Language: English

My 2019: Eva Wissting

December 25, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Eva Wissting

Staying involved with the Swedish literary scene is a way to stay connected to my home while abroad.

Next up in our A Year in Reading series is Eva Wissting, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Sweden. A book reviewer and an avid book club member when she is not contributing to Asymptote, Wissting shares with us the literary discoveries that lit up her 2019.

At the beginning of this year, I started reviewing books for a Swedish online site, Dagensbok, which has published one book review every single day since the year 2000. I first stopped by the office to pick up books to write about around this time of year, during what we in Sweden call “the middle days”—the slow and lazy days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve that feel like holidays, even though they’re not really. The entire office building appeared to be empty, except for me and the editor whom I was there to meet. To walk up to a filled bookshelf and be told that I could pick anything, get to write about it, and people, supposedly, would read what I’d written—this, for sure, was a second Christmas.

One of the books I picked up that day I most certainly wouldn’t have come across otherwise. It’s an amazing Finnish-Swedish poetry and graphic book by Jolin Slotte and Pauliina Pesonen, about finding your own words and your own voice in difficult circumstances, even when it labels you a traitor. The word-for-word translation of the Swedish title is All These Dead Eyes. The whole book is in black and white, and each right-hand side in Finnish is accompanied by a left-hand side in Swedish. I don’t speak or read Finnish, but this book is constructed so that you only need to understand one of the languages. And then, of course, the words are also accompanied by the beautifully drawn images, which is yet another language. Considering how many of us live with multiple languages—whether we fully master them or they exist more as a backdrop—it surprises me how rare truly multilingual books are.

Another book I discovered thanks to Dagensbok was Kristen Roupenian’s short story collection You Know You Want This, which I read and reviewed in the Swedish translation by Amanda Svensson. It wasn’t until I got to the story “Cat Person” that I realized I had read this author, and this short story, before—though by then I was already completely hooked on this careful study of evil. The stories are written with a great sense of craft, not only in carving out a narrative, but also in understanding how humans operate. These are also horror stories, though not the kind with monsters or ghosts or other supernatural elements; the evil in these short stories comes from within the relationships between people––normal, everyday people like you and I—which is the most horrifying kind of horror stories there are. “Cat Person” differs from the other stories in the collection in that the evil is not so clearly expressed. This is the short story that was published back in 2017 by The New Yorker and went viral. Not a lot of short stories go viral. Not a lot of emerging writers have their short stories published by The New Yorker and then have them go viral. This is certainly an author I look forward to following. READ MORE…

My 2019: Barbara Halla

December 20, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

Much is made of relatability in fiction, but it’s not something that I really think about.

As December winds to a close, we at Asymptote are once again reflecting and reminiscing on a year spent with books, those that have spoken to us, accompanied us, and in their own discreet way, carved their paths in the tracks of time alongside us. So today, in lieu of our weekly roundup, we return to our annual series with the following recap of Assistant Editor Barbara Halla’s literary year, filled with character-driven titles that range from the intimate to the epic. 

I had this strange impulse, as I sat down to write my “Year in Reading”, to scrap my outline and do something different: write not about the books that have stayed with me because of how good they were, but focus instead on the books I did not like. A “year in books that made me wish I didn’t know how to read” meditation, so to speak. And that would certainly be fun. Unsurprisingly, I seem to have a lot more to say about the books that made me miserable than the ones I loved, but I fought the impulse. What good would that do, just more misery (and free publicity) to spread in the world. So, back to my outline, and the more traditional rundown of some of the books that meant a lot to me this year.

I am going to start in reverse-chronological order. Much is made of relatability in fiction, but it’s not something that I really think about, unless someone tells me that a specific book is supposed to be particularly relatable to someone of my age/gender/nationality, in which case my brain takes this as a challenge to actively dislike it. While reviewers certainly mentioned its style (Joycean!) and its girth (a brick!), I don’t remember anyone specifically telling me that I should read Ducks, Newburyport because I would find myself in its pages. Lucy Ellmann’s opus, where an American housewife from Ohio spends her day making pies and thinking about everything from the challenges of motherhood to the climate crisis, is certainly a book of our time. But I didn’t expect that my overwhelming reaction to it would be a sense of “if someone could scan my brain this is exactly what I’d imagine it to look like!” As for relatable, this is the only book I have read in my life that shows some pity for tortoise-owners like me, and the fact that our care and attention are treated with complete indifference by the subject of our affection. There is a lesson in there somewhere about love and letting go. 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…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

November 22, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, Hodna Nuernberg, Quyen Nguyen, and Sarah Moore

Catch up on this week’s latest news in Morocco, Sweden, Vietnam, and France!

