Essays

Silencing Tales for Tolerance in Hungary: Wonderland Belongs to Everyone

November 11, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Jozefina Komporaly

Rather than privileging a didactic tone, these stories continue a counter-cultural tradition of social critique and championing human rights.

Meseország mindenkié (Wonderland Belongs to Everyone) is a Hungarian collection of classic fairy tales, adapted and retold with characters from minority or marginalised groups. Yet since its release in September, it has caused astonishing controversy and rebuke from far-right politicians, including MP Dóra Dúró literally destructing a copy. Such opposition is propagating intolerance and homophobia—the antithesis of the book’s inclusive and accepting values. Despite such an alarming reaction, the publisher sold out of its first print run. But the threat of censorship still looms large. In this essay, Jozefina Komporaly explores the political circumstances that have created such hostility, as well as the book’s valuable contribution to Hungarian children’s literature. 

The publication of a new volume of tales for children is usually exciting news for early readers and their families, for anyone young at heart, and for those following trends in children’s literature. It is also likely to be relevant to schools and nurseries, but it is rarely breaking news. If discussed in the media at all, it tends to belong to the realm of children’s programmes or cultural platforms. In recent weeks, however, this rule of thumb has been overturned in Hungary, where the subject of unconventional books addressed to young readers has sparked not only heated debates, but deplorable reactions from politicians and public figures.

The first time I heard about these incidents, in September 2020, was via a Facebook post alerting me to Hungarian MP Dóra Dúró tearing up the children’s book Meseország mindenkié (Wonderland Belongs to Everyone) and literally putting it through the shredder. She allegedly could not bear to see wonderland turn into a land of “the aberrant.” Dúró is a member of Mi Hazánk Mozgalom (Our Homeland Movement), a far-right satellite party of the ruling Fidesz, and news of her intervention came from her own social media presence when she boasted about destroying the book during an online press conference. According to her, “homosexual princes are not part of Hungarian culture,” and her aim was to lash out against “homosexual propaganda” that she saw as an attack against the “healthy development of children and against Hungarian culture.” The politician ended her Facebook post, hastily removed in the wake of the emergent scandal, with the invitation “to lay the foundations of the nation’s future within the context Hungarian families.” In doing so, she is perpetuating conservative notions about what constitutes a family and explicitly problematizing the relationship between nationality, patriotism, and sexual orientation.

Following Dúró’s incitement, Hungarian mass media and social platforms went into overdrive to discuss the matter, and an unprecedented number of high profile public figures took a stance against the book. Those who spoke out included numerous politicians, but also specialists in the humanities and the social sciences, such as eminent psychologist, psychiatrist, and academic Emőke Bagdy. Bagdy generated further shock waves when he also firmly condemned the publication, thus endorsing Dúró’s act. Emboldened by such support, this wave of rudimentary censorship continued with party activists boycotting public readings, displaying defamatory posters at bookshops selling the title, and with Dúró literally ripping apart another children’s book. Vagánybagoly és a harmadik Á, avagy mindenki lehet más (Cool Owl and the Third A, or Everybody Is Entitled to be Different) was published in 2019, but it ended up on the receiving end of Dúró’s rage simply because its author, Zsófia Bán, had previously delivered a speech at the opening of Budapest Pride. Judging by the nature of such interventions, it is probable that most commentators haven’t actually read either of these books. Their reactions were simply spurred by a fear of anything new, paired with ignorance and intolerance that is deeply engrained in Hungarian society and further exacerbated by the current regime in power. Homophobia, sanctioned by high-ranking politicians such as the current Speaker of the National Assembly, is on an alarming rise in present-day Hungary, and being associated with the LGBTQ+ cause is seemingly sufficient grounds for anyone to find themselves in the firing line of the so-called ‘morality police.’ In response to the controversy surrounding the book, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán notoriously declared that Hungary is tolerant to homosexuality, but “there is a red line that cannot be crossed: leave our children alone.” READ MORE…

On Meaning and Black Holes: Reading, Writing, and Translating with Marguerite Duras

November 4, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Georgina Fooks

Duras would have us remember the gaps between what is said and what is meant: between signifier and signified.

Renowned French writer Marguerite Duras published, amongst many highly regarded novels, plays, and screenplays, a fascinating text about the art of writing. Écrire (Writing), published in 1993, is a series of fragmented meditations on her experience of writing and what impels her to do it. Duras takes the reader into her confidence, tracing the complexities and contradictions of her artistic practice that leads to a profound reflection on the limitations of the written word. In this essay, Georgina Fooks, Asymptote’s Social Media Manager, explores Duras’s philosophy of writing laid out in Écrire, and considers how her thoughts on writing’s inherent contradictions and limitations might also be applied to translation practice.   

