Suhasini Patni

New work from China, Tibet, and Slovenia!

In this month of highlights from the world of translated literature, we’re spotlighting three singular, wide-ranging, and immersive texts. From the Chinese, Shawn Hoo discusses the philosophical and journeying collection from celebrated poet Xi Chuan. From the Tibetan, Suhasini Patni reviews a dark, compassionate novel of womanhood and urbanity from Tsering Yangkyi. And from the Slovenian master Drago Jančar, Eva Wissting gives a look into his latest novel, on how personhood and identity survive the ravages of war.

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Bloom and Other Poems by Xi Chuan, translated from the Chinese by Lucas Klein, New Directions, 2022

Review by Shawn Hoo, Assistant Editor

In the title and opening poem of Xi Chuan’s (西川) Bloom and Other Poems, a simple verb like “bloom” begins lyrically and unsuspectingly enough—

if you’re going to bloom then bloom to my rhythm
close your eyes for one second breathe for two be silent for three then bloom

—but in the course of its exuberant and exacting repetitions across six pages, the action soon blossoms into a sophisticated geometry. At times, the verb seems to indicate an instructive concern for those new to the world (“bloom a pear blossom in case the nape of your neck is cold”). Other times, we hear the speaker issuing something of an injunction or a dare: “bloom / unleash a deep underground spring with your rhizome.” In a poem structured around insistence (to borrow Gertrude Stein’s understanding of how repetition works), Lucas Klein—who also curated and translated Xi Chuan’s Notes on the Mosquito—constructs a resonant architecture, allowing the echoes to bounce off the pages’ acoustics, often to rhapsodic effect: “bloom barbaric blossoms bloom unbearable blossoms / bloom the deviant the unreasonable the illogical” and later: “bloom three thousand boundless universes / and string up and beat any beast that refuses to bloom.”

In English, though not in Mandarin, bloom sits uncomfortably close to blood; in this titular poem, this simple word—across both languages—operates with an undertone of violence, belying its vivacious exhortations until the end, ending up as a verb that has swelled beyond its initial premise. The poems that come after “Bloom” all seem to share this restless inflation of the poetic image and line, each taking the verse to its various geometric limits, upon where it strains to meet other worlds. READ MORE…

Listening to Syntax: Eugene Ostashevsky on Lucky Breaks

April 20, 2022  |  in Book Club  |  by Shawn Hoo

[Belorusets] writes in this beautiful, off-kilter, very non-state, non-Russian Russian

Reviewing Yevgenia Belorusets’s Lucky Breaks, Shawn Hoo writes, “The question of what photographs and literature can do in war, I suspect, will not be resolved anytime soon.” Still, as one reads Belorusets’s text of stories from the fringes of wartime, the role of writing within conflict—even if varied and not always discernible—emerges as vital, urgent. Our Book Club selection for the month of March, Lucky Breaks provides a doorway by which the voices and images of Ukrainian women, and their ordinary lives, emerge and connect in unexpected, miraculous ways. In the following interview with Eugene Ostashevsky, whose expert and precise translation of Lucky Breaks has given this title a formidable presence in English, Hoo and Ostashevky discuss the rejections of typical narratives, transitions of impossible grammars, and translating as a pursuit of poetics.

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, 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.

Shawn Hoo (SH): You have translated mostly Russian avant-garde and absurdist poetry. Were the things that drew you to these poets the same things that drew you to Yevgenia Belorusets’s Lucky Breaks?

Eugene Ostashevsky (EO): I translate as a poet, if that makes sense, which means that translation is vital to my poetic work (which foregrounds translation, which problematises translation) but, more importantly, that my poetics help me make translation choices. I started translating the OBERIU, the so-called absurdists, an avant-garde group in the ’20s and an underground group in the 1930s. The way their work formed me as a reader and a poet, even before I started translating, was their absurdisation of language: the way they took classical poetics and projected avant-garde poetics on them, breaking up classical poetics to build these very beautiful linguistic structures which questioned rather than affirmed language. They questioned rather than affirmed reference or the veracity of statements, and greatly relativised linguistic truth. So here’s the important point: I think maybe what drew me to them was the fact that I’m an immigrant. It was the fact that—I don’t want to say I don’t write in my native language, but—I don’t write in my native language, technically speaking.

With Belorusets, you read Lucky Breaks and there is a lot of Daniil Kharms, member of OBERIU, for the reason that Kharms really reflects on and deconstructs narrative. When Belorusets takes her stories about war and cuts out authorial omniscience, writing about the fog of war, and about interacting with people whom you don’t know much about, she describes these people in this kind of glancing way, often slipping into these Kharmsian rejections of classical narrative.

The second thing is that, like virtually all Ukrainians, she is bilingual. But she writes in Russian because that’s what they speak in her family. Now the Russian language is associated with the Russian state, but there basically used to be, in the twentieth century, two forms of Russian: an émigré Russian and a Soviet Russian. After the Soviet Union collapsed and the émigrés started publishing in Russia—because that’s where the readers were—it turned out that the compromise, the attaching of the language to the political unit of the Russian Federation (even though nobody did it consciously) turned out to be very harmful for the language. [Belorusets] writes in this beautiful, off-kilter, very non-state, non-Russian Russian which has (it sounds like I’m talking about wine) tinges of Austro-Hungarian syntax. Also, she is trained as a translator from German, so that’s also there; beyond that Central Europeanness of her Russian, there is Gogol. You feel that in the ironies, in the way the words and the clauses are not lined up one after another but rub up against each other, the way they are defamiliarised. I just love that.

