Posts by Xiao Yue Shan

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…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

May 21, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Kwan Ann Tan, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest news from China, the USA, and Malaysia!

In China, the literary establishment celebrated “China’s Thoreau” on the twenty-second anniversary of his death. In the USA, virtual events raised issues in the field and craft of literary translation, and in Malaysia, an upcoming poetry contest promises to shed light on the country’s multilingual literary landscape. Dive in!

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting from China

“One day, mankind shall look back on the origins of his failure to survive on earth. He will find that, in 1712, an Englishman named Thomas Newcomen—a predecessor of James Watt—tried to create for this world the very first steam engine.”

The above words, taken from the Chinese writer 伟岸 Wei An’s essay, “大地上的事情” (The Earth’s Happenings), indicate towards how the late essayist, thinker, and diarist came to be known as “China’s Thoreau.” In characteristically attentive, ruminative, and exacting prose, Wei An’s moralist sensitivity to humanity’s presence and existence on earth sought to honor and preserve the organic nature of life, leading his contemporaries to believe, as writer Lin Xianzhi said: “The life of Wei An has given Chinese literature a direct and elucidating fact: that the writer must first and foremost be a person of excellent virtue.” On May 19, the twenty-second anniversary of his death, an event entitled “The Philosophy of Earth” was held in Wei An’s honor, with discussions revolving around the posthumous collection of the author’s diaries from 1986 to 1999, entitled 泥土就在我身旁 (The Dirt Is Beside Me), as well as the revised edition of his total collected works, edited by Feng Qiuzi and published last year.

READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones

May 12, 2021  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Allison Braden, Suhasini Patni, and Xiao Yue Shan

Capturing "the porousness between Hindi and English," Arundhati Roy's film is a triumph of voice.

Of her 1989 film, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, Arundhati Roy writes: “I loved the quirky, spontaneous performances. I loved the fact that there were no ‘beautiful’ people in it. I loved the egalitarian friendships between the boys and girls. I loved the corny clothes, the absurd glasses, the ridiculous hairdos, the uncertainty, the joy and the sadness of it . . . It was from another time . . . I ache for the innocence of it.” Indeed, the film is potent with the tender touches of youthful idealism, fearlessly authentic to its characterisations of young architecture students in 1970s India, and an early emblem of Roy’s intrepid criticisms against the evils of her time. In this edition of Asymptote at the Movies, Editor-at-Large for India Suhasini Patni speaks with Blog Editors Allison Braden and Xiao Yue Shan about the complex role Hinglish plays in the film, the depictions of class and social mobility, and how art can arise from the myriad places in which various languages meet.

Suhasini Patni (SP): Before Arundhati Roy became famous for her Booker Prize-winning novel and Pradip Krishen became an important environmentalist, they worked on the film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, which was screened late at night on Doordarshan in 1989, then largely forgotten by the Indian audience. However, it later went on to win two National Awards (both of which were returned to protest the government’s growing intolerance) and became a cult classic.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first Hinglish film ever made in India. Critics found it difficult to categorize the language of the film; some called it an English language film—which does disservice to the mouthfuls of Hindi and Punjabi that form an integral part of the dialogue—and some called it a trilingual film, which doesn’t showcase the Indianness of the English spoken. English that is remolded to include mispronunciations and Hindi slang (“Kya maal hai. Hello sweetheart lovely,” says a catcaller to Radha).

Screen Shot 2021-05-11 at 12.46.42 AM

Discerning commentators found it difficult to admit an entire film existed in this “nonsense” language. Even the title itself is gibberish: In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones. The students in the film let us know what “those ones” are, but at the time of its release, the title was allegedly seen as inaccessible and alienating, and Roy was asked not to use it. But it’s exactly this mismatched, nonsensical language which makes for an endearing experience—a film ahead of its time, as people say.

The dialogue captures the porousness between Hindi and English. Code-switching in bilingualism is not new, but Hinglish, as Roy has written it, really grasps the way social mobility operates in a cosmopolitan city like Delhi. For the upwardly mobile, Hinglish is a language of survival. For those who cannot speak the hegemonic, pure, Sanskrit-ised Hindi, Hinglish helps to adapt to life in the capital. And in any case, North Indians have always spoken Hindustani, a Hindi that generously accommodates Urdu and other languages and dialects. Hinglish is arguably a “modern” version of Hindustani.