Writing and translating could be described as sister arts. Writers become translators, and translators become writers. After all, what is writing but the translation of ideas, experience, and memory onto the page? As writer-translators, we might seek guidance and models to follow—a way out of the text to be translated, or a way through.

One writer I turn to again and again to help navigate the complex threads tying together reading and writing—both so key to a sustainable translation practice—is Marguerite Duras, the celebrated French writer and experimental film-maker. Best known for The Lover (a hybrid work that is best described as fictionalised autobiography, which won the 1984 Prix Goncourt), her oeuvre is distinctive, addressing themes of desire, loss, and death, in a style that can be repetitive, sparse, but striking all the same.

Duras enjoys a certain infamy as a public figure in France—born in French Indochina (modern-day Vietnam) in 1914, she moved to her parents’ native France at aged seventeen. During World War II, she was a member of the Communist Party and of the French Resistance, alongside François Mitterrand (who later became President of France). Her husband was deported to Buchenwald, the notorious concentration camp—an experience she later drew on for her work The War. Later in life she was a notorious femme de lettres, known for her alcoholism and at times controversial opinions, as well as her literary success.

Duras never wrote directly about the art of translation, but her work does testify to an interest in foreign languages. Non-Francophone names populate her work, as in The Ravishing of Lol Stein, whose protagonist Lol V. Stein falls in love with Michael Richardson and frequents S. Thala and T. Beach. This interest in language as a tool and practice is evidenced in her essay on writing, Écrire, a reflexive piece that provides fruitful new ways of thinking about translation as a mode and as a discipline. It’s a piece full of contradictions—thought-provoking statements that lead us towards a Durassian conception of writing and style, which is in turn fruitful for our thinking about the arts of reading and writing, and their impact on translation. READ MORE…

Singlish Modernism

October 29, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Shawn Hoo

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bangkok, City of Mirrors: Reading Veeraporn Nitiprabha’s Lake of Tears

October 28, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Noh Anothai

In addition to warning against societal amnesia, the novel is, at its heart, about empowering young people to trust their potential.

Earlier this month, thousands of demonstrators flocked to Bangkok’s iconic Ratchaprasong intersection to demand dictator Prayut Chanocha’s resignation. Thailand is no stranger to such uprisings, but this one’s a little different: it is part of a recent movement led almost exclusively by the young. In this brief but deliciously meaty essay, translator Noh Anothai draws thoughtful parallels between the current political scene and Lake of Tears, Thai powerhouse Veeraporn Nitiprabha’s first YA novel. Set in a dystopian city with near-blind, oblivious adults, it stars two courageous children who set out to face the past—which is, of course, the only way to change the future.

Whenever Yiwa watched the news on TV, murderers who harmed even small children, terrorists, and generals who slew people by the droves—none of these looked different from other people in their savagery. But if there was one thing that set them apart from everyone else—it was their indifference, their cool disinterest in the face of either good or evil . . .

The publication of Lake of Tears (ทะเลสาบน้ำตา), Thai author Veeraporn Nitiprabha’s third novel (and the first intended for a YA audience), comes at a strangely apt moment in Thai history. For at least the past year, a new political movement has been fomenting against the current junta led by Prayudh Chanocha, who seized power in a 2014 coup. What sets this movement apart, in a country that is no stranger to mass civilian uprisings, is age: it has been largely portrayed as a youth, or even a children’s, movement. While the pro-democracy demonstrations of the 1960s were embodied in the figure of the university student (“naive in spotless white school uniform,” to quote a poem from the time), and those of the early 2000s conjure up competing stages in yellow and red, today’s movement is characterized by millennials and Generation Zers coming of age in a political climate they deem no longer tenable to democratic ideas and freedom of expression. There have even been discussions within primary schools regarding what—if anything—should be done about children refusing to honor the national anthem, showing instead the three-fingered salute that has become today’s call to action. Indeed, one popular meme shows a secondary school student, his face blurred out, studying a geometry worksheet laid out on the asphalt at one of the many outdoor sit-ins taking place around Bangkok. The caption reads: “When you have homework but still gotta drive out the dictator.” READ MORE…

Narrating State Violence in Chile and Iran: For Raúl Zurita, with Gratitude

October 21, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Poupeh Missaghi

Finding one’s literary lineage is strange . . . You don’t necessarily find the voices that speak to you among your own people or your own language.

Last month, Chilean poet Raúl Zurita won the prestigious Reina Sofia Prize for Ibero-American Poetry. He is esteemed as one of the most talented Chilean poets of the twentieth century, alongside Pablo Neruda and Vicente Huidobro. María de los Llanos Castellanos, the President of National Heritage, said that Zurita had been awarded the prize in recognition of “his work, his poetic example of overcoming pain, with verses, with words committed to life, freedom, and nature.” Having lived through Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–1990) and, like many other Chileans, having been arrested and tortured under Pinochet’s regime, Zurita’s work addresses the violence committed against the Chilean people. His books in English translation include Anteparadise (translated by Jack Schmitt), Purgatory (translated by Anna Deeny), INRI (translated by William Rowe), and Song for His Disappeared Love (translated by Daniel Borzutsky). 