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Announcing Our March Book Club Selection: Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets

March 31, 2022  |  in Book Club  |  by Shawn Hoo

Belorusets is the peerless documentarian of her times, a meticulous stitcher of the incongruities that beset contemporary Ukrainian life.

As war cruelly rages on in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one searches for elucidation amidst madness from the country’s writers. As pivotal statements of witness, hope, persistence, and humanity, such texts will undoubtedly go down in history as bright sparks of intelligence and endurance in the dark obfuscations of violence. In Lucky Breaks, Yevgenia Belorusets’s stunning documentation of daily life in eastern Ukraine, the author expertly renders stories of women struggling to reconcile their existence with the broken infrastructure of their country, weaving oratory and textuality with an expert balance of surrealism and sobriety. Testifying simultaneously to Ukraine’s tumultuous history and its uncertain present, Belorusets’s timely work speaks, necessarily, to what survival means, as it is happening.

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, 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. 

Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky, New Directions, 2022

More than a month now since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the crisis for Ukrainians continues to have no end in sight. For those of us spectating from afar, the internet has burst into a deluge of breaking news: images of aerial attacks, fleeing citizens, and pulverised buildings circulate and refresh, drawing us into the eye of the conflict. As for the heart, how much of this goes into cultivating real empathy and solidarity, and how much into encouraging a lethargy towards the bits of violence we witness daily through the screen? Literature and translation have risen up almost instinctively to defy this impersonal onslaught: from readings organised by The Guardian to Odessa-born poet Ilya Kaminsky’s advocacy of Ukrainian poetry. Asymptote, too, has launched a new column in support of Ukraine, and as Translation Tuesdays editor, I published Oksana Rosenblum’s translation of Yevhen Pluzhnyk’s “Galileo,” which, while published a week before the invasion, eerily voiced the fate of small states: “I am quiet as grass, even quieter still,/ I am so easily unnoticed.”

The question of what photographs and literature can do in war, I suspect, will not be resolved anytime soon. Amidst this media torrent, however, the daily war diary of Ukrainian photographer and writer Yevgenia Belorusets stands apart for her ability to document the war in both its pedestrian and surreal registers. On the third day, for example, Belorusets writes about meeting a woman in the park who, while carrying two huge shopping bags, admits happily to her: “When there are two of us, I’m less afraid of the artillery.” Two weeks later, she hears two students speak outdoors about what it means to teach as air raid alarms sound. Occasionally, she includes photographs: friends walking their dogs after curfew; a woman holding two bouquets of flowers. Often, the moments she records are ordinary, allowing the mingling of fragile, contradictory truths—that of people living in a simultaneously exceptional and quotidian time and place. Receiving these daily dispatches in my inbox, they come across as disciplined, tender, and urgent.

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What’s New in Translation: November 2021

November 8, 2021  |  in In This Together, New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Fairuza Hanun, Georgina Fooks, Shawn Hoo, and Suhasini Patni

New titles this month from the Philippines, Indonesia, Syria, and Slovakia!

This month, our selection of translated titles traverse the battlefield and the surfaces of paintings, lonely post-Communist apartment blocs and conservative spaces housing queer, radical instances of love. In language described by our editors and reviewers as potent, provocative, capacious, and full of longing, these four titles present an excellent pathway into the writers who are bringing the immediacies of experience into powerful socio-cultural commentary on our reality: Martin Hacla, Norman Erikson Pasaribu, Ramy Al-Asheq, and Monika Kompaníková. 

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There Are Angels Walking the Fields by Marlon Hacla, translated from the Filipino by Kristine Ong Muslim, Broken Sleep Books, 2021

Review by Shawn Hoo, Assistant Editor

Words happened. Cow became
Cow. The word milk gushed in every throat.

From this seemingly deflationary announcement that opens one of Marlon Hacla’s poems—“Words happened.”—an entire landscape is animated and given breath at the very juncture of utterance. Not only do ears of corn and a crown of birds begin to stir, so too does the speaker, finding himself transported by the magical properties of language: “I uttered the word joy / And I was once again playing a game / As a child with my friends.” Read as the collection’s ars poetica, we might say that in Hacla’s debut poetry collection, words do not simply refer to things. They move things, and each marks an occasion in the world; they sing the world into movement.

There Are Angels Walking the Fields—first published in 2010 under the Ubod New Authors Series by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts in the Philippines—opens with a lilting “Invocation,” its unbroken anaphora incanting the world of inanimate things (“In the name of the rock. In the name of the lily blossom”), of unarticulated desires (“In the name of burned / Letters from a concubine”) and of those who have been cast into the margins (“In the name of wives / Abandoned by their husbands. In the name of gay fathers”). Who could believe more in language’s ability to intervene in the world than the one who uses them in supplication? In opening the collection with this list, Hacla immediately throws his lot with the downtrodden and the forgotten—those who may not have the ability to speak—and soothes them with the divine balm of words. In her translator’s note, past contributor Kristine Ong Muslim justifies her sharpening of the poem’s decisiveness in order to heighten the quality of invocation. Thus, a line more literally translated as “In the name of hands / Not touched” becomes “In the name of hands / Never held.” Might we also consider the translator as one who practices the art of invocation—except rather than calling out in prayer, the translator calls inward, to be possessed by both languages? Where, in order for words to perform the magic of the original—for cow to become cow—something first has to happen to them? In Muslim’s translation, Hacla’s lines are screwed tight; each enjambment turns brutally, and every line sweats with a potent lyricism, as how this opening poem rollicks to an epiphany by the end:

[. . .] In the name of faces hidden.
By a black veil. In the names of ears
That had not known the sound of a violin. In the name of a flower
That bloomed in the morning and wilted by nightfall.
In your name, you who would someday die and fade away.

READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2021

July 19, 2021  |  in News  |  by Allison Braden, Shawn Hoo, and Xiao Yue Shan

Our blog editors pick their favourite pieces from the Summer 2021 issue!

As Asymptote celebrates the first issue of our second decade in world literature, we bring to you new work from thirty-five countries and twenty-four languages in our Summer 2021 issue! Drawing from the theme of our Special Feature, “Age of Division,” these varied writings speak to a moment of mounting borders, fractious politics, and heightened suspicion towards the other—but so too do they hint at the possibility of unexpected solidarities, strange encounters, and new geographies of affinity. Not sure where to begin with this bountiful issue? Let our blog editors take you through some of their favourite pieces to reveal a world that is, in the words of Lêdo Ivo, “sweet, full, pungent, and luminous.” 

In the spring of 2004, an intifada singer in Ramallah said to his interviewer, “What I do on stage and what martyrs do on the streets are one and the same, just with different instruments.” Were resistance embodied in genre, the shape would undoubtedly be that of music. The art which “all art constantly aspires towards” for its certain coherence of form and content, this singular quality also speaks to its ability to move people passionately, crucially, to action. For music is a verb; it must be performed and enacted. It embodies, within its very idea, its eventual actualisation.  

In the excerpt from Olivia Elias’s forthcoming poetry collection Your Name, Palestine, she makes a graceful address: “Musicians, a few minutes more.” Moving on to materialise the scene in sensual, wondering lines, she makes gentle work of speaking the terrible wreckage done to the country where she was born. Born in Haifa and living now in France, she is said to occupy a privileged space within the Palestinian diaspora as one of the few poets in French. In these poems, translated masterfully by Sarah Riggs and Jérémy Robert, she creates in her adopted language the continuation of the Palestinian nation, transcending geographical realities to rhyme with the poetics of Palestinian agency, with both singing and the witness of singing.

Musicians, I am speaking to you of a country
engulfed in a fault of history
of a people chosen to pay the price
of another sacrifice
of a story more than a hundred years old
full of sound and fury and blood

Intended for voices set to instruments, Elias’s work speaks to the intifada singers, the debke performances that conceptualise art from the violences of occupation, and the traditional melodies evoking the dignity of liberation. But without violence and ideology, the measured cadences of her lines are patient with painterly instinct. These poems draw their necessity from their stoic dreams of clarity. Palestine, untorn, in concert, singing.

In Mulugeta Alebachew’s “Heaven Without Prickly Pears,” writing similarly seeks physical qualities—the savoury texture of the language, the kinetic scan of the eye as it seeks and takes in. The topography of the Ethiopian town, Geneté, is overlaid with the infinite dimensions of the mind. Familiarities, kinships, intimacies run through in capillaries of psychogeography, drawing further on its composite, ramified history: “her mosaicked gum-tattoos of more than a dozen languages and myriad cultures.” With co-translator Bethlehem Attfield, Alebachew has done a wonderful job of rendering the original Amharic text, lush with dialect, into a fluent poetry that nevertheless beholds the precision of references outside of the English language.

This town bears my fondest memories, life vividly lived, and lessons well learned . . . my yesterdays, todays, and predictable tomorrows lay on its streets. . . My home includes the highway. My home does not exclude the other homes. 

In this beautiful passage which eclipses the cautious private/public boundary, Alebachew speaks to the growing of the world. Just as in the acts of reading and writing, the dialectic division of outside and inside loses its binds, and one bleeds into the other. By bringing us into his Geneté, the subtle resentment of possessive being is defied; we are given interior knowing without it being our interior. In this world there is no space indifferent or vacant. It is all compounded in an infinite geometry of living; to inhabit a text that so generously navigates a place, it is an astonishing gift. 

—Xiao Yue Shan

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Selfhood is a Queer Fiction: On The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei

June 16, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Shawn Hoo

Writing the self into being from a hodgepodge of cultural texts—that is what’s elemental to queer life

The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei, translated from the Chinese by Ari Larissa Heinrich, Columbia University Press, 2021

Dwelling on a female classmate’s romantic advances in her youth, and belatedly cognisant of her learned aversion towards all forms of intimacy, the thirty-year-old Momo realises the incongruence of the one self-guided decision she had made in her life—to become a dermal care technician: “She could just as easily have chosen a more solitary profession, like a novelist. Why did she have to choose a job reliant on intimacy?” It is the year 2100 and humanity, terrified of the ultraviolet rays seeping through the depleted ozone layer, has evacuated from land en masse to settle on the seabed. Amidst the residual trauma of the sun’s lethal rays, the dermal care trade booms and Momo climbs the profession steadily, eventually becoming the owner of Salon Canary and something of a celebrity in T City. As Momo spends her days massaging her wealthy clients with M skin—a technology that gives her access to their private lives—what she cannot shake off is the feeling that “there was at least one layer of membrane between her and the world.”