This week, our editors are bringing you news from Morocco, Sweden, Vietnam, and France In Morocco, changes to the ministry of communication are affecting book imports. In Sweden, the announcement of the August Prize has brought excitement, whilst the awarding of the Tucholsky Prize to Swedish-Chinese writer Gui Minhai has been met with indignation in China. In Vietnam, the sales of a much-anticipated translation of bestseller South Korean writer Cho Nam-joo have not been as expected. In France, the centennial of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookshop was celebrated. Read on to find out more!

Hodna Nuernberg, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Morocco

Last month, Morocco’s King Mohammed VI ordered major bureaucratic reform, slashing the government’s thirty-nine member cabinet to just twenty-four—the smallest ever—and doing away with the ministry of communication. While the official line was that the ministry was no longer necessary to regulate the kingdom’s newspapers (a convincing argument, given the state of Morocco’s oppositional press), the abolition of the ministry has had a perhaps unintended side effect: all book imports have been blocked in customs since early October.

The first article of Morocco’s 2003 Press Code guaranteed the freedom of domestic publications. Foreign books, on the other hand, were subject to the ministry of communication’s control. Prior to the October reform, this control was carried out by the foreign publications bureau of the ministry’s public relations division. As such, the bureau was responsible for “analyzing the content of foreign publications” and delivering (or not) the visas necessary for importation. Although Morocco does not officially practice state censorship, this process allowed the king to uphold his three red lines (the monarchy, the kingdom’s “territorial integrity,” and Islam), which were enshrined in article 29 of the Press Code. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

November 15, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Daljinder Johal, José García Escobar, and Scott Weintraub

This week's literary news comes from Chile, Guatemala, and the UK.

This week our writers report on a timely translation of a Chilean novel, a new translation of Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s classic, The Little Prince, into Kaqchikel, literary prizes in Guatemala, and grime rapper Stormzy’s pop-up publishing event in London. Read on to find out more!

Scott Weintraub, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Santiago

In a recent op-ed in the Chilean newspaper La Tercera (October 19, 2019; trans. Natasha Wimmer published in The Paris Review), writer Nona Fernández speculates as to the nature of the “big joke” responsible for the massive protests against President Sebastián Piñera’s neoliberal policies, among other social and political issues:

The fare hike? The minister of the economy’s advice to take advantage of cheaper early morning fares and get up at 6 A.M.? The pizza that President Piñera is eating right now at an upscale Santiago restaurant, deaf to the voice of the city? The pathetic pensions of our retirees? The depressing state of our public education? Our public health? The water that doesn’t belong to us? The militarization of Wallmapu, the ancestral territory of the Mapuche people? The incidents apparently staged by soldiers to incriminate Mapuches? The shameful treatment of our immigrants? The hobbling of our timid abortion law, due to government approval of conscientious objection for conservative doctors? The ridiculous concentration of privileges in the hands of a small minority? Persistent tax evasion by that same minority? The corruption and embezzlement scandals within the armed forces and the national police? The media monopoly of the big conglomerates, owners of television channels, newspapers, and radio stations? The constitution written under the dictatorship that still governs us to this day? Our mayors, representatives, and senators who once worked for Pinochet? Our pseudodemocracy?

READ MORE…

Wind and Wood and Word Sonnets: Toward a Multilingual Tradition in Translation

November 13, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Daniel Persia

Wind and Wood reveals new possibilities for translation and reinforces the maxim that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Poetry is a living creature; the aim of translators is not to tame it, but to cut its reins so that it may run free. This exceptional variousness is exemplified in the quadrilingual edition of word sonnets by Seymour Mayne: Wind and Wood, published in English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. This work is the second sequence of Mayne’s larger collection, Cusp: Word Sonnets (2014), which marked fifty years since his poetry first appeared in Montreal. A translation of the entire collection into Russian (translated by Mikhail Rykov, Silver Age press) was launched on October 24 at Library and Archives Canada. In this essay, Daniel Persia, Asymptote‘s Editor-at-Large for Brazil, discusses the new territory that this tremendous edition breaches, the generous particularities of Mayne’s form, and the dimensions of a single line, in different clothing.