I’m interested in knowing what you think about the film, especially considering you’re not native Hindi speakers.

Allison Braden (AB): What a charming film! I agree that the movie’s collegial atmosphere and the students’ easy rapport depends largely on the code-switching; omitting the Hindi and Punjabi in favor of English only would have done away with one of the story’s most authentic elements. For viewers who don’t speak Hindi, some of the linguistic diversity naturally gets lost behind the subtitles, which appeared for the English, Hindi, and Punjabi dialogue in the version I watched, but the languages’ relationship to class remains evident. Arundhati Roy’s character, Radha, clearly struggles with the social mobility issue you bring up, which she articulates toward the end of the movie. She specifically mentions how her position as a student at the National School of Architecture requires her to speak a language that ninety percent of the country can’t understand. Social mobility is also explicitly referred to in the eponymous Annie’s initial thesis project—a plan to line India’s extensive train tracks with fruit trees and encourage the country’s flood of rural to urban migration to reverse course. Despite his enthusiasm for the idea—he even writes to the prime minister about it—his classmates respond dismissively. I was struck by the moment when his partner rebukes him after interpreting the plan as a suggestion that she return to her village. He explains that he’s speaking about a general issue, not her individual situation, but the exchange was such an effective illustration of how those larger issues affect so many individual lives.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Far from being objectionable, for those of us who find language to be an object of fascination, the varying, generous, and emancipated dialogue of the film is one of its overarching attractions—endearing, as you say, Suhasini. Though, of course, I can imagine how difficult the melange may have been to navigate sans subtitles. READ MORE…

Truth Strangled From Ego: On Noémi Lefebvre’s Poetics of Work

April 26, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Poetics of Work wears its designation of “novel” like an alibi.

Poetics of Work by Noémi Lefebvre, translated from the French by Sophie Lewis, Les Fugitives, 2021

The deluge of our paroxysmal century has initiated a current in public intellectualism: a (only negligibly desperate) return to the texts that had attempted to reconstruct human thought and society in the aftermath of WWII, the total fracturing of order having led to a global crisis of aimlessness. I too, like many others, found myself, in the last year, grabbing my copy of The Origins of Totalitarianism in search of some clarity: “There are, to be sure, few guides left through the labyrinth of inarticulate facts if opinions are discarded and tradition is no longer accepted as unquestionable.” Though one wants to resist the striking relevancy of Arendt’s preface to the 1950s edition—“It is as though mankind has divided itself between those who believed in human omnipotence . . . and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives”—it befits to understand its sustaining fact: our past is with us. Miles won by the powers of a corrupt engine are not achievements, but illusory, precarious compromises.

In Noémi Lefebvre’s Poetics of Work, the narrator is similarly attempting to decode the estranged world with resilient methods—reading (and re-reading) Klemperer’s The Language of the Third Reich, ingesting an extraordinary number of bananas, smoking what appears to be an unlimited supply of weed. Lyon, the city trembling in the background, is both a container and a newly unbreachable concept, reconstituting after waves of unrest caused by a proposed workers’ rights reform bill. There is a “strange new climate” that clots the senses, and one is struck, at the very beginning lines, by the great distances at the intersection between the private and the public. That we are trapped in our regarding, our helpless understandings, and the world, irreverent and oblivious, goes on anyway.

Poetics of Work wears its designation of “novel” like an alibi. It is not a story of a person, a place, or a time, and is entirely unconcerned with reality as a thing to be adopted or adapted. Instead, it is a radical assertion of the mind’s omnipresence, at once myriad and intact, the only entity capable of reconciling impossibilities—the physical with the abstract, the immense and the intimate, the existent and their ghosts in memory—by strange, incredulous methods of inquiry. By thinking. It is a transcript of the transcendental geometries created by thinking, as it flows and elevates, creating depths, creating beyond limits.