In The Membranes, Chi Ta-wei, renowned Taiwanese novelist (and past Asymptote contributor), tackles a central problem of existentialism: how do we account for the estrangement between ourselves and the world? The thrilling sci-fi classic (originally published in 1995) then proceeds to compellingly insist on exploring the question’s social dimensions, getting under the skin of its queer, inscrutable protagonist. A slim, intelligent novella that ambitiously projects a militarised and corporate new world order in the rubble of environmental collapse, Chi’s brand of world-building is equally invested in envisioning new global formations as it is in attesting to emerging sexual subjectivities. It bristles with the emancipatory energy that characterises the novels coming out of post-martial-law Taiwan. Read together with works such as Chu T’ien-wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man or Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile and Last Words from Montmartre, English readers can now appreciate a fuller scope of the queer efflorescence unleashed in the experimental fiction of Taiwan’s nineties and the internal heterogeneity of its cultural moment. Ari Larissa Heinrich’s translation of Chi’s award-winning work comes a quarter of a century after its Chinese publication, but contemporary readers will relish going back to the future in a work that ventriloquises our present, its conjectures at once anachronistic and prophetic. READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Love in a Fallen City

June 10, 2021  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Allison Braden, Shawn Hoo, and Xiao Yue Shan

A literary style that lends itself so naturally to cinema has its pleasures and, in some cases, its perils when it comes to adaptation.

The allure of Eileen Chang’s prose is a bewitching combination of insight and precision—sensual acuity married with an editorial scrupulousness. Earning widespread renown with renderings of the delicate, tenuous relationships in the volatile societies of her time, Chang has become known for her ability to create vivid, lasting images. It’s no wonder, then, that her works have served as the material for several celebrated films; today, our blog editors are taking a look at Hong Kong director Ann Hui’s adaptation of Chang’s rich novella of courtship and compromise, Love in a Fallen City (1984). What follows is a discussion on the transposition of Chang’s “cinematic” language, the pitfalls of overly faithful adaptation, and the difficulties of portraying interiority.

Shawn Hoo (SH): I have always thought of Eileen Chang’s prose style—her montage of overlapping timelines; her patient, exquisite visualising of scenes; her keen ear for dialogue—as having an affinity with the language of film. That is, her stories come to me almost ready-made for film. Unsurprisingly, Chang herself did write fourteen screenplays (a neglected part of her oeuvre), and several of her stories have been adapted by celebrated Sinophone filmmakers such as Stanley Kwan, Ang Lee, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and of course, Ann Hui (all of whom have no doubt disseminated Chang’s legacy to new audiences). A literary style that lends itself so naturally to cinema has its pleasures and, in some cases, its perils when it comes to adaptation. Just hear what Hui admits when asked about her interpretation of Chang’s story: “There is no interpretation at all,” she says, “It’s more a representation. The novel is so good that adding anything at all seems impossible.” If by “representation” Hui means to hew close to the original text, then this bears out in the film’s dialogue, which is used almost verbatim in its Cantonese translation, as well as in its rendering of key scenes which appear largely unmodified on screen. Consequently, what is arguably Chang’s most loved story has had a relatively lukewarm reception in its filmic context (and in Hui’s otherwise prolific oeuvre). Faithfulness—that contested word so frequently used to discuss translation—it seems, does not always reward.

This for me raises questions about the merits of transferring what is ostensibly cinematic writing onto the film medium, and how their relationship—as well as mutual realisation—can be understood beyond a scene-for-scene, image-for-image correspondence, which is at least how I conceive of Hui’s approach: too faithful. To be clear, there is much to admire in this film, especially Hui’s treatment of early 1940s Shanghai and Hong Kong. Whereas the former has the camera concentrated on the decaying, claustrophobic Bai household and moves between adjacent rooms only to hear Liusu’s relatives badmouthing her, the latter moves liberally between the historic Repulse Bay Hotel, couples dancing to a jazz number at the Hong Kong Hotel, outdoor Chinese opera, and a rendition of Greensleeves all heard while Liusu and Liuyuan walk the city. The film’s construction of these two settings dramatises the shifts in Liusu’s psychology, one that liberates her from the sad huqin of an insular household into the cacophonous colonial cosmopolitanism of British Hong Kong which signifies new beginnings. Or rather, three settings: if we distinguish Japanese-occupied Hong Kong for its distinct aural and visual qualities. Here, I think Hui successfully leverages on the medium to elaborate on Chang’s vision, that is the role of contingency—of situated time and place—to precipitate love.

At this point, I wonder if either of you might have a different take on the relationship between representation and interpretation, to borrow Hui’s own distinction?

Allison Braden (AB): The film did strike me as a fascinating testament to the idea that extreme faithfulness can be, paradoxically, a detriment to adaptation. Conventional wisdom holds that books deal in emotions, plays in dialogue, and films in images. The limited visual scope of the first part of Love in a Fallen City—the repressively close Bai home, the tight shots in various hotel settings—calls to mind a teleplay, with more reliance on dialogue than images. This approach shortchanges Liusu’s interiority and writer Eileen Chang’s careful attention to emotional nuance. I spent the initial Hong Kong portion of the movie baffled by Liusu’s ambivalence. She clearly needs to escape her family but also seems determined to make a match for herself rather than meet anyone else’s expectations. “The first marriage is for your parents,” she says, “the second is for yourself.” But can she afford to dawdle? To repulse a supremely eligible suitor? Sure, Fan represented a foreign sensibility and exhibited domineering and misogynistic traits, but Liusu’s alternate reactions—charmed and put off—and quiet (is it too much to say sulky?) responses to his overtures didn’t offer a sufficient window into her feelings. The viewer is left to project her own interpretation on Liusu’s mystifying reticence, which I see less as intentional ambiguity and more as a failure to adequately adapt the interiority of the novel to a medium that relies on a different form of exposition. READ MORE…

Writing in Organic Formation: Federico Falco and Jennifer Croft on A Perfect Cemetery

May 20, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Shawn Hoo

I always thought about what else a short story could be beyond the usual. What would happen if I mixed short stories and poetry?