For a year now, since October 2019, Chile has been gripped in fresh political protests, sparked by a rise in subway fares. These have been the biggest protests in Chile since the end of the dictatorship and violent clashes between protestors and police have resulted in deaths, injuries, and arrests. In this essay, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Iran, Poupeh Missaghi, reflects upon Zurita’s response to state violence in his work. She draws a comparison with her native Iran, which similarly faced a US-backed coup (1953) and has recently experienced mass protests in response to economic injustice. By exploring Zurita’s ability to express the history and suffering of his country, as well as her own relationship to his body of work, Missaghi considers the importance of finding one’s literary heritage.  

The first time I saw Raúl Zurita read was in 2016 at the University of Denver. My skin felt raw, not just in the presence of his words (some of which I had read before), but also in proximity to his voice—deep and powerful yet carrying its fragility on its every note, accompanied by the trembling in his hands and torso. Trembling that wasn’t hidden or performed, but simply part of the way he carried, had to carry, his body and his voice as they carried with and in them the bodies, voices, and memories of others.

In a foreword to Purgatory, C. D. Wright says, “Instead of speaking for others, Zurita channels their voices.” There is an important difference here: the poet is not sitting on the sidelines and observing, but rather entering the purgatory himself. Whether through the intentional acts of hurting himself in his younger days (“branding his face and burning his eyes with ammonia”) or through the unasked-for Parkinson’s disease in his later years, Zurita literally embraces the pains he and his people have lived through. About his disease, Zurita notes,

I feel potent in my pains, in my curved spine, in the increasing difficulty of holding the pages when I read in public . . . I might have a bizarre sense of beauty, but my disease feels beautiful to me. It feels powerful.

Being in his presence over the years, I cannot help reading his Parkinson’s as another layer of his life-long labor of memory—his nerves being affected, being burdened, and his whole body becoming a witness who speaks even when he is not using verbal language.

***

The first work of Zurita I read was Song for His Disappeared Love, which for some reason I always remember as Song for His Disappeared Self, which is perhaps just a ghost of the same title. I read the book in a documentary poetics class taught by Eleni Sikelianos, and that was the beginning of my fascination with Zurita’s work, as well as with that of the translator Daniel Borzutzky. In Song for His Disappeared Love, Zurita narrates the pains of different countries of the Americas. Toward the end of the poem there are two drawings that resemble maps of some imaginary terrain. The niches in the first map are empty, filled with a void. The ones in the second include names of countries. Looking at them, the preceding pages of text begin to seem like another map, of partitioned city blocks or a cemetery with tombstones made of words. The last stanza of the poem before the drawings reads,

30. Is the tomb of the country’s love calling? Did you call out of pain? Out of pure pain? Was it out of pain that your love cried so hard? . . . are they calling me? Are you calling me?

This is one of the recurring themes in Zurita’s work: the psychological traces of political history on both the people and the landscape, and how one responds to being called by the voice of one’s pained country coming from the depths of darkness, long after the sources of that pain and the bodies emitting that voice are gone. This voice carried through in Zurita’s poems and the embodied, circular manner with which he approaches the topic have become, since those first encounters, a signpost on my path to addressing the pains of my own country, Iran, miles away from his. Because, of course, history repeats itself; even if this repetition is not in the details—though it can be—but more so in the psychological effects and fissures it leaves in our souls. READ MORE…

The Queer Lives of Arabic Literature

October 7, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by MK Harb

[T]he question of translating the “Arabic queer” . . . looms large . . . [H]owever, the canon does not lack for contemporary contenders.

The role that fiction plays in both relating and shaping our reality is pivotal, and this power that lies in representation is oftentimes an essential source of strength for individuals who persist under oppression and negation. For writers of queer texts in the contemporary Arab world, the complex paradigm of politics, history, storytelling, and interiority has culminated in an explosive multiplicity of voices and experiences, coming together in revolutionary expression. In this essay, MK Harb, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Lebanon, focuses in on three novels which engage their queer characters and environments in surprising and enlightening narratives, denying easy categorization to tell the poetry of the personal.

Oftentimes, when discussing the subject of queerness in contemporary Arabic literature, the idea of time travel arises in tandem. I say this only half sarcastically: it is not strange for a piece of criticism on a twenty-first-century Arabic novel to have an introduction valorizing the homoerotic poetry of Abu Nuwas, an Arabo-Persian poet from the ninth century. To put this in literary perspective, imagine an article on Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous beginning with an introduction discussing a queer text from the European Middle Ages. This bemusing conundrum is a product of orientalist academic training, often popularized by the faculties of Middle Eastern Studies departments across Western universities: a standard that singles out race in using the past to justify the present, imagining an uninterrupted continuum of the “Arab” experience irrelevant of space and time.