It is also, of course, an acknowledgement of the world going on, anyway. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 23, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Barbara Halla, José García Escobar, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest news from China, Albania, and Central America!

This week, our writers bring you news from China, Albania, and Central America. In China, the prestigious October Literature Prizes have been presented, with Jidi Majia awarded the 2020 Special Achievement Award; in Albania, the National Center for Books and Reading has revealed the winners of the its 2020–2021 translation fund; and in Central America, Carlos Fonseca and José Adiak Montoya have been featured on Granta‘s best young Spanish-language authors list. Read on to find out more! 

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting for China

October 十月, the renowned literature magazine founded in August 1978, gets its name from the downfall of China’s Gang of Four (a group of Communist Party leaders who took most of the blame for the Cultural Revolution’s devastations) in the October of 1976—upon which, as the line goes, the people of China were able to put behind them ten years of terror, and begin anew the aspirational proceedings of a new national context. As such, it is a publication that took upon itself the tremendous responsibility of delineating the rapidly changing cultural milieu, as well as rousing once more the imaginary and illuminating capacities of a language crippled from years of demolishment. It remains today one of the most prestigious publications of the nation, and the October Literature Prize amongst the highest honours awarded to Chinese writers.

On April 16, the sixteenth and seventeenth October Literature Prizes were presented in “the first town built on the Yangtze”—Lizhuang in Sichuan province. Of each edition, twelve writers were honoured in categories of Novel, Novella, Short Story, Essay, Poetry, and Special Achievement. Jidi Majia 吉狄马加 received the 2020 Special Achievement Award for his book-length poem, 裂开的星球 (The Split Planet), a totemic work that brings the soaring epics of myth into the startling light of the present, as inquiries to the human soul once again come to the poet’s consciousness; the work is emblematic of Jidi’s conviction that poetry holds a knowledge of the future. Also amongst the awardees was writer A Lai 阿来 for his novel 云中记 (In the Clouds), which describes the complete disappearance of a Tibetan village in the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and a local priest’s invocations of how one copes in the face of profound, replete obliteration. A full list of winners can be found here (Chinese only).

If you are to find yourself somewhere near Nanjing, it would be worth your time to visit the Tangshan Quarry Park, a devastatingly beautiful, painterly topography formed from a past limestone mine. It is also the site of the latest location of the Librairie Avant-Garde, a chain of bookshops well-respected for its literary selections, newly opening this month. Taking over the site of an abandoned processing plant, the newly opening Librairie is a stunning feat of contemporary architecture, preserving the red-brick facades rounded towers of its past life, while adopting cleanly to the slopes and gentle light of its natural surroundings. And even if you’re not the type to be impressed with elegant arches and staircases, the books should do; Librairie Avant-Garde is known especially for their revere of poetry, and the thousand-volume collection available here, ranging from Bei Dao to Pessoa, is given proper regard and pertinence. The opening event, held on April 17, also featured the first Librairie Avant-Garde Poetry Awards. READ MORE…

Anger, Sorrow, Compassion: On Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy

April 1, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Strange that to learn about one’s life, it is not sufficient to only live; one must also wander the halls of the past.

The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021

When I was a young girl, when beginnings were pure and brute in their unknowing, my mother ruled alone over the great realm of truths. There was the education in sensual matters (the fragrance of her unfettered in the mornings, porcelain spoons filled to overflow) and the introduction of worldly wonders (mittens, pinwheels, rock sugar), but mostly she was the insistence of one, axiomatic certainty: no one will ever love you the way I love you. She said it often, matter-of-factly, without any cadence of sentiment or tenderness, to comfort just as well to condemn—no one will ever love you the way your mama loves you. This line never wavered. It never tarnished. And it has stayed with me my whole life.

The memoir can be a baffling genre, and the writer’s memoir most of all. One spends their whole life under the thrall of converting subjectivity into objectivity, studying the essence of things and their multiplicity, studying the losing journey living matters embark on in order to arrive at the page—at the culmination of such a discursive, cognitive, and all-bearing life, what is left for the private language to make public?