In our Book Club selection for the month of April, A Perfect Cemetery, Federico Falco’s writings do not tell so much as unfold, gently and masterfully, to elucidate the relationships between the human, the non-human, and the spaces in which such meetings take place. In precise and rich evocations, Falco plumbs the rich vocabularies and intrigues of landscape to lend delicacy, sensuality, and vividity to his prose, bringing his protagonists to life with a knowing rootedness. In the following interview, transcribed from a live Q&A hosted by Assistant Editor Shawn Hoo, Falco and translator Jennifer Croft share their thoughts on the cinematic aspects of A Perfect Cemetery, the relationships between the body and the land, and the pervading theme of isolation.

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, join our Facebook group for exclusive Book Club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom Q&As with the author and/or the translator of each title!

Shawn Hoo (SH): I thought we could begin with the question of place. I read this book in Singapore, a dense city, and noted how A Perfect Cemetery has a distinct sense of place; Federico, you conjure a landscape of sierras, rivers, and forests across disparate short stories that belong to this very single novelistic world. In an interview with The Paris Review, Jennifer, you emphasize the importance of translators visiting the country they are translating from. How does your sense of place affect your approach to these stories?

Federico Falco (FF): Landscape transforms us and makes us different people; the people who live in big cities have one kind of experience of life and the people who live in different landscapes have another. There is an Argentinian writer, Juan José Saer—one of my favorites—who says that the poor who live in cities near the ocean, they have a heaviness; they become used to strange, different people arriving and leaving all the time. And the people who live in the mountains always think that there’s another place beyond the mountains. They can change their point of view because they can see things from a different point of view. The people who live in the plains here in Argentina, the Pampas, they see the same landscape all the time. They can walk ten kilometers, and the whole scene shifts ten kilometers.

So when I write, I try to think about where the character lives, where they grew up, what they need, where they differ, what was new for them—if they grew up in the plains and now live in the mountains. I used to live in the city, now I’m living in the mountains, and there are some things that you can feel in the body. Your body starts to change. The air is different. The muscles change because you’re climbing all the time. The way you relate to people in the city is really different from the way you relate to people here in the mountains. If I meet a stranger here in the street, I say hello, which I never do in the city.

Jennifer Croft (JC): I really loved listening to Fede talk about place. Obviously, translating these stories influenced me as well, and I have been thinking a lot about place in fiction. Right now, I’m working on a book of creative nonfiction called Notes on Postcards, and part of the question of this text is: why does it matter where we are when we’re communicating with someone? Or why does it matter where we are in general? I started thinking about this question in 2020, when all of my travel plans were cancelled. I felt really cut off from all of the places that I care about—first and foremost among those is Buenos Aires. I feel very panicked that I’m not allowed to enter Argentina right now because of my US passport. I’m currently in upstate New York at a writing residency called Yaddo, and I’ve had a hard time working on my project, but thanks to these conversations with Fede over the last week or so, I’ve been relaxing into it.

I like comparing my obsession with places to Fede’s, because mine is less about landscape and more about cities and cultures. Even though culture is such an extremely fluid thing, it is much more about how one feels in the context of other human beings. I’m more of a flaneur kind of writer, and it’s great for me to be able to incorporate these landscapes into my thinking too. READ MORE…

Announcing Our April Book Club Selection: A Perfect Cemetery by Federico Falco

April 29, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Shawn Hoo

Here is writing which transforms provincialism into the province of fiction, drama, and ultimately, nourishment . . .

The vast contours of the internal landscape are painted with delicacy and precise restraint by Argentine writer Federico Falco in A Perfect Cemetery, our Book Club selection for the month of April. With his studies of life on the rural outskirts, the author gently but determinately probes the stoicism and stillness of human existence, and how a perceptible smallness and inwardness can betray a complex and considered philosophy of living. In light of our days being increasingly filled with aspirational stimuli, Falco’s work is a respite of care, of untangling the secret threads that connect the nature of being with the ways of the world.

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, join our Facebook group for exclusive Book Club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom Q&As with the author and/or the translator of each title!

A Perfect Cemetery by Federico Falco, translated from the Spanish by Jennifer Croft, Charco Press, 2021

In five impeccably crafted short stories, Argentine writer Federico Falco displays his distinctive gift for distilling and dramatising the quietude of rurality to generate—from such ostensibly minor landscapes—an intense and varied portrait of life on the geographical periphery. Take, for example, the titular story: Víctor Bagiardelli, a scrupulous engineer of cemeteries, is commissioned by the mayor of small town Colonel Isabeta to build their first cemetery. Mayor Giraudo no longer wants to have the town’s dead sent to nearby Deheza to rest, but he meets resistance from the town council, who accuses him of abusing public funds in the interest of ensuring that his father is buried at home. “A bunch of ignoramuses who care nothing for progress,” Giraudo grumbles of a council whose inertness, he believes, only serves to secure the town in its provinciality.