This obsession with the queer past of the Middle Eastern archive rarely comes from an investigation into the transgressive capabilities of past writings; rather, a strong exoticism governs this curiosity, and it often falls into the trappings of fetishizing the body and the experience of male love. Now, the subject of queerness in contemporary Arabic literature is itself fraught; many countries across the Middle East and North Africa engage in heavy censorship of books, particularly ones with characters that defy the hegemony of national and patriarchal orders. The other dilemma is that of language—in the past years, many queer Arabic characters came to us through writings in English or French. Whether it is Saleem Haddad’s Guapa or Abdellah Taïa’s An Arab Melancholia, the question of translating the “Arabic queer” and its various experiences looms large. Regardless of such constraints, however, the canon does not lack for contemporary contenders, which shed some much-needed light on the developments in queer livelihoods and philosophies. In this article, we will go on an elaborately queer journey through the works of Samar Yazbek in Cinnamon, Hoda Barakat in The Stone of Laughter, and Muhammad Abdel Nabi in In the Spider’s Room. What binds the protagonists of these novels together is not simply their queerness, but also their strong interiority and internal monologues, through which they shatter and construct social orders. READ MORE…

Honoring the Art of Translation: Carolina Orloff

September 29, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Carolina Orloff

There is so much of us in the language we inherit, the language we’re nursed in. Our mother tongue defines us, whether we like it or not.

As National Translation Month draws to a close, so does our four-part special feature on the subject—a series of first-hand, original essays by key players in the translation process: an author, a platform, a translator, a publisher. And since translating also means shifting coordinates, we made sure to hit four different corners of the world. Over the course of the past few days, we’ve brought you a Romanian poet, a Chinese online literary hub, and a Turkish translator, all at the very top of their game. Today, we wrap it up by traveling from Buenos Aires to Edinburgh with Carolina Orloff, co-founder and publishing director of the award-winning Charco Press (we figured the trip was worth postponing our usual “Translation Tuesday” column, back next week).

In this thoughtful, moving piece, Carolina masterfully intertwines personal experience with theory. She dives into the challenges of living between languages (she’s a longtime Argentinian expat in the UK), explaining how that has influenced her own views of translation and, more broadly, Charco’s publishing philosophy. From missing dulce de leche to musing about Benjamin, she covers almost as much ground here as she’s done throughout her life as a bona fide globetrotter.

Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrious memory. Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough—he wanted to compose the Quixote.

‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,’ Jorge Luis Borges

When I think about translation, I’m seized by a host of thoughts and emotions—some varying, some constant. It goes beyond the years I’ve spent studying and writing theory, or the fact that I’ve been living between languages (‘entre lenguas,’ to quote the extraordinary Sylvia Molloy) for more than half my life now: there is something within my matrix, my emotional framework, that is made of languages, of gestures from different cultures, different geographies. As is the case with many compatriots, I’m a second-generation Argentinian (most of the country’s indigenous population was wiped out by a nefarious ‘whitening’ campaign during the late 1800s); like many in my generation, I have also emigrated from that southern land. All my grandparents were foreigners, and I use this word with the utmost care and precision. My parents fed off that simultaneously strange and normalised state of living in Buenos Aires while immersed in the echoes of Russian, English, Yiddish, Polish, and Andalusian Spanish. They soaked up these acquired traditions and dressed them up in new meaning—a meaning that they could call their own and that could be freer, albeit loaded with so many other foreign codes. In sum, they were constantly translating.

I recall a conversation I had with a fellow student once, when I was at the University of York. His porteño accent was much stronger than mine. I was twenty years old and had been living in English for three. When I asked him when he’d last been to Argentina, he said nonchalantly that he had actually never ‘crossed the pond.’ His mother was from Buenos Aires and yes, he had been born there, but when he was just one or two years old, they had left for Sweden in search of political asylum. They had never returned. It was an epiphanic moment for me. And now that I am a mother, an Argentinian mother living in Scotland with a daughter born in Edinburgh, I can’t help but re-signify it. There is so much of us in the language we inherit, the language we’re nursed in. Our mother tongue defines us, whether we like it or not, and I feel that there is no satisfactory way of translating that identity; it can only be transmitted. READ MORE…

Honoring the Art of Translation: Ümit Hussein

September 28, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Ümit Hussein

Our task is not restricted to giving readers access to literature . . . by doing so we also perform the role of cultural ambassadors.