Why settle for a good poem in one language when you can read it in four? Canadian poet and translator Seymour Mayne takes the art of the word sonnet to a new level in his quadrilingual collection Wind and Wood / Viento y madera / Vent et bois / Vento e madeira, published by Malisia Editorial (Argentina) just last year. In addition to an interview with Mayne himself—in which the author talks about the “intimate and creative relationship” between writer and translator—the collection brings thirty-three word sonnets, originally written in English, into Spanish (María Laura Spoturno et al.) French (Véronique Lessard and Marc Charron) and Portuguese (Maria da Conceição Vinciprova Fonseca). The project comes through the vision of María Laura Spoturno (Universidad Nacional de La Plata), who directed a collaborative effort in Spanish translation with sixty undergraduate students, successfully constructed bridges to Canada and Brazil, and served as general editor for the collection. Transcending the traditional two-language paradigm while exploring themes of aging, nostalgia, and the passing of time, Wind and Wood reveals new possibilities for translation and reinforces the age-old maxim that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

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…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

October 18, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, Sarah Moore, and Sarah Moses

Literary awards and festivals abound in this week's news from Argentina, Sweden, and the UK.

This week our reporters bring you news of Sweden’s reaction to last week’s Nobel Prize in Literature announcement by the Swedish Academy, the FILBA international festival in Buenos Aires, as well as the surprise of the Booker Prize winner(s!) in the UK.

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

Since the announcement of the 2018 and 2019 Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Literature last week, the subsequent debate shows no sign of receding. Before the announcement, literary Nobel Prize discussions within Sweden focused on whether awarding a 2018 prize was good for the world of literature or bad because it would smooth over the Swedish Academy’s connection to misconducts.

After the announcement of Polish Olga Tokarczuk (“Flights”) and Austrian Peter Handke as the two most recent literary Nobel Prize Laureates, however, the pros and cons of announcing a 2018 laureate has waned in the shadow of the controversial choice of Handke. The disagreement in Sweden centers on whether Handke’s political standpoint is misunderstood—if he has simply been naive and used by others, if he is an apologist of war crimes—or if awarding Handke is correct on solely literary merits and that disregarding politics is possible. 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…

“I Feel Free When I Write”: Linda Boström Knausgård on Her New Novel, Welcome to America

September 12, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Timmer Harvey

I am my dark, inner twin when I write.

Linda Boström Knausgård’s second novel, Welcome to America, is set not in the United States, but within the confines of a Swedish apartment swollen with family secrets and contrarian silence. Following the death of her father—a tragedy she is convinced she engineered through prayer—Boström Knausgård’s child narrator, Ellen, stops speaking. While the trauma inciting Ellen’s selective mutism is palpable, the young protagonist synchronously radiates power, wielding her silence as the only means of maintaining control in the face of a self-absorbed mother, her increasingly volatile brother, and the specter of impending adulthood. Meticulously translated by Martin Aitkin, Welcome to America is Boström Knausgård’s defiantly pithy portrait of a family disconnected and consumed by grief. On the eve of the novel’s publication in the United States, we asked the Swedish author, poet, and radio documentary producer about writing bravely, the experience of being written into someone else’s narrative, and the unexpected power of silence.

 —Sarah Timmer Harvey, August 2019

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): Welcome to America is your second novel to be translated into English. Did you collaborate with Aitken on the translation?

Linda Boström Knausgård (LBK): I didn’t work with Martin on the translation. In fact, I didn’t hear from him while he was working on it. Martin is a very good translator, and I think that he’s produced a beautiful translation. I’ve read it twice in English, and I am very happy with it. I believe that if I had started to concentrate too much during his work and asked him all my questions before he was ready, I’d be exhausted. Our languages have a lot of differences—sentences do not start, or end, in the same way. I know Norwegian and Danish very well, and when it comes to translating work into these languages, it can be difficult not to intervene too much. When I finally had a book translated into Finnish, it was a relief because I didn’t understand a word. I think it’s best to let go as much you can, but you then must also be happy when you finally read it. If you have a good translator, you should stick with him or her!