“a whole person / is too much to take,” Tove Ditlevsen writes in her ninth volume of poems, Det runde vaerelse. Yet in her memoir, The Copenhagen Trilogy, she still commands the facts of her life with that same prolific, torrential force that has sprawled through dozens of texts, telling of madness and poverty and femininity in the various violences they enact upon a single body, all in a fastidious discernment of what can be made material by ink and paper. In the reading of this monument to a life of letters, one is left with the sense that yes—a whole person is too much to take, in the way that anything, forced to be seen with such unimpeded clarity, is.

To tell the story of a life, there is always the light shone into the intimate, unthinking crevices of origin. Before Tove Ditlevsen was a woman, she was a daughter. The excavation of memory is a conscious act; some things may rise to the surface in gasps and startles, but in Childhood—the first act of the trilogy—the author is herself grasping the glimmers of what can be told to make sense of the now. In the way of Hayden White, who said, “What is at stake is not, ‘What are the facts?’ but rather, how are the facts to be described in order to sanction one mode of explaining them rather than another.” The first fact then, is that there was a girl, and there was her mother. It is the people who know you from your first moments who hand you the legends by which the world can be deciphered, and this, as Ditlevsen goes on to tell, is the making of a tragedy. READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Persepolis

February 17, 2021  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Sarah Moore and Xiao Yue Shan

Persepolis stands out for being able to narrate the political through this fierce character.

“Although this film is universal, I wish to dedicate the prize to all Iranians,” spoke Marjane Satrapi as she accepted the Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival for Persepolis. Adapted from her bestselling graphic novel of the same name, Persepolis is the autobiographical story of young Marjane as she comes of age against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution. Although she left Iran for Europe as a teenager (briefly returning to Tehran at the age of nineteen) and has lived in France since 1993, her words clarify Iran’s continual importance to her, as well as its enduring presence throughout her work. Written in French, Persepolis is both a memoir about the challenges of growing up and finding an identity and a fierce, intelligent, and nuanced depiction of Iran following the 1979 Revolution. It is at once enlightening, wise, funny, horrific, melancholy, and profound. In the following conversation, Blog Editors Xiao Yue Shan and Sarah Moore consider this groundbreaking graphic novel, which has sold more than two million copies worldwide, and its 2007 film adaptation. 

Sarah Moore (SM): Interestingly, Marjane Satrapi co-directed and co-wrote the film, so in Persepolis we can see how the author wanted to transform the drawings to animation. Satrapi recreates her own work, and she does so in a way that is loyal to the graphic novel, whilst clearly making use of what a new form can offer. Marjane is not a typical heroine. She is bold, honest, relatable, and she is blunt about the uncertainties she experienced growing up. The film transfers her to the screen with remarkable success, without losing any of her spark, humour, or complexity; Persepolis stands out for being able to narrate the political through this fierce character. It is the story of Iranian politics and life, as well as the story of a girl traversing through adolescence. Satrapi has often stated that one individual is the only universal thing—so whilst we witness the Iranian Revolution, the killing of political prisoners, and the Iran-Iraq War, we also follow Marjane as she dreams of being a prophet, goes through puberty, falls in love, has her heart broken, and suffers depression. I think Persepolis is rare in being able to move so much of the atmosphere and energy of a text into film, and one that genuinely works as a cinematic narrative as well. Of course, the plot is condensed, especially during Marjane’s time in Vienna. But the subtlety of emotion and the fullness of the characters carry through to the film, as well as the blend of humour and tragedy. What did you think of the move from book to film in a general sense?

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): There is something more automatic in the transition between graphic novel to film; in textual adaptation, a director must enforce their own visions in a discrete—albeit secondary—architecture, but the graphic novel has an established visual vocabulary. It is a transition that is made with minimal sacrifice. Still, I think there is a certain magic that is rendered between the pages of a graphic novel, in which two frames are juxtaposed by not the logic of movement or chronology, but mimics instead how a scene is pieced together in the mind—with interrupting segments of memory, reference, and unconscious categorization. The rationale of film narrative has to preserve a certain logic: the sense that something is always coming up next, much more resembling the way that biography proceeds—in the distinct knowing that a life continues.