Though Asymptote has made it a point to celebrate literary translation no matter the time of year, we’re still pretty thrilled that there’s a whole month dedicated to the cause. As we draw towards the end of National Translation Month, Asymptote is taking the opportunity to bring together essential components that complete the cycle of literature as it travels from one language to the next, with the intention of recognizing the meticulous, purposeful, and intimate labour invested into a text during this peregrination—from conception to publication. We have asked four valued members of the literary community, spanning the globe, to bring us their take on translation and its gifts. 

In this third feature, we are delighted to present an original essay by Ümit Hussein, an award-winning translator (and past Asymptote Book Club contributor!), who translates from the Turkish to the English. Her translation of Burhan Sönmez’s Istanbul Istanbul won the EBRD prize in 2018 and her translation of Nermin Yıldırım’s Secret Dreams in Istanbul is forthcoming from Anthem Press. Born and raised in North London in an extended Turkish Cypriot family, Hussein sees her role as translator reaching beyond the linguistic, in order to act as a cultural ambassador and elucidate a different cultural context for English readers. Here, she explains her own response to the question of why translation is essential to promoting literature and bringing about change.  

When I was asked to write this article, my brief was to make it about any aspect of translation I thought was important. Unaccustomed to so much freedom, I set about wracking my brain. One of the first thoughts that crossed my mind was, why do we translate at all? Given that it is widely believed that a translation can never be equal to the original; that a good translator is one that is completely invisible; that the translation must read as though written in the target language; that we are branded with the label traduttore traditore; that it is so poorly paid; and that, harshest of all, a certain award-winning writer, who translated fiction before she became a novelist, said in an interview, “For me it’s a waste of time . . . I want to write, not waste time with translations.” (Fortunately for this author, her translator, whose translation won her the prize, does not share her views.) What, then, motivates us to lavish so much love, care, time, and energy on what is frequently treated as the poor relative of “real” writing? READ MORE…

Honoring the Art of Translation: Paper Republic

September 24, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Dylan Levi King, Emily Jones, Eric Abrahamsen, Jack Hargreaves, Nicky Harman, Yao Lirong, and Yvette Zhu

Read Paper Republic is one of the most important things we can do . . . to deliver on our mission of getting more people reading Chinese literature

In the preface of the formidable Narrative Poem, Yang Lian wrote: “Long must be identical with deep, and we have to make it new for a depth never before expressed.” This maxim is Yang’s contemporary grasp of the enormously, incomparably complex world of contemporary Chinese letters, which threads tradition with novelty, comprehension with inquiry, intelligence with intuition, and is profuse with dislocations, disruptions, oppressions, and erasures. Diving into this amassment—either as reader or translator—is often an overwhelming endeavour, so it is both a relief and a source of joy that such a thing like Paper Republic exists, an online hub that serves as a platform for new Chinese writing, a resource for Chinese-English translators, an extensive database, and the base of a vibrant community eager to share dialogue and talents. In our second feature for National Translation Month, we’re proud to shed a spotlight on their impressive accomplishments with a text written cumulatively by their brilliant team.

“Paper Republic began very simply as a group blog, run by translators of Chinese literature into English,” writes founding member Eric Abrahamsen. “It was 2007, four or five of us had found each other in Beijing, and we formed a sort of mutual support group/social club.”

Since then, Paper Republic has grown and changed almost beyond recognition; incorporated as a company, we’ve spent a decade making concerted efforts to interest western publishers in Chinese literature, producing book reports, and even dabbling in literary agency. A few years ago, however, we began to focus on readers and translators. We are now a registered charity/non-profit organization, made up of a team of volunteers based in America, UK, China, and Japan. In addition to providing information about Chinese literature to people in English-speaking countries, we promote new Chinese writing in translation, publish free-to-read short fiction and essays online, host an extensive database on Chinese writers and their English translators, mentor Chinese-to-English translators, and provide resources to schools teaching Chinese.

In order to introduce Chinese writers to the world, we started Read Paper Republic back in 2015—sourcing, translating, editing, and publishing one short story every single week for a year, completely free to read. It was a mammoth undertaking, and the fact that we managed to pull it off at all is testament to the generosity of the authors and translators involved. One of the things that is special about Read Paper Republic is that every story, no matter how experienced the translator, is edited by a member of the team, who also checks the text against the Chinese, assuring literary quality as well as accuracy. From the very first series, we had aspiring translators offering their work; our editing process is both beneficial to them, and also fits perfectly with one of our aims as a non-profit: to mentor new translators. READ MORE…

Honoring the Art of Translation: Radu Vancu

September 23, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Radu Vancu

It is [the poet’s] task . . . to build an enormous, resonating device which would reverberate with beauty from all times, all spaces, all cultures.