STH: When you are writing, do you consider the language in which you are writing? For example, how Swedish might shape and contain the narrative? 

LBK: I write in Swedish and could not write in any other language, never! The language forms the story; it is my frame, and so I cannot abandon it. I love to write in Swedish. I like how it presents itself on the page, almost like a surprise. READ MORE…

Flowing Speech: On the Complexities of Audiovisual Translation

September 11, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Allison Braden

It’s really beautiful to get carried away by your emotions while translating.

Over the course of its four-season run, U.S. television show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend won acclaim and awards for its groundbreaking musical format, treatment of mental illness, and reinvention of romantic comedy tropes. Plus, it’s funny—really funny. Every episode contains jokes, quick banter, songs, and a slew of puns and double-entendres. Audiovisual translator Alicia González-Camino, who translated the scripts for Spanish dubbing, knew she’d have her work cut out for her. I spoke with González-Camino via email. Her responses to my questions, compiled below, illustrate her translation process and relationship to this project. Here she is, in her own words, discussing the show’s challenges and whether audiovisual translation counts as a literary art.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity and translated from Spanish.

—Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large for Argentina

As a translator, I started out doing any translation that fell into my hands, mostly technical, and it was so boring. I didn’t enjoy translating at all. Audiovisual translation, on the other hand, allows me to be more creative. I have fun translating, and I can feel proud of the result when I successfully make a scene or especially complicated speech flow well and sound natural. It’s a kind of translation where, on the same day, you can have animated drawings with rhymes and little made-up names, something with mafiosos, full of cursing, and something funny and comedic. And in my case, since I translate from five languages, you can also change from one language to another in one day. The result is that you can have really engaging days thanks to the variety.

Plus, in the case of dubbing, the translation comes to life in the voice of the actors. And if you’re lucky, a translation of yours can become part of the whole country’s vocabulary when a show or movie is really well-known and some phrase takes hold in the popular lexicon for posterity. That hasn’t happened to me yet with my translations, but leaving my footprint through language seems incredibly fun to me, in addition to being an honor.

I guess audiovisual translation is somewhat literary, because we’re all tied to a style we have to respect. We approach works that have existing souls and, in some sense, we create works with new souls that our respective audiences can understand, provoking the same emotions and reactions as the original.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 30, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar and Julia Sherwood

From Olga Tokarczuk to Ana María Rodas, read on for the latest in global literature!

As Italo Calvino said; “Literature is like an eye that can perceive beyond the chromatic scale to which Politics is sensitive.” This week, our editors are spanning Poland and Central America this week to bring you news of literature festivals, celebrations, and renowned writers bringing international regard to their home countries, but also, reports of literature in acts of reclamation, restoration, and freedom. To reinstate humanity into issues that seem beyond individual control is a necessary use of language, and around the world, writers are taking up the responsibility.

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Poland

In every corner of Poland, book lovers had a literary festival to choose from this summer. The Borderland Foundation, an international centre for dialogue in Sejny on the Polish/Lithuanian border, hosted a programme of discussions, workshops, and concerts from June through August, with guests including Yale University historian Timothy Snyder, who discussed The Road to Unfreedom with the centre’s director, Krzysztof Czyżewski (photos here). In July, the Non-Fiction festival in Kraków featured acclaimed non-fiction writers of the likes of Małgorzata Rejmer as well as rising new stars of literary reportage, such as Katarzyna Puzyńska, who has made a successful switch from best-selling crime to non-fiction, publishing two books of interviews with Polish policemen. Sopot Literacki, a literary festival in the Baltic Sea resort of Sopot, showcased literature from the UK from August 15 to 18, featuring, among others, novelist Sarah Perry, illustrator and comic book author Katie Green, and Reni Eddo-Lodge talking about her book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, as well as a debate among literary scholars on the current readings of the Frankenstein myth. And in the final week of August, Sopot’s sister city Gdynia renames itself the City of the Word, staging a literary festival focusing on Polish writers before the September 1 announcement of the 2019 Gdynia Literature Prize.