In an interview published in Fourth Genre, Marjane Satrapi says: “When you watch a picture, a movie, you are passive. Everything is coming to you. When you are reading comics, between one frame to the other—what is happening, you have to imagine it yourself . . . It is the only medium that uses the images in this way.”

persepolis 1 READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2021

February 3, 2021  |  in News  |  by Sarah Moore and Xiao Yue Shan

Dive into our wide-ranging tenth-anniversary issue with our blog editors.

In ten years of Asymptote, we’ve brought you a stunning array of texts, from writers familiar to those brought out newly into the light, words of conviction, ardor, invention, and precision have graced our pages, and our history-making Winter 2021 issue is no different. Featuring three new languages—Cebuano, Kahmiri, and Marathi—and deploying works from thirty-one countries in total, we are additionally featuring a curated selection of writings in our Brave New World Literature feature, which presents a myriad of talented voices navigating and graphing the changing landscape of world literature. Here, our blog editors are rounding up their selections of the pieces of the Winter 2021 edition that ignite and inspire.

The notion of a brave new world literature indicates—beyond the trepidations upon coming towards the unknown—the writer’s own, omnipresent fears about their own craft. In writing, one is always fighting against the futility of the word, how it falters to encompass even a single sensation, let alone the impatient fabric of the milieu. Each piece of writing is measured up against its time to determine its true subject, and the works included in our landmark Winter 2021 issue has to bear the comparison to a moment in history that comes close to being immeasurable, both in the frenzied proceedings of markable events, and in the psychic tracks it has carved across the globe, as each person was forced to consider—in distinctly unequal polarities of rumination or emergency—what it means to have lived through, to be living through, such a time.

This seamless interchange between writer, reader, and the present shared between them—the writing must level all three terrains while insulating its cargo of ideas. As I move through this marvelous gallery of texts that the latest issue of Asymptote gathers, I was struck by the various and telling constellations they formed with this precise moment.

In Jan Němec’s excerpts from Ways of Writing About Love, there’s a beguiling—and somewhat precious—self-conscious tone, rendered with grace by David Short, that runs through the three proses, almost as if the writer has already recognized that the bold display on the awning of the text—those two feared and wasted words, writing and love—has already pushed the language deeply into that murky deluge where only those two most indulgent peoples, writers and lovers, would willingly submerge themselves. But as the oral rhythm of the story taps itself out (Němec and Short are to be commended for their preternatural sense of how the voice paces itself), and the symphony of the mind conducts its singular cacophony, one comes to decipher its inner textures, in which writing and love are scrutinized for the particularly heightened quality one achieves during such occupations—attention to how time, and knowledge, and sensuality congregate. READ MORE…

The Shrouded Force of Fate: Anja Kampmann’s High as the Waters Rise

December 10, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

High as the Waters Rise fills the great blank canvas of loss with a precision that nourishes the fine contours of emotion.

High as the Waters Rise by Anja Kampmann, translated from the German by Anne Posten, Catapult, 2020

In the rich silt into which Titusville, Pennsylvania sinks its foundations, there was only one spot where it was possible to strike oil at the extraordinarily shallow depth of sixty-nine feet. On August 27, 1859, a small group of men, at the last-ditch orders of one Edwin Laurentine Drake, sank their pipes into the ground—guided by that unknown intuition which, in retrospect, looks terribly similar to fate—and black gold flowed forth. It is how the world flows forth from a single life, from one man’s fortune to a new forever, a radically altered world.

The idea of fate, its shrouded force, is perhaps the only abiding salve for the more devastating consequences of self-awareness. We look back on our times to construct an architecture of experiences, arranging fragments by our available logic to see what structure rises from the flood—what materializes in the aftermath to become that one reference by which we can define, or justify, our lives. For some reason, we always urge towards a singular narrative, despite sharing in the overarching suspicion that the life one leads is not one, but always many. The salvaging of this steadfast, solitary lesson is a comfort—that it indeed has all been for something. Without it, there would be only darkness, that eternal torrent, that deafening collapse.

