Posts by Xiao Yue Shan

Asymptote at the Movies: Pedro Páramo

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 QuixoteThe 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

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—

READ MORE…

WIT Month: An Interview with Ginny Tapley Takemori

. . . 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

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

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 GanjaviAmin 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…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest literary developments from Taiwan, the US, and Japan!

The disparities of COVID-19’s grip over us is becoming gradually more apparent as certain countries celebrate recovery, while others continue to shelter in place. In Taiwan and Japan, processions are resuming after the interruption, with film festivals and award announcements taking over headlines, while in the US the situation remains somehow at once unpredictable and static. In Taiwan, reportage literature seeks to reset old injustices; in Japan, the prestigious Akutagawa Prize reveals its nominees; and in the US, a beloved literary event is put off for another year. Read our editors’ dispatches from the ground here!

Vivian Szu-Chin Chih, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Taiwan

The 2020 United Daily News Literary Prize has been awarded to the Malaysia-born Sinophone novelist, Chang Kuei-hsing (張貴興), who has been living in Taiwan for the last four decades. The prestigious award went to the author’s latest novel, 野豬渡河 (Wild Boar Crosses the River) which depicts his hometown in Malaysia, Sarawak—a city occupied by the Japanese in the 1940s. Asymptote has previously featured Chang’s “Siren Song” (translated by Anna Gustafson) in our Winter 2016 issue.

The Taiwanese author notable for his reportage literature, Lan Bozhou (藍博洲), will soon have new book published by Taipei’s INK Publishing in July: 尋找二二八失蹤的宋斐如 (Searching for the Missing Song Feiru in the February 28 Incident ). Consistent with Lan’s previous focus on giving a voice to the victims of Taiwan’s White Terror (1947-1987), this new work again inquires into the difficult question of the whereabouts of Song Feiru, a Taiwanese intellectual and founder of a newspaper criticizing the government in the 1940s. The namesake of the book was kidnapped by the Kuomintang and went missing after the outbreak of the infamous February 28 Incident in 1947.

Although the global situation of COVID-19 has been rapidly evolving with uncertainty, Taiwan has luckily arrived at a relatively safe status, and many local activities are resuming this summer as a result. The island-wide screenings of Xin Qi’s (辛奇, 1924-2010) films from mid-July to late-November, and the Golden Horse Classic Film Festival (with the theme of the beloved Italian director, Federico Fellini) from late-July to mid-August, are among the events leading this trend of recovery in Taipei. Xin Qi was one of the few prolific and prominent Taiwanese-language film directors in the 1960s, whose five cross-genre cinematic works have been digitally restored by the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute, and will be screened around Taiwan’s theatres, both new and old, during the festival. As for the Golden Horse Classic Film Festival, it is a part of the global tribute to Fellini’s 100th birthday anniversary (“Fellini 100”), and will broadcast twenty-four of the director’s films, most of which are 4K versions, freshly restored.  READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

Find out what's going on in the literary worlds of Japan and Italy in this week's update!

Our editors bring you the latest news in global literature from Italy and Japan this week as COVID-19 continues to make its presence known, the one-hundredth anniversary of Gianni Rodari’s birth is celebrated, and traditionally paper-dependant Japan starts investing in a virtual literary presence. Read on for the scoop!

Anna Aresi, Copy Editor, reporting from Italy:

As is well known to people in the industry, the COVID-19 pandemic has deeply impacted the publishing sector on many levels. In particular, the cancellation of most book fairs has deprived many of an important opportunity to meet fellow publishers, authors, translators and illustrators, to discover new releases to potentially translate, and set up those professional relationships that keep the industry alive. However, as we’ve seen over and over again in these months, the scope of the pandemic’s impact has often been countered with inventive, creative solutions to hold these same events in a different format.

One of the book fairs that had to be canceled was the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, one the most important events for children’s literature, taking place in Bologna, Italy, every spring. Originally scheduled to be postponed, it soon became clear that holding the BCBF in praesentia was not going to be possible, and the event happened virtually this past May.

