Language: Chinese

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

February 28, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Sarah Moore and Xiao Yue Shan

This week's latest literary news from China and the United Kingdom!

This week our writers report on the impact of coronavirus on writers and readers in China, as well as the release of the International Booker Prize longlist. Read on to find out more! 

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting from China

“Fear can cause blindness, said the girl with dark glasses, Never a truer word, that could not be truer. . .” The words of José Saramago hover in the virus-stricken towns and cities of China: illness, the great equalizer. The streets freed of people, the antiseptic taste of disinfectant wafting, mask-ridden faces—outside China, the news grow its own, furious legends. Reports of the dead waver between hundreds and thousands, there is panic and disillusion and boredom and most of all, uncertainty.

So it is through this continual trajectory of doubt, compounded by fear, that Saramago’s renowned novel Blindness (published in China as 失明症漫记) has surged amidst the Chinese literary community as a compass towards what directions human nature may turn in times of encompassing hardship. In the growing scope of a blindness epidemic, Saramago unites fiction and ideology into a profound portrayal into how disease can infiltrate and dismantle the lattice of moral order, as well as how we may comfort one another, how the degradation of societal norms does not definitively mean the regression of one’s humanity. It is, albeit dark, a story of triumph, and triumph—even in books—is solace. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from “A Cold Season” by Jin Yucheng

February 4, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Cleo Qian

The drizzle fell steadily, and in the night, the shallow bridge, the village houses, all faded in the distance, so I could see nothing clearly.

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, novelist Jin Yucheng captures memories of Suzhou in this haunting excerpt from “A Cold Season.” Jin’s Proustian narrator evokes scenes which portend his sense of misplacement: buildings are ragged shades of decay; pedestrians roam silently like spirits; a young man appears pallid and skeletal as he laments his lost love, whose beauty is described as “bleak.” The only breaks in the town’s somber quiet are the omnipresent folksongs which seem to follow the narrator. Jin is a virtuoso of temporality and consciousness; here he slows down and speeds up the narrative via exquisite sensory detail. “Back then,” the narrator begins, though the recalled images of gloom are obfuscated by time and the town’s cold rain.

Back then, I could still sit by the bank all day, watching boats, looking at the town’s bridges. There were shops on both banks, the narrow streets boarded on top with awnings to protect them from the rain and sun. During the rainy season the buildings were ragged and gloomy, the color of mildew and decay. Pedestrians passed each other in a breathless, soundless silence, as intangible as spirits. It was a mournful scene. If you pushed open the window casements, inlaid with shell, you could hear the plaintive sound of girls singing folktales alongside the pluck of silken strings, filling the town with their poetry. Only in the pitch dark nights, by the lights from between the green plastered walls, could you see the fishing lights far off on the lake. READ MORE…

Forks Out: Our Ninth Anniversary Issue Is Here!

January 16, 2020  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

To celebrate, here's a huuge salad with a 31-country flavor spectrum, Forrest Gander, Kurdish Poetry, and the results of our essay contest!

Asymptote’s Winter 2020 edition has landed, and it concocts “A Fantastic Salad” with every ingredient you could wish for. Start with a double serving of interviews with Forrest Gander and Cecilia Vicuña, then get a bite of drama by Federico García Lorca, alongside new work from 31 countries. Our special of the day is Kurdish Poetry, honoring a people imperiled by Trump’s perfidy.

Discover our three contest winners chosen by Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee, each celebrating an author deserving of wider recognition on the world stage. Taking top honors, Jonathan Cohen introduces Dominican poet Pedro Mir, the Whitman of the Caribbean. Runners-up Lara Norgaard and Manuel Antonio Castro Córdoba wrote about Indonesian writer Putu Oka Sukanta and Argentinian novelist Alberto Laiseca respectively. Together, they walk home with $1,000 in prizes.