Because Anja Kampmann begins High as the Waters Rise with an ending, we arrive at the temporary space between the shock of happening and the proceedings of salvage. Waclaw and Mátyás are longtime companions working on an oil rig, sharing in a rare and profound intimacy that dissipates the customary subscriptions of male camaraderie. When Mátyás vanishes from the ship in an incident so abrupt and absurd that it seems almost mystical, Waclaw is stirred into a potent, hypnotic grief—a grief that necessitates the sea, the infinity it conjures, which Kampmann calls upon in the vignette that opens the text: “There would only be sea, piling up and up. There would be no north or south. The water would swallow even the cries of the storm, which no ear would hear.” In the midst of these tides—which overwhelm the daily rituals of work, care, and thought—is the solitary island of memories, visions in which Mátyás is frayed at the edges by recall. Only these mirages anchor Waclaw: these small footholds of before, in the vast midnight of after.

READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Pedro Páramo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2020

October 19, 2020  |  in News  |  by Josefina Massot, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Our blog editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2020 issue!

Asymptote’s momentous fortieth issue features brand new work from thirty-two countries, a Dutch Literature Special Feature curated by 2020 International Booker Prize co-winner Michele Hutchison, and a literary roster spanning classics like Tagore, heavy hitters like Harwicz, and rising stars like Fabias. Dizzy yet? We’re here to help.

In the Chinese language, we never use the abstract noun of beauty. Instead, beauty is always a quality, a trait something possesses. There is, for example, no real way to express the notion that “beauty is all around us”; instead, one would say, “everything here is beautiful.” I find something wondrous in this distinct nature of what beauty is. It is a wandering state, a constantly mutating definition, a metamorphosing form that adapts to whatever subject it is applied to—never fixed, never permanent. Something is beautiful not for its appeal to the pure nature of beauty, but for its unique addition to the myriad of beauty’s appearances.

I was once again reminded of this definition while reading through the Fall 2020 issue, in which the writings from thirty-two countries have compiled and allowed the contours of literary beauty to vacillate and transmit. The various Englishes that evolve via translation do not subscribe necessarily to the English that certain texts are born to, instead bringing the colours and geometries of their own language, imparting a distinct and knowing pleasure. In Stella N’Djoku’s poems, the brief lines are vehicles for a cyclical musicality, emphasized by the rhyming Italian but also vivid in the tender translation of Julia Pelosi-Thorpe, sensitive in their lineation. The verses are potent with grief, but positions it within the great immeasurability of the world—creating a familiar dwelling for grace amidst pain, and the poem as our path towards that space.

As if yesterday today tomorrow
were not places
and were here now
in centuries.

In the two poems of Kashimiri poet Nādim, one is also reminded of the singular iterations of his the poet’s original language. As translator Sonam Kachru informs us in his translator’s note, “[Nādim] is thinking of [Kashmir’s] history—a history revealed, in part, through the history of its poetry.” There is then, an impression that we are not privy to when reading in translation, yet the poem still transmits the meditative, majestic quality of scanning the poetic horizons for something that reverberates from the past into the present, and back again. The stoic power of lines like:

I will not sing—
I will sing today no song of Nishat or Shalimar, no annealed song of waters
engraving terraced gardens, no bower songs of bedded flowers;
No soft songs flush or sweetly fresh, not green dew songs
nor songs gentle and growing—

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WIT Month: An Interview with Ginny Tapley Takemori

August 24, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

. . . a book is like a musical score, and readers are the musicians; a book is only complete with their performances.

As we approach the end of a wonderfully celebratory Women in Translation month, Asymptote is proud to present a week of content featuring women writers and translators who are working at the top of their game. Since the first WIT Month in 2014, advances and improvements have been made for women working in global letters, but the significance of continuing to read and translate women’s voices remains. The act of reading women is indistinguishable from the act of reading the world—a truth we must continue to recognize.

First up in our spotlight series is translator from the Japanese, Ginny Tapley Takemori. Though Japanese literature is a landscape built by men and women alike, the nation-specific politics and postulations of gender makes for thought-provoking discussion as one examines the truths and concepts reflected in its literature. An advocate for women translators and writers in Japan, Tapley Takemori has translated award-winning texts by Sayaka Murata, Kyoko Nakajima, Kaori Fujino, among many others. In the following dialogue, she speaks with blog editor Xiao Yue Shan about her prolific endeavours of translating such vital, well-loved work.