One of the highlights of this year’s edition was the celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of Gianni Rodari’s birth. Rodari is perhaps the single most important author of children’s books in Italy, having influenced and shaped generations of students, teachers, authors, and illustrators with his poems, short stories, books, and theoretical essays. The BCBF’s website hosts a virtual exhibition, Illustrators for Gianni Rodari, showcasing the works of many Italian artists who’ve illustrated Rodari’s books. In particular, Beatrice Alemagna, an award-winning Italian illustrator based in Paris, participates with her new illustrations for A sbagliare le storie (Telling Stories Wrong), in which an absent-minded grandfather keeps making mistakes when trying to tell the story of Red Riding Hood to her granddaughter, who has to continually correct him. As anyone who’s ever read to young children knows, consistency is key when telling them stories (over and over and . . . over again!), yet as the book shows, deviations from the norm might be as fun and rewarding as the canonical version. Alemagna’s beautiful new visual interpretation of this classic will hopefully be brought to other languages soon! READ MORE…

“It’s a floating world”: Yasuhiro Yotsumoto on Japanese Poetics

I’m very much interested now in the type of poet—not only in Japan but outside as well—who tries to cultivate resistance.

The life and work of poet Yasuhiro Yotsumoto is a testament to the conviction and omnipresence of poetics, profuse in every aspect of human life. In nearly twenty volumes of poetry and criticism, he has interrogated, in verse and prose, the reality and abstractions of family, romance, corporate fiscal structuring, Japanese linguistics, culture both global and insular, a struggle against cancer, and, in doing so, has revealed something essential about poetry as it coheres with all other ideas and facts. Having displaced himself from Japan by the means of an extremely successful career in business—something he calls his “real” job, despite every indication in his manner of speaking that he considers it a mere occupation—Yotsumoto has lived in Munich since 1994, and at the time of our meeting, has just begun a very tedious and significant transition back into Japanese daily life and society.

Despite meeting all the qualifications for a writer defined by (self-imposed) exile and exodus, Yotsumoto has cultivated a significant reputation in Japanese letters. As editor of the admired literary quarterly Beagle, host of the poetry podcast Poetry Talks, Japanese national editor of Poetry International, and diligent translator of poets ranging from Li Bo to Simon Armitage, he admitted casually, without any pretension or arrogance, that he is now considered somewhat of an insider (a word that he would go on to elaborate upon) within literary circles. We conversed in English, which he professed that he is able to “speak for about two hours, then the battery runs out and I start speaking nonsense.”

I met him on the very day the state of emergency—enforced within Japan due to the COVID-19 epidemic—was due to be lifted. In Yamashita Park, plentiful with roses and the bare shoulders and legs emblematic of spring-turning-summer, we ate ice cream cones overlooking the waters of Tokyo Bay. The conversation was peppered with his generous laughter, silences full of thought, and interruptions typical of the world, busy and vivid, brilliantly alive.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): It’s impressive to be able to balance—what I imagine to be—a very heavy workload on your day job with such a prolific poetry career.

Yasuiro Yotsumoto (YY): That’s right. I wouldn’t be able to do that if it was prose—novels, or something. But poetry is okay; I can finish it before breakfast every morning. And I write everyday.

XYS: I find that most Japanese writers have this very regulated schedule.

YY: Well, I always wanted to keep this balance. It was a challenge I put upon myself, the balance between “real life” and writing. And I made that conscious decision as I graduated from university, that I could take a very cultural job—copywriter, or something—but I somehow decided not to do that, and instead I pursued two separate worlds.

XYS: Mutually exclusive.

YY: Well, mutually exclusive in terms of lifestyle, but my first book was about corporate finance theory. I went to the University of Pennsylvania and got my MBA in corporate finance in my twenties, and I wrote a book of poetry by applying such theories of the Black-Scholes option model, etc., to describe Japanese society at that time—which was peaking economically, and everyone was sensing that the burst of the bubble was not so far away, yet we kept going and going and going. That was an overlap. So I had always been an outsider amongst Japanese poets; I live outside [of Japan], and I write about things that have never been touched before. I try to bring in this kind of prosaic, very banal, everyday subject into the domain of poetry. READ MORE…

City of Signs, Empire of Signs

[Barthes] comes to know Japan not for her certain qualities, but for what she inspires within him about the art of living.