Culinary traditions have a long history. Taurus loves “to cook up some delicious,” according to Gnaomi Siemens’ modernized Old Scots Horoscope. Bai Juyi’s minimal lyrics in eighth-century Chinese are also transformed by Joey Schwartzman for contemporary sensibilities. Continuing this issue’s exploration of colloquial modernity, Alice Inggs transposes Nathan Trantaal’s Kaapse Afrikaans into non-standard English for a poignant glimpse into South African poverty. Some Artists from Iran give us “The Visual Language of Protest,” a unique document of turbulent times, while Kurdish poet Sherko Bekas describes his own nation’s suffering through poetic paradox: “I am thirsty water.” Our own Lou Sarabadzic reviews an important new anthology Poetry of the Holocaust, remembering yet more suffering not to be forgotten. READ MORE…

On Translating Chung Kwok-keung and the Language of Hong Kong Protests

January 6, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by May Huang

I believe that advocates of Hong Kong literature can show the world that the city is worth fighting—and translating—for.

On June 9, 2019, more than 1 million people took to the streets to protest an extradition bill proposed by the Hong Kong government. If passed, the bill would make it legal for Hong Kong citizens to be extradited to Mainland China and tried under Chinese law—a legal system that not only threatens Hong Kong’s rule of law, but is also known for repeated human rights violations. Given China’s steady encroachment on Hong Kong since 1997, the “one country, two systems” policy that guarantees Hong Kong’s autonomy until 2047 is undeniably in jeopardy. The city’s concern over its future continually manifests in its local discourse, protests, and literature. 

Although I grew up in Hong Kong, my interest in translating Hong Kong literature blossomed in Chicago, where I was studying English. Reading the work of Hong Kong writers allowed me to see my home city in a new light. One of the first Hong Kong poets I came across was Chung Kwok-keung, who writes about Hong Kong people, places, and politics with an attentive and empathetic gaze. In December 2014, he wrote a suite of poems (two of which were translated by Emily Jones and Sophie Smith for Asymptote) titled “Occupy Stories” about the Umbrella Movement—previously the biggest protests in Hong Kong in recent years. Now, with protests taking place again in the city, Chung is writing with an eye towards how the anti-extradition movement has shaped society.

READ MORE…

New Year, New Horizons!

January 1, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Rachel Allen, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Reading resolutions for 2020—brought to you by the blog team.

Happy New Year, reader! To ring in the ’20s, we are getting personal and sharing our own reading resolutions. From literature engaged with the effects of climate change to classic theological texts, here are the reads we have on the radar for 2020. Maybe our titles overlap with some of yours? If you’re inspired, share your resolutions with us in the comments below.

Xiao Yue Shan, Assistant Blog Editor:

We are becoming ever more impelled by the worst-case scenarios, the ultimate consequences of our carelessness. Climate change is cemented at the pinnacle of every engaged mind, consuming the concerns of those on the forefront of human progress—the writers. December is a month of returns, and a trip across the Pacific on my part meant a reabsorption into the beloved stacks of books left behind by a past self who had endlessly imagined the present. I found in those volumes an incredible vitality—it takes considerably more courage to speculate on the future now, yet in our infinitely ideating language, we can’t help it, we imagine naturally, as we have always done.

Usually my reading directives are predictable, by which I mean they’re somewhat “in accordance” with my being a female Chinese poet—the tendency veers towards a healthy majority of women writers, plenty of Chinese literature, and as much poetry as possible. As we approach the new decade, however, I’ve turned my attention to literature more specifically in dialogue with our planet. In Amitav Ghosh’s beautifully urgent book-length essay, The Great Derangement, he convincingly argues for an overhaul of the fiction genre so that it may better address and reflect upon our contemporary precarity. Though the best of our stories are inevitably engaged with our environment, I found Ghosh’s take riveting in its insistence that we continue to build and invent language that is ever more precise, alert, and curious. READ MORE…

My 2019: Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

December 23, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

What follows is not a reckoning of everything I read this year, but rather a contemplation of the different ways that books assign themselves to me

Flaubert once said that one should read not for the purpose of instruction, but “in order to live.” Continuing our staff summations of 2019 in literature, Asymptote’s Educational Arm Assistant Katarzyna Bartoszyńska outlines an abundant year of reading, ranging from feminist favourites to autofiction to books about books, and in doing so, considers the sense of how books find their way to us, perhaps so that we may live.