Jacek Dehnel, one of the authors appearing at the Gdynia festival this week, presented his latest book, Ale z naszymi umarłymi (But Together With Our Dead), a viciously funny and chilling apocalyptic satire in which Polish zombies go on the rampage and take over the world. The novel is appearing at a time in which rabid anti-LGBT propaganda, spread by the ruling PiS party in the run-up to the general election this coming October, is receiving vocal support from the Catholic Church, which has compared the LGBT movement to a ‘plague’, and a conservative weekly, Gazeta Polska, recently went so far as to print “LGBT-free zone” stickers. This summer saw a record number of Gay Pride parades held in twenty-three cities across the country in defiance of the hate campaign, and while most of the parades went off peacefully, march participants in Białystok, in the east of the country, came under violent attack from far-right protesters. Dehnel, who travelled to Białystok from his home town of Warsaw to address the crowd and has vividly captured the events in this harrowing report, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

READ MORE…

Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: From the Shadows by Juan José Millás

August 29, 2019  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Jacqueline Leung

With what appears to be an absurdist plot, Millás explores the psyche of an individual made redundant by society.

According to Sylvia Plath, August is an “odd and uneven time” so it’s all the more fitting that we’ve chosen Juan José Millás’ spectacularly surreal and cerebral novel, From the Shadows, as our Book Club selection this month. Millás is an author known for bringing existential thought into dreamlike spaces, and in this exemplifying work, the narrative carves a labyrinthine path through a mind withstanding both physical and mental confinements, and the language, rife with darkness and comedy, traces the fine walls of worlds both real and imagined with Kafkaesque soliloquy. 

The Asymptote Book Club strives to bring the best translated fiction every month to readers in the US, the UK, and the EU. From as low as USD15 a book, sign up to receive next month’s book on our website; once you’re a member, you can  join the online discussion on our Facebook page.

From the Shadows by Juan José Millás, translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead and Daniel Hahn, Bellevue Literary Press, 2019

“Every love story is a ghost story”: David Foster Wallace’s epigraph encapsulates the phantasmagoric search for love and acceptance in Juan José Millás’ From the Shadows, the author’s much-anticipated English debut. Translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead and Daniel Hahn, From the Shadows follows the story of Damián Lobo, an unemployed maintenance worker, who, in a strange turn of events, hides himself inside an old wardrobe and gets transported to the home of a young family. Instead of escaping from his physical confinement, Damián inhabits the space behind the wardrobe and becomes the “Ghost Butler,” a spectral being who tends to chores around the house in the daytime when the family is out and slips back to his hiding place in the master’s bedroom at night.

READ MORE…

Poetic Solidarity Across the Himalayan Divide in Burning the Sun’s Braids

August 28, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Shelly Bhoil

The Chinese state . . . is unable to extinguish the fire of protest among Tibetans in exile and Tibet.

For the poets who bear witness, language has been both weapon and shield, but perhaps most importantly, it has always a chance to reach both inward and outward, so that the defiant strength against cruelty may arrive from any direction. The Tibetan poems collected by Bhuchung Dumra Sonam in Burning the Sun’s Braids is a testament to this endless realm of perseverance. In the following essay, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Tibet, Shelly Bhoil, writes about the urgent and moving works in this formidable collection of resistance and courage.

Bhuchung, which means “a little boy” in Tibetan, was ten or eleven years old when he was smuggled out of Tibet for a better life as a refugee in India. During his escape with a group of familiar strangers in the winter of 1983, this little boy, for no particular reason, held on to the visions of black boots from his fantasies, but had no idea that he would never get to see his parents again. Years later, in a moment of existential rage, he tore apart a notebook of poems he had penned during his college years. Lines from one of the earliest poems he recalls having written are telling:

Like a stray dog I cling
to the dry worldly bone . . .
In a blossoming garden of hatred
this little boy
drowns in tears of sorrow . . .

From the torn pages of this notebook were to emerge Bhuchung Dumra Sonam as a prolific poet, essayist, publisher, and translator.

READ MORE…