Giraudo’s description—though unkind—is perhaps not an inaccurate assessment of Falco’s characters who, in their locality, shun the promise of progress. They are searching, instead, for a place to rest. Whether a literal burial place at the end of one’s life, or simply a spot to retreat to in order to go on living—the quest for silence and solitude constitute the central drama of their phlegmatic dispositions. After all, ‘cemetery’—from the Greek koimētḗrion—refers first and foremost to a sleeping chamber. A perfect cemetery, as the dark comedy of the collection’s title suggests, refers then to an ideal place for rest, recuperation, and languor. Read together, Falco’s fiction cohesively articulates—as the book’s intellectual and emotional pleasure—retreat as a way of life against the hedonism of pursuit.

Meanwhile, even as Mr Bagiardelli oversees the cemetery’s construction on the hillside down to the last weeping willow, and residents are eager to reserve the best spots for themselves—the 104-year-old Old Man Giraudo refuses to die, much to his son’s consternation and the engineer’s chagrin. Even the pinnacle spot in the cemetery, under the shadow of a majestic oak, is unable to convince the centenarian to rest reliably, as he actively plots against not just the cemetery’s but his life’s completion; as such, we come to understand how the ideal resting place never comes easy for these characters. That is, the only legitimate form of pursuit for the people who populate Falco’s landscape is one that is restlessly in search of stillness; a philosophy of solitude that knows how a privacy to live and die can be a hard-won thing. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

January 29, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Kwan Ann Tan and Shawn Hoo

The latest news from Singapore and Malaysia!

This week, our writers bring you news from Singapore and Malaysia. In Singapore, the literary community has been remembering the achievements of eminent Chinese-language writer Yeng Pway Ngon after he passed away. While in Malaysia, a new anthology has been published, which has collected writing about the lockdown. Read on to find out more! 

Shawn Hoo, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Singapore

On January 10, the literary community in Singapore and abroad mourned the passing of eminent Chinese-language writer 英培安 Yeng Pway Ngon. Winner of the Cultural Medallion, SEA Write Award, and four Singapore Literature Prizes, Yeng’s writing spans poetry (his latest collection is 石头 Stone), novels (including award-winning 骚动 Unrest and 画室 Art Studio), radio plays, and essays in the manner of Lu Xun. To fully appreciate Yeng’s contribution to Singapore’s cultural landscape, one must also look to his role as a bookseller, having founded two iconic Chinese-language bookstores, Vanguard Books and Grassroots Book Room, that have indelibly shaped the reading culture. In an online literary memorial service on January 15, organised by Grassroots that was attended by more than 170 participants, former students, friends, writers, and cultural workers recited some of Yeng’s verses and looked back at his public and private life. The singularity of Yeng’s influence on Singapore literature has led the Chinese-language newspaper Lianhe Zaobao to pose the question of finding the next Yeng Pway Ngon. As we remember this acclaimed cultural figure, read a play by Yeng (translated by Jeremy Tiang) from the January 2014 issue of Asymptote.

In other news, the Epigram Books Fiction Prize 2021 announced its winners on January 16 in a virtual ceremony. For the first time in the prize’s five-year history, the prize has been awarded to not one but two novels. The winning manuscripts are Sebastian Sim’s And the Award Goes to Sally Bang! and Meihan Boey’s The Formidable Miss Cassidy. They each receive SGD$15,000 in prize money as well as publication. This comes as Epigram Books announced just days before that they will stop publishing in the United Kingdom and focus on their Singapore business. Setting up its London arm in 2016, founder Edmund Wee had initially hoped that the move would allow a Singapore title to get onto the longlist of the coveted Man Booker Prize. After more than thirty titles and four years of work, the effort has proved—at least for the time being—futile. The good news, on the other hand, is that the cost savings from discontinuing the UK endeavour will be redirected to prize money for expanding the Fiction Prize shortlist from four to six novels. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: January 2021

January 11, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ah-reum Han, Sabrina Parker Greene, and Shawn Hoo

The latest in literature from South Korea, Italy, and The Netherlands!

Amidst the uncertainty of what the new year will bring, one surety is that wonderful literature remains to be discovered. In our first selections of new translations for 2021, there is a masterclass in historical fiction about a chess champion whose awe-inspiring trajectory was regrettably tainted with prevailing prejudice; a Dutch memoir that reconciles public and private definitions of sexuality, personhood, and recognition; and a Korean novel that beautifully illustrates that median pain between a love of life and an acknowledgement of its ephemerality. Read on to uncover their discrete and distinct gifts!

kim

My Brilliant Life by Ae-ran Kim, translated from the Korean by Chi-young Kim, Forge Books, 2021

 Review by Ah-reum Han, WoW Editor

Meet Areum Han, the sixteen-year-old boy with a rapid-aging genetic disorder that is at the palpitating heart of Kim Ae-ran’s bestselling novel, My Brilliant Life, translated by Chi-young Kim. “This is the story of the youngest parents with the oldest child,” writes young Areum, in the prologue to his own story. Readers learn some simple truths about Areum from the get-go: he has an uncanny way with words, he loves his parents deeply, and he doesn’t have much time left. But don’t be fooled; this story is not about the sick, nor is it about overcoming suffering. This quirky, bighearted book crackles with life on every page.