“If I want to imagine a fictive nation . . .” With those words, Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs, his study of Japan and its available reality, begins. Going on to infuse the elements of Japanese existence—everything from haiku to monolids—with his singular manner of interrogation, the Japan that Barthes illustrates is one that exemplifies the mental journeys that arise in correspondence with physical ones. Now, fifty years after its publication, Xiao Yue Shan takes contemporary Tokyo as a point of origin to discuss the Japan that corresponds to the Barthian instinct for examination, and how his fascination with this country’s collection of signs is a direct result of the city’s peculiar composition.

The urban environment is a contract between humans and their machines, between conscious and unconscious topographies, between vessels and inhabitants. It is a haven of both creativity and consumption, a spatial and experiential experiment. Of its understanding there comes a need for the discretions of a knowingly discontinuous cognizance; it is impossible to know the city wholly, and there is also no need for such knowledge.

In Tokyo there is a discreet strangeness in the negotiation between the city and its inhabitants—movements are organized covertly around narratives and histories. All that is built requires a reverence for what was there before. The past is hidden and present, the city is whole and in parts. When Roland Barthes arrived here in 1966, he recognized the enormous task that it assigned to him, that “Japan has afforded him a situation of writing.” The resulting 1970 text, Empire of Signs, is a luxury of the imagination, in which a mind perforates the scene with both an intent to investigate and an egoism that affords one the comfort to discern and judge. Japan was an amalgam of facts and fictions, to be navigated with all the directions of thinking.

Foreigners assign themselves to the subject of Tokyo with a fascination first. To achieve the perfect balance between knowledge and impressions, of experiences both living and mythical. In his assignment Barthes accomplished a passion of translation, which is to fearlessly integrate the insights of the foreigner with the extant, accumulated comprehensions of the local. Where someone who was born and lived the entirety of her life in Tokyo may have accumulated a wealth of notes in the slow, linear fashion of smallness to bigness—from the room to the home, from the home to the neighbourhood, from the neighbourhood to its vicinity, and from thereon the entirety—the foreigner comes to involve herself with the city via a series of shocks, of enthrallment with “ordinary” things, of curiosity that encourages in turns awe and despair, and of constant referral to her lack of knowing. Inevitably one sees what the other cannot, and inevitably in this interchange an enormously valuable body of knowledge arises. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

Our editors bring you the latest news from Japan, Iran, and the UK!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Japan, Iran, and the United Kingdom: in Japan, Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War has been adapted into a manga; in Iran, readers have been mourning the loss of renowned translator Najaf Daryabandari; and in the UK, Hay Festival has revealed its impressive digital programme. Read on to find out more! 

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting from Japan

There is a methodology in culture-specific product adoption that Japan has perfected in particular: a Starbucks in Kyoto’s Ninenzaka features traditional tatami flooring in an architecturally nostalgic teahouse; otherwise Italian pasta dishes are regularly indoctrinated with mentaiko (pollack roe); and well-regarded literature from other parts of the world are often adapted into the country’s most loved and widely emblematic artform—comics, or manga.

The latest text to receive this treatment is Svetlana Alexievich’s startling, emotive oral history of Soviet women who had experienced firsthand the barbarity and naked humanity of World War II. Written with the avidity of enthralled listening that has become inextricable from her literary style, in turns stoic and breaking, of both soft and difficult memory, it is a book that mends the distance between history and the body. It originally appeared in Japan as 戦争は女の顔をしていない in 2016 via the translation of 三浦 みどり Midori Miura (who had also translated works by Anatoly Pristavkin and Anna Politkovskaya), and can now also be found in the form of serialized comics, drawn and written by prolific manga artist 小梅 けいと Keito Koume, with editorial assistance from fellow comic and Soviet history specialist 速水螺旋人 Rasenjin Hayami. READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Lolita, Double Feature

This week, we discuss Nabokov's most famed novel, adapted by Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne.