Though Asymptote has made it a point to celebrate literary translation no matter the time of year, we’re still pretty thrilled that there’s a whole month dedicated to the cause. As we draw towards the end of National Translation Month, Asymptote is taking the opportunity to bring together essential components that complete the cycle of literature as it travels from one language to the next, with the intention of recognizing the meticulous, purposeful, and intimate labour invested into a text during this peregrination—from conception to publication. We have asked four valued members of the literary community, spanning the globe, to bring us their take on translation and its gifts. 

With this first feature, we are honoured to introduce an original text by Radu Vancu, a brilliant Romanian writer and translator (and past Asymptote contributor!) who traverses the international literary arena with a virtuoso expertise and a seemingly time-defiant profusion. In the following essay, he discusses his ongoing project to translate the works of Ezra Pound into Romanian, and thus brings to the forefront the great modernist’s defiance of limits. This poetry, which spans time, language, and cultures, is a testament to the sublime nature of translation, and its endless capacity for encapsulation.

Ezra Pound quickly understood that, in the case of poetry, regeneration is actually reinvention—or, more synthetically and apparently more paradoxically, inventing is actually reinventing. Poetry can live only through the graft of all that is alive throughout all ages, all cultures, all languages. Therefore, Pound came to understand that poetry does not mean only regenerated language, as he originally believed; it is instead a translingual, transnational, and even transcultural body, built (or “excerned,” to use his own word) by the addition of all the “living parts” still active in the geological layers of poetic language.

He says this in more contracted and memorable form in a 1930 Credo: “I believe that a light from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the song of Provence and Italy.” J.J. Wilhelm also observes, in Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years, that this proposition is in full consonance with a small text by Pound, Religio, from 1910—forming thus, in my opinion, an approximate backbone of Pound’s poetics, otherwise so branched and polymorphous.

The poet must coagulate in their work this migrant light which iridesces simultaneously the Eleusine texts, the Provençal ballads, the Italian sonnets, in addition to the ancient Chinese, Greek, and Latin poetry, and so on. It is their task, therefore, to not only regenerate the poetic language—this enormous burden is still too simple—but to build an enormous, resonating device which would reverberate with beauty from all times, all spaces, all cultures. This is why it is hard to capture in translation the beauty of an Ezra Pound poem: because some poems substantiate the ancient Greek beauty, harsh and dangerous (“seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoclean light / And take your wounds from it gladly,” a poem says); some others take the form of Medieval villanelles, ballads, or shapes invented by Pound himself (the villonaud, for example), coalescing in another kind of beauty—seductive, chanting, feminine, sweet; some others reinvent a traditional Chinese aesthetic in the English language of the twentieth century; and so on. What is remarkable and astounding is that you, a twenty-first-century reader of English, can resonate with all these varying types of beauty. Pound’s genius is precisely that he succeeded in making new and alive the beauty of all great poetic languages, including the old or “dead” ones.

His achievement is that he can adapt his resonating apparatus to all the diachronic wavelengths of beauty. The construction of the poem—his physis—also varies according to the oscillation of this wavelength; when “making new” the ancient Greek epigrams, the poem has two or three lines, quite rarely more, and the Idealtypus of the beauty targeted is that of an intense and sarcastic, sometimes quasi-licentious lapidarity. In other instances, when he pretends to be translating from the ancient Chinese, the poems become long, winding, archaic in lexis, but the intricacies of the lines are in actuality an ekphrasis of the Chinese ideograms. In the Cantos, this mechanism builds an enormous vortex-poem, or, more preferably, a poem whose vortex is that of History itself—infinitely commingling fragments of poems, fragments of languages, fragments of historical, economic, biological, political information, and so on. And the beauty of these demented, illegible, and hypnotic Cantos is the very demented, illegible, and hypnotic beauty of our times. READ MORE…

Sea-Change & Rubble: Mourning Our Beirut

September 2, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Reem Joudi

Where does one search for words when the air is sucked out of one's lungs? Where do we excavate the vocabulary to express our sorrow?

On August 4, 2020, the port explosions in Beirut devastated the city and sent shockwaves throughout the world within a a matter of minutes. In a year already thick with disaster, the eruption—one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosions in human history—appeared to be a harbinger for the fact that the worst days are not yet behind. From south Lebanon, Reem Joudi felt the reverberations of the blast, and penned this intimate and lyrical essay in its immediate aftermath, reflecting on the felt and lived traumas of her beloved Beirut, the human capacity for survival, and what it means now to look forward.

We were having coffee at my grandmother’s house, as we usually spent most afternoons, when our bouts of daily chatter were interrupted by a series of strange events: the living room door slammed shut, the sliding glass doors shook, and a loud thud echoed outside. “Was it an earthquake?”; “No, it sounded like gunshots.”; “Quick, turn on the TV!”. After a few seconds scrambling for the remote, my grandmother switched on the television to a local news channel, which was covering a meeting with resigned Prime Minister Saad Hariri at the Grand Serail. We assumed that the building had experienced an explosion of some sort, due to the minor damages we saw onscreen.