Reflecting on my year in reading, I started to think about how various books came into my hands. I’m a literature professor, so a lot of what I read is determined by the classes I’m teaching, the syllabi I create. But making assigned book lists seems to have become a habit that spills over into the rest of my life as well—much of my reading seems to be part of various projects with lists of their own. It’s rare for me to randomly grab a book off my to-read shelf and just dive in, though I did just that with Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins, and it ended up being one of my favorite books of the year; a collection of formally dazzling short stories, whose pleasure was heightened for me, perhaps, because I entered it with almost no previous knowledge, and so was all the more delighted by every surprising twist and turn. I had a similar experience with Yiyun Li’s breathtaking A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. But as often as not, the result of such serendipity will be the creation of a new list—for instance, I’ve now resolved to read everything else Yiyun Li has written. What follows, then, is not a reckoning of everything I read this year, but rather a contemplation of the different ways that books assign themselves to me, and the highlights of these circumlocutious processes. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “9th June” by Jacky Yuen

December 17, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Chenxin Jiang

Each generation must have its roads and its flags

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the work of Jacky Yuen. Titled “9th June,” after the date of the sizable 2019 demonstrations in Hong Kong, this poem paints the energy and direction of the protestors in a way that is both cosmic but not disengaged. Within the symbolism of the poem, the oppression of mass and obscurity are combatted by singular points. The poet expresses a spirit that is constant rejuvenating and resurfacing, which is aptly captured by the translator: clauses tumble over one another like a structure kept in motion by magnets. Inspiration moves through the people as stardust and rainbows, ethereal and material at the same time. The poem presents the material and metaphysical aspects of collective movement, expressed in individual activation, thereby expressing the frustration and hope of the current political climate.

9th June

No one wants to drown twice in the same ocean.
The fins that sank
will resurface.
⠀
The comet fights to resurface.
It trails long shards of ice
like a fisherman’s net. When we lowered it they were stones—
When the times released it they were stars in sideburns. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

December 6, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Sarah Moore and Xiao Yue Shan

The weekly roundup from China and the United Kingdom!

This week our writers bring you the latest news from China and the United Kingdom. In China, hundreds of writers and critics have attended the Hubei International Literature Week and Poetry Festival whilst in the United Kingdom, the life and work of Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney was celebrated in a film. Read on to find out more! 

Xiao Yue Shan, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting from China

“between the metaphors of intertwining language / is evidence that I live on this land / for poetry”

So go the lines of 谢克强 Xie Keqiang, one of the many renowned poets of Hubei, a central province settled in the basin of the Yangtze River. Wuhan, its capital, has long been located in the national body of literature as a poetic muse, one especially vital in Chinese literature which observes so closely the paradigms of space and narrations of home. From the ancient verses of Li Bai and Cui Hao to the contemporary lines of 张执浩 Zhang Zhihao, elements of this river-city resound in a lifeline that threads the Chinese poetic canon, same as the water threads the land.

From November 25 to December 1, Wuhan hosted the annual Hubei International Literature Week and Poetry Festival, an event that gathered hundreds of Chinese and international writers and critics to discuss and share the gifts of poetry made public. In a series of talks, readings, dialogues, and performances, poets took the stage to read their work and openly contemplate the urgent necessity for this work. READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (Nov 2019)

November 14, 2019  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

From being appointed President of ALTA to launching new poetry collections, Asymptote staff have been dazzling the world!

Is Asymptote edited anonymously? That was what someone seemed to suggest recently on Twitter—as if we were a bunch of bots. As a matter of fact, our editor-in-chief—and only full-time team member—is based in Taipei (although he made an appearance in a London translation symposium recently, which you can read about below), where he collaborates with 90+ team members from around the globe. Being virtual means our team members are often active (and physically present) literary citizens in other arenas. For evidence, look no further than this quarterly update celebrating our staff’s recent accomplishments.

Chris Tanasescu (aka MARGENTO, editor-at-large for Romania & Moldova) jointly presented with Diana Inkpen a paper on “Poetry beyond Poetry: Applying GraphPoem Outcomes in DH, NLP, and Performance” at DH Benelux 2019.

Please join us in congratulating Ellen Elias-Bursać, contributing editor, appointed to President of the American Literary Translators Association on Nov 7.

Editor-at large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood‘s most recent co-translations with Peter Sherwood Big Love by Balla and The Night Circus and Other Stories by Ursula Kovalyk were recently reviewed in The London Magazine by assistant editor Andreea Scridon.