My Brilliant Life is a bildungsroman in fast-forward. We enter Areum’s life on the cusp of his final act—and, incidentally, at the age that his own young parents had him. What ensues is a tale that is tender and funny, startling and sad. He writes about his condition:

People say it’s a miracle that I’ve lived this long. I think so, too; not very many people in my situation have lived past their sixteenth birthdays. But I believe that the larger miracle exists in the ordinary, in the living of an ordinary life and dying at an ordinary age. To me the miracles are my parents, my aunts and uncles, our next-door neighbors, the middle of summer and the middle of winter. I’m no miracle.

We become familiar with this enviable “ordinary” through Areum’s watchful eyes, meeting his father, Daesu, who is equal parts foolhardy and brash but with a boyish charm, and Mira, his proud, sharp-tongued, and fiercely protective mother. We see how they each grieve privately and publicly; how they fight, curse, and joke; how they keep secrets to be kind. We watch their simple moments of ordinary miracles: eating shaved ice together, or laying on the living room floor with face masks on.

With Areum’s growing medical expenses, Daesu and Mira struggle to make ends meet, and reluctantly agree to let Areum go on a television show. Through this national exposure, Areum has new encounters with the ordinary. For one, he meets Seoha, a seeming kindred spirit and young girl who reaches out to him after seeing him on the show. Their email exchanges soon bloom into something more—the thrill of first love, tempered with the gravity of impending loss. As Areum’s circumstances quickly unravel, we ache for him to be a teenager with teenage-sized problems. We wish him the mistakes and failures, the freedom to pout and sulk.

In all this, Daesu and Mira do what they can to give Areum a normal life, and Areum knows it. This stereo vision—Areum’s awareness of his parents’ struggles and their lives both before and beyond his own—shows us how Daesu and Mira were also unceremoniously thrust into adulthood. My Brilliant Life is a coming of age tale, not just for Areum, but also for his parents, whose stories bookend his. This is a story that is very aware of its own symmetry: the two unlikely seventeen-year-olds who became parents; their child destined never to outlive them; and the stirrings of a newborn as their first slips away. The story folds into neat patterns that amplify life’s indifferent poetry. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

December 18, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Julia Sherwood, Quyen Nguyen, and Shawn Hoo

The latest news from Austria, Singapore, and Vietnam!

This week our writers bring you the latest news from Austria, where the annual European Literature Days took place; Singapore, where Singapore Unbound has launched a new translation imprint; and Vietnam, where Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk has been translated into Vietnamese. Read on to find out more! 

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-large, reporting from Austria

The rolling hills of Austria’s Wachau are usually alive with the sound of music and literature in November as writers from all over Europe converge on the picturesque wine-growing region on the banks of the Danube for the annual European Literature Days. This year, however, since Austria went into lockdown just days before the festival began on 19 November, the words and the music emanated from the empty auditorium of the sound space (Klangraum) of the Minoriten Church in Krems. Writer Walter Grond and his colleagues from Literaturhaus Europa, joined by co-hosts Rosie Goldsmith from England’s Wiltshire and Hans-Gerd Koch from Berlin, linked up digitally with writers and musicians across Europe for four days of readings and discussions. The last-minute switch to digital format went without a hitch and the loss for those who had been looking forward to meeting old friends and enjoying autumn walks and the delicious local wine proved to be a gain for the rest of the world, as the entire festival was live-streamed (the recordings are available on the Elit YouTube channel). More Wilderness!—the festival theme that, as had happened so often before, proved to be uncannily prescient in view of the pandemic—was introduced by Austrian writer Robert Menasse in conversation with German philosopher Ariadne von Schirach, who continued exploring the wilderness inside and outside the following day in a dialogue with biologist and biosemiotician Andreas Weber. Over the weekend, a dizzying range of authors discussed and read from their works: from stars such as Sjón, Petina Gappah, and A.L. Kennedy (the recipient of this year’s Austrian Booksellers’ Prize of Honour for Tolerance in Thinking and Acting); through those who made their name more recently, like Olga Grjasnowa (Germany), Filip Springer (Poland) as well as Polly Clarke and Dan Richards from the UK; to writers who have yet to make their name in the Anglophone world, such as the Hungarian Gergely Péterfy, the Italian Fabio Andina, the Czech-born Austrian writer and musician Michael Stavarič, the Slovak Peter Balko, and Miek Zwamborn, a Dutch author based on the Scottish Isle of Mull. In addition to Menasse and Grond, the home-grown talent included writer and musician Ernst Molden, whose balcony concerts helped to keep up the spirits of his neighbourhood in Vienna during the first wave of the pandemic, and Daniela Emminger, whose reading from her dystopian novel set in Hitler’s birthplace, Braunau, was enlivened by the appearance of a banana-munching gorilla. Emminger’s succinct summaries of the whole festival can be read here. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

November 13, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Sarah Moore, Shawn Hoo, and Vivian Szu-Chin Chih

The latest news from Singapore, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Singapore, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. In Singapore, the Singapore Writers’ Festival hosted international writers, such as Liu Cixin, Teju Cole, and Sharon Olds, whilst the Cordite Poetry Review published a special feature on Singapore poetry; in Taiwan, Kishu An Forest of Literature centre has held a discussion about a new translation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; and in the UK, Carcanet Press has launched Eavan Boland’s final collection, The Historians, whilst new books about renowned poets Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton have been released. Read on to find out more! 