Takemori

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): While there isn’t necessarily a conspicuous lack of literature by women in Japan, the country’s publishing market does seem entrenched in a gendered hierarchy, with books by women largely being marketed towards and read by women. Has this been your experience in navigating Japan’s literature? And if so, do you think it has affected the way women in Japan write?

Ginny Tapley Takemori (GTT): I don’t think there is a lack of books by women—on the contrary, there are lots of women writers! A lot of women working in publishing as well, for that matter, and I don’t really notice works by women writers being particularly marketed towards and read by women. I wonder what the stats for that might reveal? There may be some truth in it, given the historical development of women’s literature in Japan. From my own present observations, however, I’d say it’s true in certain cases; for instance, Boys’ Love manga is written by women for women, but it’s super niche. In 2017, Waseda Bungaku published their whopping tome Joseigo (女性号, Women’s Edition) and it sold out in a week! I’m not convinced that only women bought it. One thing that is clear is that women are winning the big literary prizes (about par with men for the Akutagawa and the Naoki). And I don’t get the impression that these prizewinning authors are writing specifically for women at all.

XYS: Yes, I definitely agree that women have quite a prominent, well-regarded presence in Japanese literature—arguably more so than in most other countries! Yet as you said, there are certain indications in the historical development of Japanese literature that subject matter is ingrained with gendered notions: women engaging more with the occupations of day-to-day life, men with politics and metaphysical matters.

GTT: That has been the case until not so long ago, but I’m not sure the boundaries are so clear nowadays. There’s an enormous variety in women’s writing now in terms of genre, writing style, and subject matter. I don’t think women writers are content to be confined to any particular subject or style, and in some cases, they explode these boundaries in quite spectacular and innovative ways, like Sayaka Murata with Earthlings. Some also deliberately revisit literature of the past, like Hiromi Kawakami in The Ten Loves of Nishino (trans. Allison Markin Powell), harking back to The Tale of Genji. There are critics who claim that contemporary writers are nowhere near the standard of the greats like Mishima, Soseki, et al (all men, naturally), but I have a different view of literature myself.

XYS: Would you say that one of the aims of Strong Women, Soft Power—the collective you co-founded with fellow translators Allison Markin Powell and Lucy North—is to direct a spotlight on women writers in Japan, and in doing so, direct the country towards gender equality, as well as greater awareness and resistance to sexism?

GTT: Strong Women, Soft Power is first and foremost a translators’ collective, and our aim is to give Japanese women writers a voice to speak for themselves through translation. It is not our intention to impose any forms of feminism or feminist critique on them; we simply aim to create awareness of their work and highlight the imbalance in the translation of men and women writers (a phenomenon not exclusive to Japan). At the same time, we offer a platform for promoting work by women writers and to some extent for women translators, although we do collaborate regularly with our male colleagues too. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 21, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Daljinder Johal, José García Escobar, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest literary news from China, the United Kingdom, and Central America!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from the United Kingdom, Central America, and China. In China, the Shanghai Book Fair explodes with glitz and glamour in suspicious contrast with a supposed dedication to books and reading. In the United Kingdom, important translation mentorship and courses are adapting to online programmes to continue to discover and help emerging translators. And in Central America, Centroamérica Cuenta festival has created an exciting programme for its online events, whilst Guatemala’s Catafixia Editorial has announced new publications by three famed Guatemalan and Chilean poets. Read on to find out more! 

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting for China

On August 12, the 2020 Shanghai Book Fair began its week-long occupation of the grandiose Shanghai Exhibition Center, bringing with it the usual munificence of new publications, symposiums, readings, and exhibitions. While large-scale, highly attended events may seem unwise at the moment, organizers ensured the public that plenty of precautions were being taken, with the keywords of “safety” and “brilliance” operating in tandem to cohere the theme of this year’s fair. Brilliant safety—or, alternatively, safe brilliance.