Of Lolita, that startling, monumental novel that—by Vladimir Nabokov’s own words—”completely eclipsed [his] other works,” of a story that continues to enthral, shock, and conjure up long-winding debates since its 1955 publication, of this classic that stunned the world . . . 

Though Lolita was originally written in English, Nabokov himself was, as Alfred Kazin said, “a man who turned statelessness into absolute strength.” In addition to being a well-respected translator of Russian poetry, he was also the one who took on the laborious task of translating Lolita back to his native language (albeit in bootleg copies, as it was banned in the Soviet Union until 1989). Though most authors would be reluctant at the thought of translating their own work, difficulties on Nabokov’s part was perhaps mediated by his translation philosophy, which was centred around the existence of a greater metaphysical language, of which all the various iterations of the same text—including the originalare fragments. 

In consideration of this greater language, of which the spirit of a text surges and infuses its renditions, we must also think of Lolita as study of an immense mind as it navigates the English language anew, amidst a collision of intercultural practices, literary traditions, and theories. In choosing this subject for the latest Asymptote at the Movies, our blog editors consider not only Lolita‘s textuality, but also the “collision of interpretations” that led to its varied existences. The films, directed by Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne, are supreme examples of the intertextuality, as defined by Brian McFarlane, that adopts the original novel as a resource, as opposed to the source. They are celebrations of translation as a wholly original art.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): It’s hard to think of an author less befitting of cinematic adaptation than Vladimir Nabokov—that indisputable master of runaway language, his generous verbosity that creates multifarious, dramatic textures . . . It defies the instantaneous appreciation for images. That is not to say that Nabokov isn’t a distinctly vivid writer (what is more lucid than that single configuration: “four feet ten in one sock”?), but that his work is the embodiment of that singular textual quality of transformation and reference—one word simultaneously impresses on the next while calling back towards the previous, a line denoting memory is startled by its knowledge of the present. The writer, in impeccable craft, moves from the tactile to the figurative to the emotional to the sensual. 

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

This week's literary news from Mexico, Argentina, and China!

With much of the world now weeks into lockdown, our writers bring you news of its continued impact upon both the publishing and bookselling industries, as well as on writers’ own responses. In Mexico, authors such as Olivia Teroba and Jazmina Barrera have continued to engage with audiences; in Argentina, bookshops have been embracing solidarity to overcome the current challenges; and in China, the lifting of the lockdown in Wuhan has brought fresh poetry broadcasts and publications along with it. Read on to find out more! 

Andrew Adair, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

Here in Mexico City, the lockdown has been largely optional, with much frustration over President López Obrador’s casual, relaxed approach before a global pandemic. Until a few weeks ago, there was no lockdown whatsoever, which left people to follow their own moral code when it came to deciding what to stop doing and when. Now, restrictions are in place and movement in the city has calmed down, though with such lackadaisical direction, many still continue to gather. Of course, many more have no choice but to work, as Mexico is the second-most impoverished country in Latin America (Brazil being the first) and many live, not week-to-week, but day-to-day.

And so, with that, we’ve moved online with the rest of the world, shifting many literary conversations to all manner of digital platforms: Zoom, Instagram, YouTube Live—surely you know the drill by now.

One particularly busy author is Olivia Teroba, a newcomer whose first publication of feminist-edged essays, Un lugar seguro (A Safe Place) arrived last year from Paraíso Perdido. Teroba has given workshops and talks through various institutions and bookstores, most notably her Zoom videoconference “New Genealogies” with Casa Tomada, an independent cultural space which has done an impressive job of moving online.