Shawn Hoo, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Singapore:

The beginning of November sees a deluge of new writing coming from a host of literary journals. Joshua Ip and Alvin Pang have guest edited a special feature on Singapore poetry in Cordite Poetry Review that gives us the rare pleasure of rethinking Singapore poetry through the art of transcreation. The editors commissioned thirty young poets (who write primarily in English) for the challenge of transcreating verse, not just from the official languages of Malay, Tamil, and Chinese, but also ‘minor’ languages such as Kristang, Bengali, and Tagalog that make up Singapore’s linguistic soundscape. Additionally, Mahogany Journal, a new online periodical on the scene for anglophone South Asian writers in Singapore, has just released their second issue, which is themed ‘Retellings.’ Finally, one of our longest-running online journals, the Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore, has launched its October issue. Lovers of Singapore literature have a huge array of choice.

Meanwhile, this year’s virtual Singapore Writers’ Festival (mentioned in my October dispatch) concluded last weekend. While festivalgoers did not experience the familiar ritual of queuing and squeezing into a room packed with fellow writers and readers, the online format delivered its own peculiarities. Liu Cixin, Teju Cole, and Sharon Olds were some of the international stars joining us from different time zones across our devices. Margaret Atwood, whose message to novelist Balli Kaur Jaswal was a hopeful “we will get through,” had many viewers sending questions through a live chat box asking the author of The Handmaid’s Tale what it means to write in these dystopian times. Instead of browsing the festival bookstore in between panels, I scrolled through the webstore run by Closetful of Books. Nifty videos were added to lure me to new book releases, booksellers curated a list of recommended reads, while readers craving connection left love notes to nobody in particular. The copy of Intimations I ordered arrived with a sweet touch: it came with a bookplate signed by Zadie Smith. With access to video on demand, rather than rushing from room to room, I found myself toggling between panels on Southeast Asian historical fiction and Korean horror without so much as lifting a finger. If I find myself unable to concentrate (as Zadie Smith said of our social media age: “I feel very bullied at the speed I am told to think daily”), I tune in to Poetry Bites to hear Marc Nair engage in ten-minute intimate chats with ten poets. Kudos to festival director Pooja Nansi and her team for this massively successful event. We are all already looking forward to what the next year’s edition of the festival brings. READ MORE…

Singlish Modernism

October 29, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Shawn Hoo

It is this visual play, displayed with similar verve throughout the volume, that allows it to consider Singlish with modernist eyes.

Singapore’s unique multiculturalism is perhaps indicative of the world to come, an encouraging nod towards our evolving ideas of language’s forms and mutations. Just as in poetry, in which the writer is constantly mining a new idiolect from amongst the terra firma of the established vernacular, the current constraints that keep one language from colouring another are dissipating in the multilingual mindset, manifesting in a great intrigue of literary structure. This mobility of speech and its patterns—at times revolutionary, at times bewildering—is exemplified by the scrupulous and guileful poetics of award-winning Singaporean writer (and previous Asymptote contributor) Hamid Roslan, whose work simultaneously juggles and revolts against the visual, the semantic, and the syntactical. In the following essay, our editor-at-large for Singapore, Shawn Hoo, sets out on the discursive cartography charted by Hamid’s new collection, parsetreeforestfire, and finds under its myriad constructions a symphony of linguistic manipulation and play.

In 1950, within the pages of the University of Malaya’s student journal, The New Cauldron, a young Wang Gungwu pens an idealistic editorial entitled “The Way to Nationhood”—a text now regarded as a significant articulation of linguistic modernism on the peninsula hewn tightly to the dream of nationalism. He writes:

A Malayan language will arise out of the contributions these communities will make to the linguistic melting pot. The emerging language will then have to wait for a literary genius who will give it a voice and a soul, a service which Dante performed for the Italian language.

Engmalchin (a portmanteau of English, Malay, and Chinese) was the language and movement advocated by Wang and his fellow multilingual, English-educated classmates to carry the voice of poetry in post-war British Malaya, and to summon a Malayan consciousness. For this linguistic cauldron to be wrought, he had hoped for the major ethnic communities to “throw up from their native or imported civilisations the material for a new synthesis [. . .] infused with the stuff of European poetry and bound firmly in the English language.” Wang tested out this aesthetic vision in his debut, Pulse (1950); eight years later, he declared Engmalchin a failure. A new poetic idiom was premature without cultural or political independence, or as he writes, “[When] the Malayans appear, there will be Malayan poetry.” Malaya’s first dream of linguistic modernism was shattered temporarily, then permanently, when by 1965, Malaya had fragmented into what is now Malaysia and Singapore.

On the Singaporean end of the peninsula, Engmalchin’s legacy has morphed and survived as Singlish—the creole tongue mixing English, Malay, Chinese, Hokkien, Teochew, Tamil, and other languages—which in turn has found its place in Singapore poetry. Many well-loved poems, from Arthur Yap’s “2 mothers in a hdb playground” (1980) to Alfian Sa’at’s ‘Missing’ (2001) to Joshua Ip’s “conversaytion” (2012), have given voice and soul to the local speech, vocabulary, and syntax. Although one would be mistaken to assume that Singlish is the de facto register of all Singapore poets—far from it—the use of Singlish in poetry today is ubiquitous enough to go unremarked. If Engmalchin’s dream was to cultivate in poetry a national consciousness, to hold disparate languages together, and to reflect a local reality, then many will consider Singlish as its worthy and undisputed successor. READ MORE…