True to China’s dedication to establishing itself as a technological trailblazer and the foremost nation in holding dominion over the future—accentuated by the threat of COVID-19 against physical bookstores (and brick-and-mortar spaces in general)—this year’s fair adopted the modus operandi of utilizing the new to reform the old, as opposed to incorporating novel contents and technologies into the existing framework. What this means for the ancient medium of reading and writing soon became clear as the fair revealed a buffet of stratagems to morph the existing methods into multi-faceted, multi-sensory activities. Featuring isolated reading “pods,” cloud-based tours and libraries, virtual reality reading “experiences,” augmented reality reading “supplements,” “sound castles” which seemingly exist solely to provide to children books void of their need to be actually read, interactive reading featuring audio-visual installations, and robot “writing.” The embarrassment of instruments and innovations—which have become increasingly familiar to the arguably more tech-savvy Chinese population—appears to be entirely genuine in its motivation to increase readerships and engagement with literature, but also has the slightly queasy effect of concealing the book, and the function of reading itself, underneath a nebulous aggregate of superficial entertainments and twinkly charms. This is exemplified perhaps most sardonically by the AI library in the aforementioned sound castle, in which one may pick up a paper book and immediately be transported into an immersive, intuitive reading platform—what, one is likely to wonder, is the point of this book, when it performs a function identical to that of a switch or a button?

This obligation of technology to expedite and accentuate our experiences strikes me as one of its most suspect ends, in compliance with its subduing and totalizing tendencies; those among us who love reading acknowledge it as an active, pursuant undertaking, and engorging the transference of language with manufactured visions and kinetics undermines its innate and sublime power to invoke those senses and impressions by the individuating motor of human imagination. As enthusiasm for, and adoption of such technologies rise, a decline in creatively productive, sensually complex language will surely follow. Safe brilliance, indeed.
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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2020

July 20, 2020  |  in News  |  by Edwin Alanís-García, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Oral poetry, plague journals, and surrealist masters: our blog editors are here with their selections from the Summer 2020 issue!

With our Summer 2020 issue, Asymptote has brought together new work from thirty-one countries drawn under “This Strange Stillness,” acknowledging all the fearful, sorrowful, and newly arriving things that are in great need of language. It is a timely collection, though we also hope that it is a lasting one, as the texts of this issue remains full of beauty, grace, craft, as well as a knowledge of these unnerving times. If you are in need of a place to start, let our blog editors be your guide.

In these varying todays that blend into one another, I am thinking of Audre Lorde: “seeking a now that can breed / futures.” With the daily cycles of news, statistics, and corresponding tides of political turbulence, the act of reading is accompanied by the weight of scrutiny into factual truths, and the attempts to form a set of principles out of them. All this in the hope that the formidable now will be rescued into a manageable, comprehensible future. As readers and thinkers, we find ourselves in the position of insisting on the importance that literature has always taken, yet literature that thinks only of its utility is powerless—any potency can only result from a craft that knows equally of its form as it does its function.

In perusal of the Asymptote Summer 2020 issue, I returned to indulging in the pure pleasures of reading—linguistic play, secret collaborations of words, and the mysterious harmony of object, image, sound, and divinity that culminates in the sublimity of poetry. I took a particular joy in the Iranian lickos, an anonymous collection of the indigenous, oral poetic form. They are brief, curious, and contain both the wideness and aliveness of a language meant to be passed between two people. The couplets and tercets, translated brilliantly and cohesively by Mahdi Ganjavi, Amin Fatemi, and Mansour Alimoradi, possess a fluidity and attention that draw the beauty of simple conversation, and the immensity of a single day’s emotions, sharply into view. From petty humour to profound loss, their visual simplicity are an entryway into the profound origins of a poetics.

There is also a great vivacity in Sanja Mihajlovik-Kostadinovska’s “(In)Finite Models of the Short Story,” in which the concept of narrative itself is taken on a wild spin throughout its wanderings into people, places, things, feelings, and myths. Too often we are distracted by semantics, and Mihajlovik-Kostadinovska, along with translator Igor Popovski, bring the reader back into the exhilarating disarray of imagining, reorienting the story back into control of itself. READ MORE…