Our first guess was an assassination attempt; Hariri’s father—former PM Rafic Hariri—was assassinated in 2005, and the Special Tribunal investigating his death planned to release the final verdict on August 7, 2020. Our first instinct was to pray that this was not the case—not out of love for the political leader, but out of fear for the people’s mental and emotional health, which could no longer sustain such consecutive trauma and instability. The list of what we had already survived was long and seemingly endless, split in two columns between pain currently lived and years of past unrest. The former enlisted a collapsing economy, a devalued local currency, hyperinflation, twenty-hour power cuts, a global pandemic, a trash crisis, predicted food shortages, a breakdown in the banking sector—an inventory of present loss piled atop years of past losses.

Seconds later, the reality of what had happened unfolded before our eyes in disjointed fragments: partly transmitted through WhatApp videos circulated with panic-stricken urgency, and partly through live news reports. The reality was more heartbreaking, more expansive, and more destructive than imaginable. Beirut’s port had exploded, and everything scattered into dust and nothingness—ungraspable, unimaginable, slipping through fingers. Beirut’s port had exploded, and we heard it forty kilometers away at my grandmother’s house in Saida, south Lebanon. Beirut’s port had exploded, yet all I could think was: “Why am I not in Beirut right now?” The moments that followed were a blur—frantic texts to friends and loved ones, agonizing moments awaiting their replies. “Are you okay? Please tell me you’re okay.” Blood, blood, blood, and rubble refracted through screens as we stayed glued to our phones, re-watching the horror of the explosion in slow-motion. Screams as loud as the blast. A crippling numbness that I could neither untangle nor understand. When I went back home an eternity later, I found my entire body covered in red marks. I did not understand how they appeared. Why were they not bleeding? READ MORE…

Who Will Win the International Booker Prize?

August 19, 2020  |  in Essays, News  |  by Barbara Halla

One of my least favorite strands of Booker discourse [is that] . . . a particular book wins . . . because it ticks . . . marketing-friendly boxes.

The long-awaited announcement of the International Booker winner is finally around the corner, and with a shortlist explosive with singular talent, the gamblers amongst us are finding it difficult to place their bets. To lend a hand, Asymptote’s very own assistant editor Barbara Halla returns with her regularly scheduled take, lending her scrupulous gaze to not only the titles but the Prize itself—and the principles of literary criticism and merit.

In my previous coverage of the International Booker Prize, I mentioned that there is always an element of repetition to the discussions surrounding it; quite honestly, there are only so many ways one can frame the conversation beyond mere summarizations of the books themselves. I find myself hoping that each year’s selections will reveal some sort of larger theme looming in the background, giving me at least the pretense of a cohesive thesis statement. I think that was definitely the case with last year’s shortlist and its explicit concern with memory, but considering how English translation tends to lag behind each book’s original publication by at least a couple of years, it was probably a coincidence. I’ve had no such luck with the 2020 shortlist; most of my attempts at finding a common theme have felt like a stretch.

In an attempt to avoid making this simply a collection of bite-sized reviews, I want to talk about one of my least favorite strands of Booker discourse: the tedious—sometimes almost malicious—assertion that if a particular book wins, it does so not because of its “literary merit,” but rather because it ticks a number of marketing-friendly boxes. Maybe it has been translated from a language that rarely gets published in English, or perhaps it seems particularly relevant to our present, directly tackling racism, homophobia, or misogyny. Regardless of the source of such a statement, it has this irritating “political correctness is ruining literature” thrust to it.

Now, in the past I have relied on “non-literary” clues to try and guess the Booker winner, and to some extent, I still do. However, in my mind, whenever I try to glean the winner using such external factors, I do so based on a few assumptions. First of all, while not all shortlisted books will necessarily be my favorite or even to my liking, the judges at least believe them to be great books, and the winner might indeed be different under different (personal) circumstances. In fact, despite what some detractors of contemporary fiction might say, there is plenty to love about the books being published today, and in the presence of so much good literature, taking into account “external” factors is only natural. After all, as translator Anton Hur recently tweeted, in response to an article arguing against a translated fiction category for the Hugos, “Literary awards ARE marketing tools, they should be used to solve MARKETING PROBLEMS.” READ MORE…

Dulces Sueños, Don Quixote

August 12, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Edwin Alanís-García

Reciprocal listening—everyone listening to everyone—had become more important than ever. There was an entire world that needed to be heard.

One of the most devastating outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic was the damage it inflicted on the education of children worldwide. As schools shut their doors and valued programs reluctantly halted, both kids and their educators were cut off from their communities and, for some, their places of refuge. In the following essay, assistant blog editor Edwin Alanís-García shares his experience working with one of these programs and spaces in New York City, a literary haven fittingly called Still Waters in a Storm.