On April 24, la UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) celebrated International Book Day with a series of rousing talks from a wide range of authors as part of their new program #CulturaUNAMenCasa. Topics included, appropriately, “Reading poetry in digital environments,” “Books that save our lives,” and “Feminine Verse in Latin America”—a talk between Claudia Masin and Mexico City-based poet/translator Robin Myers. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2020

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

Asymptote’s Spring 2020 issue is here, featuring new work from thirty countries and twenty-four languages, as well as a Galician Poetry Special Feature. Not sure where to begin? Our blog editors can help, as they reveal their top picks from the new issue below:

It’s difficult to write, these days. In this state of global precarity, wrenching us from our patterns into stasis, the days stretch towards their completion; daily urgencies take on a more sinister tone, heightened by circuity. There is indeed time, heavier in our stock, yet the dilemma remains: the heaviness, the disintegration of form, the failure of words to justify their surroundings. After a while I realized that it is because in order to write, and to write forcefully, the writer must be able to imagine a world in which their text survives, and contributes. Yet the time has arrived, much sooner than anticipated, of a future in pieces. I’ve never been one to envision literature as a portal for escape—it seems to me that the most sublime of texts enforce us into the deep centre of the world we live in. So from Asymptote’s Spring 2020 issue—a wondrous collection of work that arrives, across boundaries, to strike a new presence—I selected certain poems that bring a special dignity to our capacity for visioning.

Natalia Toledo’s poems, translated from the Zapotec and Spanish by Clare Sullivan and Irma Pineda, stir vibrant tremors across the senses. Precise in intimate reference and conditioned with everyday magic, her language is of the sacred nature we infuse into the ordinary in order to contextualize the world to our definitions. Take “Prayer”:

For those days when the sun burnished my hair
And my smile was the blinding bright of a salt crust.
For the photographs stuck to a piece of cardboard,
their swift migration to our family altar.
For the petate and its map of urine stains,
for the twisted trees upon the rippled water.
For all that I made into a life.
I sing.

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

A week ago, I couldn’t have imagined this feeling, passing the Spring Festival in Wuhan locked-down like this.

For this week’s edition of In This Together, we present a non-fiction text from the prolific Wuhan-based writer, Fei Wo Si Cun 匪我思存 (psudonym of Ai Jingjing 艾晶晶), who has been publishing a series of texts, collected under the title The Wuhan Battle Diaries, since the first day of the city’s lockdown. Xiao Yue Shan, the translator of this text, explains the significance of these diaries:

The news in China came at the end of the lunar year; a particularly ill-fated time, as the holiday season piques the highest rate of travel both within and outside of the country. We did not know then what we know now—how quickly the virus would spread, how drastic its impact would be on our daily lives, and how, in a brief few weeks, the whole world would come to experience the same fear, trepidation, uncertainty, and weariness that the people of Wuhan awoke to in the thick of its winter.

Fei Wo Si Cun is an incredibly popular writer; her works, largely tales of love and desire, have made her a household name and launched her into screenwriting as well as media production. When the lockdown was first announced, her’s was one of the first voices sounding in response, and it has since persisted in its accounts. Her intimate, informal language charted the city’s tragedies—sometimes pragmatically, sometimes despairingly, yet always indelible with the sense of survival, and interwoven with a sense of intimate locality.

There are cities that become synonymous with their devastation—Wuhan, which had previously occupied a low tier in the global consciousness, will likely be bound to the COVID-19 pandemic for the enduring future. Yet, in Fei’s tender depictions of the city, we become privy to its actualities; there is a redemptive grace that even the most devastated places may persist as a home, as somewhere precious. Many of us around the world are finding ourselves suddenly estranged from our localities, which have been cleared of their familiarities and comforts, but it is my wish, in translating this, that a Wuhan woman’s love for her city may remind us of what we cherished of these places, of what we wish now to save.

Awaiting Spring Under Quarantine

by Fei Wo Si Cun 匪我思存

These days, I’ve been staying up late. Yesterday, at around two in the morning, when suddenly news came online that Wuhan would halt all forms of public transportation—subways, airports, train stations, and any other method of leaving the city—my chest thudded. First arrived the knowledge that these measures indicated the severity of this epidemic, then came the disbelief, that I would actually witness a lockdown like this in my lifetime. READ MORE…