Posts by Xiao Yue Shan

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.
READ MORE…

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…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 10, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Clémence Lucchini, Vivian Szu-Chin Chih, and Xiao Yue Shan

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

June 12, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Anna Aresi and Xiao Yue Shan

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

June 8, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

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

May 18, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

[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

May 15, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Poupeh Missaghi, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

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

May 14, 2020  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Sarah Moore and Xiao Yue Shan

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 original—are 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. 

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

April 24, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Andrew Adair, and Xiao Yue Shan

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

April 20, 2020  |  in News  |  by Sarah Moore and Xiao Yue Shan

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.

READ MORE…

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

April 18, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

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…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

April 3, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andreea Scridon, Barbara Halla, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest news from Albania, France, and Japan!

Many countries around the world are now weeks into their lockdown, but literature continues to thrive and is necessarily concerned with the current crisis. In Albania, literary events are moved online whilst booksellers are expected to continue working; in France, a Romanian writer and opponent of the Romanian communist regime sadly passed away from coronavirus. In Tokyo, pandemic literature sees a revival. Read on to find out more! 

Barbara Halla, Assistant Editor, reporting from Albania

There was a moment when it felt like an early April literary dispatch from Albania would just be a chance to mourn the events that I was excited about but that never came to pass. Albania registered its first cases of COVID-19 on March 8 and went into full lockdown less than 48 hours after. That obviously means that for almost the entire duration of March, literary news and activities have been scarce. There was one event that I was sad to see postponed: a panel and discussion to be held on the lost voices of Albanian women writers, something that was long overdue.

That being said, Albanians with a literary inclination have found other ways to remain engaged with their reading lists or interests. Radical Sense is a reading group that meets weekly in Tirana to read and discuss radical leftist texts at 28 November, a versatile bookstore/safe space for readers and activists, among its many other uses. Although the physicality of the charming attic where these discussions are held is sacred to the group, participants have taken a page from universities and workplaces across the globe and have just held their first online book club meeting through Zoom. Readings and discussion happen in English, so for those who live in Albania and are interested in participating, you can check in with the lovely owners of 28 November here for more details. READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Solaris

March 30, 2020  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Sarah Moore and Xiao Yue Shan

[Tarkovsky's] films are not designed to entertain—their pleasure comes from the possibility of being forever changed by seeing them.

Our second feature for Asymptote at the Movies is Andrei Tarkvosky’s Solaris, a 1972 Soviet masterpiece based on Polish writer Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel of the same name. Arguably one of the greatest science fiction films ever made, the plot focuses on psychologist Kris Kelvin and his arrival at the space station orbiting Solaris, a planet whose ocean had been the focus of intense scientific study for decades. As the two other scientists aboard behave increasingly strangely, Kelvin discovers that they are being “visited” by figures of their past, resurrected in the space station. A complex exploration of man’s place in the universe, his quest for knowledge, and the meaning of love and life, Solaris is a triumph.

Sarah Moore (SM): Sometimes it appears that a novel exists, destined for a certain filmmaker, as if it had in fact been written for such a connection. So it is with Lem’s novel and Tarkvosky; Solaris lends itself perfectly to Tarkovsky’s slow, profound meditations on human nature, the purpose of existence, memory, and the function of art. Lem’s novel is classified as science fiction but (as with many works of science fiction) incorporates a wealth of philosophy and spirituality. Tarkovsky unabashedly confronted the big questions. His films are not designed to entertain—their pleasure comes from the possibility of being forever changed by seeing them. Both the novel and the film are immensely detailed; whenever I watch Tarkovsky’s film, I am always struck by how much there is to comprehend, how much more there is to be contemplated each time. Perhaps a good place to begin this discussion, therefore, is with Tarkovsky’s own impression of Lem:

When I read Lem’s novel, what struck me above all were the moral problems evident in the relationship between Kelvin and his conscience, as manifested in the form of Hari. In fact if I understood, and greatly admired, the second half of the novel—the technology, the atmosphere of the space station, the scientific questions—it was entirely because of that situation, which seems to me to be fundamental to the work. Inner, hidden, human problems, moral problems, always engage me far more than any questions of technology; and in any case technology, and how it develops, invariably relates to moral issues, in the end that is what it rests upon. My prime sources are always the real state of the human soul, and the conflicts that are expressed in spiritual problems.

Tarkovsky’s preference for the human problems over the technological is clear in his huge re-structuring of the plot—or rather, his ability to lengthen the chronology. Whilst the action of Lem’s novel is restricted solely to the space station, such action contributes only three-quarters of Tarkovsky’s film. In a forty-minute prelude, the day before Kelvin’s departure to Solaris, we see him at his parents’ home, surrounded by lush nature. Long sequences of forests, flowing streams, underwater reeds, and large ponds contrast with the sparse, sterile settings of the space station that will appear later. Here, his complicated relationship with his father is introduced and he burns documents over an outside fire, preparing for a total rupture from his life on earth. For a text that so explicitly posits the choice between remaining on Solaris in the pursuit of scientific study and returning to earth, beginning the film in such a naturalistic setting is a huge gesture that places the human at its centre. How do you feel about the tension between “the scientific questions” and the “hidden, human problems” in the film? READ MORE…