The Traveling Serialized Adventures of Kid Quixote is a modern-day musical reimagining of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, of which the translators and performers are a community of young writers and thinkers ranging in age from seven to sixteen. To call this project “ambitious” would be an understatement—Traveling Adventures is a thorough reinterpretation of a four-hundred-year-old masterpiece of Hispanophone literature, being adapted into songs, theater performances, and even metafictional meditations on social justice, immigration, and the process of translation itself. It is a translation project years in the making, and the children were finally ready to present the first installments to the world.

Their visit to my alma mater was a confluence of the two literary worlds I’d known in New York City: the MFA program at New York University, and the sanctuary of Still Waters in a Storm, an after-school program in the working-class neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn. I volunteered at Still Waters during my last year of study, and was lucky to have witnessed the genesis of Traveling Adventures.

On a Friday morning in February, 2018, I took a train from Cambridge, MA to Boston’s South Station. The five-hour bus ride from Boston to New York stopped just a few blocks shy of the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers’ House in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, a literary landmark in a city of literature, and a space that has welcomed many of the world’s greatest poets and writers. It was a fitting venue for the Kid Quixotes. Though the performance space was smaller than some of the college classrooms and theater stages they’d been using on the tour, that intimacy provided a near theater-in-the-round experience. As one young performer described it, it felt more like doing a show in someone’s living room.

Friends and teachers spilled into the parlor. We sat close to the “stage,” a blocked-in area designated by the performers. At this distance, we weren’t just spectators, we were participants in a tale that began in seventeenth-century Spain and continued into twenty-first-century New York. The frame story begins with our protagonist (played by eight-year-old actor and author Sarah Sierra) being called to bed by her mother. Young Sarah wants to stay awake and read Don Quixote—she wants to become Don Quixote. In doing so, she adopts the persona of Kid Quixote, protector of the abused and oppressed. The dialogue is in Spanish, but quickly becomes bilingual when the scenes from the novel come to life. As she walks to school, Kid Quixote jumps into a scene from Chapter IV; a farmer is whipping a boy, and she cannot abide this injustice. What would be a horrifying scene of violence is reimagined by the children into an act of resistance, and the cruel farmer is made to look like a fool. Kid Quixote’s mission to help the downtrodden is set to “The Rescuing Song,” a plea and a promise to help those in need of protection. It is a song about belonging, and ultimately about “home.”

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Where Sunsets & Anguish Collide: Isolation in Lebanese Literature

July 22, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by MK Harb

Despite their preoccupations, be they literary or ideological, they both pause and capture love during calamity.

In the past few months, we’ve been forced to dwell on our place in the world in the light of extraordinary circumstances. As most of us experience a certain degree of forced isolation, we predictably turn to literature, in hopes that its wisdoms will enable us to regard our realities with increased awareness, understanding, and presence. In this following essay, writer MK Harb takes us through the various manifestations of isolation as seen in Lebanese literature, and more specifically via two extraordinary texts by two Lebanese-American authors, Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman and Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose.

“During these unprecedented times . . .”

I have heard and read this line over a thousand times since the pandemic began. In a fortnight, we have entered an echo chamber in which a voice is constantly screaming “unprecedented times” at us. Sometimes this voice comes in the form of an email, other times a news clipping, but mostly, it speaks to us as a marketing gimmick. Countless products remind us that these times are in fact unprecedented as they encourage us to buy sanitization stations, virtual university booths, luxury hazmat suits, and other products that commercialize placebo. Maybe the academic part of myself hates the word unprecedented; I have found that the cynicism of academia manifests in teaching that every time is precedent. From pandemics to famine to injustice, it has all been here before.

What is unprecedented in our current cataclysm is our collective online grief; from Zoom calls to Skype sessions, it has never been more ravenous and visible. However, after a while, one realizes that this excessive online engagement numbs the mind more than reassures it. Instead, resorting to literature has been one of the few escapes out of the confines of my living room to more alluring worlds. From Yasmine Seale’s new translation of Aladdin, to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness, I feel the intimacy of reading and caressing a text much more deeply than that of a video call. During these literary excursions, I discovered the omnipresence of isolation as a theme in contemporary Lebanese literature. The irony of this discovery was not lost on me; the isolation of a pandemic led me to isolation in fiction.

As I drew out these conceptual maps of society’s outcasts, I noticed their versatility. Sometimes it manifests in the trials and trepidations of a gay man in Hoda Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter, in which the character navigates a war-torn and derelict Beirut from his lonely apartment. Other times this isolation results from the acts of resistance and radicalism, as in Emily Nasrallah’s The Oleander Tree, which takes place during an epoch when the protagonist Rayya resists the feudal and patriarchal roles set for the women of her village. However, two authors in particular were naturally and strongly united in this theme: Rabih Alameddine and Etel Adnan.

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