José García Escobar, editor-at-large for Central America, published the first installment in a four-part series about last year’s migrant caravan at the Evergreen Review on Oct 30. READ MORE…

The Harmony of Normalcy: Wang Anyi’s Fu Ping in Review

November 6, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

In the patchwork format by which this novel takes its shape, the reader is as involved and intimate with the surroundings as one of the characters.

Fu Ping by Wang Anyi, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt, Columbia University Press, 2019

First, do not create extraordinary circumstances or extraordinary characters. Second, do not use too much material. Three, do not over-stylize the language. Four, do not aspire to be singular.

These strange and somewhat alienating pillars of writing philosophy are passed on to us by Wang Anyi, one of China’s most accomplished and notorious authors. Famed for her meticulous portrayals of female tenacity, ordinary citizens, and everyday minutia, she is both stylistically audacious and devoted to her subjects. Fu Ping, her most recent novel to be translated into English, and taken into a wonderfully equal rendition by Howard Goldblatt, exemplifies the thematic and aesthetic constants prevalent in her oeuvre, while simultaneously creating an illumination of city and community that leaves remarkably deep impressions by way of its quietude. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

November 1, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Daljinder Johal, Rachel Allen, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest in world letters from Beijing, Oklahoma, and the UK.

Three superpowers this week compete for our attention with their respective updates in the realm of national literature. Our editors bring you news this week from the Beijing Literature Summit, the results of the Neustadt Prize in Oklahoma, and the continued fallout of the 2019 Booker Prize award in the UK. Read on to find out more!  

Xiao Yue Shan, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting for China

“Beijing is the country’s literary mecca,” articles enthusiastically parroted this month as the nation’s capital held the 4th Beijing Literature Summit on October 18. Though the multifold of equally rich literary cities in this vast country could dissent, the summit and forum nevertheless overtook headlines as well-established members of the Beijing literati took the stage in the square at Zhengyangmen, the immediate heart of the city. Attendees included preeminent novelists Liang Xiaosheng 梁晓声 and Liu Qingbang 刘庆邦, and the poet Yang Qingxiang 杨庆祥 (a leader of “new scar poetry”), as well as an assembly of Beijing’s foremost scholars, critics, and publishers.

The talks concentrated around three predominant themes: the past, present, and future of Beijing literature. Throughout the seventy years of the People’s Republic of China, literary culture in Beijing remained at the forefront of the country’s social and cultural reality, thereby receiving the most immediate impact from the tumultuous chronology of the country as a whole. In discussing the tremendous weight of history, Liang stated that the past is not overbearing but exists in a continuous exchange with the present. The question is, he said: “How should we use the text to state it?”

READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2019

October 28, 2019  |  in News  |  by Ah-reum Han, Caridad Svich, Ellen Jones, Henry Ace Knight, Lee Yew Leong, Varun Nayar, and Victoria Livingstone

Our Section Editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2019 issue!

Eleven days after its launch, Asymptote’s Fall 2019 issue continues to capture the zeitgeist. Many of its pieces, drawn from a record thirty-six countries, simmer with polyvocal discontent at the modern world, taking aim squarely at its seamy underbelly: the ravages of environmental degradation, colonial resource extraction, and media sensationalism of violence, in particular. If you’re still looking for a way in, perhaps our Section Editors can be of some assistance. Their highlights from the edition follow:

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction, Poetry, and Microfiction Special Feature Editor:

Via frequent contributors Julia and Peter Sherwood, an excerpt from Czech writer and dramaturg Radka Denemarková’s latest Magnesia Litera Prize-winning novel, Hours of Lead, brings us into the bowels of a Chinese prison, bearing witness to a dissident girl’s defiance of state repression and censorship. Inspired by Václav Havel, the protagonist’s struggle is entirely private and self-motivated, untethered from any broader democratic collective or underground movement. Her guards are driven mad by her equanimity and individuality in the face of savage interrogation: “Even her diffident politeness is regarded as provocative. As is her decency. Restraint. Self-control. Humility. . . The guards find her very existence provocative.” Renounced by her parents and rendered persona non grata, “a one-person ghetto,” by the state, her isolation is both liberating and the ultimate gesture of self-sacrifice.

Meanwhile, poet Fabián Severo—the only Uruguayan writing in Portunhol, the language of the Uruguayan frontier with Brazil—revels in an act of presence just as radical and defiant of the mainstream, resisting the state’s attempted erasure of his language. Laura Cesarco Eglin and Jesse Lee Kercheval’s translation sings: “This language of mine sticks out its tongue at the dictionary/ dances a cumbia on top of the maps / and from the school tunic and bow tie / makes a kite / that flies / loose and free through the sky.” Don’t overlook the luminous poems of prolific French and Martinican Creole writer Monchoachi, whom Derek Walcott has credited for “completely renewing our vision of the Creole language.” “The Caribbean could be considered a workshop for the modern world,” he conveys in Eric Fishman’s English translation, “with its deportations, its exterminations, and also its ‘wildly multiple’ side, its ‘ubiquity of voices and sounds.’” READ MORE…

Our Fall 2019 Issue Is Here!

October 17, 2019  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Radka Denemarková, Sylvia Molloy, Monchoachi, and a Spotlight on International Microfiction

Welcome to our spectacular Fall 2019 edition gathering never-before-published work from a record-breaking 36 countries, including, for the first time, Azerbaijan via our spotlight on International Microfiction. Uncontained, this issue’s theme, may refer to escape either from literal prisons—the setting of some of these pieces—or from other acts of containment: A pair of texts by Czech author Radka Denemarková and Hong Kong essayist Stuart Lee tackle the timely subject of Chinese authoritarianism. In “The Container,” Thomas Boberg performs the literary equivalent of “unboxing” so popular on YouTube these days, itemizing a list of things in a container shipped from Denmark to the Gambia—all in a withering critique of global capitalism.

The container lends itself to several metaphors but none as poignant or as on point as—you guessed it, dear Asymptote reader—the container of language itself, as suggested by London-based photographer Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee’s brilliant cover highlighting the symbolism of the humble rice grain. This commodity has, like language, been exported, exchanged, enhanced, and expressed in various forms from its various origins across the planet. Even when a state attempts to erase language, resistance remains possible, as poet Fabián Severo—the only Uruguayan writing in Portunhol, the language of the country’s frontier with Brazil—demonstrates: “This language of mine sticks out its tongue at the / dictionary,” he sings, “dances a cumbia on top of the maps / and from the school tunic and bow tie / makes a kite / that flies / loose and free through the sky.” In one of Argentine writer Sylvia Molloy’s many profound riffs on the bilingual condition, Molloy claims that “one must always be bilingual from one language, the heimlich one, if only for a moment, since heim or home can change.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Du Ya

September 24, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Anni Liu

He recalls darkness: changes in earth over hundreds of millions of years / It astounds him: black, plummeting, set in motion eons ago

This week’s Translation Tuesday features two labour-centric poems by Du Ya. “The Coal Miner” could be construed as a multivalent metaphor aligning the work of a coal miner with an unbearable lack of clarity regarding one’s position in the world. On another register, however, “The Coal Miner” shows how one’s occupation and environment can be written on and in the body, as well as the mind. “Copper” looks at the quality of the sub-strata itself. It is an homage to the hidden beauties and forms that underpin all that happens upon a surface. Copper’s stability, its cycles, and their accumulations might be related to translation itself, a conceptual attitude that recalls the archaeological cultural exercises of Walter Benjamin and the re-working of source materials to gain new insight or expression. Time can be read in the changes in striation and the different iterations of copper, constantly moving beneath the surface and in the hands of artisans, as a poem or thought too changes—and stays the same—as it moves.

The Coal Miner

He means to tell people about the light
but each part of his body revolts
disobeys the center, speaks only of darkness

Having gnawed so long on that mighty seam, he has no idea
that his lungs, liver, and intestines are now made of coal
The textbooks teach this: “change in quantity leads to change in quality”

His body is such a fitting exhibit, it needs no explanation
It wears pitch black shadowless silk
like a government official donning a tailored uniform

Yet he still speaks of light—and for light
he daily lowers himself underground (and time flows unchanging)
Not even the nightfish has seen such darkness

Sometimes, in the subterranean depths, he is frightened
He recalls darkness: changes in earth over hundreds of millions of years
It astounds him: black, plummeting, set in motion eons ago

READ MORE…